September 9, 2026 · 5:15 am

Writing links for a Wednesday

I haven’t done a writing-links post in a while, so …

For anyone pushing creative stuff nobody seems to get, Rod Serling did too. When The Twilight Zone was approaching its first season, one interviewer asked Serling, “For the time being and for the foreseeable future, you’ve given up on writing anything important for television, right?”

So your beta-reader missed something you clearly explained in the manuscript? Maybe you’re not as clear as you thought.

When building a story around ancient legend, how much history should you throw in?

Acting link: The appeal of good guys playing bad guys.

“As nearly anyone who has graded a paper that was generated by ChatGPT can attest to, AI does not produce good writing. Not only does it hallucinate citations, but it fails to offer any originality or a clear point of view. It produces vague generalities without real insights. It offers a reminder that proper syntax and good writing are not the same, and as a professor I would certainly rather point out how an engaged student can refine their writing to improve their argument than grade another banal paper that is the product of intellectual laziness. What’s more, this excessive reliance on AI leads me to the inescapable question: Why are you in this field?”

I’ve read multiple complaints in recent years that a non-super supporting cast is becoming a rare thing in comics. Here’s some arguments for bringing them back.

“One thing that frustrates me quite a bit about modern opinion-writing is that hardly anyone tries to argue with a particular person or a specific argument. it’s all gesturing towards people saying something … i think writers would be well served by finding actual people of influence who hold the views they want to contest, and then contest them head on.” — Jamelle Bouie.

“Blackburn notes that there’s a lot of control relinquished to a chatbot as to what the definition of pornography or conservative values is. The definition is whatever the AI model has defined it as.” — a look at how rightwingers are using chatbots to find passages they think justify book banning.

The creators of the classic Elfquest say they’d sooner have no animated version than an unfaithful adaptation — which is why they’ve now accepted there will never be an Elfquest movie. Here’s a more detailed look at some of the bad proposals.

Why Han Solo works when Han Solo-type PCs do not.

Are clothes art? Who decides?

“Publishing.com LLC and its two principals will pay $1.5 million and be required to substantiate earnings claims in the future to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that the company and its operators misled consumers about how much money they were likely to earn using their products.”

White supremacy, and criticism of the Christopher Nolan Odyssey. Here’s another look at the politics of the film.

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September 8, 2026 · 12:46 pm

Random political quotes for a Tuesday post

“It’s always odd when “you should expose yourself to more diverse ideas” always means a certain kind of conservatism instead of like, Indigenous art, new fusion foods, math paradoxes, or the Dvorak keyboard layout” — Karen Ho on Bluesky.

I may return to some of these in the future. But there’s so much to write about so I thought I’d just put them here.

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September 8, 2026 · 5:15 am

It’s Tuesday, have some covers!

First up, one by Barye Phillips. Yes, that’s Gardner Fox the Golden and Silver Age comics writer/

Second, Charles Binger with a very Richard Powers-looking cover.

Third, art uncredited.

Fourth, also uncredited.

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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September 7, 2026 · 5:22 am

“If my own country won’t protect me, who will?” — rape and institutional betrayal

Elsie Dominguez, a member of the Merchant Marine, says she was raped by a naval captain in 2021. When she told her superiors she was “discouraged from reporting, dissuaded from seeking medical testing, denied access to confidential reporting, and had her job threatened.” Finally she filed a legal complaint. As detailed at the link, the Department of Labor decided being doped and assaulted was an injury she’d sustained in the course of her duties, therefore a worker’s comp matter … and they denied her claim.

A 13-year-old middle schooler reported a classmate had raped her. The school and the cops decided it didn’t look like she was struggling, decided it was consensual and took no action.

18-year-old Jesse Butler comes from a prominent Stillwater, Oklahoma family. Jesse Butler pleaded no contest to charges including “first-degree rape, domestic assault and battery by strangulation, attempted rape in the first degree and rape by instrumentation” from when he was seventeen. He was charged as an adult, then dropped down to juvenile; instead of a 78-year potential sentence he got a sentence of community service and counseling.

These are not new issues. The military has a long history, like many organizations, of ignoring rape; it used to be acceptable to grant clemency to officers convicted of sexual assault. Lots of judges, prosecutors and cops think they can tell it’s consensual even when it isn’t: if she’s not literally trying to fight him off, hey, she probably wanted it. I get into this a lot in Undead Sexist Cliches. However they’re still an outrage and we should keep on being outraged. Shrugging and declaring that’s just the way of the world solves nothing. We won’t know if we can end rape until we try. We won’t know if we can reform institutions to deal with rape better until we try.

The media fail us too. When E. Jean Carroll first mentioned the Toddler raped her, the media largely shrugged. “Worse still, when outlets did cover Carroll’s claims, most seemed to lead not with her harrowing account, but with Trump’s denial of it.” Likewise the New York Times spent far more newsprint covering Hilary Clinton’s alleged email scandal than on the Toddler bragging about grabbing women by the you-know-what. And look what happened next. We see similar distorted coverage on other topics today.

After a while this becomes easy to normalize: Toddler supporters don’t care he’s a rapist, so what’s the point in writing about it? Because while rape is normal — in the sense of happening a lot, and rapists getting away with it — it’s still monstrous and we should never resign ourselves to thinking otherwise. This is hard because as I’ve said before, contemplating the reality of sexual abuse and assault is like living in a Lovecraftian horror — accepting the true nature of reality feels insane.

As Scott Lemieux says, the argument rape accusations won’t affect his base is bad too. “Hearing yet more new accusations of sexual assault might not change the mind of any swing voters or demobilize any educated suburban Republican voters, and then again it might. More to the point, since when is “will it materially change the outcome of elections?” the standard for determining whether something is newsworthy? By that standard — particularly if we’re talking about individual stories — almost nothing is. What are we even doing here then? If you’re a political reporter and believe something is only news if it will turn hardcore Trump supporters against Trump, the logical conclusion is find something to do for a living.”

Lemieux also quotes an LGM commenter making the same point: “regardless of his supporters we have to keep talking about these rapes over and over and over because otherwise we accept the implicit framing that it’s somehow okay or that there’s some kind of non-legal statute of limitations on holding someone accountable for rape. In other words we normalize it. We normalize rape. Rape.

That’s not okay. I understand that we live in a rape culture and that rape and sexual assault are to some degree already distressingly normal and normalized, but this is different. This is not hidden or glossed over or anything. It’s an open accusation, both credible and substantiated by what she said at the time, and consistent with over a dozen other accounts. We need to keep talking about it. A lot. Because if we don’t we give the message that you can get a free pass on rape* if you just…do it enough times that people get tired of hearing about it, or stonewall and lie about it no matter how obviously.”

Push back. Fight. Stare Cthulhu in the eye and say no, you are not acceptable. It will be a long time before we can end rape but reminding everyone, even the apologists, how evil it is, is a beginning.

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September 6, 2026 · 5:14 am

Not alternate enough: Summoned by Michael Anderle

In a discussion of Doctor Who: Wish World at his Blue Towel Productions blog, Ben McClure says that when writing about an alternate reality version of a popular show, you can “make the new world incredibly interesting, often by raising all sorts of questions about how the world works or even how the world came into being at all … the other way to make an alternate-reality story interesting, and by far the preferred one, is to make the alternate-version of the character meaningful.”

I’ll be blogging about this in another context but it captures part of why I was disappointed in SUMMONED: The Free Judge Reborn, Book 1 by Michael Anderle. The book takes place in the 2080s, the history is very alternate but none of that seems to matter.

(This has nothing to do with the book, I’m just using random photographs to provide some visuals).

Kara Greims is a crusading attorney, constantly frustrated that money and connections allow so many of the people who wronged her clients to walk away without paying a price. When gets news her brother has been murdered in Los Angeles, she heads west and discovers he was a Free Judge, part of a secret, supernatural justice system devoted to providing justice when the secular, mortal system fails. As the skull of Jacob Grimm, her brother’s mentor, explains to Kara, the True Court prefers it if the True Judges bring justice via quasi-legal means — intimidate someone into confessing to law enforcement says — but if that doesn’t work, executing malefactors is acceptable. Kara’s first target (I’m assuming the family will turn out to be descendants of Jacob or his brother): the corrupt corporation that killed her brother.

This leads to the novel approach for an urban fantasy of having Kara work within the system: she digs up documents via public information requests, puts together a case that the company has been violating the law, gets it to the right regulators. It is not, however, novel outside urban fantasy; as she herself points out, it’s not that far from a Leverage episode. Or similar, earlier TV creations: Mission: Impossible‘s organized crime episodes, the TV movie Institute for Revenge and others.

Lack of novelty is not a problem. Bringing justice to those the law cannot touch is a popular premise and like the legend of Robin Hood, there’s always a need for someone to do it. What doesn’t work is that the bad guys fall too easily. Kara puts in a lot of effort to make her case — it’s not a cakewalk — but her legal moves invariably work. Where is the Hamilton Burger to her Perry Mason? Why are the bad guys’ lawyers not throwing up counter-moves? For all the work Kara performs, it’s too easy. Likewise, her repeated beating of the thugs they send after her makes me wonder why they don’t change tactics — a bomb in her car or something like that.

The final problem is the worldbuilding. In Kara’s timeline, Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade took a different route in 1914 and he was never assassinated. No WW I, no treaty of Versailles imposing crushing burdens on Germany. No fascism. No WW II. Also no stock market crash, no Depression. On the downside, with no Cold War there was less pressure on the federal government to support civil rights, segregation continued unabated until the 1980s. At this point there was a horrifying fire in the Japanese neighborhoods of Los Angeles; assuming it was fueled by race, imperial Japan invaded and won. Kara’s story takes place a century later.

That’s a good premise for a timeline, though not always convincing (why would the stock market crash and the Depression not happen?). I don’t see any signs of it in the story, though. Other than zeppelins being the primary form of air transport, there’s nothing that feels different from 2026 in the real world. No sign of Japanese control. No sign the law is different. Hell, Leverage is a TV show in both worlds so apparently their history ain’t that different. To go back to that quote from Blue Towel Productions, it isn’t an interesting alternate world because there’s so little alternative about it.

I wanted to like Summoned much more than I did.

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September 5, 2026 · 5:07 am

One book, one movie: Dr. Lao and his seven faces

Charles Finney’s 1935 THE CIRCUS OF DR. LAO is one weird book. And I love the cover of my edition (wish I knew the artist)

Abalone, Arizona is a small, dull, dusty desert town. First the newspaper has a big ad announcing the coming of the circus, then it shows up. In small towns back then, that’s always exciting, but townies who gather to watch are underwhelmed — three wagons, that’s all? One of them with a horse that has a fake horn on its head, one of the wagon-drivers has horns on his head and plays a syrinx, there’s a dog painted green, a little old Chinese man and a furry Something/Someone in one of the cages — is it a bear? Or maybe a Russian? Lao himself can shift from pidgin English to standard English at will.

Despite the small procession into town, there’s a full circus with sideshow exhibits and a big tent when Lao opens his show that night (memory suggests a circus setting up magically this way is a common trope but I can’t swear to it). We have a sea serpent engaging in intellectual conversation about its life history. Medusa, carefully shielded so she’s only visible in a mirror (as you might guess, someone’s going to look closer …). The satyr sexually liberates a prim young woman. Two drunk college students cause trouble. Apollonius the seer gives a middle-aged woman a bleak prophecy: she won’t find love, nothing will change, nothing will improve, she’ll simply fade away, losing hope, and then she’ll die (it’s a strikingly sad moment). A sorcerer resurrects a dead man, who runs off immediately — he has important business! Almost all of which the locals treat with complete phlegmatism, no more excited than if they’d seen a tattooed man or the like. Faced with wonders they don’t find it that wondrous. Apollonius’ prophecy feels like it could apply to the entire town.

It’s an odd but fascinating story. No real plot, just a series of incidents. No real explanation of anything. The book concludes with a Cast of Characters list including details about people who were little more than walk-ons, or were mentioned but never appeared, plus a list of unanswered questions — was it a Russian or a bear? What business did the dead man have? The end result is not everyone’s cup of tea; I have no memory what I made of it when I read it in college, other than “that’s weird.” In its own way it’s brilliant. That said, we have a couple of racial epithets dropped into casual conversation and the satyr committing sexual assault; if those are unacceptable, well now you know.

I think such a plotless novel is unfilmable so it’s no surprise when they did film it, Charles Beaumont’s script for THE 7 FACES OF DR. LAO (1964) gives it a plot to hold everything together (the great George Pal directed it). A skilled fantasy writer and Twilght Zone scriptwriter, Beaumont gives it a Twilight Zone quality — Lao (Tony Randall in yellowface) shows up and transforms everyone’s lives for the better the same way Professor Fate saves Denton in the episode Mr. Denton on Doomsday. Though it also resembles the 1962 film musical The Music Man: like Harold Hill, Dr. Lao is a traveling trickster who revives the lives of everyone in town, including inspiring a prim librarian to find love (this does make Lao the equivalent of a “magical Negro”).

This version of Abalone is a dying town and everyone knows it. Cynical Stark (Arthur O’Connell) has offered to buy everyone out so they can leave and start over; newspaper publisher Ed Cunningham (John Ericson) is pushing his neighbors to say no. He’s also pushing widowed librarian Angela Benedict (Barbara Eden) to say yes to a date, without any luck.

Enter Lao and his circus. His satyr (Randall — the “seven faces” means he plays seven roles) loosens Angela up (not quite as rapey as the book scene), the serpent mocks Stark, Apollonius (Randall again) makes his bleak prophecy. Stark’s thugs harass everyone opposing him; somehow Lao neutralizes them.

The end result, alas, lacks the sophistication of a good Twilight Zone episode; it feels more like kidvid (Lao does spend a lot of time with Angela’s young son, who’s fascinated by him). The performances are competent but not stellar. Randall playing seven roles doesn’t add much, though “actor plays multiple roles” has its own appeal. It has some charm, but I think there’s a better unfaithful adaptation they could have made. “Every time I bet on weakness, corruption, and fallibility, I want to lose — but I always win.”

All rights to images remain with current holders.

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September 4, 2026 · 4:14 pm

God said ha. I said “ha!” back

The old saying is that if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. I planned to get a lot done this week; God said “ha!” meaning there were a ton of obstacles. Despite which, to my pleasant surprise, I did get a lot done.

First the obstacles. We were still dealing with Plushie’s ulcer (diagnosed last week) but as of his Thursday appointment, it’s cured. Once again our dog has beaten a health problem despite his nearly 16 years of age! That’s always nice. He’s still on an antibiotic for the ulcer but that’s more a precaution than a necessity. We’re taking it though.

Trixie didn’t do so well. Last week she was becoming weirdly picky about food and reluctant to eat her meds. She also felt … off, in a way I can sense but couldn’t define. Sunday she began not eating at all so we took her into the vet Monday, followed by the emergency vet (they could do a couple of tests Park Vet couldn’t). At first the news was horrifying: anemic, blood count up, white blood cells up, which could indicate an infection, or possibly internal bleeding. At the end of the day, by virtue of eliminating the alternatives, they settled on probably some bleeding in the GI tract (I will skip the technical details).

We came home with directions to switch some of her meds and to have her drink a protective slurry an hour before her meals. It’s working: we took her in for a recheck Wednesday and all her signs have improved, though not by a lot (but the vet said that’s expected). She’s livelier, though also sleepier — she’s on Gabapentin now and it knocks her out. But she’s clearly happier and more interested in eating so this is a definite win. A demanding one — the need to time the slurry and her food and some of her meds makes our schedules that much more complicated.

Oh, and I also had to take our car in for an oil change and checkup. That took up a couple of hours too.

Despite which, work went well. I got two articles in for The Local Reporter, both out next week. Might get a third one done but I think that’s where the dog drama will leave me too wiped. I also got three posts up at Atomic Junk Shop, one about iron-on shirt decals in the 1970s, one on a really weird 1971 cover (above, by Murphy Anderson) and one about the path to (IMHO) the definitive Phantom Stranger run by Jim Aparo and Len Wein which kicked off with the cover at left by Aparo.

I also got a nice review of Southern Discomfort from one of my fellow bloggers. Thanks, Greg!

I worked through another year of Doc Savage’s history for Savage Adventures, and polished the bibliography. And then, on Let No Man Put Asunder, I really got some good stuff done. First I went through the writing guide Writing the Breakout Novel, taking notes on stuff that might be useful to think about (give your villains goals. Your supporting characters too). Maybe not — while I’ve read the book a lot, I’m not sure I use it’s techniques not. But I think I’m using it early enough in the rewrite process that might be different.

Then I started rereading, taking notes along the way. Insights or phrases someone offers more than once (“making the beast with two backs” is not going to appear more than once). Thin characterization or motivation. Implausible plotting. Places where it needs more tension. I got a third of the way through the book; that’s pretty good.

I also received by McFarland second-half-of-the-year royalty check. Small, but my books are still selling, which is cool; if you bought one of them, thanks!

And I now have three stories in the “made the first cut” category. No guarantee any of them will sell — I’m quite used to “This was a really tough decision, but …” emails — but they’re all possibilities. More disappointingly, I won’t get an author table to sell my books at Retcon next year. It was quite lucrative this year because it’s set up so all the con-goers go past the sale area frequently, probably why table requests have quadrupled. I’m on the waiting list so fingers crossed.

Fingers crossed too for more weeks like this.

Below, a typical Len Wein opening to a Phantom Stranger story. Aparo art.

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September 4, 2026 · 5:15 am

I like that these tarot decks exist

From a recent trip to Barnes & Noble. If I had the cash, I might have picked one of them up, just to see what the cards look like.

Who is the King of Swords in Lovecraft’s tarot? Or do they have things like the Page of Tentacles instead? Does the Austen deck use characters from her novels or is it just generic images from that era?

Perhaps someday I’ll find out.

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September 3, 2026 · 5:10 am

Zohram Mamdani is better for America than Doug Wilson

Doug Wilson is a slimy Christian theocrat who think women should lose the vote and that marital sex means men conquer, women submit. He thinks race relations in America were best under slavery and says he would have fought for the Confederacy — but totally not because of slavery. Sorry, Mr. Wilson, if you were fighting for the Confederacy you would have been fighting to protect slavery and against abolition. The CSA was quite open about slavery as a fundamental principle of their government. And here’s his latest deep insight:

“Citizenship is more of a privilege, dependent upon ancestry, background, how long you’ve been here, whether you meet the qualifications or not,” Wilson said as he insisted citizenship was not a right. “And if America is a creedal nation, then you have to have creedal standards. So anybody who voted for Mamdani should lose their citizenship.”

This is two contradictory arguments. The idea of America as a creedal nation is that we don’t base citizenship on things like ancestry or background, we base it on whether you can accept the Constitution, embrace “all men are created equal,” believe in inalienable rights. Ancestry is irrelevant. But like so many on the right, Wilson’s worldview is that the creed is Christianity, therefore Muslim=Unamerican. It’s his country, not someone like Zohram Mamdani. Of course even by that logic, depriving people of citizenship for voting for Mamdani makes no sense — except for a power-hungry religious tyrant, which I think he is.

In other words, he’s much further from the American creed than Mamdani. I am embarrassed to share my faith with Doug Wilson (technically they’re two different, incompatible versions of Christianity, but still). Where Wilson sees an apocalyptic battle between his theocracy and Islam, Christianity and Islam (and Hinduism, atheism, etc.) can coexist just fine, as they always have. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat running to be senator from Michigan, is not coming for our culture. Sharia law is not going to take over. Nor did El-Sayed dismiss 9/11 as unimportant.

Michael Savage, a would-be Rush Limbaugh (he never came close to the same success) who wants Mamdani deported is as far from the American creed as Wilson. Ditto the vapid yet venomous Ben Shapiro who speaking of Muslim immigrants asks “What has been the the vast boon to the American taxpayer from these people? What has been the great cultural reawakening that has occurred because of these people who despise the country?” A)We don’t allow people to immigrate because of some “vast boon to the American taxpayer” — and if that was a standard for judging people, Shapiro hardly qualifies. B)America has always been a nation of immigrants. If he despises that, he despises America, just as Republicans despise America for giving equal rights to gays, POC, Muslims, women … Republicans are the barbarians they imagine they’re fighting.

Mamdani meanwhile forges ahead with his policies, including plans to open grocery stores in food deserts. This may not work for a variety of reasons: expense, effectiveness, groceries suing to block the project (which they are). There’s some good discussion here including what I thought was an excellent point: “if they work well we figure out how to scale and if they don’t then oh well.” It’s a pilot project, a test. Try it, tinker with it if it needs improving, give it up if it fails. That’s okay. In fact it’s probably a healthy approach. As I’ve said before, more people should study Mamdani and learn from what he’s doing and how he’s tackling things. And responding to criticism, like claims the rich will flee his tax policies. His response: “When we talk about taxing rich we hear about fear of capital flight- flight of Black New Yorkers who can’t afford it has happened for years… Dems were branded as ‘SoCiALisT’ forever — Obama was called one…”

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September 2, 2026 · 5:18 am

When do the good times start?

When I watched The Exorcist a couple of years back, I was struck by how slowly the story opens, showing us the details of everyday life. It was a carefully calculated decision to ground the film in the “real” world before the spookery gets going.

I think the source novel, William Peter Blatty’s THE EXORCIST, does the same thing, but less successfully. It’s a hundred pages of mundane detail about Chris and Regan’s lives (and some about the priests) before anything happens; sure, there’s some odd noises in the attic, but that’s as creepy as it gets. Even after the supernatural happens, the resistance to accepting it gets comical: sure, someone fell down the steps with his head completely twisted around on his neck but that could certainly happen naturally! No, not it couldn’t.

I presume this reflects that Blatty was writing in an era when mainstream horror novels weren’t a thing — this was three years before Stephen King broke in with Carrie. So perhaps grounding it in reality was necessary — and the book’s blockbuster success clearly shows it didn’t hurt. Nevertheless I couldn’t get into it; Blatty’s oddly jerky prose style didn’t help. I do think a little more tension in the everyday stuff would have been a good idea — if you’re going to spend more than a quarter of the book in the mundane world, find some way to make it interesting.

This is, of course, a challenge lots of speculative fiction writers face when they’re setting stories in our world. Some plunge right in: the opening page of Storm Front informs us that Harry Dresden is a wizard helping people out with supernatural problems. My short story “The Savage Year” (in 19-Infinity) opens with mage Artemis West getting ready to perform magic on a job for the Secret Service. “The Glory That Was” in the same book has a robot minotaur break in on a political luncheon.

Other stories take time to build. Southern Discomfort, as I’ve mentioned before, starts with little overt magic. We have Maria’s sense of something wrong, hints that Pharisee Georgia is, shall we see, eccentric (no stop signs allowed — traffic circles instead), freakish rainstorms. Until the ravens attack as Maria’s getting off the bus, there’s nothing that seems strongly supernatural. However Chapter Two spells out that this is a town run by elves, and the person who murdered Aubric McAlister is not of mortal clay. Not a long wait.

That puts me in mind of Orson Scott Card’s old rule that the opening and ending of your story should mirror each other. Mine starts out with Maria in a bad place: on the run from the cops, emotionally closed, desperate. The final scene is all about resolving that. Likewise Let No Man Put Asunder starts with Mandy and Paul waiting for their life to begin, and ends accordingly. Maybe that’s what bugged me about The Exorcist: it starts with Chris but it’s not really a character-centered story where her personal arc is resolved at the end. Instead it switches to horror midway through and stays there.

Then again we have the priest supporting character who does indeed get a character arc. Unlike the movie, he’s not quite interesting enough to be the spine of the story, at least for me — like I said, the success of Blatty’s book certainly speaks for itself. But like I said, I didn’t find it terribly compelling, and I think I’ve identified why.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Covers top to bottom by Lee Macleod, Kemp Ward and Sam Collins.

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