A New Excerpt from The Great American Novel - From Chapter 41

I've made a lot of progress on my novel since last we discussed how it was slow going.  The chapters are averaging out to about 25 pages, but some have been a lot longer.  Turns out I have a lot to say on this topic.


Kaya has been through a lot by this point, and while its definitely unfair to drop all of this on you context-free, I think I need to share a little bit of my work so I know its not just me doing this all on my lonesome, and that it'll be worth it.  I figure I'm probably about to hit the 2/3rds marker and head into what my film school teachers called "the third act" (although I have no actors, so I may be misusing the term).  But this IS a bit about character development, and as we were so plot heavy last time, I wanted to give some hints as to Kaya's past, and give the reader a chance to see a pensive Kaya in a thinking, emotional moment.


So, without further ado...  (oh, this is about 6 pages into Chapter 41).  


Oh, and, yeah, there may be some spoilers.

    The screaming outside the reinforced steel doors was immeasurably loud, but nowhere near as loud as the voice in Kaya's head reminding her that this was nothing compared to the heartache she felt knowing Drumicus was out there, too.  She fought herself, wanting to run to the big, red button beside the door marked "OPEN", but if she did, these old women and children didn't stand a chance.  She might, but not these little ones who had not yet been hardened by the world, and certainly not trained, hour after hour.  Not like herself.
    Her mind flashed to the cool mountain green valley and the pond that gurgled and burped outside the rice paper doors of the dojo, and the silly cat that lived on the grounds watching her, year after year, transforming her body from that of a girl to that of a living weapon.  There had been endless days and nights of sparring, learning forms and movement, but that was necessary if one were to become Samurai.  Yes, she was a prodigy, and Sensei Atoki always said she was the finest student he'd ever seen.
    But she never finished the training, did she?  No.  She had a weakness then.  A weakness she would not give in to again.
    The old women watched her in silence, no doubt remembering when their own stomachs might have been as taught and trim, showing between a leather sports bra and the gun-belt that rode her hips.  And the children...  some of them could have been her own siblings (twins!, she recalled), looking up at her just as desperately now over the frustrated shrieks of the Vamps outside as her brother and sister had once looked upon her.
    Dammit!  Not again!  This time, they were all leaving.  All together.  Vampires or not.  Something she had not been able to do for Krista and Kyle, so long, long ago.
   "What are we going to do?" Bryan asked decisively.
   "Well," she shook her head.  "I don't know.  We have to get these kids out of here.  And the old women.  This door only opens to the outside, and we know what's out there.  I've got about eight charges left in my Faze-Pistol, and the Katana of Dancing Dragons is thirsty enough for Vamp throats, but I'm still just one.  I'd make it, and maybe you, but not all these old women and kids."
    Bryan nodded his head mournfully, the long locks at the back of his head tied back now in the warrior's ponytail, like some amazing lost medieval warrior. "Still, its weird how much these vamps want these particular kids and old women."
    "They're just hungry," Kaya shrugged it off.
    So much loss! she pondered, considering Elvis's strewn remains left behind.  How much more can we endure?
    Sure, he's been made of steel and wires and cogs, but, dammit, he'd been her friend.
    "Lady."  Kaya turned, feeling small hands pull on the fringed edges of her leather shorts, just above the smooth, tanned length of her leg.
    "We should take the hatch.  Then we can leave."
    "The what?" she asked.
    Bryan lifted an eyebrow.  "What damned fool thing is this?"

Kid Friendly comics! Snarked and Donald Duck

Snarked!

I finally read the first two issues of Roger Langridge's Snarked.  Well, I read issue 0 and issue 1.

Playing off the public domain status of Lewis Carroll's stories, Langridge has grabbed the briefly mentioned Walrus and The Carpenter and decided to spin a story from what we know of them from the poem (told by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in Through the Looking Glass).  If you can still track down issue 0, its pretty chock full.  Not just of story, but of the source material Langridge will hope you're familiar with as he mines Carroll's material for his own purposes.

He includes pictures by John Tenniel, Carroll's artistic accomplice, in appropriate places, but the art is the same mad cap, cartoony style I really liked in his work on The Muppets comics (also from Boom).

I suspect that, with issue 1, Langridge plans to make this a closed story, that has a beginning, middle and end.  Originally, I'd believed it would be a gag book, or have one-off stories per issue, but instead it seems we're headed off on a bit of an adventure.

You see, the Red Queen has passed, leaving two children Princess Scarlett and Prince Russell IV (aka: Rusty), but now the Red King has disappeared whilst on a sea-faring voyage.  And the kids (a) would like to find their father and (b) get away from the folks who want to seize power.  Our friend The Cheshire Cat has an idea who can help them, even if The Walrus and The Carpenter seem to be, by all indications, cheaters, liars and cons.

The Walrus, The Carpenter and the offspring of the Red Queen & King

Good stuff.

The writing is sharp, the characters archetypes but cleverly done, and its a book that you can hand a kid, but I suspect you'd want to sit and read it with them.  Its pretty fun, and the language is very well thought out.

And if you have a picture of what a "snark" (the much discussed but unseen beastie) looks like, you may send it in.

I think this is one of those books you're going to wish you'd jumped on early.

Walt Disney Treasury: Donald Duck Vol 1. and 2 (and more)

Oh, so!

Yes, I've been reading Donald Duck again.  I know, I know.  I came to Disney comics so late, I feel like I have a lot of catching up to do.

I've had both these volumes for a while, but I just dug them out of my stack of comics I haven't yet read, and I plowed through them with pretty great speed.

I don't think Boom! will be carrying on printing these books now that Disney owns Marvel comics (a shame, because Marvel's collections edition has never seemed as together as I'd like) and Boom! was just really getting themselves together on their Disney collections front.  AND it was a nice compliment to the really fancy (but expensive) work Fantagraphics was doing on their archive collections.

Hubris, thy name is Donald

The two Donald volumes are pretty reasonably priced ($14.99 cover for a lot of comics) and contain pretty good stories in both.  I finally got to read a Plain Awful story in Volume 1, and the Uncle Scrooge/ Donald go into space to collect satellites story in Volume 2 had me rolling.  Both volumes contain work of the American creator, Don Rosa, who is one of two comics creators associated with Disney's ducks that all comics people should know (along with Carl Barks).  And coming off reading the Disney Four Color Treasury, it was nice to transition to the more modern Ducks era.

Its tough to explain the appeal of a Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge comic to the uninitiated, except to say that Duckberg is a very well realized place of goofiness and big hearted skinflint trillionaires and good-hearted crooks like the Beagle Boys, and its fun to see Donald in one story wrestling with space flight and in another trying to get the nephews to school.

Don Rosa is, in my estimation, one of the most creative talents in comics, with great understanding of narrative, gags, character, etc... and its just a huge pleasure to read his work.  And I suppose it says something about how under the radar the comics must have been for Disney for this to be one of the areas where any single creator was able to make a name for themselves.

 

It's Thanksgiving Week, Signal Corps!

I shall be as bloated as this Thanksgiving parade balloon by Sunday

It's Thanksgiving Week here in the United States of America, and that means people will begin spreading all over the country in short order as we find time to rejoin with family and friends.  Or, of course, some of you may take advantage of a couple of days off and head for a long weekend on the beach somewhere.  Man, that sounds nice.

Anyway...

I just thought I'd get this out of the way before we got distracted by other things.

This year we've got The Dug & K en route to sunny Austin/ San Marcos, TX and we'll be having a nice, relaxed Thanksgiving that, for scheduling reasons, will culminate in Turkey Dinner on Saturday instead of Thursday.

I expect most of you will start disappearing by Tuesday.  We'll keep posting all week, I guess.  Catch up whenever you can.

Donald with a blunderbuss.  What could go wrong?

So Thanksgiving is a good time to take stock of all the things that are more or less going your way.  And as a 21st Century person of middle-class means, I suppose I've quite a bit to be thankful for.  Heck, living in the 21st Century seems to be something to be pretty thankful for when one considers the alternative of spending three months on a boat to end up on Plymouth Rock and then watching everybody keel over in your little colony from the plague, the vapors and whatnot.

So let's just put a big check mark next to "man has conquered some of nature, and I won't be eaten by an otter unless something goes very wrong" as something I'm thankful for.

A semi-teary farewell to "Batman: Brave and the Bold"

So this post is going to be kind of weird.

And probably pretty whiny.

Batman: Brave and the Bold only aired for a handful of seasons, and I'd argue that the first season was spent largely trying to find the right footing and tone.  Scripts were still coming in that first year that seemed a bit like team-up episodes written for Batman: The Animated Series, and one episode (I believe a Christmas episode) featured the death of the Waynes as a flashbacky plotpoint.

It just felt... weird juxtaposed against robot Santas and other DC Comics madcap shenanigans.  But the second season it seemed like we'd come over the top of the hill, and the show did nothing but pick up speed and do loop-de-loops right up until the wacky end.  The basic gist of the show was a riff on the Bronze Age-era of Brave and the Bold comics, a DC team-up book mostly featuring Batman and another figure from the DCU (Superman did the same in DC Comics Presents).  The creative team found the right balance of hilarious OUTRAGEOUSness for the adults and mixed it up with gleeful mayhem and action, and managed to introduce an astounding amount of the DCU to an unsuspecting audience.

It featured episodes done entirely as a musical (with a singing Black Canary), sit-com episodes, winking-4th-wall-breaking episodes with Batmite, brought Silver Age Superman in all his glory to TV (really for the first time), featured a Justice League v. Legion of Doom baseball game, and mined every corner of the DCU, right up to a Creature Commandos adventure this season.

Mostly, for the past two years, its really been my favorite show on TV.

Brief break from blogging

So, I just figured out I am really, really busy the next few days.  Rather than try to make time I don't have, I am taking a work-related break/ hiatus.

Ya'll take care, and we'll be back soon.

Brooksie's Belated Birthday

A belated birthday to Ms. Louise Brooks, who shares a birthday with Veronica Lake, yesterday, November 14th.  Brooksie would have been 105.

and then there was the time I found out my favorite movie was "heavily borrowing" from another movie

This evening I finally watched the 1942 film The Glass Key, a movie I've been trying to see since I first watched (and thoroughly enjoyed) the pairing of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire.  Ms. Lake would have been 92 today, and so TCM was showing some of her films.

all movie posters are better when they feature William Bendix playing a little chin music

At age 15 I rented Miller's Crossing from my local video store. I had just seen The Godfather for the first time the previous summer thanks to my uncle's remarkably good movie selection (he also showed me Das Boot) and I was young, impressionable and learning about both gangster flicks and cinema. And so when Miller's Crossing landed in my VCR, I simply had never seen anything like it.  My entire world of gangster movies came from Godfather I & II and maybe The Untouchables.  I was utterly unfamiliar with the topsy, turvy world of the likes of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, etc...

Con Report: The League Goes to Wizard World

Oh, my.

Well, it may be that comic conventions simply are not my thing.

I attended the 2nd Wizard World Austin for two hours on Sunday.  The Wizard World Comic Conventions are a far cry from the weird invasion of ballrooms at the Holiday Inn off the river I attended as a youth.  The scope is much larger, the square footage fairly impressive, and, of course, we've gone from two of three guys in Star Trek uniforms to a wild array of all kinds of outfits, and people in booths catering to people in outfits.  The big attraction seems to be the celebrities.  Wait.  I meant: the "celebrities".*

In my mind, I have many people I would like to meet.  Athletes.  Statesmen.  TV personalities.  Actors.  Authors.  The reunited cast of the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not at the top of that list.  And if I DID want to meet most of these people, slipping them a $20 bill for the privilege of meeting them isn't really what I'd have in mind.  I still don't know what it means for an actor to be making their money off of appearances at Wizard World conventions, but its nothing I want to think about a whole lot.  And not something I can very well ignore if Wizard wants for me to participate.

That said, there are some folks who are going to just be done with whatever made them "famous" in the first place, and in this respect, Wizard World is actually seems sort of neat.  Take pro-wrestler The Million Dollar Man.  That guy is not a teen-ager anymore, but he still has lots of folks who'd love to meet him, and that I get.  Last year Adam West came to sign autographs, but he's Batman.  I get the connection.

But, no, I didn't get anyone's autograph.  What I will say is that Kevin Sorbo of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys fame is a really tall guy (taller than me, and I'm, like, 6'4" or so) and I have no idea how old he is.  He still looks remarkably young.  Good on you, Sorbo.

Signal Watch Reads: The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath is among the books you're supposed to read that I was never assigned in K-12 or during college (I only took one literature class in college, and I don't know if we read anything by an American author.  Film and History degrees.  Sorry.), and as Tom Joad never dawns a cape in the book, nor does Ma Joad fight a robot or gorilla, it fell to the bottom of my reading list.  But as part of my program to catch up on books you're supposed to read that also translate pretty well to audiobook, I recently finished the 22 hour odyssey of Steinbeck's best known work.

No doubt in the era in which it was released, the book was a piece of propaganda, and I imagine it was intended as something like the socially-conscious work of Upton Sinclair in books like The Jungle, using popular media to draw attention to the circumstances of those who'd been caught up in the crush of economic and environmental turmoil in the farming communities of the south-central United States (in our case, Oklahoma) during the 1930's.

As a quick summary - the book follows the fortunes of the Joad family which, like everyone else in their Oklahoma community, is devastated by a bad crop, and loses their farm to a large industrial concern (the books makes plain this misfortune befalls most small farmers in the middle states).  With farm as home, they have nowhere else they can go and earn a living, and so take to the road to California, where they believe jobs will await them picking fruit.  It follows the hardship of crossing the country when there's no money to start with, and the reason all those Okies believed that this would work.

Signal Watch Watches: Green Lantern The Animated Series first episode

This evening Cartoon Network debuted the real start of DC Entertainment's all new DC Nation concept, kicking off an hour-long episode of the all new Green Lantern The Animated Series.

The show is the first 3D animated weekly show from DC, and I think it'll fit in neatly with both the other DC programming that's in 2D (such as Young Justice) and the very popular Star Wars: Clone Wars, which is some lovely 3D animation.

The GL of choice for this series is Hal Jordan, whom I guess the studio believed would be every kid's favorite action hero after the summer blockbuster, which...  yeah.  Luckily, the producers of this program (which include Bruce Timm and his style imprinted upon 3D), just sort of went off and did their own thing, more or less.  Honestly, they strayed quite a bit from the comics as well, and that's fine for this GL fanboy.

Not much time is spent on set-up.  Likely the producers were hoping kids had seen the movie or watched other GL material.  Instead, we get a quick overview of the basic GL concept, and then a pair of Green Lanterns grab an experimental (by Oan standards, so...  its really neat) spacecraft that's kind of a Lantern itself, and go off to find out why Lanterns are dying out in deep, deep space.