I feel like I've been to a horror workshop this past week.

It started with reading Tim Waggoner's Writing in the Dark, effectively a textbook (complete with exercises!) for writing better horror stories. He breaks down the different sub-genres, he explores what distinguishes horror from other types of fiction, and he pulls back the curtain on different techniques to use in horror to produce different effects.

I've read other writing books before -- and will read more, I'll take advice wherever I can find it -- and always come away with at least one or two changes to make to the way I write. Writing in the Dark was no different in that respect, but it went one step further: It changed the way I read.

Shortly after finishing it, I picked up a copy of Salem's Lot. I realized I haven't been reading much horror lately, so I thought going back to one of the classics would be a good way to dive in.

And I was right, but not in the way I'd intended. Because instead of just noticing things like the parallels in the story to the original Dracula, or getting sucked into the story -- both of which happened, it's still a damn fine book -- I started noticing things about the way King wrote it. Places where he was writing in a more literary voice, versus genre. Places where he slowed time down by writing everything out in minute detail, to ramp up tension. Places where he shifted point of view. How in the more "horror" chapters, he wrote in a perspective that clung tightly to one character's train of thought, to show their reactions to what was happening, which is where dread lives. Often those chapters had very little happen in them at all, but the characters reacted to them as if they were scared out of their wits, and thus carried the reader with them.

It was like Waggoner was standing over my shoulder as I read, pointing to passages and remarking on the techniques being used in each. I could still appreciate the story King was telling, still feel the chill of being hunted by an ancient vampire in a New England fall. But I could also see how he was telling the story, and think about how I could use those techniques in my own fiction.

Next I read Stephen Graham Jones' The Only Good Indians, a horror novel which came out just last year. I had the same experience with it, though -- at least for me -- the seams were less visible in this one. That is, it was harder for me to pull myself out of it, and see how it was built. But it was still possible, and I noticed both some of the same techniques King used and others being brought to bear, techniques more commonly used for monster books, which Jones' is (and King's wasn't).

I'm now reading Seanan McGuire's Middlegame, and having much the same experience. Loving the story, falling into the book, but on the way, paying attention to the way she's telling the tale, from sentence length to parenthetical remarks to event ordering (no spoilers, you'll need to pick up a copy and read it). It's another finely constructed book, and I feel I'm appreciating it on a whole different level (and learning from it).

All of which is to say: I've started drafting a new horror story (finally).

It's the one I've been outlining forever, afraid to commit it to (electronic) paper. This week I took the plunge, working on it after my words for the novel were done for the day. I'm drafting it in much the same way as the novel, working scatter-shot, drawing up bits of dialog before anything else, and then stitching it all together.

But this time, I'm consciously thinking about the different horror techniques I've seen, and looking for ways to apply them. So after finishing the dialog and blocking for one section, I went back and added in the main character's thoughts, feelings, and reactions, to pull the perspective tighter in on them. I'm also not shying away from characters in conflict, or physically fighting; taking the time to block the sequences in my head and then setting them down. Because in this story, at least, there will be pain, and there will be blood. And if my protagonist is not going to flinch, neither can I.

It's still the first draft, so it's going to need a lot of editing, but I'm already feeling better about it. More confident. Like I'm writing in a more deliberate mode, more aware of what I'm doing, and why. Here's hoping my confidence is justified, once it's done.

Novel's at 38,160 words. The snippets I'm working on are starting to spill over into the next chapter; I'm already scoping out the reactions of the characters to the events of the section I'm working on.

Meanwhile, this section is winding down. And I'm getting the feeling that much of it -- most of it, even -- might be cut in the next draft. I mean, do I really need to describe how a character makes their camp dinner in such detail? And yet, if I don't do it, I won't know that they keep flour in this jar over there, and that they constantly gather firewood as they travel, so they have a stock of it ready to go when needed. Details like that would be completely lost, if I didn't make a hash out of describing every little action right now. So I keep doing it, knowing that what I'm writing now will likely be cut, but that doesn't mean it won't be used.

I'm also...well, I'm debating whether to let one of my characters give A Speech at the end of this chapter. They have the words for it -- I've already written the points they want to hammer home -- they have the audience, they have the space and the time. But does the book have the tone for it?

I usually shy away from having characters make big speeches, or monologues. Blame part of it on a Gen-X thing: I treat displays of sincere emotion with suspicion. Blame another part on my preacher of a father, whose pompous, hypocritical sermons turned me off to religion altogether.

So I'm always pushing my characters to speak more naturally, to take any Great Wisdom they want to lay down and either show it through their actions or weave it into their dialog some other way.

But this time...this time I might let them just say what they want to say. Certainly the situation calls for it: a young girl is about to be pushed into an apprenticeship that will change her life, take her away from the family and the place she's always known and send her criss-crossing the world with her mentor. And all because of a decision she made to pursue vengeance for her father's death, that led to a near-deadly encounter with a dragon, and now this. Such sweeping changes, they call for a little more weight to the dialog, yes?

Oof, I'm uncertain. I'll write the speech, I think, and see how it plays. I can always change it later, right?

Ye gods, the Daylight Savings Time switch walloped me this week. It's like I was finally adapting to 2021 -- working on the novel, editing short stories, plotting out a new story -- and then DST yanks an hour out from under me, robbing me of just enough energy that I've been struggling just to hit my daily word count.

I've basically been slow-motion jet-lagged all week. I really wish we would stop doing this to ourselves.

The good news is that (thanks to beta readers) I now have not one, but two stories under submission. Just waiting for their little pink slips of rejection to come back 😅

I kid, but really, it feels good to have them out there. Statistically, they will get rejected from each magazine I send them to, which is how I steel myself for it. But I like these stories. I believe in these stories. There's a market for them, somewhere, and the only way I can find it is by sending them out.

Meanwhile, the novel's climbed to 36,789 words. I'm starting to connect up the snippets of dialog I've written for the ending scenes of this section, which means I'm having to actually worry about things like "How would they have treated this wound in this time period?" and "How badly injured is the protagonist, anyway?"

I am definitely getting some of these details wrong. I do not know enough about wounds, or medical care on the Central Asian steppe in the 18th century, or early modern firearms, or...really, so much. But I know enough to write something down, something I can come back and fix later, so that's what I'm doing.

It helps for me to think of this not as the first draft, but as the trash draft. The draft I know I'm going to mess up on, and revise extensively later. No one's going to see this draft but me. I'm going to finish it, and then do the research needed to get each section right. Hell, some of these scenes I'm flubbing might not even be needed, and so they'll get cut. Which would make taking the time to get them exactly right now a waste.

So it's onward! Screwing up as I go, laying down the raw material I'll shape into something better via editing.

I don't think I'm good at coming up with story titles. Mine tend to end up either very much on the nose -- my first published story, "Wishr," is named for the company at which it takes place -- or become horrible puns, like "There Will Be Bugs" (I know).

So in trying to come up with a new title for the story I've been editing, I wanted to branch out from my usual process. Started brainstorming, just listing out things as they came into my head.

At first, most of them were more of the same (I really am fond of puns). But then I thought back to short stories I've read and liked recently, and their titles, and realized: The ones I liked the best (titles, not stories) were ones that fit the story, but where I didn't understand how they fit until after I finished reading the piece.

So I shifted my brainstorm, away from trying to convince a reader to read the story (by telling them what's inside it) and towards giving readers a new insight into the story after it's been read. And voilà! I found my new title.

I've got some beta reader feedback to process (on the story as a whole) this weekend, and then the story will be ready for submission, shiny title and all.

Meanwhile, I keep moving ahead with the novel, which is sitting at 35,380 words. I'm past the big climactic scene, and into the aftermath, where the consequences of the protagonist's actions come due, and her life changes forever.

This part introduces a new character who becomes a major part of the protag's life. So after filling in the rest of the climactic scene, I'm back to sketching what comes next, setting down fragments of conversation and description as they come to me.

I'm trying to consciously develop a different voice for this character, a distinct way of looking at the world, so it's obvious she comes from a different part of it than the protagonist. Which means I'm focusing on dialog first, nailing down the back-and-forth between her and the protag before handling any action.

I'm also getting close to the end of this section of the book. 21,000 words and counting to cover just a few days in the protagonist's life. Important days, to be sure: You only get one first encounter with a dragon! Even once I read the end of this section, though, I've still got some gaps left in the earlier parts of it that I'll need to close, stitching everything together.

And once that's done? On to the next big section, which will leap years ahead in time, and thousands of miles across the Earth's surface. Let's hope I don't get lost along the way!

Novel's still chugging along, currently at 33,884 words. I've pushed through the first big scene, and am well into the second.

There's...well, there's individual pieces of the sequence that are still missing, some connective tissue that I have yet to write. The technique I've been using, of skipping around to write those scenes (or sometimes fragments of scenes) that I feel like adding, has a that cost. Eventually I have to go back and write in everything I skipped.

But for now, it's all big scene all the time, and no connective tissue...yet.

However, the big news this week is that I've finally cracked open a story I've been working on for nearly four years now. That one started out as just a character and a situation, a piece of backstory for the novel I wanted to write. But it never worked quite as well as I wanted it to, so I've kept tinkering with it (and submitting it while tinkering with it, which is a habit I need to break).

Tim Waggoner, during his 15-minute (!) workshop back in January, pointed me to the central problem that was holding up everything else: the motivation for my main character wasn't strong enough. So on weekends I've been brainstorming different ways to go, different versions of the character that would have a stronger push for their actions.

I finally hit on one this weekend that I liked, and in the process of editing the story to match, everything fell into place. I ended up cutting away about half of the story's word-count, focusing in on just three scenes. But in those scenes I not only lay out the main character's motivation, I fill in the secondary characters, giving them more life and depth. And I shifted the ending, so it's now both more complete (in the sense that the current narrative arc ends) and more open-ended (in that the world's evolution past the story is implied).

I'm going to do one more editing pass this weekend, to clean up language and make sure it all fits together properly. I'd like to have it ready to submit in time for Nightmare Magazine re-opening to submissions later this month.

I need a new title, though; the old one doesn't fit anymore. Anyone have any tips or tricks for choosing a title you can share in the comments?

So this weekend I attended another online writing class, this one from author Stephen Blackmoore (of the Eric Carter series) on how to give and receive feedback in critiques. I've been exchanging feedback with other writers for a while now, but never really had any instruction on how best to do it; my techniques have been cobbled together from blog posts and Litreactor guidelines. I wanted to see if, frankly, I've been doing it right, or if I've been failing my fellow authors by giving them the wrong type of feedback.

It was Blackmoore's first time giving the class, so it went a little longer than anticipated: 2.5 hours instead of just 2. But those two-hours-and-change were packed with excellent advice.

Some of it I'd learned the hard way, like focusing on the positive when pointing out problems. Or remembering that at the end of the day, the story belongs to the author, which goes both ways: you don't have to act on all the feedback you get, and you can't expect other writers to act on yours, either.

But the vast majority of Blackmoore's advice were things that I had some sense of, but didn't have a good way of thinking about. Like how you should treat each work not as good or bad, but as either complete or incomplete. A story that doesn't seem to be working isn't garbage, it's just a piece that needs polishing. The difference between bad and good isn't necessarily one of value (in the work or the artist), it's a matter of time and effort.

All in all, I took almost twenty pages (!) of notes. Blackmoore did more than cover general ways to handle feedback, he also did a detailed break down of six different aspects of a story to examine when offering a critique, and ways to identify -- and talk about -- problems in each one.

In short, it was a fantastic class, and one I wish I'd had years ago, before I tried to offer any other writer feedback on their work. I highly recommend taking it if you can, when he offers it again. And I'm going to start incorporating his advice into how I give critiques to others going forward.

Novel's up to 32,300 words!

It's been easier to write this week. My wife's recovered from her vaccine ordeal, and is well on her way to hitting her two-week full-strength-protection mark. Neither of us have picked up anything in the meantime, so -- touches wood -- we should be ok to ride out the rest of the pandemic.

I also got back in the habit of writing in the mornings, which seems to help. Something about trying to switch gears one more time, at the end of the day, makes it that much harder to focus on the story. Harder to think about where it's going, and what I want to describe along the way.

Finally, I think it helps that I'm facing down the two scenes in this sequence that scare me the most to write. They're both action scenes, which I consider a weakness of mine. And they're both emotionally fraught for the main character. In one of them, she winds up losing an animal companion she's had since she was a little girl. In the second, she's seeking -- but not necessarily finding -- vengeance for her father's death.

These are big, tentpole scenes. I need them to move quickly, to feel realistic, and also to hit readers right in the feels. Which means on top of my normal first-draft anxiety, I'm worried about building up to scenes that fall completely flat. Or scenes that are laughably implausible. Or scenes that make it all seem too easy on the protagonist.

Even success, in a sense, is rough. Writing scenes like these -- where the emotional stakes are high for the characters, and it can end in a broken heart -- are hard on me, too. Because I live through everything they experience; I have to, in order to put it down on the page. So I feel the knot in my chest when their father dies. My own tears well up when they have to put down one of their closest friends.

So I've been putting them off. Writing around the scenes, so to speak. And there's been plenty of other things to cover! But now I've got to write them, so I can move ahead with the story.

And somehow, once I'm in the scene, writing it, it becomes easier. Easier to picture what's happening, and easier to describe it. Easier to say what the impact of it all is. So I end up writing more, and more quickly, than before.

It's almost like my fear of the thing is worse than the thing itself?

Of course, this is still just the first draft. It might feel easier to write it once I'm in it, but it could still all be terrible writing. I won't know till it's done.

How about you? Are there particular types of scenes that you put off writing, for whatever reason? How do you overcome your hesitation?

With the new year, Biden settling into the White House, and the vaccines rolling out, my reading pace has picked up from its previous pandemic low.

So rather than work up longer individual reviews of the books I've gone through, I thought I'd do a quick breakdown of them, all at once, in reverse order (so, the most recent book I finished this month is listed first).

Here we go!

Not All Dead White Men, by Donna Zuckerberg

A frustrating read. Zuckerberg (yes, the Facebook founder is her brother) provides a detailed, anthropological study of how the denizens of the manosphere wield Classical authors to promote their racist, misogynist views. What she doesn't cover is any way to counter these arguments. If anything, she comes down on their side, agreeing that yes, the Classical tradition contains lots of misogyny (Though no racism, since race as a concept wasn't invented till the modern period. Which makes it weird that she would fall into the right-wing trap of assigning Whiteness to the Mediterranean authors of the Classical tradition? But I digress).

The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy, by Michael Lewis

A set of separately-published essays stitched together in book form. It works, because each essays illuminates a different side of the central question: What happened when an administration scornful of expertise took control of the nation's experts?

This was published in 2018, and already Lewis could see -- via his interviews and investigation -- that disaster was coming. We've got a lot to rebuild.

The Mongol Art of War, by Timothy May

Discovered this via military historian Bret Devereux's excellent series of blog posts about the historical accuracy of the Dothraki in A Song of Ice and Fire (narrator: there is none).

It's a fairly quick read, giving a detailed look -- well, as detailed as we can get, given the reliability of our historical sources -- at how the Mongol army was able to conquer so much of Asia and Europe in such a short period of time. Goes through command structure, tactics, even some detailed logistics. For example, did you know Mongols preferred riding mares on campaign, because they could drink the milk provided (and thus not need to bring as much food along)? Or that the Mongols built a navy from scratch (with Korean assistance) just so they could conquer southern China? Fascinating stuff.

Lost Art of Finding Our Way, by John Edward Huth

This is one I'm going to be reading and re-reading. It's basically a manual of all the different navigation techniques used by humans before the invention of GPS. How did the Pacific Islanders sail thousands of miles across open ocean to settle so many islands? Why did the Atlantic triangle trade develop the way it did (hint: it was the prevailing winds)? What sequence of clouds denotes an oncoming storm?

Simply wondrous. Made me look at the world around me in an entirely new way.

Reaganland, by Rick Perlstein

The final volume in Perlstein's excellent series on the rise of the Right in the United States. This one covers 1976-1980, and it's absolutely riveting. All of the techniques we've seen from the GOP under Trump -- misinformation, distortion, and deliberate hyperbole -- got their start in this time period, and coalesced around Reagan as their standard-bearer. His election cemented the shift to the Right that we've been suffering from for the last forty years.

I consider this book essential reading, if you want to understand how we got to this point in American politics.

My wife and I are only six years apart in age, and yet our childhood pop culture was completely different.

For example, I know if she starts singing along to a song I don't recognize, it's a 1970s radio hit. She knows all about The Partridge Family and Three's Company, shows I've heard of but never seen. Minstrel hobo chic is her fashion jam.

But move into the 1980s, and the roles reverse. She's never seen Fraggle Rock or Duck Tales. Doesn't know Bon Jovi or Journey (or Def Leppard or R.E.M. or Bauhaus or New Order or....).

So we've made an effort to introduce each other to our respective pop landscapes. It's interesting to find places where we overlap (MacGyver) as well as the gaps (I'd never even heard of The Rockford Files before her, and she had no clue why I was so excited to hear that She-Ra was getting rebooted on Netflix).

All of which is to say, we watched Iron Eagle this week, as part of introducing her to 80s movies I loved as a kid. And it did not hold up well.

What I remember as a scrappy-kids-rescue-the-grownups movie, a sort of Goonies adventure with higher stakes and fighter jets, is actually a harrowing tale of how a group of teenagers infiltrate a military base, steal a bunch of weapons, then invade a sovereign country, kill dozens of members of its military, and destroy a major oil refinery, all for one downed American pilot (who was violating the country’s airspace).

Questionable morals aside, that might be forgiven, if it were at a good movie. But...it’s not. The Eagles are thinly sketched, the lead has no charisma, the timeline is way too short (only three days between “go away kid” and “you’re the finest young man I know”??), and the climatic battle with the “villain” is just ridiculous.

Only Louis Gossett Jr comes out well. His character isn’t written any better than the others, but he’s just so damn good as an actor that he breathes life into Chappy through sheer force of will.

But! We talked it over, and we think the movie's salvageable. At this point it'd be a reboot, but that's ok; it gives us license to do the extensive rewrite the movie needs.

What to Keep

Chappy. Chappy Chappy Chappy. He's the real heart of the movie, the mentor tying everything together, and that needs to stay. We need someone with the right mix of charisma, maturity, and gravitas that can play him, like Denzel Washington.

We also keep the central conflict of the story: Military pilot is shot down in a hostile country and held captive. Their eldest kid and that kid's friends -- with Chappy -- plan and execute a bold rescue mission.

I also like the story of how Chappy first met Doug's dad. It's sad, but true, that a Black man getting mistaken for janitorial staff is just as plausible in 2021 as it was in 1986.

We also keep the idea of The Eagles Flight Club as a place where certain military brats hang out, and as a group of friends to help with the rescue.

And we'll keep the general sequence of how the final third of the movie plays out, with Doug ending up on his own for the rescue mission (accompanied only by Chappy's voice) after things go wrong, the attempted blackmail of the country's leaders to free his dad, and the need to evade a pursuing force once he's got his dad in the plane with him (but more on that later).

What to Change

So, we've kept the bones of the story: A military-brat teenager is going to get help from his group of friends and an older pilot to go on a daring rescue mission in a foreign country using aircraft. But we need to shift things so that it's both more realistic and less jingoistic.

We start by altering the nature of the Eagles Flying Club. Instead of being a bunch of military brats who have "the whole base rigged," it's a group of kids who work on and fly old planes. That airplane graveyard that Doug takes his date to? That's their source material, where they go to get good deals (because their parents don't make a lot) on parts and planes that they then fix up and fly. So right away, we position Doug and his friends as clever, hardworking underdogs, not bratty teens.

We also need to up the diversity in the casting. Half of the Eagles should be women. There should be more than one PoC. The US military (and thus, military families) is diverse, and we should show that on screen. Ideally, the Doug character himself is not White.

Okay, so now we've got the casting, and the reason the friends hang out put together. Now we give them an early challenge, to show who they are and how they work together: the Snake Race scene. But we make a few alterations: the bullies are not just bullies, they're fellow military brats. But their parents are wealthier (higher-up officers), so the planes they fly are expensive and new, not the buckets of junk the Eagles cobble together. The main bully got in to the Air Force Academy, while Doug was shut out.

So when the main bully taunts Doug about his rejection letter, it's the culmination of a lifetime rivalry for these kids. And when Doug accepts his challenge to race, the stakes are high in terms of pride: it's the Eagle's junkyard plane against the bully's new Cessna. No motorcycles involved.

Doug still has to take the (shorter) risky route, because the bully's new plane flies straight and fast down the (longer) easy way. And that's how he wins the race, because he and his friends have modified the old plane to perform better under such stressful conditions.

Just a few small tweaks, and we've taken this scene from "why is this in here? is that a motorcycle in a movie about planes?" to "oh shit there's no way they can beat that fast new plane in that hunk of junk."

Then, just as they're celebrating their victory, they get the news: Doug's dad has been shot down.

Here we keep a lot of the beats from the movie, but we spread them out over time, and we don't have anyone just waltz into a Situation Room and get access to Top Secret reports and a high-ranking Air Force officer. The Air Force stonewalls Doug and his family; they get most of their information from news broadcasts (yay, journalism!). All they know is where he got shot down, and why, and that the government is negotiating for his release (or worse: the government is not negotiating for his release, because "they don't negotiate with terrorists, and that includes rogue states").

A month passes. Not three days, not a few hours, a full month. Doug spirals, spending more and more time in the simulator, ignoring his friends, going through the motions with his family.

It's Chappy that pulls him out of it. Chappy that chews him out after that he takes up the Colonel's simulator time (and Doug is mouthy about it). Chappy that takes gives him a job, working with him at the local commercial airstrip.

And it's a story from Chappy, about a rescue op that almost went bad, that inspires Doug to mount a rescue for his dad. Not one that uses military equipment, though. What he imagines is a stealth mission, where they get in and get out without being caught or recognized.

Because the head of the military in the country that's holding his dad is a fan of...old aircraft. He has a collection of old planes that he's bought from various places over the years, painted and fixed up. He likes to take them out himself, without any guards, just for the thrill of it.

So that's how the Eagles plan to get into the country's airspace: They build copies of some of the planes in the enemy general's collection, so they can pretend to be just him on a joy ride.

No theft of military hardware needed, this time. No hijinks on the base that would end up with the kids spending their lives inside a military prison if they got caught. Just good old fashioned elbow grease and research.

They do still need some military intelligence, though, to track where Doug's dad is being held and the disposition of the country's air defenses (so they know how to fool them). This they have to steal -- or maybe Chappy provides it? -- but that's it.

Chappy's role is still advice and planning. He knows the hardware they'll be up against, knows how to teach them to avoid triggering any reaction that will get them killed. But he doesn't have to aid and abet them ripping off the US military, this time.

He also doesn't go. His role during the mission is going to be monitoring everything from the ground, pulling up fresh intel as they need it, and coordinating everyone. He doesn't fly any of the old planes they fix up. That's what the Eagles are for.

This lets us continue to fill out the Eagles as characters (because they're in the film more) and gives us more possibilities for the rescue (because they're part of the mission now).

So, they spend weeks (not days) planning the rescue, and working on the planes (to make them match the enemy leader's collection). They contact other Eagles Flying Clubs around the world -- thanks to the internet, there's franchises all around -- to have a place to stop, refuel, and repair on the way from the US to the country where Doug's dad is being held.

Just as they're putting the finishing touches on the plan, that's when they hear that Doug's dad is going to be executed in three days. So we get the scene where Doug can't sleep and Chappy shares war stories with him, but this is after their relationship has been built up over time, so it's both more believable and more poignant.

They set off! Things are bumpy from the beginning, of course. One of the old planes starts having engine trouble over the Atlantic, and only just touches down on the borrowed runway in rural Spain (cue shots of sheep running from the incoming planes). So they have to leave it behind, along with its Eagle pilot (to repair it and fly it home).

They lose another plane as they're crossing the Mediterranean, getting close to the country where Doug's dad is being held. A sudden fog blows in, and one of the plane's instruments starts malfunctioning. Unable to see, its pilot is forced to climb up and out of the fog, which uses up too much fuel. It's forced to turn back.

Only Doug's plane is left. He thinks about turning back himself; there's no way the plan will work with just one plane. Chappy gives him the "I'm right there in the cockpit with you" speech, bolstering his confidence.

He makes it over the border successfully, and when contacted by ground control manages to fool them into thinking he's part of the leader's entourage. He heads for the prison.

This is when they switch deceptions (and where the other planes would have been handy). As he closes into the prison, Doug switches on an electronics package his Eagles worked up. At the same time, another Eagle on a fishing boat off the coast unfurls a huge makeshift radar dish on deck, and activates another one. We see the air control at the base near the prison react to seeing an American warship appear off their coast, followed by a radar ping off an F-18 (!) deep in their airspace.

Then Doug contacts the prison, issuing his threat: He's part of a strike force sent to get his dad out. If the captured pilot isn't put in his flight suit and set on the tarmac within an hour, the warship will start launching cruise missiles at strategic targets in the country.

The prison scrambles to comply, while contacting the leader for instructions. The leader is skeptical; he orders them to go ahead and release the American, but to set snipers over the runway and prepare their own fighter craft.

Hearing that they're moving his dad, Doug relays the next part of the plan: His fighter is going back to the warship, and the pilot will be picked up by a civilian aircraft. He switches off his electronics package, and the "F-18" vanishes from their radar.

This makes the leader deeply suspicious. He orders visual confirmation of the warship's presence. A scout plane is duly launched, headed to the coast to confirm.

Meanwhile, Doug prepares to land. Watches them take his father out of the prison, shove him into a jeep, and wheel him down the runway. He makes his final turn, landing gear down.

And then the scout plane spots the "warship" in the bay: Just a fishing boat, with a smiling, waving, Eagle in it.

The leader orders the snipers to fire, just as Doug touches down.

His dad falls, shot through the shoulder. Panicked and enraged, Doug lifts off again, followed by machine gun fire. He looks back at the runway, sees his dad moving, pulling himself along till he's behind the jeep, using it for shelter.

Doug can't leave him there. Thinking quickly, he flies back over the runway, a little down from where his dad is. Drops his spare fuel tank, which explodes on contact, creating a wall of fire on the tarmac that obscures the vision of the snipers. Under its cover, he's able to land, grab his dad, and take off again.

But they're not safe. Three enemy fighters from the base set off in pursuit. Doug doesn't have any weapons, so it's just his flying against theirs, as they race for the coast.

And it seems like he's bested them! They're almost to the Mediterranean, when six more fighters show up ahead of them on radar. They're caught.

That's when we hear the American accent crackle over the radio, letting the enemy fighters (and Doug) know the six planes ahead are real F-18s, and suggesting they do not engage with Doug's plane.

The enemy fighters break off, not wanting to take on such odds. The Americans offer to escort Doug back to base. Doug follows, though he wonders what base they're referring to.

...Which is revealed as they pass back through the fog near the coast, and come out the other side, where an aircraft carrier is waiting!

Along with Chappy, who "convinced a Navy friend of his" who "was going to be in the neighborhood" to let him come along (and bring his carrier).

And that's how they work up the cover story for the rescue: The aircraft carrier strike group carried it out, not the Eagles. This gives the military the win, and lets the Eagles off the hook for the whole thing.

There you have it! An updated Iron Eagle, ready for remake in the 21st Century. We keep the emotional heart of the story, and many of the beats, but we deepen the characterization, broaden the representation, and up the realism.

sits by phone, waiting for Hollywood to call

Writing each day's words this week has been like extracting teeth using a slippy pair of old tweezers.

I had a...let's say rough...ending to last week. Several things came together at once to make work stressful, which bled into the early part of this week.

Also my wife got her second vaccine shot, which on the one hand is awesome, but on the other required her to suffer through being harassed by a cop and yelled at (in close proximity) by the staff working there. And a few hours after she got the shot, she came down with alternating chills and sweats, shaking uncontrollably. She didn't leave the bedroom for three days.

The icing on the stress cake was some maintenance that we needed done on the house, that could only be done by people entering the house. Which meant shutting off the heat, opening all the windows, and locking myself in my office while they were here.

My body, being slightly over four decades old now, doesn't react well to such compounding stresses. And it's gotten creative, so the manifestation of the stress differs every time, by type of stress and how much I'm going through.

Big speech coming up? Probably going to break out in fever blisters.

Mother-in-law had a pulmonary embolism requiring you to give up all your pets, sell your car and your house, and move back to Arkansas to take care of her? Prepare for root canal failure.

This time, I started clenching my jaw so tight that I woke myself up with muscle cramps. Felt like someone was reaching from my neck through my jaw to tug at a tooth. I got maybe four hours of sleep over two days.

So...yeah, focusing on the novel's been difficult.

It's during times like these that I'm glad I set my writing goal so low. 250 words is something I can hit in about 20 minutes, on a good day. So on days that are not good, I try to give myself an hour to hit it, dropping other housework to carve out the time. And it's working, so far.

All the same, I hope next week is more relaxing.

Coming in the midst of Black History Month, I can think of no better way to honor this President's Day than to read two essays. Both by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and both published in The Atlantic, but with completely opposed subjects.

The first essay, "My President Was Black" was published a little over four years ago, in January 2017. Obama had just left office, and Coates wrote a long, reflective essay on what the Obama Presidency had meant, both for him as a Black person, and for the country as a whole. He explored Obama's unique raising, and how that had influenced his perspective on race relations in America. He talks about how Obama achieved so much as President, despite a coalition of racist opposition that formed from his very first day in the Oval Office. And he covers how Obama disappointed him, in the way he spent more time chastising Black people for "blaming White people" and not enough time openly calling out the structures of white supremacy.

Like all of Coates' writing, it's powerful, it's though-provoking, and it's worth your time.

The second essay, "The First White President", was published just ten months after the first, in October of 2017. Even then, Coates could see clearly what many commentators could not, until after the Capitol Riot: that Donald Trump's entire political philosophy, such as it is, can be summed up as white nationalism. That Trump would not have been President at all, were it not for the racism that undergirds all politics in the United States. Trump was the ultimate expression of that racism, of that contempt for non-Whites. His racist supporters elected him as if to say, "True, a Black man can be President, after a lifetime of struggle and study. But any incompetent White man can trip into it, if he hates Blacks enough."

Everything in that essay still rings true. It's a potent reminder that Trump's grounding in racism was always there to see, if we were willing to see it. That so many people were not willing, for so long, tells us exactly how deep white nationalism's roots go in this country, and how much work we have left to do to pull it out.

This book may end up being much longer than I thought.

It's currently at 29,122 words, which is almost half of the 70K or so I thought it would end up being. The trouble is, I'm not even close to being halfway done.

The section I'm working on now, just by itself, is 16,000 words long. And it's not near done, either. I'm maybe....halfway? through the story I want to tell in this part of the book. And this section is only meant to be about one-fourth of the whole, so that would put the final word count at around 120,000 words (!)

That would make it a third longer than the longest thing I've ever written in my life.

I swear, I'm not eating up word count spinning needless metaphors or having characters do a lot of navel-gazing. It just turns out that yes, when writing a novel that moves from the lakes and forests of northern Sweden to the neverending sky of the Central Asian steppe, there's a lot of, um, ground to cover. Who knew? (Narrator: He did. Or should have).

Granted, a lot of what I'm writing now might be cut out. Some of it is no doubt redundant, or can be compacted so that the events of a few pages get covered in a few paragraphs. But even lopping off 20,000 words of filler would make this a 100K book.

100K is about 400 pages, which...well, that's a commitment, isn't it? For reader and writer alike.

So much for being done with the first draft before April. This might end up taking me the rest of the year.

Maybe it's time to look at bumping my daily word count? Trying to squeeze in a second writing session in each day? Or I could start writing on the weekends again. Just two extra days of my regular word count would be an extra 500 words a week.

Or perhaps it's best to be patient. Work on this draft during the week, like I have been, and use the weekend to edit other stories (and that previous novel, which needs a tune-up before going out).

What about you? What do you do, when a story you're working on starts to look like it'll be much longer than you anticipated?

So the Clarion West online workshop was...interesting.

The instructor, Fabio Fernandes, seems like a fantastic person, one I could easily sit and talk to for hours. I feel this because that's basically what he did for two hours: talk to us.

Well, I exaggerate. We spent the first hour hearing having everyone in the class introduce themselves.

The second hour -- and beyond? he wasn't done when I had to hop off to get back to work -- was him telling us stories, making reading recommendations, and...that's it. No real writing advice, other than to write what we want to write, rather than what we know.

But his personal stories were fascinating and eye-opening. Like the one where he picked apart a scene in Ian McDonald's Brazil (which he translated into Portuguese) involving a group of black men and a white woman, talking us through how the race relations displayed in that scene were not Brazilian, but American. Or how he's considered to be White in Brazil, but in the US or UK he's Latino, but only to people in those countries who think of themselves as White, because to other South Americans, Brazilians are not Latino, because they don't speak Spanish!

And he did in general give me confidence (permission?) to write about cultures other than my own. He said we have to find things in our experience that can bridge the gap between the culture we grew up in and the culture we want to write about. And to remember that we are all both insiders and outsiders: insiders for our native culture, outsiders to everyone else (and vice-versa).

So I guess my experience was positive? If a bit less focused than I'd like. And less organized; they said they'd have the recording link sent to us, but it's been over a week now and so far, nothing.

So I'm not sure I'm going to sign up for any more of the Clarion West online courses. Apparently fifteen minutes is more than enough to get some excellent feedback on a story draft, but not even two hours is enough time in which to give some general writing advice and techniques.

In conclusion: I really cannot wait for the pandemic to end, so we can go back to learning and sharing in person.

I'm not sure I could keep doing this writing thing, without the support of my friends.

Just this week, one of them pinged me, to ask if I'd heard anything back about a short story he'd recently beta-read for me. And I felt a prick of shame, because I hadn't submitted the story, even after incorporating his feedback, and declaring that was my intent.

But that shame is becoming action. I've promised to send it off this weekend, and asked him to penalize me (via drinks owed) if I don't.

The funny thing is, I love the short story in question. I think it's the best thing I've written to date. But it's already been rejected, in previous draft form, by half a dozen different magazines. So I'm terrified of submitting it again, and having it rejected again...and then discovering later that there's one small thing missing that makes it perfect.

Because I only get one shot at each magazine for this story. They all have policies in place that won't let you re-submit a story, even after editing. Which is their right, of course; they get inundated with submissions as it is. But it raises the stakes for me. Makes me hesitate to send the story in. Because being told "this isn't good enough" is fine with me. It's not being able to fix it and then try again.

In an odd way, I feel like I'm failing the story when it gets rejected. Like it's my job to make it the best it can be, and then go find it a home. And when I edit after getting rejections, and those edits make the story shine brighter, I feel like I let the story down by sending it out too soon.

And yet, how would I know to keep editing, without those rejections?

All of which is to say: I've got another short story I'm sending out this weekend. And another friend to feel thankful for.

Apex Magazine is back!

Apex went on what looked like permanent hiatus while editor-in-chief Jason Sizemore dealt with multiple surgeries for serious health issues (see his editorial in this month's magazine). But he's thankfully recovered, and after a successful Kickstarter, he's re-assembled the Apex editing team, and resurrected the magazine!

Issue 121, then, is their first new issue in almost two years. It's a double issue, as all of them will be from now on, released every two months. You can grab your own copy here

So let's dive in! (no spoilers, I promise).

Root Rot, by Fargo Tbakh

Jesus, this story.

Reading it is disorienting at first. There's a good reason for that, for why the narrator's voice seems jumbled and confused. But as I read, more and more pieces fell into place, until the very last scene broke my heart.

I wish I could write something this powerful. This moving. An inspiration, and a bar to shoot for.

Your Own Undoing, by P H Lee

Second person, represent!

I usually hate stories told in the second person. All those "You"s feel like commands, and I instinctually kick back against those, and out of the story.

Not so in this case. Lee's story wove a meta fairy tale around me, a story that was itself an illustration of the conflict at its heart.

If it sounds too clever for its own good, don't be put off. It's not. It's a fantastic story, first and foremost. It's only afterward, when thinking about it, that its clever structure reveals its shape. Just amazing.

Love, That Hungry Thing, by Cassandra Khaw

This one....this one did feel too clever for its own good, for me.

Not in structure, but in the way it leans so far into the modern (well, post-2004) tendency to leave readers out on a limb. Being confused can work -- see the first story, above -- for a while, but I (being very careful here, as I know not everyone shares my tastes) tend to get very frustrated if there's no payoff at the end.

And there's no payoff in this story, for me. In fact, there's very little action at all, or even dialog.

A lot of beautiful description, though. Evocative words and phrases that promise glittering insight into this future, but then never cohere into a stable image. Nothing falls into place. It's an exquisitely described place, though.

Mr Death, by Alix E Harrow

My favorite of the bunch.

I don't want to say too much, lest I give anything away. Let me just say that this is what I wish the movie Soul had been. Read it. You won't regret it.

The Niddah, by Elana Gomel

A short story about a global pandemic. Yes, really.

Grey Skies, Red Wings, Blue Lips, Black Hearts, by Merc Fenn Wolfmoor

Had an allergic reaction to this one. Something about another story that drops the reader into a confused space, with no explanation, and calls its main environment "The City."

All I Want for Christmas, by Charles Payseur

Short, powerful flash piece. Made me shudder.

My wife and I bought the house we're living in almost exactly one year ago. We closed (finished all the paperwork) on January 31, 2020. Started packing on February 1. And moved in February 2nd.

Anticipating all the get-togethers we'd host in the new place, with all that extra yard space.

During the move, I cut my head, bad enough to think I might need stitches. I drove the twenty minutes to the nearest Urgent Care clinic, only to be turned away. It was Super Bowl weekend, you see, and everyone was getting in to see the doc before the game started. I could wait two to three hours, or I could go home. I chose to go home, and resume moving (suitably bandaged, of course).

No masks. No fear of other people. No hesitancy in going out for fear of catching something.

Three weeks later, having finally decided where the furniture would go, we held a house-warming party. Invited friends from all over town, got a taco truck to cater lunch, filled half a dozen metal troughs with ice and beer. We thought it'd be maybe a few hours, ended up lasting all afternoon and into the night. I made a toast for the late-night crowd using Stone's Vertical Epic re-release to talk about every significant year in our two-decades-long marriage. We had a blast.

It was the last party any of us have been to since then.

We've been lucky this year. Neither of us has caught Covid-19. We've both been able to work from home, from this home, during the pandemic. My wife took over the third (guest) bedroom as her office, a bedroom we didn't have at the old place. We had a garage big enough to hold all the boxes for all the deliveries we started getting. We had a kitchen big enough for us to start cooking all of our own meals. A yard just big enough for our pups to go out and get some exercise, since they couldn't go to the park anymore.

I feel fortunate and grateful, and a large part of it is due to this house. So thank you, house, for being there for us.

For not having any roof leaks, other than the small one in the garage that we won't talk about.

For being insulated enough so that we can both be on Zoom calls in different rooms and not hear each other.

For not having any weird smells.

For being rock-solid enough to keep on trucking with your older appliances and bathroom fixtures, and yet flexible enough to accept upgrades when we could get them done (safely).

For having lots of sun for the pups to lay in (they really do seem to be solar-powered).

For being well-ventilated enough when we needed you to be, and tightly sealed when we needed that, too.

For being just big enough for the two of us, but not so big that we couldn't keep you clean (and thanks for understanding when we felt a little too overwhelmed to scrub the bathtub that other week).

But most of all, thanks for being ready for us. And for our company, in the short time period when we could have it. I hope we can have some more company, too, in the near future.

'Tis the season of the writer's conference.

Had the Apex Magazine 15-minute workshop on Monday, which may have permanently changed the way I approach my writing. I'm on the alert now for some of my bad writing habits, and am currently going through two different stories to eliminate them.

Today, I'm attending Clarion West's workshop on How to Write Science Fiction in a Post-Colonial World, part of their series of single-day online workshops. Similar to the Apex one, I'm not sure what to expect. I hope it'll help me with the novel I'm writing right now (and future works), where one of my main characters is from the steppes of Central Asia. I don't want to appropriate anyone's culture, but I do want to showcase the diversity of the world, particularly in the time period I'm setting this story (the 18th century), which American writers tend to whitewash.

And I'm considering signing up for the Southern California Writers Conference, which is in two weeks (and also online). It was the first writers conference I attended, back when we could safely congregate inside. I got a lot out of it: I wrote two stories, got tips on plot structure, and met some great people. And now one of my fellow Writers Coffeehouse alumni (Dennis K Crosby) is one of the special guest speakers! I could use that kind of shot in the arm again (vaccine connotation very much intended).

Not that I'm currently having trouble producing, thank goodness. Novel's at 26,099 words. I've patched up the seams in the scenes I've written so far, and moved on to the "meat" of the chapter: the POV character's close encounter with a dragon.

I'm still writing it in bits and pieces, moving up and down the page as ideas come to me and I figure things out. It keeps me from getting hung up on any one part of the book, or worry too much about how I'm going to get from Point A to Point B. I can always make something up :)

And after the Apex workshop, and re-examining some of my past short stories, I'm starting to think about the connective tissue between scenes differently. As in, maybe I don't need it, after all.

That's not quite right. I think I, the writer, need it. I need to have written it, in order to fully understand my story. But I don't necessarily need to show that to the reader.

Same thing with exposition. I need to know everything about my world. I need to know what the sunlight looks like in springtime. I need to know how the birds sound in the morning. I need to know which cars are driving by at the end of the day (if this world has cars). So these are all things I need to set down, to fix in my mind by fixing them in text. But I don't need to relay those details to the reader, unless something stands out to the POV character, and affects their decisions.

It's advice I've heard before, but not really felt in my bones until now. I'd always assumed my readers were lost unless I held their hand, and relied on my brevity to make the explanations palatable.

I think now I can trust the reader more. I still plan to write all the exposition, so I have it straight in my own head. But when editing I'm going to start taking it all out, and only putting things back in if a beta reader complains of being lost. Otherwise, I'm going to lean on actions and dialog to convey everything.

What about you? Is there a piece of classic writing advice that took you a while to fully understand?

Cobra Kai has no right to exist, let alone be good.

It's a spin-off of a move franchise whose third installment limped out of theaters thirty years ago. It's centered on the villains of those movies. And because Pat Morita has passed on (RIP), it can't include most people's favorite character.

How did this happen? Who greenlit this? Who had the audacity to even suggest it?

And how the hell is it this friggin' good?

Because seriously, if you put the first two seasons of The Mandalorian up against the first two seasons of Cobra Kai, Cobra Kai is the better show, hands down. It's got funnier lines, better acting, and better characters.

Cobra Kai's surprisingly deep, willing to show us good and bad sides of all the characters. As a result, for its first two seasons, there's no real villain. There's conflict, sure, and tension, hell yes, but you can sympathize with everyone. Root for everyone. It's been a long time since I've seen a TV show where I liked every character, but Cobra Kai pulls it off.

...for two seasons. The third season drops the "no villain" posture, and switches genres entirely. From a grounded, complex show, exploring the adult lives of Johnny Lawrence and Daniel LaRusso while also examining how their rivalry impacts their kids' lives, Cobra Kai switches over to a YA love-triangle plot in a universe with martial-arts movie logic. Which is fine, as things go, but isn't nearly as interesting, and is a jarring switch, after two seasons of being a rather different show. You'll want to see all three seasons (season two ends on a bit of a cliffhanger), but be prepared for the tonal shift.

Still, if you liked the Karate Kid movies, I highly recommend Cobra Kai. It's clearly made by people who love those movies, who could recite them line by line, because of the way they weave the backstory from the trilogy into the plot of the show. They even manage to make good plot fodder out of the third movie, which is something I didn't think was possible!

They took their love, and built this beautiful show, that for its first two seasons stomps everything else I've seen recently.

Apex Magazine is back from hiatus! One of my favorite short fiction magazines for years, Apex has consistently had fantastic stories, as shown by the many (many) awardsthey've won or been nominated for over the years.

I'm reading through their first new issue now. I'll post a full review later, but I can already tell they've retained the high bar for quality they've always had. The very first story, out of the gate, left me devastated, in a good way: just profoundly moving.

So when they announced they were doing a 15-minute online writing workshop with author Tim Waggoner, I leaped to sign up.

Sure, I had some skepticism. Most of the past workshops I've been to have been at least an hour, and even that felt short. How much could we cover in just fifteen minutes?

It turns out you can cover basically everything you need to cover, to dissect why a piece of short fiction isn't working.

I sent in the first six pages of a horror story I have that I like, that I've edited multiple times, but that also keeps getting rejected. I assumed it was a problem with the story, but I was having trouble seeing it.

Tim had no such problems. In just fifteen minutes over voice chat, he went right to the heart of the problem with my story: the motivation for my protagonist is too impersonal. Then he broke down some issues with my style -- too many short paragraphs, too much exposition up front -- that I realized are habits I need to break, because other readers have mentioned them before for other pieces (different readers saw different issues. Tim saw them all).

I wasn't all criticism, though. He also gave me techniques to use to prevent making these same mistakes again. Such as keeping a separate document open for exposition, writing it there and only there during the first draft, and then coming back and pulling from that doc while editing, inserting only what the reader has to know, and then only when they need to know it. Or combining the first few pages into a single paragraph, then breaking it up during a read-through, to end up with more natural-feeling paragraphs.

He was spot on, in everything he said. I already started re-drafting the story based on his feedback. Not only that, but I'm also editing a second story with his feedback in mind; when re-reading it after the workshop, several of those same problems leaped out at me.

Many thanks to Apex Magazine for organizing the workshop, and to Tim Waggoner for running it! I learned a lot in a short amount of time, and I'm very grateful.

It feels good to have a competent President again. A President with some dignity, who doesn't spend his time tweeting out misinformation. Whose Press Secretary thanked reporters after her first press briefing, who doesn't see journalists as the enemy. A President who made news this week because of the raft of actions he took to kick off a national response to the coronavirus pandemic, not the lies he told.

The day after the inauguration, I sat down to write after a long day at work, and when I looked up I'd written twice my daily word count, smooth as butter.

I could get used to this. I want to get used to this. Not in the sense of taking it for granted, but in the sense of it happening, over and over and over again.

There's much to be done, politically. Too many Americans are locked up in prisons. Too many Americans fear the loss of their job so much they're willing to endure urinating into bottles and absurdly low wages, while their bosses complain about not knowing how to spend all the money they're making.

But it'll be easier, collectively, to tackle such things, if we don't all have to worry about the President, too, coming after us. If we have the headspace to write, and call, and paint, and march, and sing, and petition, without wondering, every day, which shoe the executive is going to drop on us that day. What painstaking progress the administration rolled back with callous ease this morning.

It'll be good to feel like we have an ally in the White House. Not perfect, by any means. But not actively trying to set us back.

Novel's at 24,580 words. More by the end of the day, since I haven't yet done my daily words. Back to the rhythm of 2,000 words per week.

I'm at the point where I'm stitching together the pieces I've written for the current sequence, before pressing on. I'm having to shift some paragraphs around, moving them either earlier in the chapter or later, so I can keep them without interrupting the flow of things.

I can already see parts I'm going to have to revise. Conversations that don't go anywhere (currently), descriptions of daily life that will need to be rewritten according to the research I'm doing.

I'm...uncertain, whether to fix those, or just press on. The advice I've gotten from the Writer's Coffeehouse says to move on, to just make a note of it, so it'll be easy to come back to, but to keep forward momentum going. Finish the draft, then go back and patch things up.

And it's good advice! Only...if I already know how things need to change, shouldn't I change them? Or worse, if I know things need to change, but I'm not sure exactly how, isn't it better to find out the more stable form for them now, so I can keep writing the book with that in mind?

I suppose the advice is meant to keep me from getting bogged down in revisions, instead of finishing out the draft. And I definitely do not want to do that. And it'll probably be easier to make the changes I need once the book's done, and I can see the whole story, rather than now, when I'm still mapping it out.

So I suppose I will press on. Still going to make notes about revisions to the scenes, though, so I don't forget them when it's time to edit.

But to have something to edit, I've got to finish this draft.
Onward!

These past four years have been a waking nightmare. Every day, it's been a barrage of lies, mismanagement, and neglect from a President with no previous governmental experience, no redeeming qualities, and no sense of duty.

2020 brought everything bad about the modern GOP right out into the open. They're willing to let 400,000 Americans die rather than wear a piece of cloth on their face. They're more interested in holding onto power than continuing our democracy. And they're willing to commit sedition to get their way.

Biden and Harris will have a lot of work to do, just repairing the damage the GOP has done. But beyond that, they've got to contend with all the things they ignored, from the pandemic to foreign interference in our elections to the right-wing terrorists who attacked the Capitol.

And to be fair, some of the issues we need them to put a spotlight on are things we as a country have ignored for too long: racial justice, climate change, universal health care. The pandemic exposed how weak our institutions have really become, because we've left folks behind. That needs to stop, if we are to indeed build back better.

It's a heavy task, but I have hope. Hope because the need for these things is out in the open, plain as the hospitals that have been overwhelmed, plain as videos of police beating up protestors and journalists, plain as the police shooting of a Black man in broad daylight as he was getting calmly into his car with his kids.

The Biden/Harris Administration isn't an excuse for us to go back to sleep. To imagine ourselves waking up in a better country.

It's a chance for us to get to work.

I'll be watching the swearing-in ceremony today, live. You can view it here, on the Biden/Harris inaugural page, or on Youtube

I realized, this morning, that I'd never read Dr King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. So I found this copy online, and read it straight through.

It took only twenty minutes to read. But in that one letter, King evokes philosophers and thinkers from Martin Buber to St Augustine to Thomas Jefferson, laying out the justice of his cause and defending nonviolent direct action. It's a powerful, compelling, argument.

Reading the letter, it struck me how little has changed, in how police still react with violence to Black people who are nonviolently seeking justice. In King's day, they attacked marchers with dogs, billy clubs, and fire hoses. In ours, they do it with tear gas, rubber bullets, and tasers. But the demands are the same, and the violence committed in the name of upholding racist power is the same.

I urge you, if you haven't before, to read the letter. And as we speed away from 2020 and into 2021, let's remember Black people were murdered by police in 2019, and they will continue to be murdered by police in the new year, until racist power is broken, and justice is granted to all those Black families that have been told to "wait."

What a week, eh?

Trump's been impeached for a second time (finally). The insurrectionists who stormed the Capitol are being rounded up (thank goodness). And tech platforms are waking up to their complicity in the planning of the attack, and as a result, dropping right wing extremists so fast it reveals how much they were dragging their feet about it before.

Not that my family back home believes any of that, of course. I mean that quite literally: they don't think Trump has been impeached, they think "antifa" (insert eyeroll here) caused the riot, they think the First Amendment requires their favorite BBS to let them post anything they want.

It's...amazing, to me, to see the people that wrap themselves in the flag and "Blue Lives Matter" defend folks that invaded the Capitol with the intent of halting a Constitutional process (and perhaps grabbing a hostage or two) and beat the cops that tried to stop them.

What happened to the party of law and order? The party of civics, of wear-your-tie-to-school and don't-you-know-how-the-government-works, hippie? Was it always a smokescreen?

So...yeah, I've been a little distracted. Writing-wise.

But I'm still hitting my 250-words-a-day target! Not always when I'm supposed to (in the morning), and not always in a single session (10 minutes at lunch, 20 minutes after work, 15 minutes before bed...), but I am getting them done, every day.

Not much more than the minimum, I'm afraid. Which is why the novel's only at 22,894 words. But it's progress, all the same.

Taking weekends off is still helping. Relives the pressure for a bit. Lets me do some of the research I need to do to properly write the section I'm on, which can soak up a lot of time (can you believe it's hard to find an English-language book on 17th-century Central Asian history and culture?). Also gives me a chance to reflect on where things stand so far, and where I'd like to novel to go next.

What about you? How is your writing going, two weeks into the new year?

Ye gods, it has been hard for me to avoid spoilers for Mandalorian Season 2. Even though I deliberately avoided every article, every review, still things would slide by on my Twitter feed, and then boom spoiled.

So two of the "biggest" reveals -- well, okay, three -- were basically spoiled for me before I even started rewatching Season One.

I...well, I hate that, so I'm going to be very careful here. The first part of my review will be completely spoiler-free, promise.

The second part will have spoilers, but I'll label it in huge header-style letters first, so if you haven't seen Season Two yet, you can stop before you get there.

Ready?

Let's go.

Non-Spoiler Review

Season Two is a huge improvement on Season One.

In Season One, the episodes were very much disconnected, both tonally and plot-wise. It felt like the kind of show that a network that 20 years ago would have been shown out of order on a network, because they thought no one would notice.

Season Two finally gets its plot arc together. Each episode flows naturally from the last, and builds on it, till the final episode feels inevitable, instead of weirdly tacked-on.

As a result, every single part of the writing is stronger. The dialog is better, because it has a purpose. The individual plots are better, because they're not mucking about, they're building to a conclusion. And we get to see more character moments from Mando, learning more about him, and how he changes over the course of the Season.

Basically, everything that was missing from Season One is finally in place.

And thankfully, they don't throw out the elements from Season One that mostly worked. They revise them a little, perhaps, but amidst the new cameos and characters, it felt good to see them tying into locations and events from Season One. It made the whole thing seem more grounded, more real.

So what's not to like?

Well, I'll save the details for the spoiler section, but basically they still don't know what to do with Moff Gideon other than have him be SO EVIL, LIKE REALLY EVIL, HE WEARS BLACK AND EVERYTHING CAN'T YOU SEE HE'S EVIL?!!

And they can't seem to think of a good name for something Imperial other than to call it "Dark," which makes me think they drank the Dark Kool-Aid in their Dark Treehouse while wearing their Dark Hat (and listening to Dark Music) just a little too much. It's not scary at this point, it just sounds uncreative (and a little racist, to be honest).

Finally, after all the buildup I heard online about the last episode, it was a complete and total letdown. Plot-wise, character-wise, and ending-wise. Just meh.

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

This next part of the review has spoilers! If you don't want 'em, skip out now. I'm going to give you till the count of 3.

1...

2....

3.

"Dark" Troopers? Seriously? That was the best name they could come up with? The scariest name?

And what's scary about them? They have better armor than stormtroopers, they're kind of strong? I mean, really, how are they a frightening force?

They're obviously there so that the only thing that can rescue our heroes from them is a Jedi. Which is...so frustrating, and feels like a lost of wasted potential.

Ditto Moff Gideon. "I'm done with the Child, you can have him"? And then Mando just believes him? Mando, who a few episode earlier we saw shoot an enemy that claimed to be disarming? Mando, who we've seen call in a New Republic hit on an entire base? That Mando?

I don't buy it, not one bit.

I feel sorry for Moff Gideon. They have him strutting around in that ridiculous armor, which he has no business wearing in the first place, spouting villain dialog which goes nowhere and does nothing.

Dear god, I just remembered: "Dark Saber." Jesus Wept. What a horrible name for a MacGuffin.

And then Luke shows up, and he doesn't sit down to chat, doesn't explain anything, just this dude in black comes up and says "Give me the child," and Mando just hands him over, no problem.

Hahaha, nope.

They've taken the ship. Why not have Luke stay for a bit? Discuss his plans? Get to know the Child?

Oh, it's because de-aging CGI is expensive? Well, gosh, maybe they should have had some other Jedi come in and take the Child.

Like, oh....How about Qi'Ra? No computer-based aging required. We know she was working with Darth Maul, so her being a trained Sith is possible. And she can pretend to be a good person, at first, who's willing to take the Child.

But having someone actually evil, actually, interestingly evil, take the Child gives us a plot engine for Season 3, and a cliffhanger for all of us who've seen Solo.

Instead, Luke's flown in, taken the Child, end of story. What's left to do?

Oh, the whole rule over Mandalore thing? That's so obviously a fake problem, I don't...I don't really care.

I might care, if Mando had to try to protect the Child while getting involved in a plan to retake Mandalore and put what's-her-name on the throne. That'd be interesting.

But that ship's sailed, hasn't it?

So for me, the final episode was just a big letdown. Going out with not a bang, not even a whimper, but more of a sigh.

I think the first five episodes of the Season are fantastic. But things start to wobble in Episode Six (it was good to see Boba Fett kicking ass, sure, but did Mando really need to throw himself at that force field three effing times?), and then completely come apart in the finale.

I don't know if I'll watch a Season Three. Having established their show once, and fixed it the second time, then thrown it all away, what's there to draw me back?

My family and I have disagreed on politics for a long time. I turned left even before going to college, rejecting the conservatism I was raised in.

Their conservative beliefs -- shared by most people where I grew up, in West Texas -- seemed hollow and hypocritical to me. They talked a big game about freedom, but sent me to the principal's office for daring to wear a hat to school (only girls were allowed to wear hats in those hallowed halls, I was told). They talked up their faith, and turning the other cheek, but it was me that was supposed to turn that cheek, not them, as they let their sons bully me between classes. And they wrapped themselves in patriotism, but only for "real Americans," like them, not liberals or Californians or anyone living back East...or me.

There was no place for me, in their America. Except at the bottom of the ladder, to be kicked and laughed at. Open season on nerds.

So I left Texas, and I left their beliefs behind. I didn't give up on my family, though. I argued with them, often and vigorously. They were amused at my liberalism, I'm sure -- there's a smirk a right-wing person gets when they feel a leftie is talking out of their ass -- but I was sincere.

And they argued back! We had good discussions, for many years. They pushed me to refine my thinking, and I used to think I was helping them, too, to see the other side of the argument. We didn't have much in common, anymore, but we had good, old-fashioned, no-holds-barred, debates. All in good faith, and with love.

But we don't -- we can't -- argue like that anymore.

Things started changing during Obama's presidency. I didn't notice it at the time, but looking back a pivotal moment was when my older sister, in all seriousness, sat down across from me after dinner one night for a chat.

"I need to ask you about something," she said. "You're pretty up on things, you know what's going on."

I shrugged. "Sure, what's up?"

"I know the IRS is building camps out here, in the desert, to round up people with guns, and you know, conservatives. So what I do, when they come for me?"

...and I was speechless.

I mean, I said all the things I thought were right: The camps weren't real, no one was coming for her or her guns (which she doesn't own) or conservatives in general. That President Obama had no such plans, and would never do such a thing.

She listened, and she nodded. And I thought she believed me, and felt better.

But now...Now I'm not so sure. When my family's constantly posting things about how the election was stolen and the Democrats are all Muslims that want to put Oklahoma under Shari'a Law and Black Lives Matter protestors burned down the entire city of Portland in a single day. I feel like that conversation was my first glimpse that something was wrong, that my family was slipping from conservative to right-wing, and losing their grip on reality.

Could I have done something, said something, back then, to keep that from happening? Could I have reached out more, found conservative but reality-based news sources to help them feel comfortable staying with us in the real world?

Because I can't have arguments with them anymore. I have to spend all my time trying to convince them that these things they fear are simply not true.

And I can't get through to them. No matter how many news articles I link. They're "fake news" from the "mainstream media," and so can't be trusted.

Not only can't be trusted, but challenging their reality this way is taken as a personal attack. They're not "lies" they're "conservative facts." I can't...I don't know how to respond to that.

And all the time I spend fact-checking, they're continuing to like and re-post articles spreading hate and fear about liberals, about BLM, about...well, about me. Not directly, but people like me. My friends. My neighbors. Our fellow citizens.

I'm...angry, sure, but also sad. Because I've lost something that was very important to me. I've lost my debate partners. But more, I've lost my family.

And I don't know how to get them back.