the website of author and local favorite blake michael nelson | about | contact: theblakeshow@gmail.com
|
NEWS AND VIEWS - FEBRUARY 2023
WRITING NEWS I finished writing The Long Recess, the sixth Playground Noir story, this month. I'm going to compile these six stories -- The Black Trapper Keeper, Goodbye My Galaga, The Slumberous Party, The Kid With the Atomic Brain, The Far Side of the Slide, and The Long Recess -- into a book, which will probably be released sometime in March or April. As for the visual novel I mentioned last month, well, I'm still working on the script, but I'm not really sure if anything will come of this project, ultimately -- the game would need a lot of illustrations, probably more than I can afford right now. I could try using AI art, I guess, which is all the rage these days, but I'm not sure AI is capable of producing the specific kinds of scenes I have in mind. I'd have to look into it. I've also settled on what my next few writing projects will be. After I get Playground Noir out there, I'm going to write Galatea and the Dupe (the ninth Signalverse novel) and then Sam Fortune and the Hazards of the Game, which will be the second Sam Fortune novel. So I'll be working on those this year, and probably the big Signalverse crossover next year. I wasn't really planning on jumping back into the Signalverse so soon, but The White Ribbon and the Heart of the Night left kind of a bad taste in my mouth (it's not one of my best novels) and I've been wanting to write another, better Signalverse novel to make up for it ever since. As for Sam Fortune, I've been meaning to write this sequel for a long time, but I've been putting it off, partly because the first one was one of my least popular books, and partly because these are pulpy adventures set in the 1920's, which makes them a little trickier to write (I have to do a fair amount of research). I've got a real hankering to write another one of these stories now, though, and I feel like this is the right time for it. * * * * * * * * MORE IVY I mentioned last month that we got a new puppy, Ivy. Here's a couple more pictures of the adorable little nuisance. She's growing like a weed. 
* * * * * * * * WHAT I'M READING I've been making a conscious effort to read more books this year, and I think I'm off to a pretty good start: I've already completed ten books since the beginning of January, among them Aidan Moher's Fight, Magic, Items, Springs Toledo's The Gods of War, Lawrence Watt-Evans's Tom Derringer and the Electrical Empire, Greg Keyes's The Realm of the Deathless, Hideyuki Kikuchi's first Vampire Hunter D novel, and Jack Chalker's The River of Dancing Gods. The Realm of the Deathless, the third book in Keyes's High and Faraway series, was pretty good. I wasn't really a fan of the airy and fairytale-like setting, where seemingly anything could happen, and the ending struck me as more bitter than bittersweet, but the characters were interesting and I did like the prose, which was often lovely. That said, I've been reading Keyes for years and I'm probably a little more forgiving of his eccentricities than most, so your own mileage may vary. Also, the amount of mistakes and typos in this book was unreal. Who the heck proofread this thing? Anyway, he's got another new book coming out in April, which seems a little more traditional, and which I'm also looking forward to. I enjoyed Kikuchi's Vampire Hunter D. There's an awful lot of ridiculous plot contrivances in this book, though. A gang of bandits disposes of the bodies of some lawmen by burning them, but a vampire is able to figure out who they were by "reconstructing a badge from the molecules of ash recovered at the site." Apparently this is some kind of vampire super-science, but it's kind of silly, isn't it? I mean, why not just say the vampire used magic? It would almost be more believable. There's also something called Time-Bewitching Incense, which turns night into day and vice-versa (huh?), mutants who have "dimensional twisting" abilities (so when you shoot them, the bullet emerges from your head instead, somehow), and various other high-tech gadgets and arcane powers, which Kikuchi spends pages explaining. All this stuff is very creative, but the sheer weirdness of it all tends to overshadow the plot. Also, despite having been released in 1983, it reads very much like a modern light novel in some ways, with an overpowered protagonist and over-the-top fight scenes that are written as though they were intended to be animated. On the other hand, it's quite well-written, with an excellent and appropriately moody translation. Chalker's The River of Dancing Gods belongs to what the Japanese would call the isekai genre, in which an ordinary person or persons from our world are sent to a fantasy world (in this case, moments before they would have died in a car wreck). The setting is a generic hodgepodge of fantasy tropes, with elves, unicorns, and so on, and the tone is just all over the place. Sometimes it seems like it wants to be a straight-up epic fantasy, with these huge battles and deadly encounters and detailed descriptions of the geography and the nations of this fantasy world, but then at other times it wanders off into Xanth-like puns and jokiness (a "fairyboat" gets the heroes across a river at one point; they also encounter a dragon who has need of a psychiatrist because he's afraid of "fair maidens"). The protagonists are a little unusual, too. Joe is a world-weary truck driver, apparently in his fifties or sixties, and Marge is a broken-down divorcee. Both of them are subsequently given perfect new bodies (Chalker likes these kinds of transformations), but I can see why I had a hard time relating to these characters when I first tried to read this book as a twelve-year-old. Overall...well, it was okay, but I'm not really interested in checking out any of the sequels. Oh, and one other thing -- the cover art for the latest edition of this book is really ugly. It looks like an attempt to replicate the original Darrell K. Sweet cover art, but it's very poorly done; it looks sloppy and amateurish. It's an insult to his work, and for that matter to his memory (Chalker died in 2005), for his publishers to half-ass the cover like this. * * * * * * * * DISAFFECTION Ken Begg (of Jabootu fame) went to see the Kaguya-sama movie in the theater a while back and had this to say about the experience: They ran a bunch of trailers, and man, I got nothing out of them. I have never been more disaffected from Western mass market product. Everything was super loud and super frenetic and laid out all the plot points step by step (was that the climactic line that Ant Man said to Kang, that lays out his whole strategy right at the end of the movie? it sure seemed like it) and generally looked awful. Everything is all jokes and irony all the friggin' time now, literally every line is said with a smirk, in every damn trailer. And boring Seen It a Million Times mass CGI destruction. Bring the fucking scale back down to human levels, you morons...I feel the same way -- I don't have any interest in these Western movies or TV shows, either. "Disaffected" seems like the right word. There's just nothing out there that I want to watch. The MCU has become a huge and unwieldy mess, I don't care about Star Wars, stuff like Wednesday isn't my jam, and all these reboots and reimaginings (Willow, The Lord of the Rings, Ghostbusters, Star Trek, He-Man) are awful. And seeing these ancient actors like Harrison Ford, Bill Murray, and Patrick Stewart return to these roles that made them famous isn't exciting; it's depressing. I feel sorry for these guys. Like Ken, I've retreated almost totally into old movies and Japanese and Korean entertainment, mostly anime and Korean dramas and romantic comedies. The only newish Western show I'm watching now is the new Beavis and Butt-head, which is almost as funny as it was back in the day, presumably because Mike Judge is still calling the shots on it. And now that I think about it I haven't been playing very many Western video games lately, either. I've always been more partial to Japanese games, of course, particularly JRPG's, but for a few years there I was really getting into some Western games, too -- the Uncharted series, the Fallout series, Crackdown, Heavy Rain, South Park: The Stick of Truth, The Outer Worlds, stuff like that. Now I've gone back to playing Japanese games almost exclusively again. This is partly because there's just been a lot of great Japanese games coming out these last few years, but mainly because the same people writing these Western games are writing these dumb TV shows and movies, and it all comes out the same -- either snarky and ironic or just plain stupid. |
