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NEWS AND VIEWS - FEBRUARY 2022
WRITING NEWS Don't have a lot going on here this month. I'm still working on A City Burnished Silver, the third book in The Chemical Empires series, but it's been slow-going, mostly because I've been busy with some other things (including the new version of The Signal Ciy Visitor's Guide, which I wrote about last month). I think the book is turning out all right, but I really have no idea; I'm not a very good judge of my own work. I've written books that I thought were quite good (The Demon in the Metal, Sam Fortune and the Wisdom of the Ancients) that nobody seems to like, and books that I thought were kind of lousy (Champions Weekly) that have received glowing reviews. So I don't know. Anyway, I'm expecting to finish this book around June or July. Then I'm going to write the short story for the Visitor's Guide (the tentative title is "Gone Viral"), and then I'm going to start in on a brand new project: the first book in the Playground Noir kid-detective series, which doesn't have an official title yet. * * * * * * * * MY FAVORITE SONGS YOU'VE NEVER HEARD I don't have any real musical talent. I can hum a tune to life and write lyrics for it, but I can't play any instruments and my singing is...not great. I was a part of a fake band once, called STUDZ, which I wrote about here, but all I did was sing; it was my friend Ant who played the guitar and mixed the music. I have a lot of friends and relatives who are much more musically inclined, though, especially my brother Ross, who played the drums in several indie bands (so indie you've almost certainly never heard of them). The first band he was in, in college, was called Ka'tet (the name refers to a group from Stephen King's Dark Tower novels, and is a popular band name; there's an Irish Ka tet, a German Ka-tet, and probably some others). They got together around 1994, when grunge was popular, so their hard stuff has got kind of a grunge sound, but a lot of their songs are slower and more thoughtful, and a lot more are just silly -- I mean, they were basically college kids, messing around. They still get together sometimes, and back in 2006 they rerecorded some of their songs with some better recording equipment; these are the versions I usually listen to today. "Genie" is a slow, haunting tune which is probably my favorite Ka'tet song, but "Kinked" is great, too, and "Peace Poop" is hilarious. Later, while student-teaching in the U.K., Ross was in a short-lived band called Psychic Spies. Apparently this group actually managed to get their album in front of some important music executive at one point; he liked it, but for whatever reason he didn't think the band would be all that marketable. Here's a couple of their songs, "Aplomb" and "Soullight" (I should note, Ross only played the drums on the latter track). My cousin Jacob was the singer in a metal band called Ten Dark Years. I don't know much about them, but here's one of their songs, "A Perfekt Ten", which I think is pretty awesome: * * * * * * * * SCENERY (WINTER EDITION) Meanwhile I'm still working on this big project for the local power company, installing meters and receivers in old farmhouses and dairy barns and such. It's almost all outside work, and working outside in Minnesota, in February, pretty much sucks butt (I should have stayed in school) but at least I've been getting some more rural landscapes out of it. Here's some I took this month: 
That last picture is of a family of raccoons walking single-file through the woods. * * * * * * * * SUPERVILLAINS EXIST I've written several books set in a world (the Signalverse) where superheroes and supervillains are common. In real life, of course, superheroes -- including Batman-style superheroes who don't have any powers -- simply don't exist. There are several reasons for this, the biggest one being that Batman-style vigilantism is against the law -- anybody who started acting like a Batman in New York or Chicago or any other big city would quickly attract the attention of the authorities, and it probably wouldn't take long for the police or the FBI, with their vast resources, their superior numbers, and their organizational skills, to discover this would-be crime-fighter's identity and apprehend him. The state likes its monopoly on violence. So superheroes don't exist. Supervillains, on the other hand, do exist, and there's actually quite a lot of them out there. If you define a supervillain as an especially daring or audacious criminal, who has committed multiple successful crimes over a long period of time, who has escaped custody on more than one occasion (like the Joker breaking out of Arkham), and who has a colorful nickname, yeah, there's plenty of supervillains out there. I think John Dillinger would qualify. He didn't have a colorful nickname, but he was on the loose for years, robbed two dozen banks, escaped from several jails, and engaged in several shootouts with police. His partner Baby Face Nelson, a violent psychopath who laughed while spraying bullets, had a similarly long and successful criminal career. Al Capone, nicknamed Scarface, was another very successful criminal; most comic book crime bosses (like the Kingpin) owe something to this real-life figure. Other candidates include the Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal, Kalishnikov Pat (this guy was constantly escaping prison in helicopters), the Red Prince, the Black Widow (Griselda Blanco), and the White Widow (Samanatha Lewthwaite). And if you're talking serial killers, well, there's even more of those, and their nicknames are even more colorful: Ashgar the Murderer, Mad Dog Taborsky, the Grim Sleeper, the Iceman (Richard Kuklinski), the Killer Clown (John Wayne Gacy), the Zodiac Killer, and so on. So we live in a world where real-life supervillains exist, and real-life superheroes don't. Kind of a depressing thought. |