My Quixote Year

I've been waiting all year to write this one.  I can't wait any longer...!

Back in 2012, I had what I dubbed "My Trojan Year," although the actual blog post I wrote about it, apparently, was called something else (which was kind of disappointing to learn).  I read a lot more Trojan War stories that year than I experienced versions of Cervantes' Don Quixote in 2019, but there was enough.

First was Don Quixote itself, which I had never read before, but a copy of which had long been on my to-read list, probably due to length.  I found it incredibly enlightening, considering previously I only knew the story from cultural memory and Man of La Mancha (I saw a local production of it once, and enjoy the 1972 film version starring Peter O'Toole).  The story is infinitely more complex, in any manner of ways, than I could've imagined.  Like a lot of older novels, it's a far different kind of narrative than we have today.  Thankfully, it's no Tristram Shandy!  (But thanks to the brilliant film adaptation of that one, I'd love to revisit it some day.)  And it is a story of ideas, but not necessarily the ones (or just) the ones from the musical.  It's not all "impossible dream" and windmills (which, as you might expect, show up fairly early).  Anyway, the Goodreads review I wrote was one of my favorites from the year, too.

I of course went out of my way to catch Terry Gilliam's The Man Who Killed Don Quixote when it finally received wide(r) release this year.  This was a movie that famously, infamously, underwent a tortured production history, to the point where there was actually a film release (a documentary, anyway) long before it finally became a reality, called Lost in La Mancha, and for years seemed as if the only way fans were going to be able to experience Gilliam's vision.  As I detailed in another post on another blog, I opted for the DVD release of the movie, which was...about equally problematic as anything else about its sorry history.  Walmart didn't carry it.  Target only had the Blu-ray.  And Amazon didn't even officially carry it, instead listing independent vendors.  (Amazon has officially become the 21st century Sears catalog, the Walmart of conglomerate shopping.  Yay.)  But order it I of course did, and unlike a lot of other people who bothered to make the effort to see the results, I thoroughly enjoyed it.  It's still my pick for best film of the year.

Later in the year, Salman Rushdie released his latest novel, Quichotte (pronounced "key-shot").  Apparently inspired at least as much by a French opera version of Don Quixote as anything else (and as usual, Rushdie had plenty on his mind), the results are about as good as anything else I've read from the author (but it's no Satanic Verses, which to be fair few enough books are).

I didn't really plan any of this.  I mean, the Trojan Year thing was sort of easy to arrange, but I couldn't really plan for Rushdie's next book to center around Don Quixote.  I knew, coming into 2019, I had as good a shot as there had ever been to finally see Man Who Killed Don Quixote, and so that was the impetus to finally read the book, I admit.  I didn't wait to read it, all these years, on the off-chance Gilliam's movie would finally get made (much less shake loose from ridiculous "producer" entanglements).  That would have been absurd!

But I like that I ended up enjoying all three versions so much.  They each had their own things to say, even though they were basically playing from the same playbook.

Which meant, as the Trojan Year had already prodded me to think (props to anyone who went back to read about it), all over again, that I simply can't abide the perennial laments about remakes.  It seems you can't go a single year without someone (and usually, a lot of someones) complaining about the latest Hollywood remake.  (I guess Disney gets a free pass when it does those live action remakes of their animated hits, but I digress.)  I like to point out that the history of storytelling is all about retelling the same stories, that most of the old stories we know we wouldn't even recognize if presented with their original versions.  The mark of a good storyteller isn't the story but how they tell it. 

If I were to come up with a story that was popular enough for someone else to feel like making their own, I'd welcome it, I really would.  If I were lucky enough to get a movie made out of a story I wrote, I wouldn't sit here complaining about how "unfaithful" it was.  If my story wasn't strong enough to stand changes, I clearly didn't do a good enough job with it in the first place!  If someone improved on it, great!  And if someone just wanted to add to it, great!  (Ironic, given that Don Quixote, as it exists today, is presented in two acts, the second of which Cervantes wrote because someone had written what he considered a poor imitation.  I suspect history would have forgotten the imitation, as it did, even if Cervantes had never addressed it, much less written it into the second act!)

And speaking of which, a couple years ago I confessed to a second-cousin that I had a Hamilton story I wanted to write, this when Hamilton was still raging across pop culture.  She winced, suggesting that it was now a moot point.  But it really isn't.  Even if the story I still hope to write is nowhere near as pervasive, it still deserves telling, and has a vastly different viewpoint than the musical.  A few months back I watched White House Down and Olympus Has Fallen, which were two Hollywood productions that obviously overlapped significantly.  But I found the results different enough, and not just because one was obviously a Channing Tatum vehicle and the other a Gerard Butler vehicle (which ended up producing two sequels), and Tatum and Butler are very different screen personalities.  Maybe it's because I don't believe in reductive logic when it's pointless, but there's always more room to wiggle in a story than people tend to allow. 

And anyway, between a Trojan Year and a Quixote Year, I can't wait to see how this happens again...

Fall in Their Place released

 



Fall in Their Place is now available.  The link here, depending when you view it, will merge the paperback and ebook editions.

The third poetry collection I've released at this point (second in as many months!), it contains work that began the process of streamlining my poetic thought process, so on that score it has some distinction.  It's still kind of ranty, but there's slightly less angst this time, so there's that!  It's fun going through the avalanche of poems again.  But I will also be working at finding real publishers for new poetry, and perhaps even new compilations of the highlights from these collections.  Yeah!

The cover image for this one was pretty easy.  For once the database Createspace/Kindle provides gave me an obvious choice.  But in no way am I implying the guy in the picture falls!  Symbolism, folks. 

(Unless he did fall.  Which would make the picture in considerable poor taste.)

(And me as well.  And cast a dark pall over the whole collection!)

(So I assume he didn't fall.)

Anyway, there's more coming, regardless of whether or not you rush out to get this one, or the last one.  Or the next one.  But that would be nice.  Christmas is coming, yo. 

Warder in the works

One of the other things that's sidetracked work on new material has been Warder, which you might otherwise know as The Cloak of Shrouded Men.

Cloak was the first book I self-published, the product of three successive, and successful, NaNo experiences ('04-'06), the first physical copies of which I received in the mail the same day the last Harry Potter book was released in 2007 (a coincidence that has always amused me).  I began noticing further grammatical revision needs immediately.  I was supposed to have a new edition through an upstart publisher fairly soon after, but that fell apart, and the idea of releasing one never really left me.

Part of the problem was the title, not to mention the name of the main character, a superhero called Eidolon.  I loved both, and never considered changing the latter (pronounced "idol-on," as I later clarified; based on a line in a Hart Crane poem), but have had numerous ideas for the former.  Recently I settled on Warder.

I've tried shopping the book around to publishers for years.  I unlisted it from the original self-publisher a few years back.  I've done revisions, will probably do more, but I've really liked some of the ideas that've occurred to me, including a radical new ending that redefines an important element (or two).  Finding a cover image has been another long-term quest over the years, if I wanted to self-publish again, but just a few hours earlier, I think I finally solved that, too.

I intend, if I pull the trigger, to publish Warder in three volumes.  This is a story I never really intended to write in the first place, but I've never been able to leave it behind.  I like what I did with it (even if I know some readers, like Pat, will think there's too much philosophizing, too little action), and yeah, I even think, foolishly, if anything were to finally get me into comics, this story finally landing properly could do it.  Probably.  Maybe.

Well, we'll see.  (Heh.)

We'll See released

I mentioned an "avalanche of poetry" previously.  I was sidelined in my recent writerly interests by blood that hemorrhaged in my right eye about a month back and caused some panic until I found out what was happening and settled into the recovery process, and then got back to business.  I did the family Christmas chapbook thing I've been doing the past four years (intended for family, as noted, so I never advertise them here), and I finalized the manuscript for the above collection.

You can find We'll See on Amazon here.  There's a lot of crazy material in it, but also some good stuff.  That said, if poetry ain't your thing, don't go out of your way.  Even if it is, I probably have more accessible stuff.  Mostly, I love that it's got some bulk behind it, one of the largest I've had in the 5"x8" format I've been using in releases since 2016.

Quite the salesman, I know!  But as I've said, I've got an avalanche of material, and I'll keep you posted about its book-style availability.

Collider, Jupiter's Beard, the avalanche of poetry

The last time I checked in I quickly glossed on the avalanche of poetry I'm working on.  Well, I made some progress, further compiling and then just yesterday finding some additional collections, pushing the total number of volumes...quite high.  I don't often think of myself as a poet, but I've...written a lot of poems over the years, and every time quite passionately.  So it's weird that I don't think of myself as a poet.  I guess it's harder to be a poet without recognition than it is a novelist.

Speaking of that, Jupiter's Beard, in the title, is the retitled Kiss Me Quick, and it's something I'm still very much working toward. 

Collider, meanwhile, is another project I'm working on.  In fact, it's the oldest project I've worked on...ever, really, and the one I've never even come close to actually writing.  It's part of the Space Corps sequence, and as indicated, the first one I ever worked on, beginning plotting way back in 1995 (and probably earlier).  I've continuously revised outlines, streamlining and making it more sophisticated.  I've reached the point where I finally need to write the thing.

Part of the motivation is that it will be a more straightforward story than Seven Thunders.  You may or may not recall that Seven Thunders was the passion project for Space Corps, something I finally wrote about five years back and have been timidly submitting ever since ("timidly" here meaning sporadically), including on my birthday about a month ago.  Got a form rejection for it recently.  Decided that wasn't going to be the end of the story.  Seven Thunders is a heavily complex story.  Collider, as I've said, as I've worked away at it, is simpler, more naturally geared toward specific story beats that flow organically.  And this week, I began working on yet another plot revision, further streamlining it.  Some of that was made possible by Terrestrial Affairs, the novella that wasn't supposed to feature Collider material but did, which makes both stories better for it, hopefully.

And maybe I can get the damn thing accepted by a publisher.

More poetry collections coming...

It occurred to me this week that I stopped self-publishing my poetry even though I had a ton of material, so I'm going to be getting back on that.  I sort of made a vow to stop self-publishing, but mostly in terms of my fiction.  I may make an effort to be published more traditionally with poems, too, but the crazy amount of material, I seriously doubt any publisher would be like, "Sign me up for that." 

So I'll keep you posted about that, for all those just dying to see it happen...

Older Than Eddie...

Holy crap.  I'm now older than Eddie Guerrero.

This will take some explaining.  Eddie Guerrero was a professional wrestler.  He died in 2005, and I still remember him as my all-time favorite in the ring.  He had personality to spare, and was one of the most gifted athletes the business had ever seen, a pioneer of a more dynamic style that has come to dominate wrestling today.  He first stood out for me at Starrcade 1997.  Goldberg was on that card, by the way, a little before he truly broke out (stuck in a meaningless feud with another former football player, Steve "Mongo" McMichael, whose career never reached anywhere near Goldberg's heights, even at that point).  The main event was "the match of the century," between "Hollywood" Hulk Hogan and Sting, who was wrestling his first match since adopting his Crow persona and becoming WCW's champion against the nefarious New World Order.  But it was Eddie, in his match with Dean Malenko, who really stood out that night for me.

In his WCW years, Eddie was a heel, which is wrestling for bad guy.  He especially loved giving a hard time to his nephew (who, thanks to how things worked out in the family, was more or less the same age), Chavo, who looks a lot like a cousin of mine who had been killed in a bar in 1994.  When Eddie made the leap to WWE in 2000, he took a massive leap in charisma by adopting the "Latino Heat" gimmick, which was in theory another of those horrible stereotype roles wrestling frequently uses, but Eddie made it his own (didn't hurt that Jerry Lawler on commentary so excitedly repeated the nickname all the time).  Later, in 2003, Eddie was beginning to be recognized as an elder statesman, and his career reached its pinnacle in 2004 when he beat Brock Lesnar (yeah!) for the heavyweight championship.  In his final year, Eddie spent most of it in an extended showcase feud with Rey Mysterio, but his last program was with Batista, something that sort of instantly solidified the future Drax as another favorite.

Eddie died at 38.  It seems impossible, now, to think of everything he achieved in such an abbreviated life.  He struggled with sobriety at one point in his career, which led to a gap in his time with WWE, but rallied to enjoy arguably the best time he had as a wrestler.  He was about as inspiring as anyone I've encountered.

And as of today, I'm a year older than he ever got, and that seems wrong, not only because he achieved so much in his time here, but because I'm still working toward feeling even a tenth as accomplished.  I mean, I know I've done a lot.  It doesn't matter how many people see that, or what my goals are, what I envision in my future.  When I think of Eddie, I see someone who positively burst with enthusiasm for the opportunities presented him, and yes, even an ability to overcome challenges.  He's as big a source of inspiration for me as anyone who's told stories in other ways (because wrestling itself, at its best, is storytelling), in mediums that are more traditional for writers to be drawing on. 

I can only hope that if Eddie saw my life, he'd give one of those crooked grins of his and at least laugh appreciably.

The words are starting to form...

I know when a story's getting close when the words start coming, the ideas start solidifying, and I can feel the shape of it.

Writing, at least for me, isn't just about having an idea and an interest in writing.  Writing is a complex art.  Everything has to come together.  Finding the voice of the story, which isn't always the voice of a main character, is like finding the story itself.  It's perhaps easiest to see what I mean in movies.  You know when a movie has a voice.  Usually it's a style, but sometimes it's the distinct shape of the story, or the given instincts of a director, or following an actor's lead (or letting the actor lead, which some critics don't seem to understand).  Stories are the same way.  What frustrates me most when reading budding writers is when they clearly don't grasp this, and resist all attempts to explain the absolute necessity of it.  I mean, there are given genres for a reason, to give even the common writer somewhere to hang their story.

Anyway, the story I'm working on now is Kiss Me Quick. At this point it's sort of what I wanted to do with Montague (Or, In the Leviathan) (as I've since stylized it; check label records for details), but in a more contemporary fashion.  What sort of spurred me on was coming across The Sun Is Also A Star in the employee breakroom.  This was one of those young adult novels that became a movie recently, although the trailer didn't make it look like a young adult story at all.  Anyway, I hadn't seen the movie, hadn't even considered reading the book, and then I had a look inside, and I started to read a little, and realized this was a style I could handle.  I mean, it's what I've been doing anyway.  All I needed was a story.

And I already had it.  So the impetus began, and percolated.

I already had an opening few lines I thought were good, but then today came up with some new ones.  Some of what's inspired me lately is a scholarly book about the writing of The Great Gatsby (Careless People by Sarah Churchwell), which has reminded me all over again of discovering the work of Hemingway for myself, which I've been doing in recent years, which was the result of Corey Stoll's brilliant portrayal in Midnight in Paris. 

And Churchwell brings up how Gatsby is roughly 50,000 words, which is a target goal I hit many times over the past decade or so, with ease, but have never really considered as a potential end point for a longer story.  Seems as good a time as any.

I'll keep you posted.

I swear I'm going to write something soon...

Earlier this year (you'll recall I yammered on and on about it) I completed a fairly lengthy writing project.  It always seems after I've finished something like that it takes a while to start another one.  I've got plenty of stuff I want to write, which is certainly not the issue.  I just haven't gotten around to start writing any of it.  The likeliest suspect is the annual family Christmas poem (which isn't really a long project), for when I finally start up again.  And hopefully I can bother to actually submit stuff, too, which is a horrible thing for a writer to admit. 

So that's sort of what's happening, when there isn't really...anything actually happening.

And maybe when I am writing something again, I'll start yammering about it here again.  Because that was kind of fun, and it certainly kept things lively.

Oh!  Here's something:  Last weekend I went to the Tampa Comic Con, for the second year in a row, with a satchel full of my books, in case I was brave enough to actually do something with them.  Last year: nothing.  This year?  I gave a book away!  Yeah!  I also met Peter David, who was a big element of my '90s reading life (even though I sort of hated him for the next decade or so), and bought a book from him.  But I gave a book away!  (Sapo Saga, for the record, which went over so well in the virtual book tour earlier this year.) 

I hope at some point to have a publisher who'll set me up at a table at things like this, in the future.  It'd be fun.  I would vow not to spend all my time staring at a phone while my assistant does all the work.  And I would probably succeed at that.  Maybe for the first few such appearances.  Maybe it's the best way to pass the time.  But Peter David was pretty lively, which is doubly good because he had a terrible healthscare a few years back.  So I resolve to be more like Peter David!

The Burrito & Boo

I haven't actually written about the Burrito, or Boo, too much here, but a few weeks back they both moved to San Antonio, and here I am...without them.

Burrito is my niece.  I wasn't there when she was born, but three months into her life I entered it in a big way.  I agreed to watch her during the day, for two months, while my sister attended leadership school.  It was a wild crash course in babysitting for a guy who had never really babysat before.  My one experience was with a brood of young children that somewhat almost completely spiraled out of control, until they finally, finally went to bed, and the only real disaster was my inability to figure out where exactly the milk went in the fridge, which ended up in a milk jug that fell out of the fridge, and...Well, I never babysat again, until Burrito.

And even though it was occasionally frustrating (she wouldn't stop crying sometimes, until I took her for stroller rides, or carrying walks), it was also completely magical.  I had no idea I loved babies, and then I fell in love with Burrito.

And I stuck around for nearly another year, in a supporting capacity, and then my sister asked me to watch her again...for a year.  She was headed out for a tour in a delightful Asian land, and once again needed someone to look after Burrito.  Burrito and I headed off to Maine, and my dad's house (the one I had lived in while my mom took on her last few years battling cancer), and...my dad was not especially inclined to spend too much time helping out directly, so...I went into another crash course in babysitting. 

This was life as an uncle raising a toddler: Wow.  I mean, wow.  It was beautiful.  Taxing, certainly, trying to do it all day every day with occasional breaks (and learning to yearn for that illusory hope of a three hour nap, a three hour nap).  But beautiful.

Some will say that the man who emerged on the other side spent too much time merely being Burrito's friend, and that my subsequent, previously unfathomable career as a program assistant in a child development center is flawed for that same reason.  But I've taken to the idea that being a child's, especially a young child's, chief advocate is perhaps the best thing you can be if you find yourself in positions like this.  Constant encouragement.  Endless fun.  And always, always worrying when things don't seem to be working right.

All I can say is, if you look at small children and your first thought is how much of a nuisance they are, you are not among my first choices for shining examples of humanity.  Maybe you have good reasons to think that, but for me, small children especially are my favorite people.  They're the only ones who get to truly just enjoy being people. 

Now, my experiences are with babies and kids just up to the age of five.  My nephews in Maine are my closest working experiences outside of that range.  Funny enough, but at the moment I have two babies with their exact names.  Let's call them Bert and Ernie.  Bert is the older one, Ernie the younger.  The baby version of them is actually the reverse (Ernie's older).  Bert was my best friend in those years while my mom was dying.  I got to spend additional time with him during the Burrito year in Maine.  Ernie is probably more like me when I was a kid, which has been difficult to appreciate practically, since Bert always tries to monopolize my time.  I haven't gotten to spend time with either of them since I followed Burrito to Florida in the fall of 2017.

And now Burrito is gone.  My sister has a new family in San Antonio now, and so the makeshift one that was in place for the past near-four years has come to an end.  I struggled a great deal with this initially.  I wanted to remain an active part of Burrito's life.  But eventually, it seemed more rational to let the new family exist on its own terms.  A reboot.

Yeah, reboot.  Boo is my sister's cat.  I've had her in and out of my life since December 2004.  For whatever reason, she warmed to me immediately.  My happiest memories with her are from the 2005-2007 period where my sister and I shared an apartment in Massachusetts, and every day I returned home from work Boo would warmly swash back and forth across my legs in greeting.  That's where she became a botanist, "pruning" plants meant to decorate the dinner table.  That's where she stole Lando's blaster, to defend her food from ants.  That's where she was exposed as a gravy vampire.  That's where she became obsessed with the common laundry room across the hall, dashing out of the apartment at every opportunity to sneak her way in, if she didn't sabotage herself by liberally helping her claws to the stiff carpeting along the way...

Recently she'd taken to relaxing next to me, spent most of her time in my room, and joined me at night.  And I find myself missing her, actively, in these recent memories, most of all.  I keep expecting to see her amble into view. 

And I miss Burrito's penchant for constant possibilities, her endless inventiveness, her restless repackaging of reality, and yes, even the goofy winter hat and mittens right in the middle of sunny Florida...

But they're a part of some other narrative.  Maybe mine will find a family, one day.  We'll see.

2018 Box Office Top Ten

This is something I've been blogging about for years.  This year (rather late) I decided to movie it here, just to give readers some insight into what interests me.  I used to make ridiculously extensive lists, but I'm going to limit it this time, as the title indicates, to just the top ten, and then again, because I figured it'd be interesting to do it for the US and international box office results.  All numbers are derived from Box Office Mojo, as of today (7/14/19).

US 2018 Box Office Top Ten

1. Black Panther ($700 million) This was a surprise phenomenon that sort of caught on with cultural developments, went well beyond merely the typical MCU response. 
2. Avengers: Infinity War ($678 million) Having now seen Endgame, I think I prefer the setup, with Captain America's dramatic return being the highlight.
3. Incredibles 2 ($608 million) I'm the rare movie fan who doesn't obsess over every Pixar movie, and who didn't get swept up in the hoopla for the first one (which everyone claimed "was what the Fantastic Four ought to look like in the movies").  I still haven't gotten around to seeing this one.
4. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom ($417 million) I actually haven't seen any of the films in this franchise past the first one.  I did read the Michael Crichton books back in the day, however.  Crichton is a rare common factor between me and my dad, and I remain a big fan.
5. Aquaman ($335 million) I adored Justice League and thought Jason Momoa's performance in it was the highlight, so I was eager to catch this one.  It was amusing, but there's room for improvement.
6. Deadpool 2 ($318 million) I wasn't wild about the first one, but this one (and I loved how there was a "family friendly version," called Once Upon a Deadpool, released later) I really got behind.  Highlights include Domino (best superpower ever!) and the Brad Pitt cameo.
7. Dr. Seuss' The Grinch ($270 million) I'm a huge fan of Jim Carrey, so I admit partisanship with the live action version, but the vocal performance from Benedict Cumberbatch was an intriguing hook for me.
8. Mission: Impossible - Fallout ($220 million) Henry Cavill steals this one, even if he ultimately can't beat Tom Cruise.  But that's kind of to be expected, right?
9. Ant-Man and the Wasp ($216 million) I think the Ant-Man films are going to age incredibly well, possibly better than most of the rest of the MCU.  Wait for the Luis recap!
10. Bohemian Rhapsody ($216 million) I still haven't seen it, but it's still funny to me that the Rami Malek performance that was the consistent source of buzz for this one kind of got lost in the shuffle of everyone complaining that the movie wasn't faithful enough to Queen history. 

International Box Office Top Ten

1. Avengers: Infinity War ($2,048 billion)
2. Black Panther ($1,346 billion)
3. Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (1,309 billion)
4. Incredibles 2 ($1,242 billion)
5. Aquaman ($1,148 billion)
6. Bohemian Rhapsody ($903 million)
7. Venom ($856 million) Tom Hardy is another of my favorite actors, and I'm happy he got this successful spotlight.
8. Mission: Impossible - Fallout ($791 million)
9. Deadpool 2 ($778 million)
10. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald ($653 million) Made more than 75% of its international haul outside of the States, which is a fairly common figure when movies are bigger hits this way.  I keep saying this is one of my favorite Harry Potter franchise films, and I absolutely mean it.  Johnny Depp's Grindelwald is a perfect representation of the poisonous kind of politics we're currently enduring, with a chilling finale matched only by Ralph Fiennes's debut as Voldemort in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which remains my favorite of the film franchise.

Updates, June 2019

I'm getting closer to writing again, I swear.

Actually, I really am.  I'm moving into an apartment and will have a lot more spare time on my hands, and I intend to use it writing.  So I will tackle George & Gracie, and maybe getting BOLO! lettered (the pages I have, with entirely revised captioning and possibly no dialogue) and hopefully set free into the world.

And submitting again. 

And maybe other stuff related to writing.  I loved the energy, fast receding into the past, of working on Crisis Weekly, which was something that because it was tied up with DC properties, will have to remain tied to DC properties unless I do stuff like disentangling original concepts from it like I did for the A-to-Z Challenge poems.

And I hope to begin blogging regularly again.

Fun Facts About Tony! Favorite Yogurt

Hey, so here's something different:

My favorite indulgence at the moment (I kind of overdid it, I think, with peanut butter in recent years, forgetting, perhaps, that "indulgence" shouldn't mean overindulging) is Oui yogurt from Yoplait. 

I call it "French Heritage Yogurt," because, well, of my French heritage.  You can see that on the labeling itself it's "French Style Yogurt."  I have no idea if that's just a marketing gimmick.  I really don't care.  What I know is that it's absolutely delicious.

You may recall or be enduring it right now, the Greek-style fad that took over yogurt a few years back.  I tried it back at the start, and was fooled into thinking it was a good thing.  I remember telling a coworker, "Yeah, I liked it, but then I went with the safe bet, the vanilla flavor."  (Approximate dialogue.)  Vanilla is a can't-miss flavor.  I've actually called it my favorite ice cream in the past.  It's just hard to screw up.  But it can also mask deficiencies.  I ended up not liking Greek yogurt, thank you.

I've had all the available varieties of Oui and have enjoyed all of them.  I suppose I really ought to confirm that I can find it other than where I've been getting it, since that avenue will be closing off soon. 

Part of the charm and I admit it's a silly one, is that it comes in little glass jars.  I'm not usually someone who insists on "classy," but as yogurt containers go, it just seems classy.  Or glassy.  Anyway.  I like to keep souvenirs of this sort of thing (such as cans and/or bottles left over from the equally delightful Cheerwine cherry soda that's regionally available but hard to find even in-region, unless Publix is stocking it in their novelty soda selection, or I find myself at Cracker Barrel), so naturally I've got an empty one socked away.

Anyway, if you're looking for yogurt recommendations, there you go.

Updates, end of March 2019

A quick check-in:

• Doing the A-to-Z Challenge again this year, again at Sigild V.  This year will be poetry, riffing on a character from Crisis Weekly.  This has the effects of the proverbial birds with a stone, as I've been wanting to do some poetry again anyway, and I figured I owed the A-to-Z folks thanks for the recent book tour thing.
• Pretty sure I've nailed how I'm going to be writing George & Gracie, after transcribing what I'd written in a notebook at the end of the year and not initially knowing how to proceed from there.
• Submitted a story.  It's the Montague in the Leviathan proof-of-concept I wrote last year, where I finally buckled down and attempted some straight literary fiction, which I still hope can become a book later, if I can do the necessary research.
• It suddenly occurred to me that I can turn that Exemplar comic book script into something if I look into getting someone to draw it.  So that's something I'll be strongly considering.
• It's nice to have a number of prospects in the air.

Crisis Weekly, twenty-first and finale

Crisis Weekly #21.

And...we're done.  Two hundred comic book pages (roughly the equivalent of nine standard comic book issues), nearly thirty thousand words across the whole script, a hundred and thirty-six pages in the file.  It's the first time I've written a complete, extended comic book story. 

Thank you, Pat, for reading along.

Writing this for half a year (!), more or less once a week every week, it was a valuable experience.  I look forward to moving on to new projects (or perhaps even returning to old ones, like maybe even getting on to writing out BOLO (the project for which I had eight pages of art waiting to be used).  I expect George & Gracie, a project I haven't even mentioned here (it's laughable, everything I want to work on, sometimes, even from looking back at stuff I have mentioned here), to be the likely candidate, a children's story, something I haven't really tried in long form.

Either way, one of the perks of Crisis Weekly was sharing regular thoughts here again, and that's certainly something I'd like to continue.

Crisis Weekly twenty, Sapo Saga

Sapo Saga helped round out the A-to-Z Challenge Book Tour over at J Lenni Dorner's blog.  Dorner gave it the second review of the tour, and somehow an even better one, which was very nice to read.  You can read it here.  Thanks, Lenni!

Meanwhile, Crisis Weekly #20.

This is the big climax of the story, the final confrontation between Bloodwynd, that obscure superhero I plucked from the '90s, and Doomsday.  Hopefully everything I've done in the previous nineteen installments has justified this one, and that it does justice to them.

One installment to go!

Crisis Weekly nineteen

Crisis Weekly #19.

This one's another creative departure.  When I began considering writing it as something other than the usual narrative, I wanted to go with eight separate perspectives, but then I wondered if it would be more interesting, and more impactful, if it followed a single person as they aged.

The story itself takes the place of a huge moment that will otherwise not be depicted (two more installments, after all, with two other big things left to do), which I thought I could get away with, since the character who dies already had a big fight earlier, and I didn't really want to cover the same narrative ground.  The moments that stick out for me, in this thing, are the ones where I took risks, where I allowed myself to deviate, to try something different.  I think if this were a comic book, that's what would stand out for readers, too. 

This is the third installment this week, although technically only the second, as I delayed last week's for one of them.  If you remember, I skipped a week at Thanksgiving, so I'm really just catching up.  The first time I wrote a double-length script I told myself that's what I was doing, but as far as having the material for something that was supposed to be weekly, as advertised in the title, there really ought to have been, on average, enough scripts to cover every week.  So now there are, and so we're back on track.

Not that you cared.

Crisis Weekly seventeen and eighteen...

Because I had a three-day weekend, and the sister and niece were away, I decided to tackle Crisis Weekly a bit differently, with #17 and #18 both available today.

It's actually kind of funny, because the latter entry was always going to be my third and final double-length entry.  To tackle writing it on the same day as writing another one meant writing twenty-four pages of comic book script in one day, tripling what I'd done nearly every other entry.  I happened to have the time, and narratively the entries easily segued into each other, and perhaps even benefited from being written together. 

Anyway, it's always nice to have a little extra writing time, any time at all to myself, any extended length of time.  I may not always fill that time with writing, but it gives me a lot of room to play with, and hopefully I tend to use it wisely, even though I always want to do more and there always is more to do, so much I want to accomplish...

That leaves three entries to go, and then it's off to other projects.  Since I knocked out a script early in the week, it leaves me wondering if I will actually write four scripts worth of pages this week, if I'll go back on the clock on Saturday morning, as regularly scheduled. 

Ah, we'll see.

Crisis Weekly the sixteenth, Sapo Saga

This week is sort of an ode to Robin: Son of Batman, a short-lived spinoff of Batman & Robin, the New 52 iteration by Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason, which I loved and became one of my all-time favorite runs.  Gleason tackled Robin on his own, and as you can see from that cover gave Damian Wayne a unique supporting cast, the daughter of someone he'd actually killed, and a humungous Man-Bat named Goliath.

Yesterday my novella Sapo Saga was in the spotlight!  Thanks to its being written specifically for the A-to-Z Challenge back in 2016, it was eligible for a special book tour that's going on at the moment.  Jemima Pett featured Sapo Saga on her blog yesterday, and also happened to give the book a glowing review!  You can read it here.

Crisis Weekly, the fifteenth.

Crisis Weekly #15.

Holy crap!  I've been waiting to write the last line of dialogue in this one for months!  That's one of the joys of writing any story, knowing what's coming up and then finally getting to write it.  In that way, the writer's journey isn't so different from the reader's, they just get to get there first.

The whole thing will be explained later, but hopefully some of the clues will start to fall into place, and seem less like clues and more like bludgeons.  I once remarked on someone else's blog that I haven't really tried writing mysteries, but mysteries can come in all kinds of shapes.  We just tend to think of them almost exclusively as detective stories.  But they aren't always.  The Harry Potter books were, essentially, mysteries, so it was probably hugely natural for J.K. Rowling to write more traditional mysteries in the Cormoran Strike series, which I again evoke in this installment by returning the focus to Bloodwynd and his amputated leg.  But there's a lot more in it, too!  There's also a line of dialogue from one of the characters who hasn't really been featured a lot, but nonetheless has been playing a key role, and finally we get to see more of what that is, and again it's inspired by Rowling, something I wished she had done rather than what she did, in this instance.  But more on that later.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Crisis Weekly, the fourteenth.

Crisis Weekly #14.

I realize that sometimes these scripts are hard to read, as they don't seem to give enough visual description, or seem overly repetitive.  This week's script has a series of repetitive images, and yes, it was deliberate.

Even if it's disappointing as a reader, as the writer I'm picturing generally what the illustrated page looks like, what the intended visual effect is supposed to be.  I can't make readers of a script see the same thing I do, but as the writer, the result is what matters, even if these pages are never drawn.  I'm not writing these to be read solely as an elaborate way to read a story, but as an exercise in comic book scriptwriting, easily the longest I've yet attempted.

The funny thing I learned, some time ago, is that in writing comic book scripts, I become a lot more interested in the visual progress of a story.  I become a lot more interested in what characters are doing.  When I write prose, I'm more interested in what they're thinking, in explaining their internal journeys.  This may be unusual and perhaps even disorienting for readers who are far more used to popular writing that relies on action to build momentum, moments that build on each other whether they're mysteries or similar stories.  But personally, I'm a little bored by writing that spends most of its time distracting the reader, that expands a story past the story so far that the story all but disappears behind narrative gloss.

My opinion, anyway.  But comic books are inherently a visual medium, and it would be unnatural to try and approach them any other way.  So, too, with film, which is why most visionary directors are known for, well, their visuals.  Some are known for their dialogue, too, but that's because they've spent a good amount of time developing how their characters talk.  A lot of writers, in any medium, mistake the ability to write with merely presenting the bare essentials, and not the ability to do it interestingly.

Again, perceptions will vary.  You might look at what I did this week and say I wasted my time, and your time.  But I had a character (the Caballero) who finally found himself in the spotlight, and there was a lot to accomplish in very little time, and there are bigger things yet to reveal about him, and so I had to be very deliberate in my approach.

So I made some creative decisions.

Crisis Weekly, the thirteenth

Crisis Weekly #13.

It should come as no surprise that Crisis Weekly was inspired by 52, a weekly series DC did back in 2006-07.  52 was a big deal at the time, both for the fact that it took on the challenge of coordinating a weekly series featuring a continuous story, something that had never been done before, but brought together DC's best writers (Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, Greg Rucka, and Mark Waid) to collaborate on it.  I loved it.  I thought and still do that it was a seminal achievement filled with great moments, archetypal storytelling that knew how to turn a dramatic corner and take bold risks with characters nobody would've ever expected to enjoy such results. 

Along the way, 52 introduced new characters.  Batwoman had the greatest sticking power.  She's starred in a few ongoing series of her own since then, and even made a spectacular live action debut in the "Arrowverse" TV crossover event last year, "Elseworlds."  There was also Supernova, who was ultimately revealed to be Booster Gold all along, a fact that was a little disappointing to fans who hoped there was another standout newcomer in the mix.  (Later, DC attempted to draft Booster's present-day ancestor into the role, but the idea had little staying power.) 

This week's installment of Crisis Weekly plays with the legacy of Supernova.  I had introduced the character of Boxer (meant to be a representative of a competing space cop organization to the Green Lantern Corps) early on, but hadn't featured him since, knowing that he had little other purpose than to be eventually exposed as one of the White Martians.  So, rather than letting readers bond with the guy, I saved him for the moment he gets revealed.  Hopefully he still works as interesting in and of himself, what he attempted to represent, above and beyond what he actually is.

This week I also sketched out the rest of the story.  Assuming all goes according to plan, Crisis Weekly will end with #21, eight installments later.  When I originally conceived of it, I thought the story might go longer, but I didn't want something that eventually just sort of existed.  I wanted a story that kept hitting its beats at a reasonable pace.  Readers will tell me whether or not I'll have succeeded.

Crisis Weekly, the twelfth

Crisis Weekly #12.

This is one of the moments I've been building toward, one of the ones I've been eagerly anticipating writing.  President Reilly, a.k.a. Firehawk, finally gets to command the spotlight, in the most dramatic fashion possible.  In a way, it's a reprise of her earlier battle against a legion of Man-Bats, but it's also the State of the Union address!  And it's her confronting, head-on, the challenges of the public's negative perception of superheroes, allowing herself to be viewed as the first time, as president, as a superhero.

I didn't invent the concept of Firehawk as a politician.  I first came across her in that regard in the pages of Firestorm.  Her secret origin is actually horrifying.  The daughter of a US senator, Lorraine is kidnapped as forcibly experimented on, in the hopes of duplicating Firestorm's powers.  The results aren't quite as intended, but she does in fact gain superpowers, and eventually a reputation as a bona fide superhero, who eventually for a time joins the odd "Firestorm matrix," in effect finally becoming Firestorm.  But not before becoming herself a US senator. 

She doesn't even rate her own Wikipedia page, however.  She's lumped in for one of those group pages of miscellaneous characters, with a fairly brief entry even at that.  Yet Firehawk has fascinated me since, as I've previously mentioned, I first learned about her on the back of a trading card, and then her later appearances in Firestorm, as a senator, as part of the Firestorm matrix (there's usually two individuals who comprise Firestorm: the one who represents the body and the one who in effect represents the mind, the role Firehawk assumed).

Her major role in Crisis Weekly is a small indication of what I consider to be her vast potential.

Crisis Weekly, the eleventh.

Crisis Weekly #11.

The last new character is introduced this week (probably), and his name is Ezrah.  Ezrah is named after someone I met during my first six months in childcare, who was in fact one of the kids.  Interacting with kids all day, you see a wide variety of personalities, and naturally some are going to stick out.  Sometimes it seems like the ones who do stick out for all the wrong reasons, and sometimes it's not even their fault, but because for one reason or another they have developmental delays.  Ezrah required a lot of attention, but I didn't mind at all.  I tend to feel most accomplished when it's clear I'm helping kids like Ezrah, and I guess that kind of instant gratification is basis human nature.  You want to know you're making a difference.  Most of the other staff in the facility are women, and it was theorized that Ezrah responded to me because I'm male, as he was at the time otherwise at home with a single dad, and you can do the math for the rest of it.  I like to believe it wasn't so simple, but who can say?

For those keeping score at home, I'd love to disclose some additional inspiration for the fictional Ezrah, but that would be telling.  Instead, I'd like to just reference one additional source of inspiration that cropped up this week, for the splash page involving El Dorado's apparent death, which is a callback for me to Mike Costa's brilliant G.I. Joe/Cobra comics, in which Chuckles gets the last laugh by assassinating Cobra Commander.  It was Costa's biggest moment in his long run (and led directly to two G.I. Joe crossover events, "Cobra Civil War" and "Cobra Command") across several series, and I just like to bring up his work, on the chance it'll inspire more people to read it.