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NEWS AND VIEWS - DECEMBER 2022
WRITING NEWS I'm afraid I didn't get very much writing done this month, partly because I've just been busy with other things, but mainly because my insomnia really started acting up again and I simply haven't felt much like writing lately. I did manage to add a little bit to the fourth Playground Noir story, The Kid With the Atomic Brain, however. I've been trying to decide what my next project ought to be, after I finish the six or seven Playground Noir stories. Here's what I've got on the docket (in no particular order): Galatea and the Dupe. The ninth Signalverse novel, which will probably wind up being pretty short. The protagonist, a selfish jerk, has the ability to duplicate any non-living object, and he's been using this ability to counterfeit money and valuables and to lead a hedonistic kind of life. After he's kidnapped and exploited by the supervillain group Organized Crime, however, and after he befriends another kidnap victim named Galatea, he begins to see the error of his ways. I've got a basic outline for this, but it needs to be broken down into a more thorough chapter-by-chapter outline. Untitled Signalverse Crossover. The tenth Signalverse novel, which will bring together several characters (Ally and Danny, Jack and Lia, and Alan and Raye) from the previous books into one big adventure. No outline yet, but I'd like for this one to be a huge epic which would basically serve as the final novel in the series just in case I never get around to writing another one. So I would expect it to run around 100,000 words. Signal City Adventures. A collection of five short stories set in the Signalverse, which I would probably release on Amazon as a single volume. It would include 1) a humorous story about Insomniak waking up in strange places, 2) a story about Ankhara and the Paranormals, 3) a story about a geeky history professor getting into an adventure with Shieldmaiden, Lumberjack, and Lumberjill, 4) a story about a young girl who is upset that her favorite hero, the Eyeball, is retiring, and 5) a story about Lucy Wright, Blake Hunter, and the Time League. Signal Intelligence. Another Signalverse novel -- a direct sequel to Disreputable Persons. This one would take place in the summer of 2018, and it might feature Orchid in a cameo. Unlikely to be written unless/until I've finished Galatea and the Dupe and the big Signalverse crossover. Sam Fortune and the Secrets of Alchemy. A Sam Fortune short story, set in 1926. Sam, Nellie, and Griff get into another adventure when Sam's old friend, a hard-bitten detective named Boswell, asks him to help recover a stolen safe deposit box belonging to an elderly Civil War veteran, which may or may not contain the secret to eternal life. Sam Fortune and the Hazards of the Game. A Sam Fortune novel, set in 1927. Sam makes friends with an actress in New York and winds up accompanying her to California as her bodyguard (she has a jealous ex-boyfriend); he later finds temporary employment as a stuntman in pre-Code Hollywood and gets caught up in a search for a sunken Spanish galleon. Needs outlining. Teenage Swordsman. An anime-inspired novel, or series of novels, set in a strange high school where every student is assigned a unique weapon and is expected to spend an hour each day battling monsters in a kind of dungeon beneath the school, to no clear purpose. Needs outlining. Hardcore. Novella (probably) about a guy who sets out to rescue his favorite TV actress after the onset of a zombie apocalypse. Dark comedy. Roughly outlined, but needs work. It's been on the backburner for a long, long time. Untitled Fantasy Series. A new fantasy trilogy, set in a steampunk-like world with trains and airships and focusing on the Avir, magic-workers who are the descendants of sleeping gods. I feel like this could be a fun series, but it'd be a big commitment and after the failure of my last fantasy series I'm not terribly eager to start writing it. I know quite a bit about the setting, and I know the villain's plan and how everything shakes out, but I don't know much about the characters yet and the whole thing needs a lot of outlining. I also have ideas for several additional Signalverse novels, including a direct sequel to Orchid and a third novel starring Kaden and Izzy from the White Ribbon books, but they're not really priorities at this point. If any of these stories sound interesting to you, let me know! * * * * * * * * THE GAMES I PLAYED IN 2022 I had a lot of fun with a lot of games this year. I started off the year playing Trails in the Sky: The 3rd and the first Famicom Detective Club game (which I failed to finish); I then moved on to the Final Fantasy VII remake, Triangle Strategy (another game I failed to finish), Trails of Cold Steel III, Atelier Ryza: Ever Darkness and the Secret Hideout, and Yakuza: Like A Dragon, which I'm still working on. I also tried Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis, but didn't get very far with it, and Symphony of War: The Nephilim Saga, and put about fifteen hours into Slay the Spire. Oh, and I played Stick Fight and Shredder's Revenge and a handful of other games with my friends when they came over for some gaming sessions this year. And of course I played a ton of Tetris Ultimate and Tetris 99. The highlight of the year, gaming-wise, was Trails of Cold Steel III, which I absolutely loved. Yakuza: Like a Dragon is coming in a close second, though; this is a fun, funny, and original RPG, which I'm having a great time with. I also enjoyed Trails in the Sky: The 3rd, although it was definitely the weakest of the Trails games I've played so far. The Final Fantasy VII remake was fun -- I'll definitely be playing the next game (Rebirth) when it comes out. I've always been sort of lukewarm on the FFVII franchise (I'm a FFVI man myself), but this game has managed to get me interested in this story and these characters again. I liked Atelier Ryza, but I didn't love it. I guess I might consider picking up the sequels someday, but probably only if they were on sale. I gave up on four games -- I thought I would really like Triangle Strategy, but it just felt kind of bland to me and I could never seem to get into it. Famicom Detective Club annoyed me because I could never figure out how to advance the plot and I started to feel like I was just wasting my time with it (I might give the sequel a try someday, though). Tactics Ogre: Knight of Lodis was fine, but the battles were lengthy and kind of frustrating at times, and I guess I just wasn't having much fun with it. And although I enjoyed my time with Slay the Spire, I lost interest in it after I realized it was basically a gambling game. Strategy and skill will only get you so far with it, and if there's no story to keep you invested, well, what's the point? Why am I playing this? I haven't officially given up on Symphony of War, but the amateurish writing and RPG Maker-like graphics definitely soured me on it. I'm not sure if I'll return to it. The gameplay seemed fine, at least. I had some successes with Tetris Ultimate and Tetris 99 -- I got a new high score in Tetris Ultimate (something like 280,000) and placed first in a Tetris 99 match. I've hit second and third place multiple times as well, but that's admittedly pretty rare; I usually rank around sixteen or seventeen, and occasionally in the twenties, thirties, or forties if I get start getting targeted heavily or if the competition happens to be really good. (Best time to play this game is when everyone in Japan in sleeping.) 
Next year? Well, I'm expecting to finish Yakuza: Like a Dragon by the end of the year, and to follow it up with Trails of Cold Steel IV, which I'm really, really looking forward to. I'm also looking forward to the follow-up, Trails into Reverie, which is due out next summer. Apart from that...well, of the games I currently own, I'd like to get to Tales of Arise, Trials of Mana, The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, and maybe something like Hollow Knight, Ender Lilies, The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition or Steins; Gate: My Darling's Embrace for variety. I'm also very much looking forward to Eiyuden Chronicle: Hundred Heroes, Octopath Traveler II, and the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom, which I believe are all technically scheduled for release in 2023. Starfield is a possibility as well, but I'd have to buy an Xbox for it (I think) and I'm probably better off waiting for the reviews on that one anyway. Bethesda, you know. * * * * * * * * THE MOVIES I'VE SEEN A MILLION TIMES I grew up in a rural area in the late 80's and early 90's. It could get pretty boring. We could only pick up three TV channels (ABC, CBS, and PBS), and I only owned a handful of video games at that time. I only had one sibling, an older brother, who was only rarely interested in playing with me, and my friends all lived miles away. And the weather in Minnesota is pretty bad most of the time -- everyone knows about the winters, but the buggy, humid summers can be miserable, too -- so I wound up spending a lot of time cooped up in the house. To keep myself entertained, I read books, I took up drawing (I never got very good at it), I played those video games, and I watched movies -- some that my brother and I had bought, others that we had taped off of TV. I watched these movies over and over and over again. When you watch the same set of movies a million times, they probably eventually begin to have some effect on your personality, so if you're wondering how I got this way, well, it's because these were the movies I was constantly watching when I was a kid: The Star Wars trilogy. The original trilogy, before the Special Editions came out. Back to the Future II and Back to the Future III. Curiously, although I had seen the movie a few times, we didn't own a copy of the original Back to the Future. The 1989 Batman, which I still regard as the best live-action Batman movie ever (with Batman Returns a close runner-up). Yeah, the plot twist where the Joker turns out to be the guy who killed Bruce's parents was kind of silly, and the Prince songs weren't a good fit, but I like everything else about this movie. The Nolan trilogy just didn't do it for me -- The Dark Knight was good, but Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises were just okay, and I never bought Christian Bale in the lead role. That raspy, mouth-breathing voice he puts on when he's Batman made it hard for me to take him seriously. For old-fashioned comic book-style goodness, it's the '89 Batman all the way. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. I saw Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom a few times as a kid, but Last Crusade was the one I watched a million times and the one I'm most attached to. Beetlejuice. We taped this one off TV, so the version I grew up with was somewhat bowdlerized. Hook. Yeah, unfortunately. Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. I liked this movie as a kid, but watching it now...ugh. It's a very dark movie, with some strange characters (the Sheriff's witch) and some pretty bad acting. Field of Dreams. A much better Costner movie, which I taped off of TV. Of course it's not really a kids movie, and as a kid I didn't really understand some of the deeper themes, but I watched it a million times anyway. I was really into baseball back then. 
Big Top Pee-Wee. The inferior sequel to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure. I liked Pee-Wee's Playhouse, so my brother bought this one for me for Christmas, but I never really warmed to it, even after watching it two or three million times. Police Academy 3, Police Academy 4, and Police Academy 5. My brother and I taped all of these movies off of TV. As a kid, I loved them, because they were full of cartoonish characters and bad jokes, but as an adult...yeah, I can't really think of anything good to say about them. I guess Bobcat Goldthwait's Zed is still kind of funny. I should also note that I liked the third and fourth movies much better than the fifth, by which point even I could see that the series was running out of steam. Three Godzilla movies: Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster, King Kong vs. Godzilla, and Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster. Dubbed versions, of course. I watched the crap out of these. Ghostbusters. Epic. Home Alone. A Christmas movie that I watched all year long. Armed and Dangerous. A pretty funny John Candy movie. Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure. I watched this one a lot. Still one of my favorite movies of all time. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Underrated. The Rocketeer. I've written about this one here before. Another one of my favorites. Major League. A heavily edited version, taped off of TV. The recording I had was of very bad quality, too, so I didn't watch this one as much as some of the others. Superman II. The Richard Lester version, edited for TV with a couple of the subplots cut out. I didn't see the first Superman until I was in my late teens. The Great Outdoors. As a kid I thought this movie was hilarious, especially the stuff with the raccoons and the bald-headed bear. It hasn't really held up very well, though -- the jokes are hit or miss and the romantic subplot kind is kind of blah. Willow. I liked this movie, I don't care what anyone says. I even bought the Chris Claremont Chronicles of the Shadow War novels that continued the story, but they were so strange and so totally unrelated to anything that happened in the movie (Willow isn't even called Willow in these novels; he calls himself Thorn Drumheller for some reason) that I could never really get into them. As for the new Disney+ series...nah. |