Sort of like Sgt. Rock on Joe Kubert’s cover. But both of us will live to fight again.
Today though, this is all I could manage. Back to form tomorrow.
But I’ll take this moment to say go Scott Colom, Mississippi’s first Democratic senator in more than 40 years!
All rights to image remain with current holder.
Filed under Miscellanea, Personal
But like the Justice League indexing Watching Jekyll and Hyde has put me through the ringer. So no post besides this Murphy Anderson cover today (it’s one of my favorites).
The good news: I will be done today, meeting my deadline. Only 25 pages to go. Then I tackle a couple of other tasks I’ve been postponing, then tomorrow I rest at last.
Hump day is victory day!
All rights to image remain with current holder.
Filed under Comics, Nonfiction, Writing
The Become the Sky ebook goes live Friday on multiple websites and is available for preorder on any of them. As usual, I’ll be blogging about how I came to write the two stories I contributed. This week it’s about Obolos.
Weirdly I can’t find any record on my blog for the story before 2022 even though that post refers to reworking an earlier draft. I’m guessing I worked on the previous draft back before I started this blog, set it aside and only came back to it in 2022. I’m fairly sure I called the early draft something like Don’t Pay the Ferryman but by 2022, I had another story with a similar title. Though it eventually wound up with another title, becoming Shadows Reflected in Darkness in 19-Infinity.
That’s far enough back I can’t swear to my initial inspiration. What I remember is the image of a terrified woman; operating on the fringes of the underworld, she had a sudden attack of ethics and now a mob boss wants her dead. Her only hope is the mysterious Ferryman, a shadowy figure who like Charon ferries people who are effectively dead away to another world. Where? Well, anywhere’s better than dead in New York, which is the only alternative.
My earlier post refers to the previous draft as ending in a hand-wave. That’s typical for me; a lot of times I’ll just pull a first draft ending out of my butt if I can’t think of a good one. That frees my mind to start working on the second draft. Apparently in this case I didn’t get very far.
I do know I bounced around in the details of my protagonist. Rich, self-centered, but at one point she was black or she was a Paris Hilton-type (back when Hilton was a pop-culture name, obviously). Finally she became Eleanor Holt, a young socialite in the 1930s. Using her connections she’d brought people together, like a contractor with several tons of defective steel and a bridge inspector with a very expensive mistress. The people she connected were grateful. Only one such deal had proven bad enough that her ethics had asserted themselves. Now mob boss “Rackets” Lawton was sitting in a cell, there was a $10,000 price on my protagonist’s head and the Ferryman—shadowy and possibly mythical though he is—is the only way out. Because when Rackets Lawton wants you dead, every street out of New York is a dead end.
The 1930s setting was what I needed. It shaped my protagonist, now Eleanor Holt, a rich woman who steals for the adrenalin rush. I’m a huge fan of actress Barbara Stanwyck and my mind used her as a template without any conscious decision on my part. The 1930s tough-dame dialogue came naturally too. The only question … when the Ferryman took Eleanor to safety, where was she going to end up? And what sort of challenge was she going to face?
I’m not going to tell you but I will say it took me a long while to answer both questions. When I did work out the answers, I took the story to my writing group. They liked it but had some good suggestions — some of the backstory was confusing, the ending exposition was a little flat. I worked to fix both.
When we settled on “escape” as the theme of Become the Sky, I knew I’d found a home for the story (at 8,000 words, a lot of markets wont’ take it). If you buy a copy (and why wouldn’t you?), you can read it for yourself.
Covers by Sonya Lano and Kemp Ward (bottom). All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under Short Stories, Story behind the story, Writing
Gwen Snyder on Bluesky: “I know this is last week’s prompt but my personal Rushmore tweet was that guy who said we should solve loneliness and climate change by abolishing washing machines and having women go back to laundering clothes by hand down at the village riverbank.”
Riiight. Given that we’re dealing with a male loneliness epidemic in particular, wouldn’t it make more sense to have men doing the laundry? And how many people live near a convenient riverbank? It’s fairly typical of the nostalgia for community that assumes getting back to the Good Old Days includes getting back to the days when men ran everything. Do the women get a say in how they spend their days? Of course not.
I think community at its best is a wonderful thing. As Kristen Kobes du Mez says, however, close-knit communities often have dark sides. And built into the longing for them comes the implicit assumption — often not stated specifically — that part of what makes them work is putting authority, power and decision-making in the hands of men. Women will fill the “traditional” role of making the system run by providing unpaid labor—housekeepers, organizers of school events, emotional support, whatever is needed.
Since second-wave feminism exploded into people’s awareness in the 1970s, anti-feminists have been pushing back. Phyliss Schlafly glorifying how nobody has ever had it so good as the American stay-at-home housewife and mother (Schlafly, of course, built a career on telling other women not to have careers). More recently holding up tradwives as what women should aspire too, though now many tradwives are coming out and saying it’s a dead-end street.
It’s true that trying to cope with a life outside the home and all the responsibilities wives are often stuck with exhausts women. That doesn’t mean the solution is to stay home, let the husband be the boss and escape all the struggles of working in a capitalist world. Paul Deneen (at the du Mez link) and J.D. Vance talk about protecting the women from the brutal capitalist competition as if they were going to be pampered house pets. But if capitalism is that awful, why should men suffer? Why not reform the system?
Because they don’t want to. They don’t care whether patriarchy works by any normal standard of the word “works.” For right-wing purposes, it “works” if it reaffirms their penis entitles them to a higher status. If it’s dysfunctional, so what? They’re still ruling it.
(Still working on Watching Jekyll and Hyde so no time for a deeper, longer post).
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
WHEN HOLLYWOOD LOVED BRITAIN: The Hollywood “British” Film, 1939-1945 by H. Mark Glancy looks at what the author argues is a niche genre existing from the early 1930s through the end of WW II: films set in Britain or the British Empire, about them (or a Hollywood idealized version like The Rains Came), based on British writers such as Dickens, Doyle or Stevenson and starring expat British actors.
Glancy explains the development of talking pictures was a big spur to making these films: spoken language meant a language barrier in many countries but not in England. The British Isles were also small enough, with enough cinemas, that distributing them was easy. And as Germany began pushing against foreign non-Aryan influences in films shown there, there was less cost if Hollywood got cut out of that market for being openly pro-British (from what I’ve read elsewhere, adapting classics such as David Copperfield appealed to studio heads as a way to prove they were a class act).
When WW II began, the studios were positioned to make pro-British films such as A Yank in the RAF, even if that meant working around the Production Code (couldn’t say anything that was anti-German) and isolationists. Glancy goes into the factors influencing the genre, criticism (the benevolent view of the British class system and British colonialism) and how the war encouraged Hollywood to put an even more positive spin on things. This makes me wonder if one reason the 1941 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde eschews any hint of Victorian hypocrisy is the need to present our ally in the best possible light (much as we did with the Soviet Union in that era).
I expected to like BORROWED TIME: The Story of Britain Between the Wars by Roy Hattersly just as much; I didn’t. The book covers a number of interesting angles — post-war efforts to build a lasting peace, Edward VIII’s abdication, the boom in the British car industry post-war, the housing crisis, cricket, the struggles of the poor — but Hattersly, a former member of Parliament, focuses too much on the politics and very inside baseball in that: who took which position and why, how this played out, which ministers and MPs rose or fell as the issues developed. I get none of the sense of everyday life David Kynaston puts into his 1950s histories and there’s too much stuff that doesn’t get covered: nothing on Scotland or Wales, little on the Empire outside of India, nothing on the “bright young things” who partied through the 1930s. There’s also a lack of structure — why stick the chapter on Edward’s 1930s abdication right after the chapter on post-WW I peacemaking? Unsatisfying, overall.
Filed under Reading
This was a loooong week. Recovering from last week’s sickness, getting some last minute details done on Become the Sky (cover by Sonya Lano) and, of course, finishing up Watching Jekyll and Hyde. Plus the usual little stuff like vet appointments, drugs to pickup, etc.
Exhausting. But productive. First off, my illness seems to have passed, though as usual the sore throat is lingering. I intend resting my voice over the weekend, giving my throat steam baths, etc. and then hopefully I’ll be ready to talk again without making things worse. I hate not talking but rest is essential with this, trust me. Unfortunately I’m still sleeping poorly — I’m not sure I’ll get back to normal until Watching Jekyll and Hyde is done.
Speaking of which, today I finished going over the galleys and making all necessary corrections (Mark Blankfield, in the photo above from Jekyll and Hyde … Together Again, was identified as Mark Blankfield, for instance). I’m disappointed, but not shocked, how many corrections I had to make. More disappointed that I don’t think my prose flows quite as smoothly as it did on The Aliens Are Here —I haven’t achieved the goal (as Kaye Gibbons put it once) of writing so the next word is inevitable. It’s still readable and informative and it’s possible I’m being hard on myself (we writers often are). Still next McFarland book I’ll definitely allow more time for polishing the prose.
I’d intended to make out the index before the galleys came back to me but oops, it seems I forgot. In fairness, it has been a hectic year—as you know if you read me regularly, taking care of our dogs sucked up a lot of energy this year. And it’s still doable by next Wednesday, just more of a push.
And in good news, the care for the dogs paid off. We took them in for their annual wellness exam today and everything looks good. Huzzah!
We have finished work on the Become the Sky anthology. Now it’s just a matter of telling Amazon and D2D to release it, assuming no odd problems crop up in them processing it (it happens). We have a launch party scheduled but we may not get the books in time to have them on hand—Amazon can be slow sending out author copies.
And that’s pretty much it. Intense work but not many colorful stories. Though speaking of stories, I have one Local Reporter story on the impact of federal SNAP program budget cuts to Orange County and one about a group fighting suicide on college campuses.
I’ll be working this weekend yet I’m still glad it’s here. Have fun, y’all. All rights to images remain with current holders.
Filed under The Dog Ate My Homework, Writing
I mean, accusing them of apathetic floats?
Or of ebbing energy levels and a lack of unity?
I came across these photos flipping through a yearbook during the Choctaw High School tour at my reunion. Fifty years later I’ve no idea if this denunciation of the 11th grade made sense to me at the time. Sure doesn’t now.
Filed under Personal
I ran into a bizarre, but apparently genuine post online recently. A tech guy bragged that when his wife wanted him to read their daughter a bedtime story over the phone he proposed an audiobook. Mom: no, she should hear your voice. Dad: I’ll have AI read it in my voice! Because when you work in AI, that’s the kind of outside-the-box thinking you come up with.
Next this assessment (not of that incident) by Rebecca Solnit: “A lot of what AI use amounts to is the abandonment first of mildly demanding activities and then the abandonment of your own belief you have capacity to do them, and then the actual ability to do them them. Maybe an abandonment/atrophy of natural intelligence.” She’s writing about Marissa Mayer, a techpreneur whose new LLM is supposed to save women the costs of emotional labor. In this case, a teacher asked Mayer for a list of three cool things about her kid; Mayer “likes cracking a hard problem” but for a challenge like this, she had her new proprietary AI, Dazzle, come up with answers. As Solnit says, this is undoubtedly partly a PR push for the tech — but it fits with so many other things I’ve blogged about. People repeatedly outsourcing stuff that’s within their power because it’s uncomfortable or they’re not sure they can say it perfectly and everyone knows a computer can do it better.
Wired, for example, looks at how tradpublishing is embracing AI, often without telling authors. Why have staff write responses to authors or offer critiques when you have a machine? Isn’t that better.
For another aspect, let’s talk this post:
Needless to say, I do not think the author of this post was ever writing a book And that’s said. It’s not just the ethics of pirating everyone else’s work, though that’s certainly a factor. Lots of authors start out imitating other authors. I did bad Lord Dunsany and Bad Lovecraft; I improved. Robert Bloch started out doing Bad Lovecraft and he improved a lot. If all you do is tell the LLM “turn my prompt into a Cthulhu Mythos story” you’ll never learn to do better.
Or consider Marc Andreessen’s argument that thanks to AI, someone with no set, no camera, no actors and no movie-making skills can still make a movie. That shit has never stopped a determined low-budget filmmaker: they’ve shot films in their basement, their living room, the street outside. They’ve used their neighbors or strangers on the street as actors. A lot of these films suck; some of them are great. Post-WW II Italian neorealist films were almost all shot on location with non-actors because Italy was in no shape for anything more sophisticated. And even the directors who made bad films had a chance to learn by doing. Telling your AI to make a movie — again, you learn nothing.
Like writers, tand-up comics steal from each other but there’s a limit to how much damage one comedian can do. Instagram, however, is allegedly allowing hundreds of AI comics to perform (for want of a better word) and they’re straight up stealing real people’s routines. After all, why should we get the benefits of our creativity or imagination when Silicon Valley wants it all?
In other AI notes:
Using LLMs to verify the logic of math proofs has become a game changer. Like so much else done with LLMs, the results aren’t reliable.
The hell of facing a job-application system run by computers.
“without feeling anything, without caring, they convince people that they are empathic, that people are being heard when they speak to machines. And what’s missing in that behavioral judgment of whether something is empathic is all of the things that empathy really does for a person, which involve my commitment to you, my caring about you, my being willing to sort of walk a little bit of the road with you”
It’s difficult to explain the utter nausea and dread that slid over me the morning after the 2016 election. I wasn’t sold by all the talk of a blue wave, I feared it could go the other way, but the stomach-churning unease when I discovered the Toddler had indeed been elected was nightmarish. TYG and I seriously discussed leaving the country, as a few people I know have done since. It wasn’t just the Toddler. It was seeing Republicans embrace him and how quickly they slid to an even more extreme position.
2020, by contrast, was a relief. Biden, sane, sober, sensible old dude, won the race. I knew the threat hadn’t gone away, but Biden and Harris beat it back. However we didn’t get the prophesied Blue Wave then either, making it rough going for Biden’s term.
Last night, though … shit. First black woman governor. The odiously corrupt Ken Paxton went down. Greg Abbott lost his grip on Texas (apparently all their statewide offices went to Dems). Suzanne Collins bit the dust. North Carolina replaced Thom Tillis (who wasn’t running) with former Dem governor Roy Cooper. Darlene Graham lost in South Carolina. Vivek Ramaswamy’s odious pro-pedophile ads didn’t save him in Ohio. We have a majority in the House and we flipped the Senate — and a year ago, plenty of smart politics nerds were saying that was an unattainable dream.
None of the scenarios where the Toddler declared martial law, seized all the voting machines, sent storm troopers to the polling places etc. happened. My occasional worries that techbros would somehow subvert the tech didn’t happen either.
The Toddler will undoubtedly respond with rage and irrational behavior, but let’s face it, if he’d retained control of Congress he’d push the envelope then too. The Toddler’s gonna toddle, no matter what.
There will be lots of analysis about what it means, what Dems should do when they’re seated in January. I may have some thoughts down the road. For the moment, I’m just going to groove on last night. It’s not the beginning of the end for Republican extremism, but it may turn out to be the end of the beginning. And it feels good.
Filed under Politics
