I've gotten this advice about taking out the unmarketable stuff from a gal in real life too. But again, I'm not looking for commercial success, never was. I'm a scientist. I'm writing to 'make the science accessible.' That's all. This is actually - - - what we're asked to do in academia. 'Make the science accessible.'
So, I put the science (evolution, atmospheric chemistry, all the things we know and can actually use that knowledge to save our world) into a new frame (this book) and then ... I'm asked to remove the science from it altogether.
I guess no one actually
wants the science accessible. At least, very few. No one wants the science.
See the problem? I have zero interest in being an author of the sort that I suspect most people here are aiming for. I'm just trying to make as much of the science of climate change as accessible as possible. i've already cut way more than I wanted to (parts per million of different gases, isotopic signatures, and so on). The oil formed over evolutionary time scales. We are burning carbon that has been locked away for 300 million years. We are burning it all in under 300 years. The math: It takes a million times as long to *form* as it takes for us to burn. That's a problem. We're putting too much carbon into the air way too fast and way faster than the system can absorb. by a factor of a *million.*
If we could see that carbon coming out of tailpipes? we might all understand the gravity of the situation, a little bit better, and that's Myrta.
We needed to stop burning oil in 1990. We have only accelerated.
The fossil fuel industry is content to do anything that will keep the money flowing in. This includes owning politics (along with the NRA). The EPA chief is happy to help. (!!) It makes him rich. Everyone in the administration is happy to help.
^^ None of that is candy, and none of it is fiction, and very few people want to think about it because we all
use fossil fuels and in a sense we are all complicit. People want candy, like a nice story about an attractive soul mate and victory and triumph and above all no guilt. I have no plans to sell candy, but am happy to caramelize my carrots as much as possible before serving them, so if making Alphonse magical helps explain the evolutionary scales we're dealing with, then that's good. I don't expect to get rich selling carrots, even carmelized ones.
But this drifts from the point. I think the answer to the original question is that Alphonse can have a little more proactivity. He's driving himself already, but readers don't seem to see it. So I guess making a decision is not the same as fighting a pack of wolves and emerging victorious. I would have thought the first was proactivity but it sounds like people think the second is.