the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
|
NEWS AND VIEWS - JANUARY 2023
WRITING NEWS I finished writing two more Playground Noir stories this month: The Kid With the Atomic Brain and The Far Side of the Slide. Right now I'm working on the sixth story, The Long Recess, which will probably be the last one I write, at least for a while. I spent some time this month learning how to use Ren'Py -- I've been thinking I might like to try writing a visual novel. For practice, I made one based on one of my buddy Ant's old Blake Hunter comic strips, and I liked how it came out (I'm not going to make it available anywhere; the story is pretty vulgar and I used some copyrighted music anyway). So then I started thinking about what kind of story I'd like to write. My first thought was to write something set in the Signalverse, but every time I started putting a plot together it would get out of hand and become this epic thing, and that's not really the direction I want to go -- a big-time story like that would need way, way too much artwork. So my next thought was to make a game based on these Playground Noir stories, which are much smaller in scale, have significantly fewer characters, and are more appropriate for a visual novel anyway, since they're written in the first person. I started adapting the first story, The Black Trapper Keeper, and I think it's turning out okay so far. I don't have any music and I'm using A.I.-generated placeholder art for now, which makes it a little hard to judge what the final product might look like, but I think I'm going to keep playing around with this thing and see where it takes me. Other than that, nothing much going on, writing-wise. * * * * * * * * BLAKE INVESTIGATES: UFO'S When I was a kid I used to love reading books about UFO's and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster and that sort of thing. In fact, in elementary school I read those kinds of books almost exclusively -- until I discovered the fantasy genre the only other books I read were Choose Your Own Adventure stories and novelizations of movies like Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey. As an adult, I've pretty much lost interest in the Fortean mysteries, but I still occasionally find myself reading about UFO sightings, abductions, and related mysteries on Wikipedia. Sometimes they give me ideas for stories. Here's some that I find especially intriguing and/or interesting. (I should probably preface all this by saying that I don't believe in aliens and I think the vast majority of UFO sightings are bogus. For almost two decades now almost everyone on the planet has been walking around with a high-definition camera in their pocket, and as far as I know there hasn't been a noticeable uptick in the number of UFO photos. As for the famous Pentagon UFO videos...well, frankly, the fact that the U.S. government has "authenticated" these videos only makes me more skeptical of them.) The Kelly-Hopkinsville encounter. I've always been intrigued by this one. You can read the Wikipedia article for a more detailed summary, but basically, a bunch of little silvery aliens purportedly starting swarming a farmhouse in Kentucky in 1955, peeking in the windows and trying to get inside. Understandably alarmed, the inhabitants blasted them with their shotguns, a la The Galaxy Invader, but the blasts didn't seem to harm them; the aliens, who floated rather than walked, simply righted themselves and kept on coming. Finally giving up the fight, the embattled residents escaped the house and went to the police, who returned to investigate. The police found nothing except for some shot-out windows. Later that night, however, the aliens allegedly returned, and the inhabitants fled. All this seems pretty ridiculous, of course. There's two things about this case that I find intriguing, though. One is the fact that, even though this whole thing sounds pretty silly, none of the people involved thought it was funny. They thought they were fighting for their lives and they took it very seriously. The other thing that gets me about this one is the dumb explanation some skeptics have offered -- it was a great horned owl they were shooting at! C'mon. These were rural people; I'm sure they could tell the difference between an owl and a creature from outer space. And this encounter apparently lasted hours. In all that time they couldn't figure out they were shooting at owls? Like I said, I don't believe in aliens, but something very strange obviously happened to these people and I don't think anyone's ever come up with a plausible explanation of what it could have been. The Pascagoula Abduction. Two fishermen, Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker, claimed that a couple of carrot-shaped alien robots paralyzed them and took them aboard their spaceship while they were fishing on the Pascagoula River in Mississippi. The Wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but the intriguing thing about this otherwise outlandish story, to me, is the fact that when these two guys went to the sheriff to tell him about the abduction, he played a little trick on them, secretly recording their conversation after he left the room. He figured if they were lying or pranking him they'd "break character", so to speak, but instead, they kept talking about the encounter, with Hickson turning philosophical and Parker freaking out and babbling about wanting to see a doctor ("Ah need somethin' to settle my naaarves," he drawls). On the other hand, Hickson later started embellishing the story and even claimed to have been abducted a few more times afterward, while Parker, after keeping quiet about the incident for years, eventually started making the rounds at UFO conventions. So, uhh, neither guy comes out of it looking all that credible. The Falcon Lake incident. This is a pretty famous one; in fact the Canadians even commemorated the incident on a $20 silver coin. Apparently, in 1967, this Polish guy named Steve Michalak was prospecting up in Manitoba when he saw a couple of weird flying objects, one of which landed. When he approached it, he was burned by the craft's exhaust and went on to suffer lifelong debilitating injuries. What I find interesting about this one is the very detailed description Michalak gave of the craft. He also never maintained that the ship was piloted by aliens, or that it was anything other than man-made -- he assumed it was some kind of experimental aircraft and even claimed to hear human voices coming from inside of it, which went quiet when he called out to them. Skeptics claim Michalak was merely drunk, which was apparently confirmed by the bartender at the Falcon Hotel where he was staying, and that he must have burned himself accidentally somehow. Some skeptics have also claimed that he made up the story to keep people away from the claim he had staked, but if that was the case, it was a pretty dumb idea -- claiming that you saw a mysterious spaceship in the area isn't really the best way to keep people off your land. In any case, investigators did find some burned vegetation where Michalak said the ship had landed, along with higher-than-normal levels of radiation, but those high readings were later discounted after it was disovered that there was a radium vein in the vicinity. * * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING Here's what I've been reading this month: 
I finished Fight, Magic, Items (which is about JRPG's) and The Gods of War (which is about boxing); I'm still working on the others. * * * * * * * * IVY We got a new puppy this month, a black lab, who we named Ivy. Still working on getting her housebroken. 
|