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NEWS AND VIEWS - JUNE 2022
WRITING NEWS Not a very productive month (read the next item if you want to know why). I have been making some progress on A City Burnished Silver, though, and I'm expecting to have it done before the end of the summer. Because it's probably going to run a little shorter than the previous two novels (maybe 90,000 words), I'm planning on adding an appendix to this one to pad it out a bit; in fact I've already written up several little essays on the science, history, and politics of the Chemical Empires world. Oh, and my usual cover artist for this series, Jorge Jacinto, has agreed to do the cover art for this book as well, so that's nice. As for The Signal City Visitor's Guide (or The Complete Guide to the Signalverse, which is what I'm thinking about calling it now)...well, I'm still working on it. Maybe I'll have more to say about it next month. * * * * * * * * SHARLA This has been a very bad month for me -- one of the worst months of my life, in fact. Around the end of May our dog, Sharla, began acting kind of strangely -- she was constantly standing up and sitting down, sitting on her haunches, getting up and moving again, and so on, like she couldn't get comfortable. She was also limping on her back leg. Thinking she probably just had a muscle sprain or something, we didn't think much of it, but after a week or so we took her to the vet. The vet couldn't find any broken bones or damaged tendons, so she came to the same conclusion we did, that she had some kind of muscle injury, and that all she needed was some rest and some pain meds. But she didn't get any better -- in fact, over the next two days, she got much, much worse, to the point where she couldn't walk at all, and eventually she began refusing to eat as well, which made it impossible for us to give her her pills. So we took her to the vet again. I thought she might have had Lyme disease, but her bloodwork came out fine. The vet had no idea what was wrong with her, but after consulting with some specialists she thought maybe she had developed a growth that was pressing on her spine. But the only way to know for sure would be to take her down to the Twin Cities (over a hundred miles away) for an MRI or CT scan, and it might take weeks to get her an appointment. (And even if they had found something, they might not have been able to do anything about it.) In the meantime she was in constant, extreme pain, refusing to eat, and unable to even get up and pee (the vet had to sedate her to drain her bladder). We kept praying that she would improve, that this thing would go away just as mysteriously as it had arrived, but in the end we had finally made the difficult decision to have her put down. She had only just turned nine years old. I'm not ashamed to say, I spent the next two days bawling like a baby. We were really, really attached to Sharla, probably because she was our first real house dog. She ate every meal with us (begging from the table). I played fetch with her every day. She helped me get through my insomnia crisis last year, getting into bed with me and keeping me company during the worst of it. And she was so excited to see me when I came home from work every day that she would spin around in circles. I loved this dog. So all this was very shocking, very sudden. Two weeks before we had her put down she was fine, in perfect health, and even three or four days before the end she was still eating a little and still able to walk around without help. We had no reason to believe she was in any real danger. It took us totally by surprise. And while all this was going on my dad was in the hospital, having an angioplasty. So we were worrying about him, and worrying about Sharla, and all these things just kind of hit us all at once (fortunately everything turned out fine for my dad). When it rains it pours, you know? So this has been a bad month. I spent half of it worried sick and the other half of it grieving. I still haven't quite gotten over the shock of it and I doubt I will anytime soon. I'm really going to miss her. 
* * * * * * * * ON SUPERHEROES Because I write novels about superheroes, a lot of people assume I'm some kind of huge superhero nerd and that I must be totally obsessed with the MCU and all the latest superhero movies. In fact, although I've always been interested in the superhero "mythologies" of Marvel and DC, I'm not that crazy for superhero stuff. I don't read superhero comics very often (maybe one or two a year) and I'm pretty selective about the superhero movies and TV shows I watch -- I haven't seen and have no particular interest in Justice League, the Wonder Woman movies, Aquaman, Venom, Marvel's Disney+ shows, or any of the most recent Batman flicks. I don't care about the Arrowverse. I haven't played Sony's Spider-Man or any of the Arkham games. Nor do I have any interest in The Boys. I read a synopsis of the comic book series years ago and found it disgusting. I'm sure it's well-written, with interesting characters and all that, and the fans certainly seem to love the TV series, but I'm just not interested in watching a show about a bunch of reckless, cruel, degenerate superheroes who act more like villains than heroes -- I just don't like seeing superheroes portrayed in that way. It's also why I'm not much into Watchmen, Invincible, or comic series like Mark Waid's Irredeemable, which depict superheroes as crazy, violent, manipulative, and so on. I don't like this grim, gritty, nihilistic stuff. I like superheroes like the Superman depicted in the first Superman movie from 1978, who was kind, charming, honest, and who even took the time to help a little girl get her cat out of a tree in one scene (you'll never see anything like that in one of those bombastic Zach Snyder movies). Superheroes were originally conceived as wholesome, aspirational characters, and totally deconstructing them in this way just seems kind of sick to me. The Boys does to superheroes what Peter Jackson's Meet the Feebles did to the Muppets. I should also add that I'm allergic to "realistic" superhero worlds, especially ones where the writer tries to imagine how real-world governments might react to the presence of superheroes. It might be fun to think about, but the whole idea of a super-powered individual is pretty absurd, and when you start digging too deeply into the concept it tends to lead directly to the kind of deconstruction that I just complained about. It's something I've always been careful to avoid in my own Signalverse books. |