I’m two episodes into Dead Boy Detectives and I’m having a blast. Something about this feels wonderfully light and playful, despite the show’s somber, grisly, and morbid elements.
What can I say?
Continue readingCategory Archives: Writing
How has Fallout been my chill-out?
It’s been a minute.
I’ve been packing, clearing out, and moving into a smaller space (plus storage). This is, as ever, revealing. It’s also a tremendously time-hungry pain in the ass.
I’ve had less time for consuming media as a result of all this, but I’ve sometimes watched an episode of Fallout as a way of relaxing in the evenings. And I do mean relaxing. But why is this show about awful stuff not awful?
Continue readingCascade Failure (on GeeklyInc)
I promised to link my review of L.M. Sagas’ Cascade Failure when it posted on GeeklyInc, but that entirely slipped my mind. The review is up! It’s been up for almost a month. My apologies.
In case you are deathly allergic to clicking external links, here’s the tl;dr…
Continue readingMonarch: Legacy of Monsters, after season 1
What’s my verdict after finishing season one of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters? No spoilers, I liked it. I even loved some of it. But I didn’t love all of it equally—for one, I didn’t care much about the big monsters most of the time.
My lack of interest in most of the monsters turned out just fine! That didn’t detract from the show, because Monarch is far more focused on people, and humanity, than on giant stompy monsters. And it was Monarch’s focus on people that I loved.
I think there are some interesting details in why I loved the parts I loved, and what didn’t work as well for me. Come check it out.
Continue readingInternal critics & crediting all the work
I struggle to give credit to all the important work that is part of writing.
I think that work can be roughly sorted into three categories:
Continue readingDavid Drake, 1945-2023
Rest in peace, David Drake. May your memory be a blessing.
I did not know David Drake, but I knew his work. I reviewed a number of his books here. Recently, when a friend was looking for a very particular flavor of genre fiction, I recommended Drake. I said, “He may not write the most poetic or literary story, and you might be able to spot tropes from a long ways off, but damn does he know how to drive plot.”
From what little I know about Drake’s writing habits and his collaborations, I admire him. He apparently knew the arc of each story well enough to write detailed plot outlines (there’s a free example here), and would then hand those off to his collaborator and take second billing. He thus helped other writers get published and break into the market. Eric Flint, if my memory of various author’s notes serves, found those outlines to be extremely helpful with their shared Belisarius series.
David Drake also clearly wrote to release some of the awfulness he’d experienced while serving in Vietnam, especially in his Hammer’s Slammers series. He was of the generation of genre authors, especially military fiction authors, whose lives had been turned sideways by the war. His post here from 2009 states his feelings about the war pretty eloquently.
Relatedly, I appreciate Drake’s military fiction; its sense of grim loneliness and futility, blended with camaraderie and the occasional glimpse of something more admirable, feels like a fitting portrait of war. It fits with what I’ve heard from my veteran friends who’ve been in combat. Unlike other mil-fic I’ve read, Drake’s stories don’t pretend that there’s some inner nobility or heroism inherently brought out by war. Nor does he pretend that wars accomplish much good.
I never dug deeper into David Drake’s political leanings. Given my frustration with other mil-fic authors, perhaps I wanted to protect myself from unwanted knowledge. It’s easier for me to read Drake’s work and appreciate it when I don’t feel immediately repelled by him. We’ll see whether I risk learning more. It won’t happen today.
If you want to read Drake’s books, you can find some of them here in the Baen Free Library. I can’t recommend the Larry Correia or John Ringo titles that appear nearby without wreathing my recommendation in enough caveats to float a lead brick. Stick with David Drake instead.
Filler, fight scenes, and Marvel fluff
I practiced stage combat years ago. I know how to choreograph a decent fight. I love watching skilled practitioners strut their stuff. This is why I love watching old Jackie Chan movies and the John Wick series, why I marvel at Olympic gymnasts or any other athletes where I have some basic understanding of just how utterly awesome these people are at what they do. I appreciate skill, and I admire craft.
Making a big blockbuster action sequence takes a lot of work, and can be done well. Sometimes I like that style. The first time I watched the first Avengers movie, I don’t think I was aware that the climactic fight took over twenty minutes. I enjoyed the spectacle, appreciated the work put into it, and didn’t care about how long it ran.
But many of those climactic fights feel like filler. Maybe I’ve seen too many Marvel movies, consumed them past the point of satiation. Or maybe…
Continue readingThe back-into-it roundup, 11/2/23
There’s a wall that builds itself. It stands between me and my creative work. If I pass through it every day, I can knock it down a little with each trip—moving past it is never effortless, but the wall doesn’t have a chance to grow that much. If I don’t pass through for a while, the wall climbs and solidifies. Pushing past it gets harder the longer I wait.
I shared that image, that metaphor, with Ley when it came to me recently. They nodded, and suggested the metaphor of a quickly-overgrown path that I need to frequently bushwhack and clear. That works for me too.
I’ve been busy doing other work for a week or so. I didn’t think that would be such a distraction from my other writing, but it was. Fortunately, I had the Monuments Men post ready and was almost finished with another World Seed (The Blister is now available for sale!).
But now I’m trying to decide which fiction project to return to, how I want to start bushwhacking—and I’m being pulled in yet another direction by Skip Intro’s Veronica Mars episode for the Copaganda series. Sometimes I watch or listen to interesting analysis (critique and/or appreciation) of stories and find that spark of inspiration. This was one of those times. I don’t know where I’ll take it or what I’ll do with it. Maybe I’ll hunt down more old noir and see if that gives me any new clues.
That’s my ramble for now.
Wait, I should have another review showing up on Geekly Inc soon. I reviewed A Power Unbound, which I enjoyed. I’ll probably have more for you here about that another time, and I’ll let you know when that post has gone live.
Oh, it’s already up! Enjoy.
Inspiration, Irritation, & Spite
There’s a quote from Ursula Vernon that’s stuck with me, something I think I found in one of her Author’s Notes. “Inspiration knocks now and again, but spite bangs on the door all year long.”
That doesn’t ring fully true for me—my spite-writing is usually a rant or half-formed polemic in my journal, and I struggle to turn those into fiction—but it sparked a funny question for myself the other day.
Do I write like oysters make pearls?
Continue readingNimona (Netflix 2023)
I loved the comic by ND Stevenson.
I loved this movie too, right up to the end, even though it was clearly its own take on the story. 90% of this movie, maybe 98% of this movie, did more or less everything I wanted. The actors, animators, and writers did a marvelous job. Then, at the very end, the movie really frustrated me.
I can’t meaningfully talk about this movie, and how I feel about it, without spoiling the end. Suffice to say I didn’t expect this totally predictable ending. I wish they had written a different one. I’ll mark the spoilers below.
Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 