Monthly Archives: December 2023

2023 A Personal Review

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The year, as we in the west number it, is coming to a close and that is a time for reflection. This year has seen triumph and tragedy in my personal life, much like the years that preceded it and that will follow.

In January I began the world building work for my next science-fiction novel, a dystopic and cynical story set on the corporate cities of Mars under the thumb of a once brilliant billion now degenerated into madness and paranoia. With it set only a hundred years into the future that required lots of research and planning to keep from making myself appear too foolish. This month also saw a dear friend of nearly 40 years struck with a terrible wasting degenerative neuro-muscular disease.

February saw the released of a pair of films that I thoroughly enjoyed, Megan a fun take on the killer doll cliche and Cocaine Bear which delivered precisely what was labeled on the tin.

In March I continued the work on my Mars novel and endured the lackluster Antman and The Wasp: Quantum Mania and the even less enjoyable 65 but was treated to the spirited and fun Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.

April saw the historic event of a former President of the United States charged with crimes and his party lash themselves to the mast of his sinking ship. Sadly, nothing in the intervening 8 months changed and they remain devoted to his insurrection and criminality. April was also when I began thinking seriously that the time was right for someone to revisit the werewolf as presented in 1941’s The Wolf-Man with particular attention to the fascism in the subtext.

May was a birth month, a celebration if you wanted of my own and the experimental scene I wrote for a very vague and unformed concept of a werewolf novel. After its reception at my writers group and with their encouragement I continued on past that scene and unwittingly started writing a novel without a prepared outline.

In June I watched Asteroid City a strange almost poetic film nearly devoid of any traditional plot and yet strangely compelling. All world building work ceased as the werewolf novel took over all of my creative CPU cycles.

July was a very good month for movies with the release of Oppenheimer and Barbie both film outstanding in their quality with resonate themes of deep importance. My sweetie-wife and I finished the TV series Silo and agreed it had been a waste of time and talent as had Marvel’s Secret Invasion. It was about this time that I began to seriously consider that my unplanned novel was not going to crash and burn and might actually get finished.

In August The unplotted novel passed 40,000 word and my sweetie-wife and I discovered the delightful Australian murder/comedy series Deadloch a real hidden treasure on Amazon Prime.

September witnessed the passing of that dear friend diagnosed in January and once again the hard terrible lesson of life is that it ends. The movies of this month, A Haunting in Venice, and The Annual secret morgue of genre films, did little to mitigate the sadness of that period.

With October I became confident enough in my werewolf novel to reach out to a former editor and pitch him the book. He expressed an interest but also cautioned I would need a pen name for it. The Annual Enrollment Period (AEP) for Medicare Advantage enrollment started and the day-job became more stressful and busier but work on the novel continued.

November was a pleasant month. Two enjoyable features at the theater, The Marvels and Next Goal Wins provided comfort cinema, the annual sf convention LosCon provided friends and geek infusions as well as seeing to completion of the novel first draft.

That brings us to December, I closed out in theater film watching with the fantastic Godzilla Minus 1, abandoned the series The Crown as the Charles and Diana story held little interest for me, and turned my manuscript over to my darling sweetie-wife for her red pen of corrections.

As I said at the outset, 2023 held triumph and tragedy and now onto 2024.

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Quick Thoughts a New Discovery: 1670

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My sweetie-wife discovered the existence of this Netflix series from Poland 1670.

Netflix

The show is centered on a fictional Polish village in the year, you guessed it, 1670 and the trial and tribulations of its ruling noble families. It is a farcical comedy utterly unconcerned with period accuracy instead using the characters as commentary on our present world. Such as the business-minded second son who treats prayers the same way a bullying boss treats commands to underlings. It has been compared to the program What we Do in the Shadows because the characters continually break the fourth wall and address the audience directly. In at least one scene the camera itself is a participant, but without the framing device of a documentarian crew.

In the first 30-minute episode we both. laughed out loud several times and look forward to return to this strange program. It is from Poland and can be viewed either in Polish with Subtitling, our preferred method, or with an English language dub.

1670 streams on Netflix.

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Justify, Excuse, and Explain

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The three words that comprise the title of this post are often used nearly interchangeably when discussing a person, group’s, or nation’s behavior but to my mind hey carry very different and important connotations.

Justify, which clearly comes from ‘justice’ is about making an argument that an action needed to be taken and was ultimately right to have been taken. You can justify taxes, the taking of a person’s property, because the social benefits are so large so important that the taking is ultimately a good and necessary thing. Other cases can be more edge case and will depend on the moral standing, philosophies, and such of the people involved.

Excuse to me carries the burden of acknowledgment of wrongdoing. This does not have to be a major or in any way a serious wrongdoing. We ask to be excused when we burp loudly because the noise of generally considered unpleasant and upsetting. In asking to be excused we admit that the sound was unsettling. We bump into a person on the train or in a crowd and again seek to be excused because uninvited touching is a violation. To excuse carries the knowledge of wrongdoing and the admission that it was wrong. One does not excuse malice because malice rarely carries any sort of admission of transgression.

Explain is a revealing of cause and effect absent moral judgment. That is not to say that the transgressive acts one might ‘explain’ are absent of moral weight or judgment but merely that understanding how they came to be done, the cause and effect that created the chain that bound the participant in the event are described and understood without judgment. We explain serial killers by understanding that childhood abuse and trauma has warped their minds and desires creating monsters. This is not excusing or justifying but understanding how they came to be.

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The Joy of Friends, Even Virtually

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For a few years now I have been gamemastering a tabletop role playing campaign of Space Opera, a game form the 80s with the most complex and poorly edited rule set I have ever seen but is loads of fun.

A year ago, several of the player moved north by a couple of states and out in-person games became virtual games hosted over Zoom. (Being that Space Opera has been out of print since the 80s there was no suitable on-line gaming app that really fit my needs, hence just a simple Zoom.)

The game has continued and it’s very nice every two weeks of so that we get to hang out, see each other, even if it on computer monitors, and game.

This past Saturday was the scheduled game night and all through the day I had been emotionally out of sorts. Not really depressed, just unmotivated and listless. Holiday plans meant that the session would be abbreviated but we needed to run it because I had left the players in a tight spot. (One of their crew had been kidnapped and the baddies were using threats to attempt to force the heroes into assassinating someone.)

I ran the game and my mood flew high. We laughed, we had fun, the dark turn of events for the characters provided strong motivation. By the end of the shortened session all of my listlessness had evaporated. It was not because of the game play it was because good friends are a major component of a happy life. Sometimes when we are crabby and out of sorts isolating ourselves is exactly the wrong prescription.

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The New Doctor: The Church on Ruby Road

Disney Studios/BBC

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Following the series of Doctor Who specials reuniting David Tennant edition of the timeless time lord and Catherin Tate’s Companion Donna, the newly bi-generated Doctor, Ncuti Gatwa, demonstrated his style and flair with the newest Christmas Special The Church on Ruby Road.

With Russel T. Davies return to the series the 4 specials debuting on Disney+, Disney really is trying to own all things ‘Geekdom,’ represent a return to form for the Doctor Who franchise.

With Doctor Who it is best to set aside any concerns about continuity and treat each special and episode as high fantasy rather than any variation of science-fiction.

The Doctor, drawn by a series of coincidences, encounters Ruby Sunday (Millie Gibson) a who with a deeply mysterious past, now plagued by goblins out to steal the foster baby left in her charge. Gatwa’s energy as The Doctor is fresh, spritely, and engaging. Gibson’s performance as Ruby is not plain or down-to-Earth but does have a color of real characterization that nicely counterbalances Gatwa’s manic energy.

Russel T. Davies writing remains fast but fairly straight-forward, eschewing the convoluted and nearly impossible to follow circuitous plots of the previous showrunner Chris Chibnall. At least with this Christmas special Davies has dispensed with world, galaxy, or universe saving plots in favor of a more relatable level of threat, monsters out to eat a baby. Doctor Who f the last few seasons has grown far too epic in its scope, proportions, and stakes and much like James Bond needed a radical correction.

It will be some time before we get the full season of the newest Doctor Who but for a change, I am actually looking forward to it.

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Series Review: Ultraviolet (1998)

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Several weeks ago, spurred by a discussion of the HBO series The Wire I decided that I wanted to rewatch and earlier television series with Idris Elba Ultraviolet.

Starring Jack Davenport, that many people will recognize as Norrington from the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, the series follows Detective Inspector Mike Colefield (Davenport) who upon investigating the disappearance of his best friend that night before that friend’s wedding stumbles into the knowledge that vampires are real, and that a secret organization has been fighting them for centuries. Teamed up with a war veteran Vaughn Rice (Idris Elba), a physician Angela Marsh (Susannah Harker) and a former priest Pearse Harman (Philip Quast) Mike tries to uncover what really happened to his best friend, dodge the determined prying of the jilted fiancé, and help the organization discover what grad scheme the vampires have sudden launched.

My sweetie-wife originally exposed me to this series as she had the program on VHS tapes. Much of the vampire lore has been jettisoned. While the vampires are immortal, ageless, and possess fantastic strength and speed, they do not have the ability to enthrall, assume animal or gaseous forms but remain invisible to mirrors and all form of electronic imagery and recording.

While the series is far from perfect, the fiancé character is far too annoying and Mike’s attraction to her indicates to me that this marriage would have been in serious troubles without vampiric intervention, it is quite enjoyable and a nice take on ‘modern vampire hunting.’ These undead creates are not the romantic seducing lovers of modern fantasy but intelligent deadly predators. The entire story is told in six self-contained episodes. They can currently be streamed on Tubi for free. (You just have to endure the bloodsucking of adverts.)

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An Unimaginable Future

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I was born in the early 1960s making be part of the tail-end of that massive generation the Baby Boomers. Bright beckoning futures such as Star Trek filled my childhood while the ever-present threat of nuclear annihilation hovered over our heads. For decades the go-to and standby baddies of most fiction was the menacing duplicitous and seemingly everywhere conspiracy of International Communism as exported to ever trouble spot around the globe by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, but we just called it Russia.

The United States led the ‘Free World’ against the spreading, infecting, and corrupting influence, and subversion of freedom by Russia. Our allies, while not always endeared to out ways and over-sized personalities, stood shoulder to shoulder with us in that fight, united in the belief that freedom was a universal good. Even if we, and I mean all of the allies, more often than we’d ever admit, fell short of that lofty ideal. The striving for that goal, for a more perfect realization of freedom for humanity, for the rights of self-determination, is what stood as apart from the vast police states of Russia and her brood of puppet nations.

Throughout the 1980s I had friends across the American Political spectrum and my conservative ones were steadfast in the belief that Russia posed a threat to democracy and freedom. That Russian intelligence services infiltrated and manipulated groups in our open society creating conflict and divisions that weakened the ‘free world.’ They were right. After the fall of the USSR so much came to light about their massive operations attempting to exploit both our divisions and our freedoms against us. My conservative friends crowed in being proved right.

And now I live in a future that would have been unimaginable to all of us in the 1980s. I don’t mean the power computers we carry about in our pockets like so many dimes, nor do I mean the fantastic imagery we created with keystrokes, or that we can now launch and land rockets as we envisioned in the SF movies of the 1950s.

No, I mean that those same conservatives who crowed so loudly about their correct detection of the threats to our freedoms have so willingly, so enthusiastically wedded themselves to the very same threat. That violations of the constitutional order and attempts to steal power from legitimate free and fair elections are swept away as mere distraction of ‘personality.’

Back in the 1980s a common criticism of the left from my conservative friends was that the people on the left were only voting for their own selfish interests, free food, and money from the teat of the government. It is clear now that this charge is quite accurate to the conservatives. All professed dedication to the ideals of democracy and the ‘free world’ are casually overthrown for the party that promises to keep delivering the goodies you want. Maybe those goodies are tax cuts and commerce unrestrained by the public good. Maybe it’s the power to compel people to live by your own hypocritical ethics. Or perhaps it’s the promise to not encumber your choice in firearms. Whatever the ‘goodie’ it is clear that the ideals of Freedom are disposable when weight against that selfish interest.

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The Journey in Writing a Novel Without an Outline

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On May 3rd without any preparation or planning I started out writing what would become my first horror novel. All of my previous attempts in horror had been of the short fiction variety and all of my previous novels had been written from carefully created detailed outlines. I had low expectations of success thinking that I would most likely lose the thread of whatever it was I was writing before I had managed 10,000 words.

About seven thousand words into the project, I felt I had a fairly good grasp on what I wanted to do with the characters, settings, and themes. Enough so that I drafted a one-page act breakdown that listed possible events in each of the five acts. While the novel had no outline, I am still very much a writer that believes in structure, and I have become quite devoted to a 5 Act format for my works.

Over the Thanksgiving Weekend I completed the first draft of ‘The Wolves of Wallace Point,’ a novel with a far higher ‘on-screen’ body count than any of my previous works. Now a week before Christmas I have completed my revisions to the first draft. Despite flying blind without little set-in stone about the plot very little of the manuscript required any form of major change. Once my sweetie-wife has completed her pass to catch my spelling and grammar sins it will be ready to hand off to the beta readers.

I am uncertain if I actually did manage to hit the target tone of horror and I may have landed adjacently in the ‘adventure’ genre. Then again, I know I can be very picky about horror and being so close to the work may have in fact blinded me to its nature. That is why beta readers are so vital in this process.

The entire experiment took just over six months from the first scene to completion surprising me in just how smoothly the writing actually went. Thematically ‘The Wolves of Wallace’ point is in conversation with a few prior works of fiction, principally 1941’s The Walk-Man from which nearly all of everyone’s conception of werewolves descend and an episode of the original series of Star Trek‘The Savage Curtain,’ which badly explored the difference between good and evil.

I have learned many things about myself as a writer over these last seven months. That I can trust my sense of plot and structure even when I am fumbling in the dark. That I can trust my sense of character and let some simply walk on without a need to construct carefully erected backstories. And that theme can provide an essential guidance when nothing else is really known.

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The Crown Has Lost Its Glitter

 

I was shocked when I got totally sucked into Netflix’s series The Crown. I am not and never have been a Royal Watcher. The Royal Family of the U.K., or any nation for that matter, has had little interest to me. At heart I am a lower caser republican.

However, the first season with the young Elizabeth as a dram seized my imagination and I was hooked for the first four seasons of this drama.

Season 5 came around and it took me quite a while to get through the entire run of ten episodes. Not because it was bad, the production quality remained outstanding, the cast impressive in their talents, and writing sharp, I just didn’t care. What I didn’t and don’t care about is the Charles and Diana show.

Their ‘fairy tale’ romance held little interest for me when it happened, their marriage and its trouble held even less. I do remember when she died because I was at a WorldCon and there were some tasteless parties the final night, but, as with all celebrity deaths, it occupied very little of my mind.

Last night I started season six episode one. I didn’t not finish. I don’t care about her relationship with Dodi, I don’t care about his with Camilla. The last two seasons, much like the Hobbit trilogy, has wandered far afield from the character it was supposed to fixate upon.

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