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Episode Summary This week on Live Like the World is Dying, Carrot Quinn comes on to talk to Inmn about her new book "BETS," and about how writing speculative fiction can help inform how we live through the apocalypses we're currently facing. Carrot also reads a chapter from the book, which is out now on Kickstarter. Guest Info Carrot Quinn is the author of "Thru-Hiking Will Break Your Heart" and "The Sunset Route", as well as eleven thousand miles of daily hiking blogs at carrotquinn.com and a weekly newsletter at substack.com/@carrotquinn Bets is a speculative fiction novel being self-published by Carrot Quinn. You can back it on Kickstarter at www.kickstarter.com/projects/carrotquinn/bets-a-speculative-fiction-novel-by-carrot-quinn <h4>"The cities are dying. Bets escapes just in time to save her own life. But where will she go? She's heard that somewhere in the desert, people have found a way to be free..."</h4> Host Info Inmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery Publisher Info This show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. Transcript Live Like the World is Dying: Carrot Quinn on “BETS” and Writing the Apocalypse **Inmn ** 00:14 Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today, Inmn Neruin, and today we get to talk to one of my favorite authors, which is a really fun thing for me and a really fun--hopefully--a really fun thing for listeners out there. And today we're going to be talking to Carrot Quinn about a new book, a book about the apocalypse, a book about bikes, a book about the desert. These are all of the things that I want to talk about all the time. And I think that...I think it's going to be a great conversation. We haven't had the conversation yet. So I'm assuming some things, but I have high hopes. But first, we are a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on that network. [sorta singing] Doo doo doo doo doo. **Inmn ** 01:59 And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today, Carrot. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a little bit about what you...? What do you do in the world? **Carrot ** 02:13 Thanks for having me, Inmn. I'm really excited to be here. My name is Carrot Quinn and I use she or they pronouns and I am a writer. I live in Alaska. I used to live in Tucson. And I write books and I do outdoors stuff. I do these guided backpacking trips that are fun, and I have to chihuahua mixes. **Inmn ** 02:41 Cool. Hell yeah. And we've had you on the show before to talk about things like long distance hiking, and it it, like one of your previous books, just made me want to go out and walk long distances, which I have not done yet. But hopefully might [forlornly] someday. I was wondering if we could just start off by, could you tell us a little bit about your book and about the kind of world and setting, before we, I believe, you have a chapter prepared to read for us. **Carrot ** 03:18 Yeah, totally. So I wrote a speculative fiction novel called "Bets" that will be out in January of 2025. And it is set in a near future, sort of post collapse western United States. And one reason, the reason I started working on this novel four years ago, I think the reason we all.... You know, everyone's who's writing speculative fiction right now, like what draws us to it is all of these things we see sort of coming down the pike around the world and in the US with climate with all these different things, and we're all trying to imagine like, what's going to happen? How's it going to happen? How's it going to feel when it happens? And what are we going to do? And so, starting to write this novel four years ago, which felt like a really therapeutic experience for me, because I imagined what if this young person was living in a city in the Western United States, and the city was collapsing, and she needed to flee and she needed to ride her bike across the desert to try and find people who had found a way to survive, who she could join living in the desert. Like, what would that be like? Like, who would she encounter? What would the, you know.... Who, if she met people on the road, what would they be like? What shape would the roads been? What would she eat? Where would she find water? What skills would she need? And, trying to imagine this as kind of a thought exercise was really comforting to me. It's sort of, I feel like we...one thing that fiction does for us is we can put ourselves in these scenarios and try and imagine how we would respond emotionally and how they would feel for us, and that and that almost makes us feel prepared for things that might happen, even if they don't ever happen. It's like this very comforting thing. And so I created this character who's living the city. And the rural United States, like Western rural United States, at least--I don't even really talk about the rest of the country because I didn't actually build that part of this world--but the western United States has been abandoned. Because, you know, the first thing, one of the first things to go, was international supply chains in the US, which basically destroyed the entire economy and the ability to access most goods. And then the rural United States, also there is like water scarcity and a lot of contamination and different things. Disease, because of the lack of access to different medical care, and so people in the rural United States, it just emptied out, and they all went to what was left of the cities. And the cities are these precarious places in this world where, you know, it's impossible to find housing, and most people live in these encampments. And it's really hard to find goods. And it's basically just like, really extremely poor people. And then a handful of like, super wealthy. And the biggest industry left in the US are the prisons, and there's new prisons being built all the time because the prisons have slave labor. So that's like a source of goods. So that's like, the US economy is really reliant on this source of goods. So things are super criminalized because they want more people in the prisons to create more goods. So this young person, Bets, she's 20, that's the world she grew up in, in the city. She was orphaned when she was really young, cause both her parents were disappeared. She doesn't know where her mom went, which is one of the sort of through-lines of the plot is this mystery. And in the beginning, she gets this clue. And then she's sort of trying to like follow up on that clue on her journey. And she also has this love interest, Georgia. They have like...she has very insecure attachment with Georgia. And we don't know much about Georgia. She's sort of mysterious. And then later in the book, it switches to her perspective. And there's kind of this reveal. And you learn all of these like secrets about her, and how she's part of this plot. So Bets, in the very first chapter--I will try not to give any spoilers, but you can read the first chapter online so you'll know exactly what happens--but something really bad hppens. And she realizes she has to flee the city or she's gonna die. And so she steals a bike, essentially, and also ends up with this little dog. [laughing self-reflectively] And that she just, she doesn't want to abandon. It's not her dog, but she ends up with it. And she does want to abandoned it. So she takes this little dog with her. He rides in the pannier, and she just sets out west and she doesn't know what she's gonna find. She can't find a map. The only thing she can find is this old guidebook called "An RVer's Guide to the American West" that has like very broad overview maps. And she's like, "Okay, what's the first thing in here? It's a KOA, okay, I'll just bike towards this KOA," which is, you know, like this funny camp. It's like Campgrounds of America. They have these like little cabins, and she's like, "Is it going to be? Who's going to live there? Is it going to be militia? Is it going to be abandoned? Will there be water?" And you know, like, she goes through everything that's in her panniers and all her supplies. You kind of know what she has, and she sets out on this journey. And then I have her sort of meeting different groups of people who have, who are surviving in different ways. Like, some of them, you know, at first you think they're really great. And then, you know, maybe turns out they're not and other people, maybe they are great. And she has to get out of various sticky situations. Nothing bad ever happens to the dog. And then-- **Carrot ** 03:50 Thank you for that clarification. Yeah, thank you. **Carrot ** 05:43 I didn't want it...the dog is purely there just for joy and pleasure nothing bad ever happens to the dog. And there's...as we, as the novel continues, there's sort of like this unfolding of these other plotlines and these other characters who are...who have like other chapters from their perspectives, who are sort of like...all the characters are slowly converging towards the end. And then in the end, there's this huge plot twist that changes everything you thought you knew about the whole world right from the beginning, which I didn't know how to write plot twists. And then in the last year and a half, I've been reading all of these thrillers to try to learn how to write plot twists, because I really wanted to put one in there. So I finally figured it out. And I put it in there. And I'm so proud of myself, because plot twists really helped me stay engaged with the book if I'm like anticipating something. And so I wanted to put that in there because I really like that. So that's the novel. **Inmn ** 09:31 Cool, cool. Cool. Well, I'm...I'm very, very, very excited for it to come out and to read all of the plot twists that you have. Yeah, I like dabble in writing and like the idea of having to write a convincing plot twist sounds really hard. And I don't know. Yeah, I.... So I feel especially excited because I have been--we know each other IRL from the desert--and I feel like I've been hearing you talk about this book for years. And so the fact that it's coming out, and that people get to read it soon is very exciting. And, you know, as much as I would love to launch into a conversation about preparedness, the apocalypse, bikes, and all of these things, I'm wondering if you want to read your sample chapter first, and then we can...and then we'll talk about that stuff? How does that sound? **Carrot ** 10:42 Yeah, Sounds great. **Inmn ** 10:43 Cool. This also works really perfectly with that we just did a two-part episode on riding your bike a really long distance. **Carrot ** 10:53 Perfect. **Inmn ** 10:55 Everything is perfect. Everything in the world is perfect. Don't tell me otherwise. **Carrot ** 11:00 Yeah, yeah, plot twist, everything in the world is perfect. Turns out. So this is chapter four. And where we are is that Bets has left the city. And you can read the first chapter online on my Substack and that...you can kind of read like the kind of setup. And then she leaves the city and she's on a bike and she has this little dog and she bikes for a little while. And then she bikes through the night and gets to.... Some different things happen that are kind of exciting. And then she bikes through the night. And she's kind of...she's outside of the city now. And it's these kind of larger estates, like old farms and people's summer homes and she pulls her bike off onto the drive towards one of them and there's like the big house and she doesn't go in the house. She goes, she finds a barn behind the house where it's like still pretty nice inside. Like it's clean smelling and, you know, there's like it's not.... Like houses, once they're abandoned, you know, become kind of disgusting. But this barn is still pretty nice. So she barricades the door and puts her sleeping bag on the ground and goes to sleep with the dog. And so now she's waking up the next afternoon and that's where we're gonna start. **Inmn ** 12:21 Cool. **Carrot ** 12:24 Chapter Four. When I stepped outside the barn to pee in the afternoon, there's a deer browsing in the fallen apples of an abandoned orchard. A pang of regret. I wish I had a rifle. Although guns are popular with some of my friends, I've only ever chosen to arm myself with a knife. I want the freedom to move quickly and I don't want to draw attention to myself. I want to be liquid, able to flow around obstacles as they appear. A rifle would make me clumsy. I wish I had one right now, though. "What would we even do with a whole deer?" I say to the dog as I gather bruised apples in my shirt. The dog pads around me, sniffing the fruit. The apples are crawling with wasps and I shoo them away. My legs feel rested and I'm antsy to get back on my bike. First though, I want to check out this house. The back door to the house is locked, but the window is busted out and I brush away the broken glass and pull myself through, lift the dog up after me. Inside it's damp and smells of rotten wood. Trapezoids of sunlight gather on the dirty linoleum in the kitchen. And beyond that is a carpeted living room where the furniture hulks like dusty sleeping beasts. It's amazing how quickly a person's cozy home, after being abandoned, will turn into this, an eerie sickly place where you don't want to stay for more than a few minutes. Is it the dust, the mold, or is the house itself a living being, animated from within by its inhabitants and when they leave the house becomes a corpse and begins to rot? There's a staircase stained with water from the roof and I climb it to a landing with three closed white doors. The brass knob of the middle door is cool in my hand. The room is a bedroom, a bed, the quilt and sheets pulled back exposing the bare mattress,a bookcase cluttered with books, a closet tangled with clothes. The dust motes drift unbothered in the light from the window. There's a small rustling. It's the dog. He's padded up the stairs after me. I sit on the bed and look out the window at the apple orchard and let the sadness spread out from my heart like a fog. It spills out the doorway and onto the landing. It seeps under the doors to the other rooms and then I'm there, back in the dream, the dream I have often at night that I've been having since I was a small child. In the dream I'm in a large house and I'm searching for something. I wander through rooms that open into other rooms. The rooms hold antiques from another time, junk ,furniture from the apartment I shared with my parents. The rooms hold people I love who've been disappeared. The rooms who hold people I haven't met yet. The people welcome me or they do not know me. Sometimes I take up residence in one of these rooms, but always their true occupants appear after a while and telling me that I have to leave. In none of the rooms is that for which I am searching and so I push them on deeper and deeper into the house. I sink down in the bowels of the house or up into its castle spires. The house's corridors are maze, and I can't find my way out. The li…
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