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NEWS AND VIEWS - DECEMBER 2019
WRITING NEWS I've decided to self-publish my latest novel, The Demon in the Metal, after getting a couple of rejections from a couple of publishers. I could try shopping it around some more, I guess, but frankly, I'd rather just put it out there myself than waste a year or two years waiting around for more rejections. I've already got the print and ebook versions ready to go; all that's left now is to find someone to do the cover art. I thought I might save some money by painting a cover myself, so I gave it a shot, but I'm not really happy with the result; it looks kind of amateurish and it doesn't really scream "epic fantasy novel." 
So I'm probably going to have to hire someone to do it. Not sure when it'll be out...maybe February? We'll see. (I'm also considering turning it into an audiobook, but I'll have to do some research on that first.) Apart from that...well, there's really nothing else going on, writing-wise. I've been fiddling around with some outlines for some new Signalverse books, but I'm not really doing any serious work right now; in fact I'm actually considering taking a break from writing. The Demon in the Metal took a lot out of me. * * * * * * * * STAR WARS Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 80's, I was pretty big into Star Wars back in the day. Living in the middle of nowhere, miles from town, with nobody to pal around with except my older brother (who was four years older than me) and with only three TV channels, I used to get pretty bored around the house, especially during summer vacation. So I watched a lot of movies -- the same movies, over and over again, because we only had a handful of VHS tapes lying around. I've probably seen the three movies of the original Star Wars trilogy fifty times each. Maybe a hundred times. I know every line, every scene. So obviously I grew pretty attached to these movies, and to the franchise generally. I played some of the video games, read a couple of the novels (Zahn's Thrawn trilogy), bought the Special Edition collection on VHS and was as excited as anyone when The Phantom Menace came out in 1999. I still like the original trilogy, but I'm sorry to say, the prequels soured me on the whole franchise. I watched The Phantom Menace three or four times, trying to force myself to like it, but I just couldn't. It has some nice scenes, and some nice spectacle (that lightsaber fight at the end is pretty great) but it's a bad movie overall -- badly written, badly acted, and full of bad ideas. Attack of the Clones was even worse, though, and Revenge of the Sith ("From my point of view the Jedi are evil!") did nothing to redeem the series. Are the Disney movies any better? I don't know; I haven't seen any of them. From the trailers and the few clips that I've seen, I suspect the new movies are probably a technical improvement over the prequels (better writing and better acting, if not necessarily better storytelling), but they give off a kind of soulless, corporate vibe as well (I get this same impression from the new Ghostbusters movies, the new Terminator movies, and lots of other rehashes of childhood favorites). The prequels sucked, but they sucked in a stupid, earnest kind of way. The new movies just look like they've been focus-grouped to death. I could be wrong; like I said, I haven't seen the new movies. And I don't plan to. Total apathy. * * * * * * * * ROBO VAMPIRE! The Rifftrax guys recently released a riff of Robo Vampire, one of my favorite bad movies, which I reviewed here last year. Very funny stuff. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING, WHAT I READ Didn't do a lot of reading this year; as of this writing I'm only up to eighteen books. There's a few reasons for this: 1) I haven't bought very many books this year, because I've been trying to save money, and 2) I've been preoccupied with The Demon in the Metal. I also didn't want to read anything this year that might kill my confidence, so I avoided some fantasy novels that I might otherwise have picked up: Brian McClellan's latest, Curtis Craddock's Labyrinth of Scions and Sorcery, and so on. But eighteen books isn't too bad. For fiction, I read Harry Connolly's short The Twisted Path; Astro City: Broken Melody; The Illiad; the first volume of Hataraku Maou-sama!; Greg Keyes's interesting Kingdoms of the Cursed; and two Ross MacDonald mysteries, The Barbarous Coast and Find a Victim. I read much more non-fiction: Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem, by Carol Delaney; Conquest, by Hugh Thomas; Thomas Asbridge's The Greatest Knight; two pirate histories (Empire of Blue Water and The Republic of Pirates); two Herbert Asbury books (All Around the Town and The Gangs of Chicago); Machiavelli's The Prince; two boxing bios (Smokin' Joe by Mark Kram Jr. and Smokestack Lightning: Harry Greb, 1919 by Springs Toledo); and a college textbook on Japanese history, Japan: Its History and Culture. Of the fiction...well, I probably got the most out of the Ross MacDonald novels. I liked The Kingdoms of the Cursed, though, and I'm glad I read The Illiad. For non-fiction...I liked the pirate histories, and I liked The Greatest Knight. Columbus and the Quest for Jerusalem and Conquest were informative and interesting. The Herbert Asbury books were okay, but not as colorful as his Gangs of New York or The Barbary Coast. And the boxing bios were fine. Next year? I've got nine books in my Amazon wishlist right now, so I'm thinking about going on a little book-buying spree at the end of the year: I'd like to get some more Brian McClellan stuff, Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall, Harry Connolly's One Man, Alone on the Ice (a book about Douglas Mawson), the Spider-Man novel Lawrence Watt-Evans wrote with Kurt Busiek (under his pen name of Nathan Archer), and a few others.
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