the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
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NEWS AND VIEWS - JULY 2022
WRITING NEWS The Complete Guide to the Signalverse is now available on Amazon! This is a "world guide", full of background information on the Signalverse -- it's based on the older Signal City Visitor's Guide, which was available on my website for a while, but it's been totally redesigned and updated with new information. It contains something like five hundred character entries and a much more expansive timeline; I've also included several mini-essays on the Signalverse, covering metahumans, magic, technology, pop culture, and so on. It's also got a cover gallery, lots of fun trivia, some info on the Signalverse's alien races and various parallel worlds, and perhaps most significantly, a brand new 10,000-word short story called "Going Viral" which has not appeared anywhere before -- this is the first short story I've written which is set in the Signalverse. If you have any interest at all in these superhero novels I've been writing, I think you're pretty likely to enjoy this book. Just be aware that it's full, and I mean full, of spoilers. I was originally planning to include some illustrations in this book as well, but I finally decided to release it without them -- I'm afraid I just couldn't justify the expense. Maybe in the second edition? The book is only available as a paperback at the moment; I'm not sure when or if I'll be releasing an ebook version. It's also a little pricey, at $23.99, but the proof copy I ordered didn't look so hot with just standard color paper, so I figured I'd better go with premium. Anyway, here's the cover: 
As for A City Burnished Silver...well, it hit 85,000 words a few days ago, and I'm expecting it to run about 90,000, so I'm getting pretty close to the end. I'm hoping to release it around September/October. Not sure what I'm going to be working on after I finish A City Burnished Silver -- probably it'll be the first book in the Playground Noir series, which I've been meaning to write for years now. But there are other possibilities. A sequel to Sam Fortune, another Signalverse novel (likely Galatea and the Dupe)...we'll see. I have an idea for another fantasy series as well, but I'm starting to think I'm not really cut out for fantasy. I don't think I'm capable of writing a better fantasy than The Demon in the Metal, and that book wasn't exactly a roaring success. So maybe it's time to give some other genre a try. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M PLAYING I started Square Enix's Triangle Strategy this month. I was really looking forward to this one, because of its obvious resemblance to Final Fantasy Tactics (an old favorite), but it's actually been kind of disappointing so far. The voice acting is very flat (I finally turned it off) and the writing has a strong Song of Ice and Fire vibe -- the royal family has a "Kingsguard" for example, and knights are called "ser", which is a big tip-off. To the best of my knowledge nobody ever used "ser" for "sir" before GRRM. These are probably localization choices from some Game of Thrones fan and not present in the original Japanese, but either way, I found them kind of grating. I loved the first three books of A Song of Ice and Fire, and the first four seasons of Game of Thrones were a good adaptation, but the series' influence on the fantasy genre has been disastrous (all that grimdark crap), and I've soured on it over the years. The TV series obviously went to hell after the fourth season, and GRRM's seeming inability to finish the sixth book (it's been eleven years now) reflects very poorly on him. In the years since A Dance with Dragons was released, I've written almost twelve books, totaling almost 800,000 words, and unlike GRRM, I don't make any money writing these things and I don't have legions of fans waiting for future installments, so I'm not writing them with any sense of urgency; I just write whenever I feel like it. If a lazy writer like me can write all that in that amount of time, GRRM sure as hell can. What's his problem? * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M WATCHING Working my way through several shows at the moment: the second season of Komi Can't Communicate, which is funny and heartfelt; Spy x Family, which is pretty slick (I get why this show is so popuar); and Our Beloved Summer, another one of these Korean dramas that I'm always watching for some reason. This one's about a boy and a girl who starred in a documentary together when they were students (the documentarians thought it would be funny to put a studious girl and a slacker guy together, to see what would happen). After the filming ended, they became a couple, but broke up after a few years, and now fate has thrown them back together again in the present -- in a bit of twist, the slacker guy has become a successful artist, and the studious girl has become an unhappy office worker, never quite reaching her full potential. The show frequently flashes back to their relationship, and to scenes from the documentary, which gives it a wistful, nostalgic kind of feel. Pretty good stuff. I also recently finished watching Blue Birthday, a Korean drama with a time-travel premise: a young woman discovers that she can travel back in time, to her school days, by burning the photographs her friend took back then. The friend, whom she had a crush on, seemingly committed suicide before she could tell him how she felt, and she uses this time-travel technique to try to stop him and change the future. The plot eventually becomes very twisty. I liked this series well enough -- the premise was vaguely similar to Proposal Daisakusen, one of my all-time favorite Japanese dramas -- but it didn't blow me away or anything. Just a decent show. * * * * * * * * * TETRIS 99 Finally. 
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