October oddments

Light the candles and bring the blankets. The great darkness is drawing in. The best part of the year is ~half over, the Hallowe’en candy is available at the drug store by the crate, and the scary movies are all over the Plex server. I’m making pumpkin pasties and beef pies. Time for a roundup.

The Projects

The Last Alchemist, my YA novel, is about ten chapters from done. That’s a bonkers sensation in and of itself — like how could I not finish it now, right? It practically finishes itself!

No but really, there’s a weird gravity that’s taken over at this point where each week’s writing feels like it’s going faster and faster. That’s not quite true — I got mired in a belter of one a couple weeks ago — but it feels great.

This project, as you might recall, mostly started as envy, when a friend of mine announced he was spending last Christmas vacation on a “just for the joy of it” writing project, and I wanted something with which to do the same.

Well, 26 chapters and two rewrites later, our girl Kya has made the second-act turn and is bearing down on the finale. You’re gonna love her when you meet her: she’s got a robot, a crush, and all the magic of a broken world inside her.

Speaking of “just for the joy of it” projects, I’m also banging my way through a scriptment for a movie called Safecrackers, which is kind of my attempt at Horizon Zero Dawn meets The (1999) Mummy. And by “banging my way through” it, I really mean it: I am not slowing down for anything on this draft. Don’t know how to make the connective link from one set piece to the next? Write “connective scene here” in blue ink, and keep going.

I am not the greatest imaginer of set pieces (or at least, I don’t think I am), but I’m finding that when I come up with derring-do for my gang of adventurers (a rogue, a bard, an artificer, a cleric and a barbarian — natch), I am having the most fun. In a post-apocalyptic world dotted with dead trillionaires who were obsessed with the ancient times, it turns out, you can come up with a lot of weird shit.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, agent querying on Enneaka has not yielded anything fruitful. This is largely a shame because my actual number one wow wow wow choice of a potential agent was on that list, and it would’ve been great to work with her — which is not off the table yet, and perhaps no news is good news, but still, I like news.

Regardless, I have some new leads to follow, two of which seem quite promising, so we’re not out of the race yet; and if none of this nets out, there’s always open publishing calls and other ways to get the book onto the streets. As always, stay subscribed to my newsletter for all the updates as they arrive.

This next part is like that thing where all conversations now eventually devolve into what television shows everyone is watching, except it’s the online version of that

This has been a great season for TV.

Agatha All Along

Like, I know this rhetorical device gets used a lot these days, but anyone who’s not digging this show (unless it’s for the obvious reasons), I dunno what to do for you. Ok, admittedly, “five witchy broads go adventuring” maybe isn’t to everyone’s taste, but if you (like me) love Amblin-style PG-13 hijinks, magic, and great actresses, it’s a tour-de-force.

Do you need to have seen WandaVision? Someone asked me that on Threads a few weeks ago and I was so ebullient in my desire to get people into the pipeline that I said “nah”… but I’ve been rethinking that. For a couple of reasons:

1. Yes, I suspect the emotional stakes of the story are just a lot more legible if you’re already familiar with Agatha, what she did to Wanda, and who Wanda’s children were (the latter of which, at least, is probably why so many people who didn’t watch WV were so miffed by Multiverse of Madness, so probably the same math applies here)
2. Why wouldn’t you watch WandaVision?!? It’s 9 half-hour episodes and it rules. I had kind of forgotten how hard that show went, until I rewatched a few key episodes ahead of this new series. Boy, we were given so many gifts in Phase 4 that I think we kind of just thought that level of excellence was normal.

One more reason to watch Agatha: they’re nailing this:

Like, apologies to whomever is playing that role over on the DC side, but you are being smoked.

The Rings of Power Season 2

It ended last week and I loved it. I loved season 1 too; hey, fun fact, I had a good time with The Hobbit movies when they were here, because I can enjoy all of these things while still being heartily aware that there’s an order of magnitude between them and Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.

The neat thing is, this isn’t an all-or-nothing game. If you’re into Tolkien, if you’re into fantasy television, if you’re into magnificent production design and production value, there’s so much to enjoy on a week by week basis in TROP that you’re doing yourself a disservice not to get into it.

I will say, one of the only (but pretty major) ways in which the second season wholly whiffs is the long-awaited presentation of Tom Bombadil. I like Rory Kinnear; I like the Rufus Wainright song. But this ain’t it, for reasons better spelled out by Roxana Hadadi in Vulture than anything I’m going to write here. A shame!

The Penguin

Here we have the sequel series to a Batman movie that (at the time) seemed to tell me that maybe I was past the saturation point on Batman as a premise… and yet, The Penguin kind of rocks.

First of all, for whatever strange casting alchemies went into deciding that casting Colin Farrell as the Penguin and then covering him in latex was a better idea than casting any of twelve dozen character actors who actually look like the Penguin, it’s still gangs of fun watching him play this role… and because he’s Colin Farrell, he’s obviously crushing it.

Add to that Cristin Miliotti, who is so tiny that it seems like some kind of contravention of nature that she’s able to play Sofia with so much central gravity that she can bend whole scenes towards herself. I’m not ready to call The Penguin the DC universe’s Andor moment, but it’s in that vein: what if we took this source material as the ground rules for a complicated, adult-friendly inquiry into how this would all work?

And, like both of the above, it looks fantastic. Any series that gives my TV a run for its 4K money gets advanced to the top of the list for purely financial, self-interested reasons.

And finally…

…The Simpsons??

Incredibly (mostly to myself), I have started watching The Simpsons again, for the first time in fifteen years. It’s not the first time that a series finale convinced me to go back and watch a show; it is, however, the first time said series finale has been followed by more episodes, so it’s a backwards-and-forwards filling in of the blanks for me, starting with season 36 but also starting with season 21 and hoping to meet somewhere in the middle before season 45. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Disney+ keeps paying for itself, at least for me.

Filthy lucre

Happy Thanksgiving, turkeys. I am one of (I hope) many in Canada and around the world who has recognized something important: Canadian Thanksgiving rules. It happens at exactly the right time; it features exactly the right foods; and it lets white folk like myself spend a few days feeling alternatingly shitty about the horrors we’ve visited upon this world and, at the same time, grateful for the vast bounty we’ve reaped with our monstrousness. Heady!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t let you all know how grateful I am for the response to this newsletter, and to my evolving life as a writer in general. I’m in the process of building out my small business as a means to turn some of this writing into dollars (copywriting, technical writing, story editing, you name it). In the meantime, there’s this tip jar.

I promise to work on the CTAs on this web site.

I also promise not to go tip jar crazy, but it’s hilarious that I can do a tip jar. (And for those who spend their free moments becoming neurotic about how I can possibly afford this lavish lifestyle, no, this is not a cry for help.)

But, y’know, Ghost does cost a portion of money, and it would be great to be able to cover that without going to a full pay-for-subscriptions model. Mostly because the latter sounds like a hassle.

Further oddments, Octoberwise

• "In a world where metaphor itself has been weaponized against the Palestinian people, Hammad is right to underscore the risks of literary recognition, which can easily facilitate an escape from responsibility." Andrea Long Chu on how to "read" Palestine. (Vulture)
• In 2013, I wasn’t in Christchurch long. But I think about it an awful lot. (Carbon Upfront)
• One of the best things I read this week was this Drew McWeeny piece, which is about — I dunno — kind of everything. This entire hellworld and all the people making it worse; at least, if you’re a film & entertainment person like me. (Formerly Dangerous)
• For no particular reason, I was thinking about No Time To Die recently. (Tederick.com, asshole!!!)
• As usual, there’s a new Star Wars action figure-related YouTube post. We’re about halfway through the pilot on these videos, so feel free to hit the comments and let me know if there’s any overlap between your interest in this newsletter and your interest in seeing me do stuff using the moving image. I suspect those audiences are… quite separate? But you never know. (YouTube)