Chateau Lloyd

Now that my schedule has loosened up a bit, I'm able to seriously think about writing.  The question then turns into what I should write?

After 11 books, I've covered many of the topics that have interested me.  Scorpion's Pass has scratched an itch from my college days, as have both Long Live Death and Walls of Men.  

Battle Officer Wolf got the whole authorship rolling, and it's got a sequel built into the original concept.

The Man of Destiny series allowed me to work out my Star Wars prequel hate and create a new universe of my own.

Similarly, Vampires of Michigan has the potential to be a franchise if I want do go that way.

Three Weeks with the Coasties was originally intended to be an introduction into semi-autobiographic writings on my military experience.

Finally, there's plenty of space for more game designs and even an update of Conqueror: Fields of Victory.

Given this vast amount of open terrain for creativity, why am I not using it?

The answer, I think, is boredom.  Having done a topic, I'm done with it.  I simply cannot relate to authors or filmmakers who want to constantly revisit their earlier work.

That being said, I'm now looking at things a little differently, and seeing if a story I'm turning over in my head might fit in an existing setting rather than needing a new one.

And yes, there is some commercial element to this as a new title will bring the older ones to the forefront and timed with a discount, could boost my sales.  However, since my motivation is pleasure rather than profit, this is not persuasive to me.

A better argument is that I enjoyed creating my characters and settings and revisiting them could be a fun way to tell new stories about people I haven't talked about in a while.  This is beginning to resonate with me.

One of my colleagues at Bleeding Fool has reported that Disney is now so desperate for recycled material that they are going to do backstories on all the characters they killed off in The Acolyte.

This is taking the strange obsession with retconning and prequels to its logical and absurd conclusion.

No story ever moves forward; that's dangerous.  Current writing emphasizes world-building and details rather than plot, character development and progression.

The Star Wars setting has immense potential for standalone stories, yet all Disney has done is try to recycle existing material, and in the process has created a host of contradictions that destroy the integrity of the thing.  When the stories were pushed forward, they were hateful takes on existing characters, so one can see why no one has had the stomach to revisit the disastrous sequel trilogy.

Yet.

I've written about prequels before and I don't like them.  Many of my settings could easily accommodate them, but why move backwards when one can move forward?  I suppose one could argue that if I did a book for The Vampires of Michigan about the bootlegging years, that wouldn't be a prequel so much as a different story in the same setting, especially if I use different characters.

That would be the only way I can see it working.  When I write a character, I don't generally create a full and massive biography just in case.  I flesh out only the details I have.  Going back and adding in more risks the integrity of what already exists, and one can see this in how much J.R.R. Tolkien struggled to make his concept of Galadriel work.  She had a backstory when he wrote Lord of the Rings, but as he dug deeper into the First Age, he went back and forth about who she was and how she got where she was.

The published version of her in The Silmarillion is not the final form, which was still in draft.  Instead, Christopher Tolkien, his son and literary executor, chose the most finished version, which was also in line with existing texts.

If a genius like Tolkien struggled to make prequels and backstories work, I'm far less qualified to bother with it.

I am thinking about sequels however, and many of my books are suitable for that.  This intrigues me because I've yet to try it, and it would probably be good for sales because the original book would get a boost.  It's been difficult to write of late, but I'm restructuring my schedule to make it more friendly for that pursuit.

Even better, I'm starting to get ideas about what scenes I would run.  Writing has been a helpful hobby for many years and I miss it.  Hopefully I'll be back in the swing of things soon.

Is any movie a better distillation than 1990s youth culture than Wesley Snipes' Blade?  It's got a bit of everything - the brash anti-hero, vampirism as a decadent (secular) lifestyle, and of course that sexy soft-core lesbian porn that was just starting to creep into the popular consciousness.

Indeed, in retrospect that was a clever marketing ploy by Hollywood, because while two men having sex is disgusting, two women having sex is merely absurd - and far more aesthetically pleasing.

In any event, I hadn't watched it in many years, which may strike people as surprising given my (fairly) recent authorship of The Vampires of Michigan.   To a certain extent, Blade was the Ur-text of that book insofar as it treated vampirism as a morally neutral biological phenomenon.  Obviously, the blood drinking was bad, but religious symbols and sacred objects were specifically mentioned as useless.

Garlic and silver were instead the primary threats to the vamps.

The storyline is unremarkable, and what sells the picture are the actors and the remarkably slick aesthetic.  Wesley Snipes is just so damn cool.  He oozes cool, personifies it - women want him, men want to BE him.  Modern movies simply cannot produce that level of charisma.

Put simply, it knew what it wanted to be and became that thing.  

That being said, there is a spiritual void at the heart of the picture which I had not noticed before - in part because it has been so long since I saw it.  When you are in your 20s, partying and lots of sex seems all that one could want in life.  Later on, other priorities emerge.

That was a large part of what inspired my take on vampires.  I very much enjoyed (and incorporated) fight scenes with cool weapons and people capable of dishing out (and taking) absurd amounts of damage, but the real heart of the matter to me was how one kept going after 100 years of orgies.  There had to be something more.

Anyhow, the film has held up remarkably well.

I've noticed a bunch of people are coming here via searches or links pertaining to Patrick Swayze's superlative Road House.

If you liked that film, you'll probably enjoy The Vampires of Michigan.  No, this isn't the usual 90s vintage tale of teen angst or social squabbling.  This is a driving, fast-paced tale that uses vampires to frame the action.  It's partly a meditation on what immortality would actually mean, and an extended chase where the each side in turn becomes the hunter and the hunted.

It was really fun to write, and when it came out, one of my friends (who is a fan) said it was the best writing I had yet done. 

One of the aspects I enjoyed was finally putting my firearms knowledge to narrative use.  Matching characters with weapons and showing them in action was fun.   (Only the bad guys use Glocks.)

The whole thing is written in a cinematic style, emphasizing showing rather than telling, and avoiding internal monologues.

Basically it's sexy, fun, high body-count action novel.   Check it out!

When Van Helsing first came out, I thought it was great, and naturally I bought the DVD.  A couple of nights ago I watched it again, and was quite underwhelmed.

My disenchantment is focused on two areas.  The first, and most obvious, is the overuse of CGI to create insane spectacles and daring escapes.  It was funny and over the top in 2004, but after a decade of superhero movies and the excesses of Star Wars, it's just annoying, a waste of screen time devoid of dramatic impact.  I've written before about how the constraints placed on prior generations of filmmakers brought about better quality, so I won't belabor the point.

Much more subtle is my dislike of the film's approach to theology, which is frankly awful.  I used to give it credit for having the Catholic Church be shown in a positive light, but it gets so much wrong and in so many ways, it's hard to sit through it.

Hugh Jackman's character is a generic jaded superhero, and David Wenham's friar is an amusing collection of friar/scholar tropes, but it hasn't aged well.  Even Kate Beckinsale (with her atrocious accent) left me cold. 

About the only performance that was still enjoyable was Richard Roxburgh's Dracula, which he eerily foreshadowed in Moulin Rouge.  That film has held up well, by the way.

The combination of steampunk crossbows and interfaith good guys was very much of its time, part of the hallucination that democracy was a universal and achievable aspiration. 

If nothing else, the film demonstrates that the most dated films are the ones rooted in a "modernity" that didn't last.

I'm once again binge-watching the early seasons of Miami Vice and I'm thinking it would be fun to set the next installment in the World Series Championship year of 1984.  It's an interesting year for a variety of reasons.  Obviously there is the George Orwell angle, but 1984 marked a rare moment of unity in American politics.  The notion of a a presidential candidate carrying 49 states is inconceivable today.

Whether looking at Cold War politics, cultural differences and of course the far superior music and entertainment, I think it would be fun.

As to the plot...well, that's yet to be determined.  I've got a couple of ideas and I'm sure some of the same characters will be represented. 

Of course, nothing may come of it, but that's the fun of being a novelist - not just the ideas that are completed, but the ones that are tossed around for fun.

A year ago I did a post on how the snakes have come back to Ireland.

By curious coincidence, First Things has an article with almost exactly the same title on the same topic.

The secularization of St. Patrick's feast day is kind of fascinating.  I'm seeing all sorts of promotions for corned beef and cabbage, but of course it is a Friday in Lent, which means that meat is forbidden.  Yes, there are some jurisdictions where dispensations have been made, but it's plain that the concept of the day is now getting drunk and eating bland food.

This is not by any means unique.  Christmas is famously secular these days, mostly pagan myths about a fat old man and flying reindeer.  Still the fall of Ireland is sad to behold.

England has also embraced the same empty, soulless materialism that fascinated the United States.  The allure is powerful.  Who doesn't want to cast aside the restrictive morals of the past to indulge in every form of sin and gratification?  It is a tale as old as Sodom and Gomorrah.

On the positive side, I think we are rapidly reaching the limits of what decadence can even permit.  This was one of the themes of The Vampires of Michigan - at a certain point, you simply can't debauch yourself any more.  There are finite ways of gratifying lust, each carrying progressively greater risk and damage.  Just as with drugs, there is a law of diminishing returns, where each new transgression brings less of a high.

We see this with music and entertainment - stuff that was shocking in my youth is boring today.  Madonna masturbating with a cross in the late 80s is as distant to us as the Elvis Presley swinging his hips was back then.

J.R.R. Tolkien understood this, that the ultimate end of evil must be nihilism.  Evil is all about pulling things down, whether they be moral boundaries or degrading the human spirit.  When at last all depravity has been experienced, there is nothing left but the void.

This is why I am hopeful, because darkness ultimately cannot triumph.  Clearly it is my task to keep the lamp burning through the night until the dawn inevitably comes.  St. Patrick showed us how it was done and we will have to do it again.

The test readers have finally finished their labors, and we're now coming down the home stretch of Walls of Men.

This project really got out of hand developed beyond what I expected.  Based on my experience with Long Live Death, I figured I could hammer out a concise military history of China in little over twice the time it took me to write about Spain.  I was wrong.

Badly wrong.

Target completion dates kept slipping backward, from March to May to July to September.  I'm now reasonably confident that I will at least have a proof copy printed in November.

On the plus side, the feedback is very positive, which is great.  On the other hand, I've got a bit of work ahead in terms of cleaning things up.  I'm not really bothered by that because almost every one of my books has required a post-publication update as new typos and mistakes are brought to light.  Given the scope of this particular work, I'm willing to delay final publication until it's as clean as can be reasonably expected.

What next?  I'm not sure, but I need a break from the non-fiction realm.  Things are too stressful and disappearing into a world of my own creation will do me some good.  Both Vampires of Michigan and Battle Officer Wolf are long overdue for sequels, and I've been thinking about both of them.

I'm also looking at a revised one-volume version of Man of Destiny with some new content added to it (along with improved cover art).

To put it another way, I've still got stories to tell and things to say and with my impending retirement from military service, I'll have a lot more time to do it.

Over the past year, I've been all over the place on my next book project.  I looked at a sequel to Battle Officer Wolf, pondered writing The Vampires of Michigan: Pandemic, dabbled in doing a series of essays on spiritual warfare, and even took yet another stab (or two) at writing something in the fantasy genre.

Instead, I've settled on writing a concise, quick-moving military history of China.  I'm not sure how long it will be, but if you know me, you know it will be short.  Long books bore me.

I feel that Long Live Death was the right length for the topic and I'm very happy with it's reception.  It goes into just enough detail to make its point and inform the reader, and also points you to more detailed information in case you want it.

That's what I want to achieve with this new book.  At the moment, it's working title is "Something Something Dragon," because books about China almost always have "dragon" in the title.  You know, something like "The Dragon's Brittle Claws," because one of my themes is that Chinese military track record is uneven at best.

Hey, it took me a while to come up with Long Live Death, so no hurry.

I've not yet put together a deadline, or a projected completion date, but unlike other efforts, there is significant momentum.  I'm starting to get some good writing sessions and acquiring additional sources.  The mania is setting in.

I should note that like the Spanish Civil War, Chinese military history is another area that fascinated me in my late teens.  It was always somewhat obscure, and I found that a challenge.  At one point in college I came up with a Chinese version of Milton Bradley's Shogun game (which has been renamed a bunch, not sure what they call it now).  So a lot of my research is already floating around in my head, it's just a question of organizing it.

I have to say that the Lord of Spirits podcast is fundamentally changing how I think about everything, not just religion.

I've got a post up at Bleedingfool.com comparing Deadpool and The Crow.  Both in subject and structure the two are strikingly similar, but I want to dig a little deeper into the moral aspects of The Crow. 

Previously, I always thought of it as a spiritually-tinged revenge movie with proto-emo imagery and music.  That's still true, but the broadly Catholic-influenced themes and actions really stood out to me.

From a this perspective, Brandon Lee's character isn't a ghost bent on revenge so much as a soul in Purgatory who is cleansed of sin by carrying out divine judgement on unrepentant sinners while also helping those capable of redemption to find it.  The titular crow is his guardian angel, guiding him on the path to salvation and peace.

The late Brandon Lee did a great job in this film, and one can't help but see similarities in his fate and that of his character, Eric. 

On the face of it, Eric isn't a paragon of virtue.  He's a rock and roller who has a live-in girlfriend - not exactly a poster child for the Holy Family.

And yet, he intends to marry her, proposing in the proper way.  Even the wedding dress is modest and traditional.  The date - Halloween - seems like a hipster conceit, but that means their first morning as husband and wife will be All Saints Day.

Okay, maybe I'm reaching there, but it's interesting to look at how he approaches his task.  Each one of the guilty party he approaches has the opportunity to seek mercy.  Only the pawn broker asks for it, and so he is spared (though his continued sinful behavior inevitably catches up to him).

The bag guys aren't just bad, they are objectively evil.  The witch practicing blood magic?  Yeah, that's a big call for some divine retribution there.

Finally, there's the big confrontation between Lee's character and the arch-villain, Top Dollar.  As is customary, the villain gets the upper hand and seems sure to triumph but our hero suddenly turns that tables - in this case by summoning the memories of his fiancee's suffering and giving to the bad guy all at once.

What's interesting here is that Eric does this only after Top Dollar has admitted that yes, he was ultimately responsible for the double murder.  He may as well have said mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

In fact, the fact that Eric is able to obtain those memories at all is another Catholic 'tell.'  Officer Albrecht stayed with Shelly throughout her ordeal - a corporal act of mercy.  Albrecht also looks after Sarah, buying her dinner when they meet, which is of course an act of charity.

Throughout the film, these moments knit together a tapestry of religious symbolism that may appear purely spiritual, but all have a basis in Catholic theology.  Note how Eric purges the heroin from Sarah's mother and then tells her to go forth and sin no more.

When the mother then tries to be 'motherly' and her daughter gives her grief, the film could take a darker turn, but Sarah chooses the path of mercy, and accepts her mother's repentance.

The final scene where the again-dying Eric sees a vision of his fiancee approaching in a luminescent white light may appear to be simply traditional good vibes, a vague spiritualism, but a Catholic would note that her ordeal had already purified her, and that she was waiting for Eric to cleanse himself of sin as well.  Having done so - offering forgiveness to some, justice to others - Eric is now able to ascend with her.

Make no mistake, the film abounds with Christian symbolism, right down to the showdown in what appears to be an abandoned cathedral.   From my view, the entire film is permeated with not just religious themes, but ones that make the most sense if one views it from the Catholic perspective.