In which I spill the tea on the creative activity I work on (when I'm not writing) for the November 2024 IWSG.

This is my last post for the year. I hope that those of you who are working hard on your novels this month are proceeding nicely. As for the rest of you, may you have a holiday in which Mariah Carey doesn't scream too much "All I Want for Christmas" in your ears. I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

Today is post-election day aftermath. It is also the first Wednesday of November 2024, and this means it is time for our Insecure Writer's Support Group posts. If this is the first that you have heard of this blogging phenomenon, you can read and sign-up for it at this LINK.

What is the Purpose of the IWSG?: It is to share and encourage. Writers can express doubts and concerns without fear of appearing foolish or weak. Those who have been through the fire can offer assistance and guidance. It’s a safe haven for insecure writers of all kinds.

When do y'all post?: The first Wednesday of every month is officially Insecure Writer’s Support Group day. So, on that day you should post your thoughts on your own blog. Some ideas for what those posts could entail are 1) you could talk about your doubts and the fears you have conquered, 2) you could discuss your struggles and triumphs, and 3) you could offer a word of encouragement for others who are struggling. Being a part of this blogfest means being involved. So, you should visit others in the group and connect with your fellow writers. A good rule of thumb is to aim for a dozen new people each time and return comments. This group is all about connecting. Be sure to link to this page and display the badge in your post. And please be sure your avatar links back to your blog. Otherwise, when you leave a comment, people can't find you to comment back.

The X (formerly Twitter) handle the Insecure Writer's Support Group uses is @TheIWSG and the hashtag is #IWSG.

The awesome co-hosts for the November 6 posting of the IWSG are Diedre Knight, Lisa Buie Collard , Kim Lajevardi, and JQ Rose!

Now, every month, the IWSG announces a question that members can answer in their IWSG post. These questions may prompt you to share advice, insight, a personal experience or story. If this is what you want to write about, you should include your answer to the question in your IWSG post or let it inspire your post if you are struggling with something to say.

But remember, the question is optional :)

November 6 question - What creative activity do you engage in when you're not writing?

When I'm not writing I write things for my homebrew setting in Dungeons & Dragons. Over the years, I've built a secondary ruleset that overlays the primary rules of 5e+, and these books contain all the flavor of my homebrew world. I've also digitized maps to make them available to display on 32-inch monitors, and I've come up with all sorts of spells, abilities, classes, and you name it. It's fun to just sit and watch tv and think over a new ability and write it down, revise it, and then think about what it might look like with someone playing it. I think that's where I get the most enjoyment: in the theorycrafting. It is my jam.

Thanks for visiting my blog this year. I will be back for the January 2025 edition of the IWSG. Hopefully (by then) things have settled down a bit politically in this country. But I'm honestly not counting on that.

Let us all take a moment to appreciate the art of Greg Hildebrandt.

I learned that last week, the artist Greg Hildebrandt passed away. When I first heard of the "Brothers Hildebrandt" I felt that their surnames were certainly meant for great artists. It's the kind of name that you'd expect to see on an oils and acrylics line of paint in your local art store. Certainly Star Wars fans are familiar with their work from a painting of Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. It's notable that they did this project without even having seen the movie. I read somewhere that Lucas had promised them that they'd only have their art on a few promo materials, but then it just got slapped on everything until they finally had to sue to get paid (and I think it was only for like $2,000). Hildebrandt was also the guy that gave Luke Skywalker abs that Luke never had.

Every fantasy reader, even those not familiar with them, has probably seen elements and themes of their work popularized in other materials and art. Here (for example) is the Balrog from Fellowship of the Ring. 

And then there's the depiction that Hildebrandt did of the Argonath (Lord of the Rings), which was a monument of two enormous statues carved in the likenesses of Isildur and Anárion standing on either side of the River Anduin at the northern entrance to Nen Hithoel. It marked the northern border of Gondor, and nearby to the south were previous outposts, Amon Hen and Amon Lhaw.

For me, I think the one thing that always drew my eye (about their work) was their use of light and shadow. Many of their paintings have this high contrast to them to really sharpen features while adding a kind of magic to the whole mix. Oftentimes, the shadows in their landscapes feel cool to me (low temperature as opposed to "awesome"). Maybe it's because they would oftentimes drench their shadowy landscapes with a kind of blue tone. The Hildebrandt's dabbled in just about anything that would take their art. Here's a picture from a Superman comic book that was illustrated by Greg Hildebrandt:

And they also lovingly illustrated the Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks, basically turning his first outing as an author into an illustrated edition. I don't know any authors who get this kind of treatment so early in their careers. From what I've read, Random House was just really trying to mine the market of people who wanted "something else" after consuming The Lord of the Rings.

No matter what their assignment was to illustrate, I feel like the Hildebrandt brothers showed up to paint something as realistic as it could be portrayed, given the many fantastic elements of their overall portfolio. With Greg's passing, there aren't too many artists of this era that are left. I can think of a handful: Boris Vallejo, Julie Bell, and Michael Whelan (I'll be really sad when Whelan passes on). Michael Whelan actually retired until Brandon Sanderson showed up with a truckload of money and dumped it on him to illustrate his books. I can't blame Sanderson. Whelan (in my opinion) was the best in the business, and it was probably every artist's dream to get a Whelan cover. Since people were/are just throwing millions of dollars at Sanderson, I think the money came so easy that he could just feel free to splurge on whatever his heart desired. Sanderson could have diamond studded window wipers if he wanted. Anyway, I'll leave you with this movie poster for Clash of the Titans that I really liked (illustrated by Greg Hildebrandt). It's weird to think that this era of art is gone, but as I've often said, "Everything in life is temporary. Even us."

Did George Lucas invent the Prequel?

Did George Lucas invent the prequel? I remember when he announced that there would be prequels to his iconic Star Wars trilogy way back in the mid-90's. It was one of those rumors that grew and grew until you started seeing chatter of it on the primitive thing we called "the internet." I remember seeing the first trailer for the Phantom Menace and how Apple's website was the best place to go to view them in a thing called "Quicktime." But I honestly don't remember if there were such things as "prequels" before The Phantom Menace. Now, of course, they are everywhere.

The latest thing that I saw that is getting a prequel is the movie/story of It by Stephen King. I kind of wonder why they are doing a prequel. The latest adaptation of It was successful. I've seen the first one but avoided part 2 simply because I don't much care for scary movies. However, I kind of wonder what could possibly be told in a prequel to It other than "more of the same." From what I understand of the monster, it reappears every 27 years or so (I can't remember the exact timeline), kills a bunch of kids, and then goes dormant again. So, in an It prequel, I'm guessing we shall see more kids being killed and an attempt to fight back at some point that doesn't go well because It survived (obviously). I may not be seeing this prequel though from the correct vantage point. Maybe the fact that it is a retread of the story is the point. Folks want "more of the same" but maybe just slightly different enough that there can be some surprises.

My blogging friend Alex over on his IWSG post for the month of October said that prequels are kind of an odd thing because you always know how they will end (he was specifically talking about Rings of Power). And you know what? He's right. They are kind of an odd thing. I mean...we knew that the little kid named Anakin had to turn into Darth Vader at some point. But seeing it happen on screen was kind of fulfilling. I really liked Christensen's performance (to be honest), and I liked how pouty Anakin was. I think it actually made Darth Vader a bit more menacing, because you just know he's not altogether a sane person who is just choosing to be evil. He's kind of crazy, and was pushed into that by trauma that he couldn't deal with properly, nor did he have access to any kind of mental health care that might have helped him to deal with it.

Obviously, nostalgia is an important reason for why prequels exist in the first place. But it may also be due to the structure of storytelling. Oftentimes in traditional storytelling, you have the bulk of the tale that leads to a climax, and then once that is over, the story quickly ends. With a prequel, you can still have that very satisfying ending way off in the future, but now you've got more ground to develop different characters, and to set up what may have led to that really satisfying conclusion in the distant future.

Anyway, I guess when I started writing this post, I wanted to know if George Lucas invented the prequel. I don't know for sure, but I do know that if you "Google" the term prequel, you come up with nothing but links to articles discussing the Star Wars prequels. That might be reason enough to say that he invented it. If so, I think that's pretty neat. George had a lot of great ideas (obviously), but inventing "the prequel" has affected movies in such a way that it honestly is comparable to someone inventing "color for film." Like...I'd compare it to being on that big of a scale. It's like someone taking the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and inventing "the Uncrustable."  You just don't know how good the idea is until its suddenly there and you realize that you can't live without it.

2025 may be the most interesting year of our lifetimes and not in a good way.

 As I watch yet another car drive down the street with a huge flag duct taped to the side of it, all black, with huge white letters that say "F*CK BIDEN" but without the asterisk...it's almost hard to believe that any of this is real. People being nasty has always been a thing, but I have a co-worker who is scared to drive on the street now because of a road rage incident where a guy wouldn't let her into a lane and when she forced the issue, he revved his engine and laid on the horn for ten seconds.

I myself have survived several road rage incidents, each one leaving me shaken with an adrenaline rush. People passing me, then slamming on the brakes to stop in the middle of a road, forcing me to skid to a stop, then rolling down the window to give me the finger. Another guy nearly sideswiped my car with his trailer by passing super aggressively (I ended up on the side of the road). A third person actually did hit my car with theirs in a sideswipe, scraping all the paint off my mirror, and they just kept rolling down the street with their finger out the window. I guess I should count myself lucky. There are many in my area who have just been flat out shot and killed on the highways in Salt Lake.

And then there is the weird and almost surreal income inequality that I now see everywhere. I hear of pig-butchering scams that have robbed people who are into crypto of hundreds of thousands of dollars. I see these people who are on the news and saying, "I first started noticing things when I couldn't get an address or a return call for the $700,000 that I wired to XXX." Then the report continues with other testimonies of various sums, all in the hundreds of thousands.

No one ever stops to say...whoah whoah whoah...you had hundreds of thousands of dollars that was just lying around and you only noticed it when something happened with say...$700,000...that seemed iffy? What kind of money are you talking about here? How much money is actually out there? It turns out...a ton (read this as millions and millions) of Americans are really wealthy. Yet, all I hear is bitching about the economy. Why are so many people bitching about the economy when they literally have hundreds of thousands of dollars to lose to scammers? It doesn't seem real...but it somehow is.

I guess the most shocking thing to me is how different these people are from me. I remember decades ago someone asked Bill Clinton a question about the liberal mindset and he offhandedly said that when you write everything down that liberals believe in it all sounds good, and that he actually didn't understand why anyone didn't think the same thing. But I think it's safe to say that he was ignorant in the same way that I was ignorant. There are millions of brains out there that actually like the idea of unmarried teenage pregnancy, that actually like the idea of slavery, that actually like the idea of having only one religion and no other beliefs to challenge them in any way, and that actually like the idea of forced birth, women being paid less than men for doing the same job, and yes probably concentration camps too. Yes, they like all of that. It's been a very successful trick to gaslight ourselves that these people are outliers. Now, with election day next week, I wonder where it all ends. I think 2025 is going to be a very interesting year, and I don't mean that in a good way.

Can you tell a Star Wars story with Force users at its core and ignore the Skywalkers and somehow avoid cancellation?

Emperor Palpatine (not pictured) using his "Force Lightning" to destroy an armada of
ships floating above his world in a nebula cloud thing that is in outer space.

I had an interesting discussion at Sunday brunch involving Star Wars. My friend Jessica asked, "Why did Rey have to be a Palpatine or a Skywalker in that last movie?" The movie that she was talking about was The Rise of Skywalker just for reference. Jessica's point was that, "it could have been perfectly fine for Rey to be a nobody...like, she didn't have to be a Skywalker or a Palpatine. I would have liked it even better in fact if they didn't make it so that she had to come from those bloodlines at all."

Here's what I said (more or less) to try to answer this question. I think that Star Wars has a "Skywalker" problem. Anytime they try to tell a story with a Force-user in it...if it is not linked to the Skywalkers, the fan base will reject it. And then I went on to explain to Jessica that they actually tried to do this. They tried to sever the ties with the Skywalker's in The Last Jedi, even going so far as to kill off Luke and to leave the ending of the story with some no name kid sweeping up and doing his chores and demonstrating some measure of "force ability." They could have gone in any direction after The Last Jedi. But the backlash this movie created was so huge, that Disney got scared. They fired that director, went back to JJ Abrams, and that's how we got horses riding on the outside of a star destroyer in a nebula/cloud in space, and how we got the emperor shooting lightning out of his fingers that was so powerful that it could hit every spaceship in the entire armada spread out through this nebula. Think about that for a moment. Why would the Emperor have ever needed a "Death Star" if he could just destroy everything with his own lightning bolts?

So, I said, "It was utterly ridiculous but JJ quieted down the fan base and gave us this ridiculous story that barely even made sense, and he paid fan service yet again to people who just weren't done with the Skywalkers." Then I said, "They also tried to do this a second time, and it also failed. The Acolyte was a show that Disney + put out that didn't have any Skywalkers in it at all. It dared to tell a story of "The Force" that was different and kind of refreshing. Well...that sure as shit got canceled. I think the only reason that the other series having a "force user" (called Ahsoka) is even remotely successful is that her character ties directly into the Skywalkers, and one of the reasons The Mandalorian is successful is that they reincarnated a young Luke Skywalker to teach Grogu some basics of the Force before he went on his way."

Now, I did point out that stories that don't have Force users in them can totally abandon the Skywalkers and be good. You see this in Andor. There are no Force users so there's no mention of the Skywalkers and suddenly the magic works again. You can have a good story that no one is angry about and that people will watch. But here was my point to Jessica: no one knows if it is possible to write a Star Wars story that people will like if you have force users that have no connection to the Skywalkers in any way. All that we do know is that people get upset and they review bomb the crap out of the projects that do try to break away from the Skywalkers and then everyone involved with the project gets blacklisted and/or loses their jobs.

Anyway, I'd like to know what y'all think about this theory of mine: is it possible to even tell a story in the Star Wars universe that has force-using people at its core and ignore the Skywalkers and still make money/not get canceled?

I want to tell you about my retinal tear experience.

Sometimes I feel like I'm falling apart in my fifties. Last week (keep in mind that this was after I had the kidney stone fairy visit which occurred after I had the covid fairy visit), something weird happened with my vision. I was downstairs in my house, and I thought that the cat was hiding behind an ottoman because I saw its orange-ish tail flicking back and forth. But when I checked, there was no cat there. A moment later I saw it again behind another thing, and that's when I realized...the cat isn't in the room. However, there is something in my eye. It was a strange floater, but it was darker than any floater I had ever seen. Almost like a reddish and black spot just off center in my vision, shaped like a mouse, with a tail that flicked around. I joked with my friend that I had "Muad'dib" in my eye, because of a line from the 1980's Dune movie where Paul Atreides asks, "What do you call the mouse shadow in the second moon?" And Stilgar replies, "We call that one Muad'dib."

The next morning, it wasn't any better. There wasn't any physical pain, but I started to worry that this "floater" might be something more sinister. So, I went to the eye doctor, they ran me through some tests, dilated my eyes, and took photographs of it. My doctor said, "That floater is blood. I can't see where it is coming from but I'm concerned. I need to send you to a retina specialist." Well I went and saw the retina specialist, and they also dilated my eyes, injected a special ink into my arm that would highlight any bleeding areas in the eye, and then put me in front of another machine to take photographs. The doctor came in, took a look at them, and said that I had a tear in my retina, which is the photosensitive layer of cells that gives you vision. He said that he wanted to operate on it within ten minutes.

I asked him how these things happen, and he said, "A lot of the time it is just age. But there are other factors like diabetes and other such conditions that can create retinal tears. It might be that the fluid in my eyes is a bit stickier than normal, so when it pulls away from the retina, it might try to suck some of the retina with it like a suction cup." He also said, "Retinal tears in people your age is fairly common." So yeah, I guess that happened. Anyway, I did go through with the procedure, and I didn't like it. But it's not like you have much choice when the other option is to just eventually lose your vision. The procedure is to basically staple the tear back into place using a pulsating laser that makes a hammering sound and creates a hammering pressure on the back of your eye (and maybe a faint smell of burning flesh but I might have imagined that). I thought it was quite painful, not to mention the fact that you just completely lose vision in that eye. My left eye was black.  I could see nothing, which was scary.

After the procedure my vision slowly came back in that eye over the course of the day. I took some Ibuprofen and by the next morning, I could see normally. I still have that mouse-shaped swirly thing of blood floating around in the vitreous, but I've learned to ignore it for the most part. The doctor said it will go away over the next few months as it gets reabsorbed. So anyway, that was health issue number three in so many months. I'm hoping that this is the end of them for a while. But if it isn't, at least I've met my deductible on my health insurance until next July. So any procedure I need, I'm just going to have done. If I have to go to the emergency room for any reason, I'll just go. Might as well, since it will be free. I guess I should be grateful that we have the technology to fix things like retinal tears. It actually is pretty amazing if you think about it.

How do you feel about another person playing in the sandbox of a creator who may be dead?

Next month, those of us who like the Dune story of Arrakis and the Great Houses all backstabbing each other for thousands of years get a treat. It's called Dune: Prophecy and it is inspired by the novel Sisterhood of Dune which is co-written by Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. I actually didn't know this, and I only found out yesterday because there is so much hate for Brian Herbert online. I haven't read any of his books, but now I'm intrigued. Maybe I should finish up my Dune readings (as I only got to the end of God Emperor) and then moved on. But the kinds of vitriol that's targeting Herbert's son, Brian, basically goes along the lines of "I consider all of these works fan-fiction" or "I hate the way they are retconning characters. Some of the choices don't even make sense." For nerds who are deeply and emotionally invested in these science fiction works, these are real "clutch the pearls" statements. 

All of this makes me question what right anyone has to play in someone else's sandbox. Let's step back for a moment and think of other sandboxes that people are presently playing in or have played in within the last few decades. We've got Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, we've got Disney happily playing in the Star Wars sandbox and the Alien sandbox, and we also have Max which played in the Watchmen sandbox with a mini-series. Some people get upset when a character becomes black (when they were previously white). Others get upset when a character gets recast with a female (think way back to the Battlestar Galactica reboot and the SyFy channel's decision to make the character of "Starbuck" a woman when it was previously played by Dirk Benedict in the 1970's show).

In some cases (certainly) there are people who object to seeing something filmed that previously was just a mythical thing. The Clone Wars was like this. So, you had it name dropped by Luke Skywalker in A New Hope when he spoke to Ben and asked "You were in the Clone Wars?" And every single one of us wondered what the heck the "Clone Wars" even were, and so we made up things in the dearth of information that was available. So we imagined far off battles and struggles, and it was natural for every one of us to make it bigger than life in our imaginations. But when they showed up in film...even though there were lots of epic scenes...it could never live up to your dreams. And to some extent, we even get upset with original authors of material revisiting their sandboxes. The Matrix strikes me as one of these, calling any further attempts to explore the stories and themes of The Matrix a cash grab, as if audiences will just watch these things as brain-dead drones because they don't actually know what is good. "Oh it has Matrix in its name so I'll give it money." I don't think that's how any of this actually works.

Look, people will always try to recapture lightning in a bottle because it just feels so good. Jurassic Park was an amazing idea. I don't blame people for making that "cash grab" and trying to recreate the same wonder that we saw in that first film/book. It won't ever happen. Still...there's room to play in that sandbox. I for one think it would be cool to stop focusing on dinosaurs and cloning and set a world that is "post Jurassic Park" and do a spy thriller where it's a kind of Mission: Impossible scenario of world governments with the added part that dinosaurs are real and have been unleashed upon the world. I think that would be really cool...kinda like what happened when people thought of Alien and Predator and someone said...why don't we mash these together?

In the Star Wars universe, I've often felt that a series centered around a bounty hunter would be magnificent. Well, we got that in The Mandalorian and I was right. For what it's worth, I think the best Star Wars stories keep the Jedi and the Sith way in the background or not even mentioned at all, and they focus on the politics and danger present with a civil war that spans a galaxy. There's just so much you can do with that, and they haven't scratched the surface. For example, what about a series that has a crackpot team of rebels whose entire mission is to break into a skyscraper on some important core world where the tie fighter was developed to say...find the plans for something else...like a fuel depot or something like that? That would be a ton of fun.

Furthermore, I will never be so stuck in the mud that I won't think that a descendant of a famous author (like Brian Herbert is to Frank Herbert) doesn't have a right to play in the sandbox that the famous author created. I say, go for it. It seems silly that great ideas should just be done and finished when there might be more to tell in these enormous universes that were so meticulously created by a person who may have been bordering on obsession to get things completed before they kicked the bucket. I'm sure that long after George R.R. Martin is dead, we will have people playing in the Game of Thrones sandbox with stories about Arya and the other continents she discovers and on and on and on. Anyway, that's my opinion on this particular topic. So in finishing, I ask you all this question: do you like it when someone else plays in a famous property's sandbox? Or do you find this "fan fiction" offensive to your sensibilities and disrespectful to the creator?