War on the Homefront, Then and Now

Good morning, Blog Buds. 

I've been watching 1940's House in an effort to decide if I have the gumption to revise a novel I wrote called Manic Knight.  I've already told my editor about it and she said she'd like to see it.  Manic Knight was the third novel I sent through Queryland and it almost made it.  Sugar Rush was the fourth novel I sent through Queryland and it scored my first publishing contract.  In any case, Manic Knight is a Science Fiction based Time Travel story about a biracial girl, Angelica, who is called from the present day back to 1940 Britain to take her white father's place as a Bedivere Knight after he's killed in battle.  If you've read any of the Ophelia Dawson stories, you know that Ophelia's true love, Adrian, is the son of a Bedivere Knight too.  I decided, early on, to connect my different series by 'world-building' because it's so huge and vital in the Fantasy and Science Fiction genres.  Why build a new fictional universe when I can just expand the same one?

The thing that strikes me the most about 1940's House is the different experience of people back then during wartime and people right now.  The United States has been at war since September 11, 2011, but, for the most part, most people are free to ignore that fact.  We haven't had to walk instead of drive so that the military can have our oil to drive the engine of war.  We can walk into any Walmart and have a couple dozen brands of shampoo to choose from.  We don't need to black out our windows to keep bomber planes from destroying our homes. 

Some people say modern Americans have it too easy, that we're too soft, and we could never handle another time period like World War II.  We'd sit down and cry for our iPads and starve to death when the government ran out of food to put into our crying little mouths.

I disagree.  I think that resourcefulness and determination is still there.  A lot of Americans would be sent reeling for a while, I think, but we'd find our feet and come back swinging.

We're like a sleeping dragon you really do not want to wake up, because we'll be seriously pissed if you do.

The lesson I take away from the 1940's House is plant a garden, keep my bike in good condition, learn to catch, gut, and cook fish, learn to be self-sufficient, even if we don't need to and we don't actually live that way all the time.

I think the dragon should keep at least one eye open at all times.
http://www.ready.gov/

P.S. You should be able to find 1940's House on video or DVD at your local library or you can buy it off Amazon.com.  It's tied for first place with Frontier House as my favorite Historical-Reality series.