Last week I was visiting my home town of Zagreb, Croatia. It was my mom’s birthday. I went into a flower shop to buy her some flowers.
I pointed at some sunset-pink roses. “Six of those,” I said to the flower shop girl.
She shrugged as if to apologize. “We really only sell them in odd numbers. So five… or seven…”
I stared hard at her for a moment. “Fine,” I said. “Then give me seven.”
While she was tying the roses up I was pacing the flower shop and inspecting the orchids and potted eucalyptus plants. My irritation was growing.
“And can you tell me please,” I finally blurted out, “why exactly you only sell them in odd numbers?”
The flower shop girl looked at me patiently, the way she might with a child. “Because even numbers are for the dead. Odd numbers are for living people.”
I was taken aback. But I’ve double-checked since. The girl is right.
At least in this part of the world — Croatia, Serbia, and possibly a dozen other tiny countries with a shared cultural history — you buy an even number of flowers when you go to a wake or a funeral. You buy an odd number for weddings, graduations, birthdays, etc.
Why? Why not the other way around?
Who knows. Perhaps some practical reason. Perhaps symbolic. Or perhaps entirely arbitrary, set by some highly OCD person once upon a time who managed to enforce his will on the rest of us.
One thing’s for sure:
People love these kinds of rules. They live by them. It gives structure and coherence and even meaning to an otherwise chaotic existence.
People love these rules so much they will seek them out if they are missing.
My friend Sam sent me an article last week about Brandon Sanderson, one of the best-selling fantasy authors in the world.
Sanderson sold $55 million worth of books last year. But unlike with J.K. Rowling or George R.R. Martin, practically nobody, outside Sanderson’s sizeable audience, knows who he is.
The reason, as the article will tell you, is that Sanderson is not a very good writer.
So why the devoted following of millions of people?
One reason, according to Sanderson’s fans, is his characters. And then, from the article:
“The second answer to Why Sanderson? is his worlds. This is probably what he’s best known for. Worldbuilding, as it’s called. Sanderson dreams up far-off lands—sometimes cities, sometimes whole planets, with rules and systems and politics—and then he populates them with characters whose fates are also the worlds’.”
So there you go:
People are shopping for worlds to inhabit.
They might enjoy yours, and even pay to be inside.
In order for that to happen, one thing you will need is a strong and elaborate set of rules.
For example:
One of the rules of my world, as you might know, is that deadlines are deadly.
You don’t want to miss them.
Because I don’t extend them and I don’t make exceptions to them.
My deadlines also come exactly at 8:31pm CET.
Such as my deadline tomorrow, Tuesday, at 8:31pm CET, to get my MVE course before the price goes up threefold, from $100 to $297. That’s less than 24 hours from now. In case you don’t want to be struck down by the law: