Not Entirely Sure What A Constable Is

Hello dear readers. Welcome to our idiosyncratic routine of blog posting.

Man, I was really baked when I wrote that last post. So many sentence fragments that go nowhere. I should probably edit it, but, meh. Too much work. I'll just sound like a disjointed idiot forever in the digital ether.

But yes, I'm brimming with content from not only my month of NaNoWriMo (where I hit my word goal for the month, yet haven't finished Suicide Queen) and the last few weeks of hyper productivity. Because in the middle of last month (a little over exactly a month ago) I got laid off from my office job in thanks to the parent company "cleaning house" after the buyout finalized.

So, I'm fairly bitter about that. I'm also working back as a barista again while looking for writing work and looking down the barrel of my senior year at ASU starting up early January. Barely hung in with a B for Spanish 102. Barely. Still have to take 201 & 202 in the near future. Taking care of my Math requirement, and have to take another science class/lab (not sure which discipline to take yet. Probably Chem, since I've never taken it before) as well as a slew of upper division English courses. I'll be applying for their Media Studies masters program at the end of the year as well. Yay for increasing student loan debt with degrees that sound highfalutin.

Hip-hip-HOORAY

In my time of being unemployed, I got plenty of gaming done as well as writing. I blasted through quite a few First Person Shooters from yesteryear. Quake, DOOM 2, Half-Life (full life consequences), & Halo: Combat Evolved. I played through Deus Ex:Mankind Divided, and plan on giving the PS2 version of the original a whirl. After playing the PS2 version of Half-Life, I regret downgrading myself graphically and sticking to the DualShock 2 controller for Deus Ex. Especially since I could probably pick them up on steam for hella cheap and play it on max settings. Eh, whatever. At least it gives my PS2 something to do besides gather dust in my living room.

I'm a little burnt out on playing games in first person perspective, so I finally played Alan Wake for my first time. Hot damn, that was a game about a writer writing his way out of something. It was a fun ride, and I'd recommend it if you like survival horror games. It's not entirely survival horrorish, but it made me think of a lost Silent Hill game, heavily influenced by David Lynch and Stephen King. I also realized I own a slapdash Alan Wake costume out of different articles of clothing I own.

Not the cover.

So in reference to getting some writing work done, I'm shopping another round of shorts to see if anyone wants to publish my work. I'm remaining optimistic, but I'm thinking about just saying fuck it and start self pubbing my shorts as "singles" for $.99 a piece, then collecting them after the fact. Now that I have Scrivner to start making epubs in an easy manner, I'm more inclined to start getting more titles under my name. As of right now, it comes down to another load of work to do, which is tough to tack on when I'm in the middle of a big project I need to get done.

And what project is that? To Slice The Sky!

My good friend/editor/collaborator and I finished hacking apart the manuscript in its entirety. And I'm now working on new draft chapters for the final stage of the story. So, if I continue to blog at a less disjointed and more on time manner, you'll see them all. If I can keep myself motivated (which is a stretch), I might even be done with the novel by the time we catch up with what I have.

I've also been listening to a lot of outrun and played through Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon. It was exactly what I needed at the time. In the midst of all these things, I began working on a new short that is very outrun in its feel of futuristic loneliness, on top of fitting nicely into the series. Roplaxive Pharmaceuticals infects patient zero with a graybox virus to use them as a guinea pig. They send him to a corporate hospital retreat in Singapore where everything goes wrong. It came from a long night and morning of dreaming and half-awake visualization. I've got the first page and the set up done. It's going to be a short, and I really want to keep it below 6000 words, but I'm feeling like I need to take them through the streets of Hong Kong or something.

So, that's it for housekeeping. Let's get down to some gritty science fiction action. Dog.

Blood & Tears - A Slayer's Life by Buffy Ann Summers

Let's gloss over supplication over a lapse in blogging. We all know life sucks and shit happens. Let's do this.

So I think it's time to write about Buffy. It's been damn too long, and I'm finally getting back to stalled out watching, all because I was last on "Killed by Death" which is totally a monster of the week, but has some great moments that work in the mythology of the series. So now I'm on, "I Only Have Eyes for You," which is just great horror writing with heart and depth. So now it's time to finally drop some Buffy love.

You know why? Because I'm sick of being pissed off by everything on the internet and I feel like writing about something I love. Obvious Spoiler Alert ahead for the whole show.

Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer is one of the greatest cultural touch stones in the world, and most people don't even know it. It takes the completely ridiculous premise of a cheerleader blonde SoCal girl slaying vampires, demons, and the legions of the undead and makes it the most engaging thing to be on an up and coming tv station with a teenage demographic at prime time. Buffy stands tall in story telling, paying homage to the medium of television as well as being a mishmash of genres.

The series hallmark is its ability to dip in and out of any contrivance and novelty with pure fluidity. It's allowed to go from a tear jerking death right into whimsical or outright silly within a line. I'm trying to keep it strictly to season 2 but it does it during the entire run of the series. And it does as much with a television budget as one can be asked. The '90s truly were an era of incredible television CG. It is stronger for its idiosyncrasies opposed to hampered by inconsistency because it maintains to be consistently likable.

Season 2 is where the show grows its fangs. It plays with being a campy monster of the week while each time chipping away at an overarching narrative in the B and sometimes C plots. The show's team tackled a lot in a one-hour time slot on the WB's New Tuesday, and right off the bat, we're shown what dying for the first time does to Buffy Summers. It then goes on to a deeper understanding of Angel, having both died in the same manner, and ramps up their romance and rivalry into intense metaphors that are layered and nuanced in thanks to a creative team that paid homage as it laid new ground.

The main cast also helps bring it home and delivers such powerful performances at the right moments, and are able to just nail a line. Quite a few of season 2's plentiful whatever'sville episodes, like in between When She was Bad till Halloween. It's in the background of these camp-fests meant to make you laugh, the bubbling darkness of the real story. Sandwiched between an episode about teenage boys reanimating a collection of fresh female bodies to build a girlfriend for one of their reanimated brother, and a Xander episode about a soul sucking mummy that seems to try and recreate the magic of Season 1's The Pack, but falls pretty short, we get introduced to Season 2's part A villains, Spike & Drusilla. Our punk mate, Spike, and his Lolita Gothic Vampire-Princess, Drusilla.

School Hard is the first time that Buffy's mom, Joyce Summers, encounters Buffy in her element. It's the metaphor of her world's clashing, juggling her three responsibilities of home, school & slaying. The interplay between her authority figures of her mother, Giles & Principal Snyder that would be the line Buffy continues to walk. Much like the line of Comedy, Horror & Teen Drama the show nimbly walked the intermingling of the supernatural encroaching upon the daily life of Sunnydale. Particularly in episodes like Lie To Me, where Buffy's old crush moves to Sunnydale to convince vampires to change him. It guest starred that weird looking dude who was '90s hot from Roswell. I don't feel like looking up his name.

That's what helped everything move so great in Season 2. Buffy trying to have a normal life as a sixteen year old girl, while she slays vampires is a theme that grows up during the show, but kinda goes away then comes back again, and always with consequences. Everything is over heightened by her being a teenager, only to have the responsibility of playing The Chosen One to fight back the Hellmouth. That theme culminates in the end of Season A with What's My Line parts 1 & 2.

The two parter throws the first issue where Buffy feels like running from it, as well as placing her relationship with Angel as a priority in his life. It plays very strongly on the relationship theme where everyone paired up in Season 2. And these relationships, Buffy/Angle, Xander/Cordelia, Giles/Jenny, and the ever romantic, but never OTP, Willow/Oz, are just set ups for your happiness to then rip out your heart. It leaves us with Drusilla  returned to strength, and becomes Goth Queen with visions, while Spike ends up in a wheelchair.

We come back to the show with a John Ritter guest appearance in Ted, which shifts the story back into Buffy's home, illustrating that even her mom can't live a normal life independent of Buffy. Ted wasn't built by a villainous trio of mad scientists, nor a constructed body by an ancient corruption demon. Ted was the robot of a genius who also was obsessed with his wife to the point he built an android to keep marrying women to play out a fantasy life until they died. Willow says at the end of the episode that the police found a lot of bodies in the closet, so who knows what went on in the backstory there. But it's amazing how it happened in Sunnydale. What are the odds that someone who looked enough like Ted's ex wife would move to Sunnydale with enough frequency? Or would he hunt them down? Is it just blonde women, or any woman with wavy blonde hair and high cheek bones? There's a lot of unanswered questions in Ted.

Bad Eggs follows that question mark with a good ole body-snatcher story coupled with Buffy and Angle arguing about how they'll never be able to breed. It's a ridiculous episode featuring the first appearance of the Gorch Bros. I guess someone on the team just really wanted a couple of bumbling cowboy vampires on the show. But Buffy and Angle's relationship becomes more troubled as they talk out the difficulties of mating on top of the fact that Buffy's one job is to slay vampires, and just because Angle is good looking and has a soul, he gets a pass.

And that leads us to our mid act 2 reveal for season 2. Surprise has Buffy's 16th birthday, and to "Answer the question, 'What do you get the Slayer who has everything?'" Apparently she gets a severed arm of a big bad unkillable demon named The Judge. After his assembly and attack on Buffy and Angel directed by Spike and Drusilla, B&A have to run for their lives. In their brief respite, Buffy and Angel have the most tastefully cut night of romance and passion, leaving us instead on badass cliffhanger.

Innocence sees Buffy blossoming into womanhood after her deflowering. She has to reject and overcome the immediate feelings of having sex for the first time with her true teenage love who turns out to be the epitome of your sworn enemy. She has to grow up in that moment, because the childish thing would be to curl up and cry about how sad she is about it. Instead she rises to the occasion and kicks Angelus square in his evil vampire nards.

The next milestone of episodes after we find out Oz is a werewolf (and the only appearance of a. werewolf poachers and b. Wolf looking animatronic snout werewolves.) and a valentines episode that leads into an everybody loves Xander silly chase (also Buffy rats) is Passions. Passions shows Angel as his Angelus self in all the twisted glory the show can rain on one character. All of Angel's post-coital interactions are used to emotionally damage Buffy, leading up to the first truly Joss Whedon kill placed into the world.

Jenny Calendar was the first Agent Coleson, though Jenny stayed dead. She's one of those deaths where you don't really see how important she was to the core, and how likable she was. Never get attached to anyone who's whimsically likable in a Mutant Enemy Production. Ms. Calendar, Phil Coleson, Wash... never again. For being the kinda blossoming girlfriend of Rupert Giles, the effects of her death ripple through all of the Scooby Gang, from Willow taking over her class, to Giles being so taken aback and trying to ignore the loss of someone who challenged him romantically as an equal, Xander seeing it as a turning point to where Angel needs to die for what he did, and Buffy finally seeing the consequences of her one night of losing herself to passion.

But Buffy carries that weight. Even when she runs away, which is her number one answer for the first few seasons. When trouble rears its head, Buffy flees. In Prophecy Girl, she threatens to quit slaying when she finds out The Master will kill her. The beginning and end of the season is Buffy figuratively running away from her friends and attempting to isolate herself. While the first time she's trying to run away from memories of her own death, at the end of Becoming part 1 & 2, she's literally running away from her shattered life of expulsion from home and school, and the dissolution of her relationship with Angel... by killing him.

Before we close out the season, there's an episode that would be otherwise known as the, "DON'T WALK AWAY FROM ME BITCH!" episode if it wasn't so powerful and emotionally charged. I Only Have Eyes For You takes a monster of the week as a framing method to get Angel and Buffy in the room to say the things that they wanted to say to each other while possessed by poltergeists. It makes the two-part season finale even more powerful when it comes time for her to save the world from being sucked into hell.

The final moments of season two's climactic battle between Buffy and Angel comes to a halt once Willow completes the gypsy curse to restore his soul. Angel and Buffy's tender moment of pure, unadulterated, love holds with soft piano music as the portal into a hell dimension opened by Angel's blood appears behind his back, with only his blood to close it again. Choosing the world to her love like a dutiful slayer, Buffy kills the newly good and completely reformed Angel as she feeds his blood to the portal on the length of a sword.

Season 2 was a lot of things, and many of them happened all at once. The final word in vampire romance, a meditation on the power and position of women, and action mingled with tears. It proves that the quirky introduction from the mid-season replacement last season has enough emotional weight and engaging story hooks to make it a prime time slot holder. Buffy the Vampire Slayer has its cheesy moments, but they're around nuggets of true televised wonder.

Fist fights with God

Hey cats & kittens. So I actually promised I'd post Sunday and here I am. This is also the last amount of prepared chapter rewrites I have to share with you. I'm currently working on chapter 20 of To Slice The Sky, and I'm about halfway done. I thankfully don't have much in the way of work getting in my way.

To preface tonight's selection, it's the official meeting of the novel's, "Big Bad," that's made some physical appearances in The Raw prior to this meeting. It so far has not been popular in regard to content, and I definitely kinda slacked in tying things together well. I more wanted to be done and get over with the chapter, and I feel it suffered for it. I'll have to go back over this and give it a little smoother transition and more of an ominous tone. I feel I breezed over this important moment, and I've been wanting it to really pop and shine. I mostly wanted to just get it over with because this chapter has been what's hung me up 2 years in a row from completing this project and it just needs to be done. I'm planning on one more pass before it goes off to the editor anyway, so I'll tighten it up then.

I'm just excited that the end is finally in sight, and the look of it is way different than how it started. You've been enjoying yourselves, right? For my beta readers that know what the rough draft looks like, I imagine it's a vast improvement.

In other writing project ideas, my NaNoWriMo book, Suicide Queen, has been coming together in my notes. I've got a good idea of the direction I want to go, but it seems very subdued for the genre it's going to be. It'll come out differently in the mix, and I'll have to work not to impede myself. It's weird that writing a story really is helping to create a living, breathing, thing, and watching it outgrow your own weak aspirations.

I've never gotten the people so timid to get started writing because they don't have a good enough idea. It's not about having a super original idea, it's about just having an idea. There's so many different forms of storytelling out there that as long as you tell it in your voice, that's all that matters. To quote Neil Gaiman's Sandman, "Trust the story, not the teller." The story is always going to be there at the core, but the changes are with the person that tells it.

I've always loved sitting around a table, trading stories, especially ones that involve more than one person in the circle. Tag teaming stories, trading off different perspectives all Rashomon style, the inevitable, "You're telling it wrong." I live for that stuff. Humans share stories and that's how we pass on the wisdom we've gained.

Well, enough beating myself off about writing stuff, here's a completed chapter that needs more work but has still been hit with the rewrite train.

DOG!

Sic Semper Tyrannis

Dude, I would have like three times as many posts on this blog if I posted consistently.

So, what's up neglected yet faithful readers? I have a couple chapters that I want to share still, and I really want to hold myself accountable to post on Sunday again. It's not like I'm doing anything with my time on Sunday anyway. Well, nothing that requires me to not be at a computer.

I've been unenthused to write just out of being exhausted for no reason whatsoever. It's not like I have kids to sap my energy, but working in an office and doing classwork has been leaving me with a strong desire to just switch off my mind, relax, and float down stream.

The downside is that it doesn't afford me much creative juice to forge on ahead in the novel this close to the end. But I'm still determined to have Version 2.0 complete by the end of the year. NaNoWriMo is going to be a serious obstacle, and I'm also feeling worried going into the challenge if I'm going to be successful at it.

So, I'm just going to dive right in. I believe we're on chapter 18 now. Beginning Act 3. The heroes are returning home to cross the final thresholds into manhood. And threshold they meet.

This hasn't won many upvotes, so the chapter probably still needs some work. It was largely unchanged from its original version, and still seems contextually relevant, even though it was inspired by Occupy Wall Street and the suppression of the movement. Especially since the movement is looked at as a failure, opposed to the silencing of the voice of the people, and the turning of the American people against each other again.The heavy handed metaphor of a corporate sponsored rebellion of the slave class that permeates the novel? That's what it was inspired by.

That's another reason why I've been silent for the week. I'm so burnt out on people talking politics everywhere I turn. Especially the partisan answers and how fucking smug everyone's been about it. I worry and fret over the results of this election, because seriously, the damage is going to be great. We're going to be stuck with a tepid fraud or a delusional megalomaniac. I mean, that's not really that different than any other nation's choice, but America has done a pretty decent job of not electing tyrants up to this point. Your feelings on the subject may change depending on if you believe Johnny Booth or Spielberg.

Whatever, we're far beyond the point of voting. A definite line has been crossed in American history at some point, and unfortunately it's as crass as the gang wars of the '90s, all about Red vs. Blue. Once again our eyes are off the real enemies. The slaves fight among themselves to their master's delight. Because at the end of this fight, unless we look at who benefits from everyone salivating at the mouth to lash out at someone who is out of line with their groupthink, we'll end up back in the same old rut.

See, this is why I didn't want to blog.

Just glossing right over it

So here's my dilemma. I finished rewrites on two chapters for To Slice The Sky, and now that I have a moment in between school sessions, I want to blog at least more than a week in a row. So, do I milk out content in a cheap manner over multiple weeks, or do I shove it all down your throat and make it so I have something new for next week?

Well, since you really have no say in this, outside of whether or not you're going to continue reading this blog again, I think I'm going to go for option 1. And hey, what's up gang? Haven't seen you in a while. What has it been, like 28 days? A lunar cycle? Really? Wonderful news!

I just finished session A for my fall semester. Session B is going to run halfway through November, and into NaNoWriMo. I'm all ripped and raring to get started, working on my crime/heist/noir deconstruction, Suicide Queen. It'll be fun writing a story about a trio of outlaws in a Sin City-esque manner. I haven't done an extended Noir piece, but I've always been a disciple of Chandler.

The only thing really on my mind has been politics, but such is life during an election year. This isn't a place for me to indoctrinate you into the reason why anarchy works as a sustainable method, but like any other form of governance runs afoul because of its mitigation through humans. But let's just say, if you're a red or blue, we should be uniting over the fact we're pissed this country is fucked up, and the sides we're yelling at aren't to blame. And that's the most political I'm going to get.

I did a lotta stuff in the last month, and going over it would take a long time, soooo... DOG PICTURE AND STORY TIME!

Ladder to Heaven

Oh shi... waddup?

Taking a break from my 9/11 festivities of playing Civilization and watching Amazing Race reruns on Hulu.

This week blew by but was a whirlwind of stress, frustration, and a heavy workload. Regardless, I still managed to get started on chapter 18 for To Slice The Sky. Nothing substantial, but at least I can cut out the parts I know I don't need, or have changed too much to work as is. It seems to always take me about a year to get up to this point, and all I've done this year is work on the novel in my free time, the small bit that it is.

For class, I'm currently reading Philip K Dick's Martian Time-Slip. I've gotten a little over halfway through it so far and have been enjoying it immensely. It's another mind-bending study on psychology and humanity's future, as well as the ripples death causes through people's lives. It's a very fast read as well,

Last night I watched Kathryn Bigelow's 1991 action masterpiece, Point Break. It was awesome as per usual. I'm fairly certain that Point Break is the greatest action movie ever. For real. Die Hard and Commando aside, Point Break is top to bottom a well put together, gripping thrill ride. And it was most likely the last time Gary Busy acted like a human on film.

Well, I don't have anything to offer for this week. Unless you want to see a bunch of pictures of me taking back America on 9/11.

Coming across the waters

The invasion begins

Splitting the atom

Irradiated wasteland blues.

See ya next week.

Excuses to day drink and start fires

What is up my D-O-G-E's? How does you this Labor Dabor?

Blah blah, sorry missed last week, and this is a day late, blah.

Trust me, not much was missed by me not checking in. Just busy days at work, and busier times at night, learning Español and finishing up The Martian Chronicles. I also finished writing the next chapter for To Slice The Sky. It seems like Act II has mostly been revisions and full on rewrites to accommodate a slumping mid-section that didn't really rise action, and sort of meandered about without much direction.

It's been a pretty mixed bag of emotions doing rewrites for this draft of the novel. Here we are staring down at the last quarter of the year, and I'm 1 chapter away from closing up Act II. Granted, everything for the novel flows considerably better, and should just need a proofreading and slight tune-up around the newer additions to get everything uniform. So I'm sort of exasperated with myself for not being further along in the process, and that I've done such huge sweeping changes on things that weren't working. But on the bright side, I'm also realizing that since I began the outline back in Summer of 2011 that I've thankfully become a better writer during that period and can discern that what I had at first was crap, and now I'm able to craft much more coherent narratives. At least I think I can. You're more of a judge of that than I am.

I've also decided that for the omnibus version release of The Lilim Chronicles wave 1, I'm going to have to go back and do one last retouch on By Starlight as well as Urban Legends of the Future. For the release, not only will I be editing the two collections, but also making some needed changes to make the world more cohesive. They'll be getting new--unifying--covers, and I'll be rebranding myself as well.

I've been working on a writing assignment for my Spanish class, and my original topic was going to focus on Latino/a science fiction authors. I came across two major problems, 1) I needed articles in Spanish, and everything I found on the topic was in English. & 2) Every article was pretty much a repeat of, "Where are all the Latino/a science fiction authors?" A quick look at the name at the top of this website, or the name above the link you clicked to get here, probably has you wondering, "What the hell does that have to do with you, gringo?" Well, my father's European surname and Western naming conventions aside, I'm Mexican from my mother's side. I specifically made my character Decker Mexican-American because pretty much the only Latina character I've had to look up to in Science Fiction is Vasquez from Aliens, and while externally I'm a blue-eyed, lightly tanned, whiteboy I grew up with my mom's family in Los Angeles.

In my writing, I've wanted to express a lot of my frustration with being trapped between two worlds as a mixed race person in America, and try to write a lot about conflicting dichotomies, and while it's all well and good, I don't feel that my voice does anyone anywhere much justice coming from another white guy trying to tell everyone how to live. That, and my current pen name is clunky as hell, and being called, "Chris-py" my whole life is pretty old after thirty+ years. So after two paragraphs of justification, with the re-release of my wave one books, I'm going to be changing my pen name across the internet, borrowing my mother's maiden name. So, my book making moniker will be Christopher Fernandez going forth. Doesn't that just flow so much better? Say it out loud with an accent: Christopher Fernandez. ¡Muy picante!

Reconnecting to a culture that got lost in pre-civil rights era American white washing has been a thing in my adult life that I've tried to achieve, and along with learning Spanish like my aunts/uncles/mom never did, this is just one more link in that chain. Not like I'm planning on changing my actual name, but as far as pen names go, Bollweg just ain't sexy. Which is probably one of many reasons I've never heard it used during intimacy.

Aside from moral queries into what is and isn't cultural appropriation, I finished reading Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles. Man, what a fantastic read. It definitely is a collection that builds upon itself and got way better with each passing story. In particular, I really loved the chapters Usher II (where a former English professor builds Poe's House of Usher on Mars, inviting all the moral watchdogs from Earth on a deadly tour through it), the highly reprinted, "There Will Come Soft Rains," (a story of an automated house when there's no more humans to automate for) and the final story, "The Million-Year Picnic". For being such a fan of poetry, I'm really surprised I wasn't ever as enthralled with the lyric delivery of Bradbury's prose back in high school. It's so flowing and evocative that pages disappeared before my eyes before I realized, "Oh, shit. I was so wrapped up in the flow, I don't know what I'm reading about." And going back, realizing all these beautiful words I'd read were about such bleak and alienating topics.

Even if the science has harshly shown everything about The Martian Chronicles to be a Space Opera fever dream from 1950, the biting satire on Cold War American life, and the destructive tendencies of well meaning Americans when faced with the consequences of our cultural lifestyle, is as fresh as it was 66 years ago. Yeah, sixty-six damn years, and we still haven't learned a damn thing, and are possibly on the verge of making all the same mistakes we've been warned about for over half a century. It's things like that that make me wonder if everything I wrote about representing the Latino-American science fiction writing population is a waste since clearly humanity has learned jack and shit from reading SciFi over the years.

But at least we have smart phones now.

Well, without further ado, here's chapter 16 from To Slice The Sky. Dog: