November 2024 in Review

Hello Funny People,

To quote Stephen Colbert on his first show after November 5th, "Well...fuck." And frankly, what else need be said besides that?

A Brief Recapitulation

So, like most of you likely reading this, I was left unhappy with the election results. Here in Missouri, we did manage to increase the minimum wage, so over the next two years, it will reach $15. We also, by the slimmest 51%-49% majority, got Amendment 3 enshrined into the state constitution. But those were both cold comfort in the wake of everything else. With Republicans still in the majority in Jeff City—while they won't do anything to dampen wages—they will do all they can to either amend the Amendment to nullify its effects or legislate as much as they can around it. I don't know when the people of Missouri will learn that they cannot have liberal policy and conservative politicans determined to squash it in today's political landscape. If we're lucky the amendment will last two years.

Honestly, though, after a little research, I realized that Kamala actually did nearly identically well as Hilary did in 2016. One less electoral vote, but 8 million more total votes. That made me realize something:

America has a problem with women in power.

This, of course, isn't new. The ERA was never ratified. And that was simply a statement declaring equality of women. It gave them no new rights as citizens, no supremacy in any way. It merely acknowledged their equity in standing. And even that simple statement was too much for America to stomach.

There is a sizeable population in this country who will tolerate a woman in a position of authority, but only if her position is subordinate to and/or reliant upon a man. Hilary served as secretary of State, an appointed cabinet position, under Obama. Kamala was Vice President, a position selected by and second to the President, but with no power, save what the president chooses to delegate to them. But once a woman is the one poised to take power, a chunk of the electorate winces away. 

7.5 million either didn't vote for her or didn't vote at all, if you compare Biden's numbers in 2020 to Kamala's now. So, now, women sadly see where the glass ceiling is. They can be VP, but clearly, the only way they're taking that seat behind the resolute desk is if the man who elevated them dies. 

As much as it pains me to admit it, but we should've seen this coming. Our case study to show is Georgia in 2020.

The very same year Georgia sent a pair of male, Democrats to the Senate, was also the year Stacy Abrahams ran for the Governorship. And the people of Georgia said, "Well send these men to DC, but we ain't having no lady in the Governor's mansion."

I wasn't surprised. Nor was I even disappointed. The result simply left me numb; 2024 confirmed all of my worst biases against this country and the people in it. 

Does that mean I'll leave it? No. For one, I have no where else to go. For another, if I leave, the assholes win. 

What I have learned though is that you should expect nothing. Do not invest your hope that the better angels of your fellow citizens' nature will shine through when it counts. The vast majority of American people care more about the price of eggs and gas being too high than they do about making sure everyone who lives within its borders are treated with equity and humanity. And they care so much more about that, they honestly believe a member of the Billionaire Class—the true culprits behind price hikes—will lower it for them. At their core, the American spirit is greedy, vile, and short-sighted, and it always will be. America is Charlottesvilles. America will always be Charlottesvilles. This is not the land of hope and opportunity. This is the land of "Gimme it, it's mine! Gimme it, it's mine!" This is the land of brutality, dehumanization, cruelty, and selfishness. This is a land that sells you the bill of goods that merit will get you somewhere, when in fact, its all about who you know, how much money you have, and most importantly, how little melanin you have in your skin and what's between your legs. America has a caste system and a class system and nothing will ever break it down. Don't hold your breath and don't hold out hope of things truly improving because America will disappoint you every time.

In the wake of that, I also discovered I was suffering from a stress fracture in my left foot, which only compounded the pain of these realizations. Thankfully, I manged to get a walking boot that's been a big help. I'll likely have to wear if for the rest of the year before I see any real improvement back to normalcy.

Spent Thanksgiving weekend with my brother in Ohio, which was quite nice. Though, it was much colder up there than I anticipated. I had to break out my arctic explorer's blue coat, gloves, and scarf. Always all three in tandem to ensure maximum warmth. We even got a fair bit of snowfall while I was there, and thanks to the lake effect (Akron is just south of one of the great lakes), it stuck around for the duration.

The Writing Life

#AmDrafting: The Novel Arena

On election day, I managed to complete the first half of the steampunk dark fantasy. Part one presently stands at 60,484 words. That's a hair over 10k more words than I'd hoped, but first drafts can be longer.

Now, I have to finish the second half. Likely, I suspect the second half to be about the same length, which means the final first draft will sit at 120k words. After that comes rewriting, to which, of course, I'm looking forward.

In other news, I appear to be slowly making my way back to writing the portal fantasy. Perhaps a whole month away from the project has softened my attitude towards it. At the very least, with only bout 16 chapters left, I think I ought to finish it, even if I think it's crap. Getting it out of my system, instead of letting it linger like a mental hang nail might be the best thing for me.

Finally, I hit another new milestone. The weekend before Thanksgiving, I hired my first freelance editor. A longstanding pal of mine from the old Twitter Writing Community agreed, for a reasonable sum, of course, to look over my fantasy novel. I sent the down payment to him, along with the manuscript the Friday before Black Friday. We're planning to do two rounds of edits over the next handful of months (the final edit will be due back to me by the end of May). While I've worked with short fiction editors a handful of times now, a novel edit is a different beast. I trust my editor because I trust him as a person, so I'm hoping this process is fruitful. If so, it may end up becoming standard fare for me going forward. We shall see. Inthe end, I'm hoping that my novel will come out strong than it was before and maybe have a better chance in the query trenches on future.

Report on the Short Fiction Front

Two quick bits of old business. First, the guys at Flash Point SF officially released their Year Three collection, which includes "The Culebre of San Moreno."

Sadly, the anthology is only available as an ebook. A real shame because that's quite a nice cover from artist Kevn Pabst. If you choose to buy it, I know Tom, Max, and thenithers involved in the zine would greatly appreciate it as it will help them continue the project of keeping the zine alive in the near future.

Also, after a three year-wait, BAM has finally released the 42 Stories Anthology, featuring my (thus far), only foray into historical fiction. 

You can read my microfiction "When William Walker Faces the Firing Squad," in Chapter 11, Hitchhiker's Guide to History, as the sixth entry in that chapter.

At present, the anthology is quite expensive in paperback, but an ebook version is available for a more sensible sum. It's quite the chonky book to say the least, but then what can you expect from something that contains so many pieces of microfiction?

Still waiting to hear back from the sort of hold notice I got from a pro-rate zine for one of my flash pieces. I'm not sure how that will end, but considering my general low state right now, I'm not optimistic.

I'm also in the middle of revising my Latin American Fantasy story—the one I had critiqued at the Repeat Offenders Workshop—into the novelette it always should've been. My hope (faint as it may be), is to send it to a pro-rate zine and sell it. If possible, I'd like to send it to BCS. But before I do, I plan to have a few people critique it again—and if possible, a few people who've pubbed with BCS before to increase my odds of an acceptance.

Finally, I received another honorable mentioned from the Writers of the Future Contest for the other story I had critiqued. This was, of course, the pre-revision version, so it wasn't as though I'd expected even a silver honorable mention. But it is clear that I'm at a new plateau in my short fiction writing. I'm stuck, and I'm not sure how to make it over that hump. 

Maybe I will by revising these two stories. Who knows?

Miscellaneous

Despite all the trouble this month brought with it, I've manged to keep up with my media consumption, on both the reading front and the watching front.

The ending of The Penguin was an absolute heartbreaker. Yet, thinking about it, it was both inevitable and bittersweet. It had all the hallmarks of a tragic, bittersweet ending, which, given that Oz is at his heart a villain, despite his antiheroic characterization throughout the show (yeah, he's a bastard, but he's our bastard), this was the only way it could've ended and remained true to who The Penguin truly is. Oz got what he wanted, but now, he'll never get what he truly needed. 

If Colin Farrell doesn't at least get an Emmy Nomination for this next year, there's no justice in the world.

One thing that marks out this series though is how full-tilt gangster narrative it went, which I enjoyed. In between episodes, I found myself also rewatching classic films, like The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, as well as revisiting shows,like Peaky Blinders. The thing about gangsters, as characters, is that they all have one defining characteristic.

They always want more. 

They're never content with achieving a certain level of success or wealth or status. Their eyes are always looking to the next thing on the horizon. And until something stops them, they will keep climbing. In the last few episodes, we saw hints of Oz's aspirations. He wasn't content simply ruling Gotham's underworld, even after he toppled Sofia in the ultimate sick twist. No. This is a man who wants to rule all of Gotham. And where better to do that than the office of the Mayor? 

In future, Rob Pattinson's Batman is going to have his hands full with this menacing flightless bird.

Kathy Bates's Matlock has also been making steady progress over the last several weeks. She's grown closer to her colleagues at Jacobs & Moore, including with Olympia, with whom she still has a bit of a frosty relationship (colleagues, but not friends). A pretty consistent winning-streak with alll the cases she's navigated has definitely helped. However, she still remains determined to see her true mission through: to find the proof she needs to put Olympia's father-in-law in jail for hiding the opioid documents. Sadly, now that Maddie has finally wiggled her way into the pharmaceutical end of the firm's operations, it looks as though the network will be putting a round of reruns on for the next few weeks to let the show find more viewers. But when it comes back with new episodes (I read one report saying that'll be in the first week of December), I'll be there.

Starting the day after Thanksgiving, my family began its annual tradition of watching as many Christmas movies as we could. In addition to old standbys like the first two Home Alone films, the Jim Carrey How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and the multitude of A Christmas Carol films that are out there, I added one new film to the lineup: The Holdovers, starring Paul Giamatti. Partly, I added it to the lineup because I'm a big fan of Giamatti's work, so any new additions to that canon are always welcome. And partly, I wanted to see if this film lived up to all the hype I'd heard of when the film debuted last year. 

I was not disappointed. 

In addition to Giamatti's inimitable charm that makes even his most crotchety characters (of which, there are many), somehow likeable, the other central ast members hold their own against him. The cinematography is gorgeous, reflecting the period in which the film is set, and most of all, the script is hilarious. Witty. Acerbic. Punchy and sharp. Yet, it also doesn't sacrifice human feeling and vulnerability. The kind of material Giamatti excels at playing. I think I'll make sure this remains a fixture in the seasonal movie rotation.

While up in Akron, my brother took us to his neighborhood movie theater (the same one where we saw Alien Romulus this summer), and we got to see Wicked Part 1. Naturally, Stephen Schwartz's music and the story derived from Gregory Maguire's retelling made the transition to the screen with ease. And to my surprise and delight, I really enjoyed Grande and Erivo's depictions of the leads. Glinda was as insufferable as a bubbly shallow popular girl she was ought to be, and Elphaba was powerful, sympathetic, and desperately trying not to show how hurt she was by how other people sneered at her green skin and society rejected her because of her skin. However, most vital for me was seeing how the film depicted the Land of Oz itself. And again, I was delighted. Depicting Oz is not an easy thing to accomplish. It’s a fairyland, full of bizarre details, and awash with fantastical characteristics. It's on par with Narnia in terms of its seeming hodgepodge world. And frequently, filmmakers lean too hard into using CGI to showing that world. This Oz though? It was on par with what we see in films like the original The Wizard of Oz and Return to Oz. I can't wait to see what else they show us in Part 2.

City of Last Chances by Adrian Tchaikovsky 

My first Tchaikovsky. After bouncing off Children of Time last year, I wasn't entirely sure if I was ever going to find a route into Adrian's work. But I finally did with this mosaic of a novel. Ilmar is a city under occupation, which boarders on a strange forest filled with monsters. However, it's also a portal that can lead to a myriad of other worlds, worlds that the occupiers are extremely interested in invading to bring their gift of supposed cultural perfection to these other places. And most of the Ilmary are perfectly happy to let them, if it will let them live in peace—even if it's the piece thar comes from merely going unnoticed. But revolution is brewing, and such a rising tide sweeps all boats into its current, whether they like it or not. It's Les Misérables, but with magic. 

Adrian's use of folk magic in this book is what really stood out to me. Wards, made of special items. Gods, some abandoned and near powerless, while others linger on on the edges of society. Creatures capable of taking human form as they choose. Demons, with whom it's possible to draw contracts and summon them from an underworld. All very weird; all imbued with an intense sense of wonder. Most of it never fully gets explained, which is exactly how folk magic should be. The wise and knowing know, and the ones who don't get to find out the hard way. It's truly a peak example of modern soft magic done right.

A sequel of this is already out, along with a third. I plan to read both soon enough.

Predator One by Jonathan Maberry

After the intense experience of Code Zero, I wasn't sure if Maberry was going to be able to follow that banger up. But follow it up he did with the most intense close-shave of a Joe Ledger adventure yet. 

With the world so online, with people becoming so enamored and reliant on devices, what would happen if, all of a sudden, all those devices and systems turned against us? Answer: something every bit a terrifying as The Terminator—except instead of the foe being humanoid robots, it's your self-drivinf car system, your cellphone, the computer system that keeps your airplane aloft and runs everything connected to it, and that drone that just delivered your fast food. Faceless and unpredictable. 

This, probably more than any novel so far in the series, should give the reader pause before connecting to your local WiFi hotspot.

Kill Switch by Jonathan Hotspot.

If Predator One explored what happens when our computers and computer systems come at us, Kill Switch asks a different question. What happened when it's our very minds that are subject to hacking? Who can you trust? How can your protect yourself?

This is also the book that finally begins to interconnect the Joe Ledger universe with the Cthulhu Mythos. We get our first hints at Cthulhu existing in this world; we meet our first shoggoths, aothough they'renever named as such; the language of R'lyeh makes its first on-page appearance; and, most vitally, the possibility of a multiverse truly comes to the foreground. 

All that fun said, Maberry still keeps that story grounded by making the villain of the novel follow what I call the Scooby-Doo rule: the true villain is also a human, with petty human motivation. In this case, pride and resentment at simply growing older and being forcibly benched from what he loves, while another "faster gun" comes up behind him to replace him. Just to show them up, he turns to sabotage, subterfuge, and finally attempted take over, all because he refuses to accept his own diminishing powers. Ego: the great destroyer.

This is also the book that brings the DMS nearest to that ultimate edge of oblivion yet, setting us up for what will come in the Rogue Team International follow-ups. Not only does it have one of the most significant cast changes since, arguably, Dragon Factory, but Church literally lost control of it for a blip because of how badly the new POTUS of this series felt the organization failed in Predator One. But, this original sequence isn't over yet yet. With two more volumes to go, the answer to how the DMS closes up shop is still to come for this reader.

Red Country by Joe Abercrombie 

After putting off reading the final standalone book of the First Law world, I finally did. And I must admit, I liked it more than The Heroes but not as much as Best Served Cold. In a lot of ways, Red Country marks the end of an era in the world of First Law. Decades have passed since the events of the original trilogy, and many of the key players in that story have either vanished, died, or begun to feel their years. And here, we finally learn the fate of one such character as he leaped to his supposed death at the end of The Last Argument of Kings. It's Unforgiven à la Epic Fantasy, a western-style fantasy that explores the reality that, while you can run from the past for a while, it always catches up to you in the end.

The Hunger and the Dusk by G. Willow Wilson & Chris Wildgoose

One thing I did start doing this last month was begin digging trying to find something I could read with my eyes. Well, what better reading material than quality comics? Granted, this was fairly new terrain for me. Comics hadn't played much of a role in my media or storytelling diet when I was a kid. Growing up dyslexic, with boomer-aged parents, who believed anything with pictures couldn't truly count as reading, I simoly didn't have access to them. But that was then; this is now. Now, I've been craving to find a route into the medium. And I found it with The Hunger and the Dusk.

This graphic novel takes some of the old standbys of classic epic fantasy, like Orcs, Humans, long wars over territory, and a dying world, and brings it back to the human scale. Here, we enter a land of diminishing resources when an invading force known as the Vangol—towering, thin, merciless warriors, with a taste for flesh—invade that world, trying to escape...something. To stand against them, the Orc tribes of the north agree to unify with their longtime foes, Humankind, to combat this new adversary and save their land. 

As a symbol of this new alliance, the Orcs agree to have one of their own, a skilled healer named Tara Icemane, join the warrior company of the Last Men Standing, led by Callum Battlechild, an illiterate illegitimate warrior born from a rape in wartime (hence his surname). Together, they try to overcome centuries of animosity and navigate differences in culture to find shared ground (and possibly, romance?), as their world stands on the brink of collapse. And where better to find it than on their shared battlefield?

With top-tier writing from World Fabtasy Award winner, G. Willow Wilson, and art by Chris Wildgoose, Hunger and the Dusk shows that there's still room for the old tropes of fantasy in the world, so long as you bring something new and nuanced to these old-school elements. Thus far, only the first 9 issues are out, but this comic is due to at least hit 12. Here's hoping there's more to come after that.

ElfQuest by Wendy & Richard Pini

A couple of months ago, in my efforts to try to get more into comics, I stumbled across a YouTube channel by the name of mattt, which specialized in making mini-documentaries about various comic creators. Not the big names we all know like Steve Ditko, Alan Moore, Frank Miller, Jack Kirby, or Stan Lee. To find his own audience within this highly competitive field of YT, he began focusing on the lesser-know, but no-less-important figures in comics and comicbook history. Two such figures: Wendy and Richard Pini, the creators and publishers of ElfQuest. 

After watching that mini-documentary about them, I grew curious to read this magnum opus of comicbook history. So, I bought the first compendium and began reading it to fill the void left by Hunger and the Dusk. Wow, was I not disappointed. This comic is beautiful, with anime/manga-style character design and dynamic action, combined with Tolkien-esque levels of worldbuilding, and imbued with a sense of wonder rivaling Studio Ghibli productions.

I'm looking forward to continuing this journey, that the Pinis are still adding to in collaboration with Dark Horse. And Dark Horse itself is re-releasing the compendium early next year. Like I said, I prefer reading physical copies when reading comics, but I'm making due with ebooks until the re-releases appear.

2024 is rapidly drawing to a close, funny people. I'm not optimistic that it will end well..but maybe, at least, it will end on an interesting note. We shall see, won't we?

— IMC 🙃