All Comments on '10 Pound Bag Ch. 041-045'

I got a feeling this Sonya business is going to get nasty!

When you introduced the runaway slaves in Ch 37, they were brother and sister, who you named Amos and Esther.

Who the fuck is 'Holder'? Did I blank out portions, or all of Ch 39 or 40, and there's another young, male character? I'll be going back to re-read them, I guess.

Also, in Ch 37, our hero determined, and told 'the women', they were in the 1820's. That does not square with, "horseless carriages and locomotives existed in that day and age".

I'd have to go look up when locomotives were invented, but memory seems to be shouting that Lincoln was behind the westward expansion of the railroad west, wasn't he? And both the Civil War and Lincoln are 40-45 years away, timewise.

While I'd have to research locomotives to be certain, I'm damn certain there were NO friggin' "horseless carriages" in the 1820's. That was the midst of single digit horsepower, with a direct ratio of horse to horse shit being an important factor for 'powered' equipment.

You've done a decent job of keeping technology accurate, but dropped the ball on this one.

Also, the statement about having 'only enough woodcutting equipment for a campsite', and then listing off a logging ax, splitter, two man saw, etc, etc gets into the realm of 'Cinderella man', with your character. He may have won the lottery, and went wild buying stuff, but the truck and trailer do have a max weight limit, and man, you had him cramming shit in there like it was a friggin' semi.

That fifth wheel would have been waddling down the road, and the truck would have givin' up the ghost, either dumping the transmission, or having overheating problems long before they got to Nebraska.

But, back to the 'woodcutting' equipment. Our hero may have over bought sharp and toothed tools, but to portray it as 'what's normal for a campsite', is problematic. I have a Estwing steel shank, 16" roofing hatchet in my tent stake and rope bag. It's been in there for 40+ years, and not used for anything else.

And it has been the ONLY woodcutting tool I've had at a campsite, since I bought it to replace the old wood handled hatchet I carried as a Boy Scout and Explorer.

You were positioning our hero to do horseback camping. Even with packhorses, cargo weight is expensive. Use redundancy between axes, sledges/splitters or others is not realistic.

I'm not saying our hero wouldn't/shouldn't have bought them, it's the portrayal of them being 'typical campsite equipment' is the issue. Nit picky, maybe, but details matter when writing time travel operas.

I'm off to real life duties, but when next reading it will be back to 35-40, before I'm back here. In the mean time, I'll be doing some US locomotive research, and catch up at the end of 45-50.

GeoD