Dusting off the 'ole Damn Boots

It’s s stupid metaphor for getting back into writing.

“Dusting off boots”

Makes ya think of these, doesn’t it?

…maybe more dust and less snow.

Like I said, a stupid metaphor, and a stock photo.

I stopped writing back in January of ‘22—maybe longer than that.

Sometime back before then my Editor gave back my edited 2nd Novel. The experience was humbling. Truth be told it was a slow-burning reality-check, punch to the fucking gut. The thing is, I know I’m a good writer. But only I know this. Maybe a few other people do to—maybe. But a few hundred people don’t know this—certainly not a few thousand. And I’m untested. Getting my incomplete 2nd Novel edited was a test. And I wouldn’t say I failed. I had to fucking regroup—get my shit together and do a lot of thinking.

I took some time off. I didn’t write. I let me creativity out in other ways. I started a YouTube Channel building Legos. I had another kid.

ChatGPT and MidJourney came out during this time away from writing. I started prompting AI Generated art that you can buy here in my store. Some of it is based on the world I am writing into existence and some of it is quirky pop-art—shit I find interesting.

DJ Stark

Back to those dusty boots…

I’m plotting out my story again. I’m not writing—not just yet. I’m laying the foundation. I’m doing several somethings that I’ve never done before:

1. I’m writing on a Mac. Yeah I know. What the fuck, right? But hear me out! David Bowie—yes I’m comparing myself to David Bowie—went through all these phases in his career. He was Ziggy, Aladdin Sane, Halloween Jack, The Thin White Duke and the Blind Prophet. Up until now I’ve been the Windows Guy. Now I’m entering my Mac Guy Persona. It’s kinda groovy actually. The software I’m using, Scrivener and Aeon Timeline were sorta built for this type of hardware. The ease in which I can switch between the two apps is nothing short of amazing. Don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll evolve into my next persona before too long, or become some kind of weird pan-technical chimera.

2. I’m making an outline. I’m not going to use the dumb writing terms involving “pants” and “plans” but I was always of the “pants” variety. It was physically jarring to try and outline—to plan out a story, which has always been something of an organic process for me. But the reality of this story is, it’s been swimming around between my synapses now for years. I know all the beats, all the scenes, and all the not yet conceived scenes that will come into being based on the ideas and rules of the story that I’ve already established. So it’s time for me to stop spinning my fucking wheels and literarily jerking-off with writes and rewrites. Time to get my shit in order. I’m not writing right now. I’m outlining, plotting, and carving a fucking map—a story bible to follow when I actually start writing. I’m doing everything short of etching this motherfucker in stone and then I’m going to look at it, pick a section, and start writing out the pros, start check off the boxes and getting it done, once and for all.

3. I’m not putting any time limits or pressure on the Hows and the Whens. It will be ready when it’s ready. It will also be ready when I don’t have a steaming pile of shit for my Editor.

4. Lastly, I’ve given up Coffee thanks to the-virus-that-shan’t-be-named. After that little nuisance coffee makes me anxious to the point of panic attacks—another something I’ve never ever done before.

I think that covers my year-plus off of writing, thinking of writing, and doing anything having to do with fiction.

Oh, and I’ve started reading fiction again.

So what have I been reading? Glad you asked:

1. The Court of Wings and Ruin by Sarah J. Maas—Pretty good but the antagonist was about as 2D as one could get before being 1D, very lame. Hated the bad-guy for all the wrong reasons.

2. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino—Just started this. Loving it like I loved the movie. Add a lot more depth to the characters that cinema just doesn’t have time to convey. Gonna rewatch the 3-Hour movie again afterwards.

3. In the queue I have Dan O’Malley’s Blitz, Justin Cronin’s The Ferryman, David Wong’s If this Book Exists, You’re in the Wong Universe, and some James Axler pulp-apocalyptic sci-fi for when I feel like taking this whole literary thing seriously.

Cheers!

The Presumption of AI Artists

This blog post was not written by AI…

But it could have been. You can now pay a company to write blog posts for you. With a few simple ‘prompts’ to help capture the theme and the feel of your post, you can completely automate the writing process. Think of all the content I could ‘create’ if I could type less words than what I’ve just typed here, and had the AI spit out screed after screed of content on the daily!

Another productive Facebook thread.

The same thing is currently all the rage in the realm of visual art. Legit artists are feeling disenfranchised because the AI is doing in seconds what it would take hours or days to produce. Folks like me, who can’t draw worth a damn are creating content like this for mostly fun and possible profit:

Library II

from $45.00

The Library stands formidably in the center of the Fields of White to the north of Coravan City. The books held within are numerous. Some titles are familiar, while others more obscure. Some of the books are stories their authors never intended to write. Yet they all reside within the ancient walls of the Library...

• Acid-free, PH-neutral, poly-cotton base
• 20.5 mil (0.5 mm) thick poly-cotton blend canvas
• Canvas fabric weight: 13.9 oz/yd2(470 g/m²)
• Fade-resistant
• Hand-stretched over solid wood stretcher bars
• Matte finish coating
• 1.5″ (3.81 cm) deep
• Mounting brackets included
• Blank product in the EU sourced from Latvia
• Blank product in the US sourced from the US

I am no artist, nor do I pretend to be one. Where I worked hard to string sentences together in a somewhat coherent fashion, I did little to do the same with pen, pencil, cray-paws and paper. My interest in comic books was equal parts story and visual appeal—sometimes the visuals outweighing the story. Don’t judge a comic by it’s…content? I knew what appealed to me both in the artist as well as the writer. I’m embarrassed to say that it took me well into my late 20s before I was able to fully appreciate Neil Gaiman’s, The Sandman, because as a teenager I was too hung up on how it looked. My tastes matured. I developed—I’d like to think for the better.

I view this AI generated art similar to asking an artist for a commission. In my own experience this involves telling the artist my idea over 1-2 emails, paying them, and getting something in the mail. The artwork is that artist’s interpretation of my idea. Was my description too vague, too literal? How did the artist interpret my description? If I sent along an image and said “…in this style” it is up to the artist I’m commissioning to make a judgement call as to what the hell I mean. Does he follow the sample image to the letter or use is as a vague point of reference?

Sometimes the artiest gets it right. Other times it’s way off the mark and I’m left with paying for something I really didn’t want.

AI is the same way. You feed it a prompt and get a result. Nothing more. Only with AI you can tweak your prompt to get something closer to what you desire…or not.

If I had the capital to keep an artist on retainer, or if I were a company with an entire art department, I could achieve the same results through regular meetings, a plethora of visual aides, mood boards, etc.

And ultimately, through the human artist, I would get exactly what I’m looking for.

With the AI, in this current state, it’s a gamble. I may gut lucky from time to time with something that is visually compelling, but it won’t be exact. Which is why AI generated art is great for joe-consumer but not for anything professional in it’s current state.

Maybe one day it will be, or maybe one day I will learn how to manipulate the prompts just enough to reproduce what is in my minds eyes.

So what am I, if not an artist?

The cynic would say that I’m a master manipulator.

But I like to think myself more as a curator. I’m feeding the AI an idea and I’m assessing what it gives me based on my own unique tastes. What I find visually appealing is different from what you find visually appealing—in fact, depending on who ‘you’ happen to be, I might find it appalling! That’s how art—like writing, works—not everything is everyone’s cup o’ tea.

And that, my friends, is what ultimately makes art…art, whether it’s crafted by a human, AI, or a goat.

If you found value from this post, please consider contributing financially. You may have noticed that I’ve not written here in a while. This is in part due to life being busy. But money is always a great incentive and motivation in writing for reals instead of letting the AI do it. Consider becoming a Patron or even giving a one-time donation.

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I’m going to keep writing and posting from time to time. But I’ll do it a lot more if I feel that someone out there is receiving some value from it. Thank you and good day.

The Many Saints of Newark - Three Incomplete Stories

…but great characters!

I finally got around to watching this prequel to The Sopranos—The Many Saints of Newark.

For its time, The Sopranos was a wonderful show about mobsters in New Jersey during the late 1990's. It was one of the two HBO flagship shows at the time, during a time when the network was all about pushing envelopes and showing that they could create content and not just play movies that had been out for a while…a long while, like Super Man 4: The Quest for Peace. Full-frontal female nudity and a lot of f-words was the mainstay. (NSFW but Watch Till the End). This was years ahead of Game of Thrones with its fantasy penises… and dragons.

I’ve seen enough clips from episodes on Instagram to know that a complete re-watch of the series will never happen unless on a dare or a Patreon incentive—some aspects of the show are so over-the-top that they border on absurdity. But the Sopranos was a very important show for many reasons. I could go on and on about the characters—Tony as the anti-hero and how he paved the way for folks like Walter White and Vic Mackey—but this is a post about the Many Saint of Newark and I’m sure the whole anti-hero analysis has been done to death on YouTube.

Let’s get the one great thing this movie did out of the way:

The Characters

Remember in Men in Black 3 when Will Smith went back in time to help a young Tommy Lee Jones played by Josh Brolin? Remember how great Brolin played Tommy Lee Jones? If you don’t remember, take my word for it—Josh Brolin channeled the living soul of Jones so good that you literally believed that Will Smith had indeed travelled back in time to help a young Tommy Lee Jones…Agent K….whatever.

The actors playing the young versions of characters from the original show did a remarkable job—a Josh Brolin performance! Everyone mentioned below stood out. Most notable was Cory Stoll as Uncle Junior, and John Magaro as Silvio Dante. These two actors nailed their counterparts cadence and mannerisms as well as Brolin brought a young Jones to life—Magaro especially! I would have watched two hours of Magaro as Dante.

I would have loved to see that origin story, only for it to end in the future, with an older Steven Van Zandt waking up from a coma. That would have been a solid Sopranos story with something of a happy ending.

Honorable mentions must of course go to Michael Gandolfini, who was a teenage Tony Soprano. I was skeptical of this casting choice but he really delivered, portraying his late father’s best known role very well.

Vera Farmiga’s performance of Livia Soprano was hauntingly good. My ears are still ringing with, “Ohhhh, poor you!”

The character’s from The Sopranos were charactures of how real people are supposed to talk and act. But since the show was a drama, not a sitcom, they mirrored real-life closer than they necessarily should. I think because of this, when a new younger actor takes on the mantle of these characters, they really do something amazing in their portrayals.

Because of all this, I felt that the performance of Alessandro Nivola as anti-hero “Dickie” Moltisanti was both underrated and amazing. The Soprano’s focused on Dickie’s kid, Christopher—under the mobster tutelage of Tony. Dickie had been long dead by the time the HBO show had begun, and the few references to him were told by the unreliable source of Tony himself.

Dickie, as seen in The Sopranos

So to see Christopher’s father, not skewed by Tony’s filters, was refreshing and was what made aspects of the movie enjoyable.

Dickie as seen in The Many Saints of Newark

The Plot

Here where things get dicey. I enjoyed this movie as a fan of the Sopranos—it was good information. It was something I would have enjoyed reading on a Fan Wiki. But the story tried to do too much. Specifically it tried to do 3 things—or tell three different stories all at the same time.

Story # 1 (The Main Story)

…was about Dickie Moltisanti. It’s about his struggles with morality, his struggles with women, and coming to grips with being a key player in the New Jersey Family. He’s very much like an older Tony Soprano—constantly struggling with internal battles, at war with doing right by his family, and doing right by The Family.

To me, this was the main story, the only story. David Chase should have put all his eggs into this one basket.

Story # 2

Young Tony Soprano. This whole storyline felt forced. It’s like, because Tony was the main character of the show, his character had to also get top billing in this story that really didn’t involve him.

I enjoyed the interactions between Young Tony and Dickie because they showed a man who was in the game—Dickie, trying to pull his young nephew into it as well. Young Tony has a bright future both in academics and football, and the temptation is there for him to be part Dickie’s life. We also see scene after scene of Tony getting into trouble with a young Richie Aprile and even Carmella! So there was a lot of room to who Dickie’s influence eventually playing a part in the choices Tony would ultimately make.

Young Tony’s connection with his real father, Johnny Boy, is put on ice when Johnny’s sent to prison. So Dickie filling that void in Tony’s life makes sense.

But there’s no follow-through to this plotline. Dickie has all these moral hang-ups that are never fully developed and Tony is literally left out in the cold with no explanation just before the movie ends. We the audience are left to ‘use our imagination’ to fill in the gaps between Many Saints and Tony becoming a Capo in the DiMeo crime family, but the movie gives us no reason to believe that this will happen.

Were someone to watch Many Saints, then watch the Sopranos, they would probably be surprised that Tony ends up a mobster only because the movie did a good job at letting us think he had a future that was significantly lacking in the crime department—Dickie had shut him out, he wasn’t on the best terms with his own father, and he interacted very little with other members of his family, minus his oppressive mother. In fact, the relationship Tony and Livia had would have only further enforced the notion that Tony would remain on the straight-and-narrow—not become part of the mob—if only to eventually get away from her!

Story # 3

The narrator that came in like a ghost throughout the movie was Christopher Moltisanti, who, if you didn’t already know, was killed by Tony in one of the later seasons of the show. Even though the movie is about the ghost’s dad, it insists on telling us that it’s all about Tony. Even through the amount of screen time that we see Tony is significantly less than Dickie, and that the importance of what Dickie is doing is leaps and bounds greater than the adolescent antics of a teenage Tony, Ghost Christopher insists on refocusing our attention on Tony—he killed me years from now, he’s a dick, I’m so sad because I’m dead, blah blah blah. It was such an unnecessary plotline for a prequel. It didn’t need to be there and it actually took away from the main story concerning Dickie. They would have been better off focusing on Dickie and Tony’s relationship without the damn ghost of Christopher—who got real fucking annoy as the show dragged on.

That’s my take on The Many Saints of Newark. I didn’t hate it but the story was poorly executed and tried to do too much. Unlike the Matrix Resurrections, I enjoyed the info-dump as a fan of the series. It told enough of a compelling story and the colorful characters made up for a lack of any sort of plot. Go watch it if you were a fan of the show…just don’t expect very much from it.

If You Enjoyed this, Consider Donating or Becoming a Patreon:

This past year I realized that both my time and writing is valuable, and not without a sacrifice to my family and personal life. I will never charge for this content, however if you received any value from the above post, please consider donating an amount equal to the value you received. This is the Value for Value Model and it’s how I plan to do business going forward. If this post was worth a cup of coffee, consider donating to my coffee fund. If it’s worth more, that’s cool too.

A link to the Donation Page can be found Here.

There is also my Patreon if you’d like to do more than a one-time donation. You can find the link to my Patreon below. Thank you and Goodnight.

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Aeon Timeline and Scrivener

Real quick, guys.

I’ve been using Aeon Timeline 3 in conjunction with Scrivener [the Third] . After something of a learning curve when it comes to syncing data between the two programs, I think I’m at a point where I can actually start working with both programs creatively.

A brief note on the setup:

I’ll probably post a more in-depth video on this at some point but there’s a great deal of customisation that can go into making your timelines specific to your story. If you put in the work, you’ll get a lot out of it. It’s important to spend as little time on this as possible, so that it doesn’t take away from your creative time. I have the luxury of having children, which affords me very little creative time, but quite a lot of time where they might be running around, watching TV and being distracting enough where I can setup these two apps without having to use a lot of creative brain-power.

I say all this to say that I don’t feel as if I was avoiding the creative process, but merely using the time I had to do what I was mentally capable of doing. Now that I’ve gotten these technical aspects put to bed, I can shift into a more creative mindset and hopefully carve out some time to throw on the headphones and make some magic!

A Note on the Magic:

My story is in two parts. Part 2 was edited and I have copious notes from my awesome editor. Part 1 needs to be expanded. So what I’m doing with Timeline, is restructuring the content I already have, and inserting new scenes and chapters, in order to tell a better story. I have a lot of this up in my head, based on the Editor feedback, etc. But it’s important to get this all nailed down and codified.

Timeline is going to help me do this.

I’m going to work almost exclusively in Timeline in order to get the structure set. All of this will sync with Scrivener. Once I’m happy with the bones of my story, I will transition over to Scrivener and start writing the scenes, and getting the book ready for another pass from The Editor.

It’s all a huge process, but it now feels like building something sharp, tight and tangible, instead of looking at it through cloudy glasses.

It should go without saying but, no I am not getting paid to endorse these two products. I legit love both Aeon Timeline and Scrivener. I’ve been using them for years and they seem to be getting better and better with each version—Timeline especially.

Speaking of Getting Paid:

This past year I realised that both my time and writing is valuable, and not without a sacrifice to my family and personal life. I will never charge for this content, however if you received any value from the above post, please consider donating an amount equal to the value you received. This is the Value for Value model and it’s how I plan to do business going forward. If this post was worth a cup of coffee, consider donating to my coffee fund. If it’s worth more, that’s cool too.

A link to the Donation Page can be found Here.

There is also my Patreon if you’d like to do more than a one-time donation. You can find the link to my Patreon below. Thank you and Goodnight.

Become a Patron!

The Matrix Resurrections - Where to Even Begin

Well at the risk of turning into a movie site, here’s a post about The Matrix 4. Hold on to your butts!

A few things:

1. I’ve not written anything lately. Life has gotten the better of me and I’m trying to change that. So if I seem a bit rusty, that’s why.

2. This post is FULL OF SPOILERS. Thank you for the clicks but turn away now if you’ve not seen this movie yet and don’t want to read what I have to say. I’ve written this with the assumption that you’ve seen the movie though it’s an amusing read regardless if you've seen the movie or have the desire to.

3. This is a new and innovative Choose-Your-Own-Adventure post. Here’s how it works. After the introduction, I’m going to start the post by listing off what I felt the Matrix 4 got right—positive stuff that will make fans of the franchise feel all warm and fuzzy inside, as they stew in their human-pod, jacked-in to the illusion of truth…

   And after all the unicorns and rainbows, I am going to lay out the train-wreck that was The Matrix 4. So if you’re into controversy then by all means choose the train-wreck segment first, then come back and read the positive, massage-parlour with all it’s incense and body oils segment. And if you need to ease into your hate-read of your favourite movie by hearing some good points, that will abruptly go into a brutal casting of stones, then start up at the top. Choose Your Own Adventure. Got it? Good.

Introduction:

The Matrix Resurrections, or the Matrix 4, or M4—if you want to get all Mission Impossible about it, is a continuation of the story of [Paul] Thomas Anderson, aka NEO, aka The One, aka “Ted”, on his Kung-Fu quest to save humanity from the great lie that is the un-tellable…<pause for dramatic effect> …Matrix. This time around, Tommy A is an oblivious video game designer, completely unaware of his adventures in the past three movies, due to memory suppression helped on by his therapists and The Machines—the primary antagonists of the franchise. But for all their hyper-intelligent machine ways, they foolishly allowed Anderson Thomas 360 to design the very game based on his real-life adventures. So when A. Tommy Vercetti starts remembering who he was, it should come as no surprise to anyone. Enter Trinity, I mean Tiffany, and hilarity ensues.

The Fuzzy Good Stuff

These are the things I really liked about M4 Resurrections:

A Young New Cast

Believe it or not I liked the new crew, the young cast of Redpills who somehow figure out who Tommy Two-Guns is, helping him once again get out of the Matrix. This reminded me of my exploits back in The Matrix Online, back in good-ole 2005. I was fresh out of college and MMORPGs were new and janky. The game worked off the premise of the end of the third and presumably final movie: The Truce that Neo had brokered with the Machines was in effect, and Redpills were allowed to leave the Matrix for their own adventures. The players in the game were those Redpills and many an adventure was had. For all the snark and sarcasm of this post I truly have many fond memories of my time playing MXO, and the friends I made both In and Out of Character. Much of what I’m writing now has its roots in those RP sessions with fellow redpills. And the new cast is totally in line with that time of my video game life. They felt fresh, new and exciting. It was unfortunate they were overshadowed by the great and mighty ReHash Machine.

So without getting into the whole backstory of the game, the movie’s young cast was a great callback for MXO fans. It showed that the Truce was still in place. That Redpills were still active and that other adventures not centred around Neo, Trinity, etc had the potential for happening.

Their style, though still very leathery and goth-lite, had more of an upbeat edge, between the bright hair, the bright suits and the intricate ink-work.

The young cast and their style was a reflection of how different the Matrix had become. Keep in mind, the Matrix of the previous movies, up until the very end of Matrix 3, didn’t have a sun. Daytime was a white sky over a green filter. Sunlight only came from the program, Sati, who Neo had helped in M3.

I would have liked to see more of the younger cast, but we’ll get to that in the Negative Nancy section of the post.

The Tech

Both the movie tech and the tech within the movie were amazing. The Matrix came out in 1999. I was a young adult back then, in college, fresh out of High School. The tech they used back then was ground-braking. What we have now is so much better and so overused that we don’t even realise that the majority of what we see on the screen is computer generated. Visually, the scenes both in and out of the Matrix were amazing, clean and awesome to behold. I would have sat through two hours of Real World machine vs machine fights with no story just to see the visual mayhem. Those special effects folks really did a good job.

Tech in the universe of the movie brought in elements from The Animatrix, specifically Matriculated. In the pre-truce setting of the animated short, humans ‘trick’ the Machines into joining the cause to fight other machines. The result is a band of redpills who work together with machines.

In the post-Truce era, machines, like humans have the free-will to not be subjects of the system. So we see the redpills and the machines working side-by-side for their own purposes. Programs, not part of the system have also joined the cause, and manifest themselves in the real world using nano-tech and lots of cool grey bubbles that take the shape of humans, though I could very easily see them as dragons or hobbits or talking cars, like from that cars movie…called, Cars.

Because of the Truce, we get to see a human city that isn’t underground and isn’t called Zion. There’s an artificial sun, but everyone still seems to dress in homeless-chic.

"There are some things in this world… that will never change."

…like the way we dress in the real world.

A New Generation of Programs and Callbacks that Worked—as Opposed to ALL the Callbacks that Didn’t.

The Purge. The Matrix was rebooted sometime after the Truce and before the start of the M4Rez. During this time a lot of old-movie baggage was thrown out like yesterdays jam—the Oracle, the Architect, Morpheus, and Zion. There were two purges—one carried out in the Matrix by the Machines, and another by humans due to their own stubborn need to live in the past. Morpheus is not with us in this new movie because he, and much of Zion’s hierarchy couldn’t make the transition from war to peace. It was important to have this moment in the movie because it made Morpheus less of an icon and more of a human. His hubris was that he couldn’t let go when peace had finally been achieved. Taking Morpheus and Zion out of the equation had the potential of moving forward and not getting stuck in the past. It could have closed the door on an endless cycle of rehashing what happened in the previous movies.

From a story-telling standpoint it was good to not make a movie that was full of callbacks to the original trilogy. Unfortunately, the movie couldn’t get out of its own damn way in that regard. More on that later.

The Merovingian. I was so happy to see that he did not get purged. It goes to show just how powerful a program he is, who was able to survive such an ordeal. And that he’s reduced to a raving lunatic shows that even survival did not come without a price. That he left the movie without getting judo-chopped by Neo makes me think that there’s a story in the works…if only in my dreams.

Neil Patrick Harris as Architect 2.0 was great. He’s known as the Analyst and masquerade as Ander & Son’s shrink, and I thought he was a lot more animated than the dry Architect. His reason for being such a heavy hitter in the Machine hierarchy reminded me of a reverse Monsters Inc. “We can get more energy from you humans if we scare and manipulate the shit out of you, rather then just let you live your lives.”

That’s about it for what I liked. Onward to infamy and queue up the nerd-rage!

Train-Wreck Time, Kids!

In the echoing words of Our Lord and Saviour, Barack Obama—let me be clear: I am a huge Matrix fan. I watch the Trilogy on the regular and I went through great lengths to acquire a FanEdit of M2&M3 that is truly the best telling of those two movies. My love for the franchise is littered throughout this site and I’ll refute anyone who tries to say that my love for The Matrix is nothing but pure, and consensual and made from the first snowfall in the North Pole.

That being said…

What the ever-loving fuck was wrong with this movie?

Hard as it is to consider, as a fan I really didn’t want another Matrix movie. In this climate of reboots I knew it would’t be genuine. In the movie there is this out-of-place meta-commentary that happens during a series of game-dev meetings, which sums this sentiment up nicely—Warner Bros. wanted a sequel and the creatives did not. But Hollywood Legal eventually got their way. So here we have hot-garbage on a 190 million dollar budget. Money well spent!

Let’s get the obvious out of the way.

Agent Smith

After all these years, to be going back to where it started... back to the Matrix.

Agent Smith is back and he’s young and is Tom AnderNeo’s boss? What? No. The whole point of the Truce was that Smith had gotten so powerful that The Machines needed Neo to stop him. And stop him he did. That Smith is back in M4 is moronic. It completely nullifies the Truce and lessens Neo's importance to the Machines. And it seemed like he was only meant to be there to fill time and create a big reveal that was so utterly unnecessary. And then he comes back at the end to suddenly be a good guy who helps Neo and Trinity escape, with literally no explanation as to why. Really movie?!?!

At some point after the first movie, the creative minds behind the franchise decided that it just had to be Smith—there couldn’t be another bad guy. And the Smith-arch worked and was played out in the first three movies. To bring him back made me tired and further enforces the idea of the movie industry being unwilling to take risks. And because they couldn’t decide who was the big baddie, Smith or the Analyst, it all fell flat at the end. Though they made it abundantly clear who I should be rooting for, they left it vague as to who I should be rooting against. The entire arch collapsed into absurdity when Smith turned face. It truly was a bad pro-wrestling angle, again, on a 190 million digital crypto budget of Monopoly Mario Coins.

And speaking of Smith—while we’re still on the subject—what was the deal with Morpheus-Smith program?

Guys, seriously, I’m Morpheus…only I’m not…or something.

Subconsciously, Anderson T. Chesterton the Third, created this fail-safe designed specifically to get him out of the Matrix in case something like this were to happen. And yet, we see an Anderson & Thomas who is so far removed from his past life that when it’s literally staring him in the face in the form of a video game, he has no idea. Don’t get me wrong, the Morpheus program was cool and did a great job at rounding out the cast of redpills, but his backstory sucked and was just thrown at us in the first five minutes of the movie. One second he thinks he’s Agent Smith and the next after this bizarro internal life-reevaluation, he suddenly thinks he’s Cowboy Curtis.

Callbacks: Dude, the movie opens up with a re-shoot of the opening to The Matrix. And it’s lame. I’m sorry, but it is. And the info dump that follows was too much for the start of the freaking movie. And speaking of re-shoots, what the hell was with all the footage from the previous movies used not as flashbacks but as video game content for the video game T. A. The One created. Why? Just why?

Don't even get me started on the rehash of the Dojo scene and the terrible fight sequences peppered throughout the film. This was a franchise built on westernised Kung Fu. What M4 gave us was a geriatric Hulk Hogan and Ric Flare slapping each other in a lackluster main event.

Trinity and Neo

I love Reeves and Moss, but…

…I saw tired actors working in an industry hell-bent on reboots …

I love Reeves and Moss, both professionally and sexually. I think Keanu is a great actor, I think he’s a wonderful human being. I will binge-watch all of his movies including A Walk in the Clouds and Point Break. But damnit I really didn’t want to see an old Neo in another Matrix movie. When I saw the stills for Bill and Ted Face the Music, I saw tired actors working in an industry hell-bent on reboots, an industry too afraid to take chances on something new. Tired Neo is a reflection of a stale and sad Hollywood, which is ironic because in 1999 The Matrix was a movie hailed for innovation, taking chances and doing something new while telling an original story. M4 with Reeves and Moss just felt tired to me. And I don’t want that to sound like a knock on them. I’m really glad to see the two of them in movies, just not movies like the Matrix, where the characters are meant to be an idealised self, video game characters come-to-life. No one plays video games to play as their mom or an old man. It just doesn’t happen.

Here’s a radical thought: Make a Matrix movie with a cast of young redpills where there’s no Neo or Trinity. Have it set, oh I don’t know, in the Matrix, and the antagonist is not a Machine Agent that goes rogue, but some other entity—maybe a rouge human captain that’s trying to bring down the Matrix at the expense of so many lost lives—maybe a sentient program that creates a religious following based on the ‘teachings’ of The One—maybe a really evil rubber ducky that has decided it no longer wants to be a ducky anymore.

Any of those ideas would have been better than the rehash we got. Personally I’m liking the duck idea the best.

Let’s not forget the elephant in the room here. Since The Matrix, the Wachowski’s have historically made terrible movies. So I went into M4 with no expectations whatsoever—the same way I went into Ant Man. But unlike Ant Man, the expectation needle did not rise much above the first big line. There was a lot of great potential and ideas here, but the execution was off, and it relied too much on what had come before. The risk-takers of 1999 had been replaced by the industry hacks of today.

This past year I realised that both my time and writing is valuable, and not without a sacrifice to my family and personal life. I will never charge for this content, however if you received any value from the above post, please consider donating an amount equal to the value you received. This is the Value for Value model and it’s how I plan to do business going forward. If this post was worth a cup of coffee, consider donating to my coffee fund. If it’s worth more, that’s cool too.

A link to the Donation Page can be found Here.

There is also my Patreon if you’d like to do more than a one-time donation. You can find the link to my Patreon below. Thank you and Goodnight.

Become a Patron!

Looking Backward: The Karate Kid Theory: Updated

I read Arkham Asylum: A Serious House On a Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean. I say ‘read’ and not ‘re-read’ because I don’t remember ever reading this story before—even though I’ve had the book for years. In my mind, I had conjured up images of Batman entering the asylum, and with the threat of murdered doctors and orderlies—Batman is forced to comply with the demands of The Joker and other elements of his rogues gallery.

So far, so good.

Where my mind takes a strange turn is that I remembered Batman being put on trial—a trial judged, of course by The Joker and prosecuted by Two-Face. This apparently did not happen in ‘A Serious House On a Serious Earth’. The story by Morrison was much cooler than my memory, though the McKean imagery of the trial seemed so real.

But where did the memory come from?

I’ll spare you the internet research and conclude by saying that I had remembered an episode of Batman: The Animated Series, entitled, “The Trial”, in which these very memories played out. My mind had taken David McKean’s macabre art, and reconstructed it to fit into the children’s animated show of my youth.

What we remember and what actually happened are funny sometimes. I’m sure there’s a name for this phenomenon. I’m sure I could even look it up. But for now we’ll call it, the “Batman the Animated Series Drawn by David McKean Syndrome”.

I re-watched the final season of How I Met Your Mother, thanks to a subscription to Amazon Prime Video that I keep forgetting that I have. The season as a whole is solid. The introduction of the Mother is great. I almost wish they had brought her in and developed her story much sooner, like in season 8, or maybe even 7.

But I say this with some apprehension.

We the audience may have grown tired of her by the final season. “Have them meet already!” would have a much louder effect with a face to the name. Her limited presence in the last season kept us wanting, which was probably the desired intention of the showrunners.

The ending, even after watching it again, was awful. I’m not going to spoil it here. But I will say: we can’t all get our happy ending, even in a comedy. And the show ultimately was about Ted—Ted’s story, to his children.

The original ending isn’t great. It’s so not great that the DVD version contains an alternate ending. YouTube also has said ending, which I’ll share here.

In my opinion—which is the only opinion that matters here—is that the ending of How I Met Your Mother deserves the same treatment as the Karate Kid movies:

There were only two Karate Kid movies.

The Karate Kid, and the Karate Kid 2.

In those movies our hero: underdog, Daniel Larusso, moves into a strange place (California), gets bullied, learns Karate, gets the girl, wins a tournament, loses the girl, goes to another strange and exotic place (Okinawa), gets the girl (and does an ancient tea ceremony so you know it’s true love) fights to the death and comes out the hero. Karate Kid 3 (which doesn’t exits) is just a rehash of the true and only movies. Four, the reboots—garbage, they didn’t happen—some strange mistaken memory that your mind got wrong.

What about Cobra Kai? Alternate universe in which Johnny Lawrence is that hero of the piece, so the inconsistences with Larusso’s character are easily forgiven—it’s not about him. No matter how much the show tries, it’s all about Johnny. (Sweep the Leg).

The same rules apply to How I Met Your Mother. The above ending is the only ending. Anyone to say otherwise is lame.

Hidden Mountain and the Future

Manuscript returned from The Editor. Humbling. She’s the real deal. No punches were pulled. I have a lot of work ahead of me to get this story into a readable state. I’m going with the notions that The Editor is just that good and I’m not just that bad.

When Hidden Mountain was edited, the big takeaway was working on writing from my main character’s perspective and not to branch out into descriptions of things she wasn’t actively seeing.

Today’s takeaway seems to be: Stop holding back. There’s a big world here and the reader needs to damn well see it.

The other big takeaway is that Hidden Mountain is NOT ready for primetime. So I did something bold and pulled it. If you bought it, thank you. Congrats. You’ll be holding onto a rare book that’ll be priceless someday. Your support was invaluable. It got me off my ass and motivated me to take the next step. You folks got me serious, showed me that I have something here. And all I can promise is that the next version of the story will be amazing!

So what am I doing?

Currently I’m drinking some good wine thanks to my longtime friend, Paul at Bottivino. I’ve always been a fan of wine. But now I’m drinking good wine. And I’m learning a thing or two in the process. He’s been sending me some selections that are both surprising and in line with my own unique tastes. And it’s nice to say that I have a ‘wine guy’. Paul’s a sommelier and he really has a passion for wine, and for educating folks.

Check him out!

What else am I doing?

Writing this post because it’s been a while.

But more specifically:

Hidden Mountain and the manuscript currently called Azure’s Dream will be combined. HMountain will be expanded. I’m in the process of doing that now. Azure Dream will ben heavily worked over. Both stories—now one, will go to my editor to be beat into submission. I’ll continue to drink wine and pay the editor and work on Book 3, which will now be Book 2. Eventually, I have successfully written the next Harry Potter and I’ll have ya’ll to thank for it.

In the meantime…

I set up a Patreon. You can find it HERE.

If you find value in my work, or feel like sending some good karma my way, please feel free to subscribe. I’ve got some ideas in the way or perks, and I’d love to engage with you folks. Anything you feel like giving will help motivate me to keep doing it. I’m not looking for money, just motivation.

Thanks!

Show Tunes and Books

The wife and I finally got around to watching The Greatest Showman. I loved it though we both felt the pacing was a bit off. Rushed mostly…mostly. The music was great. Modern show-tuney with just enough edge.

I like show-tunes, and like Hugh Jackman, I’m not gay about it. They’ve just always been my thing—the most moving of the musical genres I subscribe to, that hits all my emotional buttons. I relish in the good cry I get from a show-tune and I feel Zero shame admitting it.

I picked up the audio autobiography by PT Barnum as I neared the end of the movie. That period of time is fascinating. PT Barnum is an interesting individual. More on that later I’m sure, which I finish the book.

I just finished Dead Moon and Terminus by Peter Clines. If you’ve not started reading the Threshold Universe series you need to start. It’s a pre-req for life at this point. It’s Lovecraft enough, yet different enough to stand tall in a league of it’s own.

I’m also reading Unmasked by Andy Ngo, which is non-fiction, and, to some, mythology. Probably one of the more controversial books I’ve read and cared to mention. I’ll probably write up a review of it when I finish, if I’m not kicked from the platform for being subversive.

And finally, in the news of writing, I’ve submitted my manuscript for the sequel to Hidden Mountain to my Editor. The current title is, Azure’s Dream. I’ve also begun writing the first chapter of the 3rd Book. The working title is, Doberman. But this may change as I’m barely a scene in.

Hidden Mountain is Now Out in Paperback!

Hey kid, check this out:

The novella that was six years in the making, that became an e-book, has found its way out of The Matrix and discovered its physical form. Birthed from a pod, like a bald Keanu Reeves, it has discovered its dark reality and will one day wage a one-man war against sentient machines…

The novella is out in paperback.

I’ve added an introduction, a bonus chapter, and a teaser chapter for the next book. There is also a glossary of terms specific to the world I’ve been crafting for far too long.

Go buy the book.

Speaking of the next book: The manuscript goes to My New Editor in February. The next book will indeed be a book, a novel, and picks up where Hidden Mountain left off. The working title is, “The Azure Dream” because “Cold Ice Cream and Hot Kisses” had already been taken. Thanks a bunch, Gavin Belson. But I’m sure a new title will be realized once I get the edited story back. It’ll probably be something captivating and mysterious, and very much in the same vein of “Cold Ice Cream…”

And as far as a release date, I’m going for somewhere in the ballpark of mid-to-late 2021. Updates will flow from this site once February comes and goes.

And with that, I’d like to thank everyone who has already purchased Hidden Mountain, in either or both forms, out of obligation for being family, or married into family, or married to me directly. Please tell your friends and colleagues about it. Please review it over on Amazon. Please drop me a line if you thought it changed your life or can’t wait for the sequel. These are the anxious pleas that we writers feed on.

Hidden Mountain - The First Self Published Work by C.G. McGinn

As my own worst critic, I feel I do a very good jobs writing about other peoples work. Maybe I’m bias.

And it’s not very often that I write about my own work. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s never happened. Sure, I’ve talked a little about my process, and what I’m doing, writing, struggling to produce. But I’ve not talked about a completed, readable project.

…Until now.

Cue the music!

Buy on Amazon

I published my first professionally edited novella. I’d been sitting on it for a few years now. For a while I’d been trying to pull a George Lucas, tweaking some of the bits I wasn’t happy with, writing it in the first person. I even tried scripting it as a graphic novel.

The other day I had a revelation: Just publish the damn thing. Good or bad, rough around the edges, there it is—it’s out there for all the world to see.

And I’m motivated to finish and have edited the sequel!

I currently have enough content to make Book 2 much larger than a novella, however, through the process of writing it, I uncovered new and exciting avenues for the story that weren’t there when I first began.

So there it is. I have a self-published work on Amazon and a second story on the way. Go buy it! It’s less than a cup of coffee.

Chapter 5 of Fire and Brimstone, and Being Back from the Great Beyond

No, no, I’m still here. Haven’t gotten rid of me yet.

Here is Chapter 5 of the aforementioned tale entitled, Fire and Brimstone. The story is taking shape here. It’s a rough train-wreck, which is why it’s here for free, but if you believe in the work, feel free to donate some coin. Value4Value is a powerful tool in this information era. Just ask the No Agenda Show. It seems to be working well for them.

If this is your first time here, get caught up and check out the first few chapters.

Wife had the kid.

Started working from home

Only to be called back into the office

Will probably start working from home again in a week or so

Praying to God that summer isn’t canceled

Might start streaming again soon.

Fire and Brimstone Chapter 4

Without further delay, Chapter 4 of Fire and Brimstone is now out! While reading over this chapter and making small edits, I was pleasantly surprised by how it came out. The tone seems to be set in here and it’s now my job to maintain said tone in future chapters.

Chapter 5 is also written and I should have that up in the next day or so…maybe even today.

Also, in case you’re just tuning in, I’m streaming my writing sessions for this story, over here on Twitch.

You can catch up on the first three chapters over here.

And as always, thank you for your support, whether it’s in the form of encouraging words, Follows on Twitch, or Financial Contributions. Value for Value.

In other news: Had Child Number 3. Well…my Wife had Child Number 3. But you can imagine the ripple-effect having a Third Human Resource would have on one’s life. I’ve not been able to stream, or write, or do much of anything except take care of the kids and crash at the end of the night re-re-re-watching episodes of The Office. Jim and Pam are just the best!

But we’ll hopefully get the writing back on track soon, and maybe even the streaming. Though I did pick up GTA V, so I might very well be my own worst enemy.

Fire and Brimstone Chapter 3

Chapter 3 is now live!

Go read it.

I had every intention of streaming some writing sessions last week. But life got busy and the weather got treacherous.

Chapter 4 may be up before the end of the weekend. But I won’t have anymore until I start up the morning stream again. Fingers crossed.

Chapter 2 of Fire and Brimstone

Fire and Brimstone

Chapter 2 has been posted and can be read HERE.

Twitch

If you’ve been following the morning stream, you’ll know that I’m knee-deep into Chapter 3. What? You’re not following my Twitch Stream? Well what are you waiting for. It’s easy! And you’d be in good company:

SaltyKaitlyn

RabenWrites

MelloTodd

You should go follow them as well!

And so, to business

It’s been some time since my last post. So I wanted to cover a few projects I’m trying to get off the ground.

Twitch

I’m streaming on Twitch. You can find me Here

During the week from 6AM - 7AM you can see me writing stories and talking about it.

On the weekends I can be found in the evening playing games like Batman, or whatever else I feel like playing.

See the schedule on Twitch for an up-to-date list.

When I’m not actively streaming, enjoy the salty styles of saltykaitlyn and a cast of few once I add more friends to my Host List.

Please feel free to Follow me, and watch and chat when I’m streaming! Just like here at CGMcGinn.com, my Twitch Stream is the Happiest Place on the Internet.

Fire and Brimstone

So I’m posting my work on This Website for your enjoyment. As I write the chapters I’ll update This Page.

As new chapters are released I’ll update my social media accounts so that everyone will know when new content comes out.

These are rough drafts of my work. Here is my process: I’m writing this story live on Twtich in the morning. I’ll then read through each chapter, clean up any grammar and expand on a few ideas. For example, in the live writing of Chapter 1, the character of Charlotte didn’t have a previous career as a pastry chef. That bit of her backstory was added during this initial editing phase and released today, Here.

Eventually I’ll have a complete story that is edited, and consistent and polished, which will be published here on the website in a digital format. But in the meantime, if you find entertainment in these rough-cuts of my work, feel free to take advantage of the Donate button and throw some value, for the value you received.

Thanks!

Started streaming on Twitch

It's true. And we're playing Batman.

Go to twitch.tv/cgmcg and check out the past two streams. Give me a follow while you're there.

In the Morning, during the week, I plan to start streaming my writing sessions. It'll help keep me on task and possibly start a community of imaginative thinkers that will grow into some sort of cult-like commune where we'll all eat kale. Or maybe I'll just finally get my shit published.

So check it out and watch me play video games and write. It's like what I used to do with my broski, only with the potential of a much bigger audience….and money.

The Archive is Now Open

This is a short post to let you know that I’m still alive. I’m also proud to announce the grand opening of The Archive, which according to the Mueller Report is considered, “…the happiest place on Earth.” It is a page where you can find all my blog posts grouped by category. Right now the categories are:

Books Fiction

Comic Books

Writing

Movies

Music

Nonfiction

Televisions

Recipes

…and Video Games

So if you’re looking to read something in a specific gene, go Here and it will take you There.

What surprised me was that I’ve written a lot about comic books—and I plan to write a lot more (foreshadowing). Perhaps I’m in the wrong field—although I can’t draw worth a damn.

Moving forward I may break these categories down further into sub-genres—sci-fi, fantasy, paranormal romance…just to name a few.

Hope you find this helpful.

Also, I changed the site’s background image because the last one mysterious disappears. I wonder if I’d broken some sort of Copyright violation, although I never received any warning…at least, not yet (foreshadowing).

COMIC BOOK THEORY: THE "CAKE AND EAT IT TOO" GAMBIT - PART 2 (The Sequel to Part 1...this time it's personal)

When last we spoke on this subject, I cobbled together a bunch of funny pictures and talked a bit about Batgirl, and somehow I made a few good points. Ben Dunn re-posted the first entry on his Facebook page and this site here, cgmcginn.com saw unprecedented traffic, almost hitting 45 page views…almost. And for funzies, Ben posted Part 1 again today and I hit that sweet sweet 42 page views.

Seeing how I’m trending now, I figure now would be as good a time as any to release Part 2 of my thoughts on a Ninja High School reboot, comic books, and whatever the hell else comes to mind while I type and drink. Strap on your seat-belts kids and crank up the Nickelback. You’re in for a nerd-fueled ride into the mind on an obscure comic book fan! Roll the intro:

“Look at this photograph…something-something…it makes me laugh…”

In Part 1, I wrote about what DC Comics did right with the Batgirl story line during New 52. Re-read Part 1 for there will be no recap here.

If I were writing Ninja High School, here’s what I’d keep, and what I’d do differently—starting with characters.

Jeremy

I’m going to make the radical suggestion that Batgirl, and Jeremy Feeple are very similar, perhaps even two sides of the same coin. (There’s a Two-Face reference in there somewhere).

Jeremy is not violent by nature. He’s ordinary. He looks at the world in a certain way and makes judgments based on past experience and a moral code that he’s still forming. He’s only 16—he has a lot of growing up to do.

For much of the original run I felt that Jeremy was, ‘along for the ride’. He was pulled into a lot of strange situations that he didn’t ask for. He was the object of affection by both a ninja and an alien—hot. Every boy’s dream. It’s a great male fantasy and damnit it works!

But Jeremy’s ability to assert himself was often lacking. My teenage self at the time didn’t care about these sorts of heavy topics, but the dude who just turned 40 tends to look at things with, well, more experienced eyes—eyes which now need glasses to see.

Jeremy was the vehicle that my teenage self rode through these stories. He had personality but it was muted much of the time in order for us to see all the action and hilarity from everyone else.

It would be nice for there to be a bit more depth to Jeremy Feeple. Under the currently timeline, he experienced his father leaving him. In my proposed timeline, mom is out of the picture. In both cases that loss should impact him much more. He should have an edge. He shouldn’t be a punk, but there should be more grit around his character. Maybe he does well in school, but is also a bit full of himself. Maybe he’s aggressive in gym class. Maybe he’s a loaner, with only a small circle of friends. Maybe it takes a lot for him to warm to someone. Maybe the loss of his mother made him icy, so he’s had a string of sour relationships. He was burned by a first love and now he’s closed himself off. Enter Ichi and Asrial and suddenly their job to win his affection has gotten that much more difficult. The two smoke-shows show up and the boy just isn’t interested. How does one win the boy who doesn’t want to get hurt again?

Asrial

Let’s get this out of the way: Asrial is fun and sexy eye-candy. She’s strong, she can do techie/mechanical/other-worldly shit. She looks great in short-shots, crop-tops, tank-tops, cut-offs, and body-suites. And there’s that whole furry thing with the ears…er…if that’s what you’re into.

If works! It’s great! The whole look sticks in the mind and has become synonymous with Ninja High School. All of what I just said has to stay. She’s one of the most well-rounded characters. She’s smart and sexy. She could be Batgirl. She should be Batgirl. She should fight crime when she’s not trying to woo Jeremy. I would read a series based entirely on Asrial, the same way I would play an entire Arkham game where Batgirl was the main character. More about that in a near-future post.

What Asrial needs in a reboot is more storylines that develop her and show that she can stand on her own, without Jeremy. She’s a strong female lead. She can kick ass and be independent. She don’t need no man!

But at the same time, I’m really happy with how she and Jeremy end up together in the original run. I feel like she went from the best-friend tag-along to the lover. Though I never fully understood where Jermey and Ichi, turned into Jeremy and Asrial. That was lost in the cobwebs of my mind or was never made clear.

Were the same scenario to play out again, there needs to be a breakup. There needs to be time to heal. Since it’s Ninja High School, there needs to be ninja’s sent to kill Jeremy, who are later called back when Ichi sees that revenge only works when your parents are shot outside of a theater and you have a strange obsession with bats.

Ichi

Ichi is the wild-card in all this. Like Asrial, she’s strong and independent. What makes her different? Ambition? The Ninja Clan. Out of all the NHS primary character, she is the hardest to wrap my head around. She’s always been the most selfish character in the story—at first. And her development into someone who actually cares for Jeremy is a very well done transformation.

Storylines I Loved from the Original Run that should be Explored with Modern Themes

Lendo Rivalsan goes to Hell. The entire plot line where Lendo goes to Hell to save Jeremy’s soul was amazing to both my young mind, and as a concept. It was never fully developed but Lendo changed during that time in Hell. He sort of revert back to his old self once the story had run its course. It was a missed opportunity that could be rekindled in the reboot.

We also learned a great deal about Mimi Master. It was also a great tie-in to the Warrior Nun Areala, which is becoming a Netflix something-or-other, so it would be topical. Speaking of…

Mimi Masters as a character, in a story about Ninjas and Technology—both alien and steam, the fact that there magic is interesting. Magic, in a world that could otherwise be categorized as science fiction with martial arts—like the Matrix.

Mimi brings the whole philosophical, spiritual, supernatural element into the series—again, like the Matrix. It makes for a great tool to have in your comic-writing toolbox. It falls in line with Dr. Strange being part of the Avengers. You have Iron Man technology, but there’s also some dark and mysterious shit going down that not even Iron Man is prepared for. With Mimi, you have magic and demons and the idea of an afterlife, and magic missiles. There could be an entire story-line that would label the comic, fantasy, before bouncing back into something based in technology and/or Kung-Fu.

Kung-Fu: For much of the series, Jeremy’s girlfriend was a ninja. Let that sink in. Jeremy was dating a ninja. Why oh why did he not think to ask her to learn some moves? Not only would it help develop his relationship with Ichi, but it would be both humorous and maybe even rewarding. Jeremy learns some moves and then gets himself out of a jam. Jeremy and Ichi train together, and grow closer. Jeremy looks more like a developed character and less like a prop for the ladies.

His brother, Ricky was the ninja in the family while Jeremy remained ordinary. I say, make Jeremy start the story ordinary and develop into something more.

Here’s a small tangent. As you may have gathered from the first post, I’m a fan of Batgirl. Again, there should be an Arkham game for Batgirl. Recently I read Batgirl of Burnsides. Didn’t much care for it, but what they tried to do was make Batgirl—and a comic for that matter, hip to shit like social media. There were clones of Facebook, Tinder, and Spotify all over the place in that damn book. An underlying theme in Burnsides was how social media could be used for evil and nefarious ways, instead of, ya know, being used for evil and nefarious ways…

I think Burnsides went overboard with social media. But what was cool to see was that everyone had a smartphone, or a computer, or something that made them connected to everyone and everything else. Good or bad, it showed the kind of world we live in and didn’t try to remake some ideal time from days gone by. It’s a question that is asked in a lot of older science fiction: in a world with cell phones, how would this story be different. Think about a movie like Starwars. What if they had cell phones, text messaging, social media platforms?

What if Ninja High School had a social media platform? What would a computer powered by steam look like? What if Dimension X were a computer simulation instead of another realm that exists in the backwaters of space and time?

I’m going to stop here. This series of posts probably requires a part 3, or a well paying job, or a side-hustle, or no money at all but commissions from time to time. Whatever the case, I’m not finished with these ideas. I just have to stop writing before I start vomiting words on paper.

Crowfall: Book 3 of the Raven's Mark by Ed McDonald

I’ve read a lot of books.

And there are all sorts of wacky ways we find new and old books to read. It’s something most of us don’t ever realize—the mechanical sub-routine that is at work in the discovery of books. They are recommend to us. We see suggestions under headings like, “If you like this, try this…”

We find them on the “New” shelf at our local library or bookstore.

I get most excited about in the discovery of a new book when it happens simply on a whim. In my mind I’ll say something like, “that sounds interesting, I’ll give it a shot.” And a chapter into it, my face is completely blown off and I’m hooked. These are the books I’m most passionate about, that give me literal chills and I’ve re-read them every few years. That last part is a big deal—I’ll swear for emphasis: It’s a big fucking deal. I don’t re-read books. I just don’t do it unless it’s a remarkable book. I’ve re-read the following in my entire life:

The Count of Monte Cristo

Cat’s Cradle

The Gunslinger

The Rook

The Lies of Locke Lamora

These are all books that blew me away for one reason or another. The Rook especially was an amazing story and now a series on Starz. There’s something I wrote about the Rook that may or may not be framed in the Author’s Pool Room:

Here’s the point: A great discovery should be shared. It’s that sage-like wisdom from Indiana Jones—It belongs in a museum! Moreover, it belongs in your bookshelf, in your friends bookshelves, in your local libraries and on the Amazon top-whatever Amazon has.

I think Book 1 of the Raven’t Mark series fell into my lap while ordering Fantasy and Sci-Fi books for the library I occasionally work at. It sounded interesting. Little did I know how hooked I’d get. And it was a series I’d have to wait for because at the time only one of the three books had been released. Books were pre-ordered and promptly devoured within their debut week. The Raven’s Mark is a page turner.

I can safely say that I would get into a drunken bar fight defending these books. If you don’t like them, there’s something wrong with you, you have no soul, or you’re just an asshole. Sorry, the science is in on this one. This is a great read!

Crowfall brings closure to the story, telling a tale of a man who must become a monster in order to move the heavens and earth for the woman he loves. That’s a simple movie-poster tagline for a much more complex plot. It’s also a story told in shades of gray. There are no ‘good guys’ but there is a likability to the characters revealed in their many and assorted flaws.

Where Ed McDonald shines as a writer is in his ability to find his character’s voice. Ryhalt Galharrow feels like a flesh and blood human telling an account of his actual life—albeit the flesh is discolored and bruised and the blood is mostly Misery poison. But the character’s voice is sharp and raw. He’s the sort of person you’d find in a bar of a less than reputable sort, and would probably do well to avoid. But instead you sit down with him, he buys you a drink, and then starts telling you a story. One drink becomes several and his story takes you places you didn’t plan on going. He shows you things you didn’t ask to see, things that give you nightmares and make you afraid to close your eyes. But by now it’s too late. You’re hooked.

The Raven’s Mark comes from a place of darkness, both in the physical realm and the realm of the human soul, and somehow finds it’s way into the purest light.

The series is still too new to read a second time, but reading it again, in a year or two will certainly happen. It’s a damn great trilogy and I look forward to more stories from Ed. He’s an author to be shared.

Ravencry: Book 2 of the Raven's Mark by Ed McDonald

When I finally put all my ducks in a row, get published (self or otherwise), and get on the scene, my first order of business will be to befriend Ed McDonald and talk shop over pints of thick strong stouts, porters, and ales of the chest-hair growing variety. I get the sense that he’s a pretty cool guy. I’m following him on Instagram, so it’s a start. Maybe when this post goes live I will make mention of it on the “Insta”—something I should do more often anyway. Based on one of his more recent posts, I’m pretty sure we share a similar writing style—the difference being he has 2 books published with a 3rd coming out in June while I have a series of rough drafts ranging in degrees of roughness similar to grades of sandpaper. He obviously has the discipline in which I lack.

I enjoy his writing style and the 2nd book of the Raven’s Mark series, Ravencry maintains the hard and sharp edge introduced in his first book. The character of Ryhalt Galharrow is what you get when you take Ian McShane’s, Al Swearengen and throw him into a magic-fill, apocalyptic fantasy, where he is able to swear and murder his way through all matter of monster and conspiracy. Galharrow drinks profusely, swears excessively—if not poetically, and cares very little for how he presents himself to the nobility.

Two Ian McShane “Swegen” posts in a week. Time to re-watch Deadwood!

And yet somehow, he is a character with heart, who cares for others—not necessarily society as a whole but perhaps just those closest to him. And those people—few and meager as they may be, he does not want to see them eaten by what may crawl out from the Misery—a seemingly endless stretch of land plagued by magic, more radioactive than ethereal.

As for my second order of business: Revenge. Swift and brutal revenge. Or Creme Brulee.

Revenge

A dish best served with caramelized sugar and a butane torch.