This blog tracks the epic of kick-starting a whole writing career, with spies and thrillers, now saints and vampires. I cover the creative process, stuff that blows up, history, philosophy, and theology. If you like any or all of the above, you'll like this one. We talk about comic books, movies, music, and writing. Usually, all at the same time.
[Note: All Amazon links here are associate links. Which means nothing to you, but it means Declan Finn gets a few pennies for the sale. Thank you.]
After the Sad Puppies 4 list came out last week, things went weird. Very weird. How weird, you ask?
As I mentioned last week, a comment at File 770 called me "The next John C. Wright." Which, frankly, I'll take becoming the next bestsellling Catholic SFF writer, compared to golden age sci-fi.
But I'm relatively certain that they didn't mean it as a compliment.
And then, things got stranger.
For example, I was going through the Twitter Stream for @SadRbtPuppies, and got Cat Valente versus Charlie Martin.
Tolstoy once wrote that "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
This, of course, is just bullcrap.
Don't believe me? Go to a meeting of the children of alcoholics sometime. Sit and listen to the stories. But, more importantly, look at the other members as they nod in agreement. They're all checking off the boxes on the list. Because it's the same exact crap, with minor variations, on a race to the bottom.
For the law enforcement people who come across this, could you please tell me if the following sounds familiar: A domestic violence complaint comes in to 911. A patrol car pulls up to the incident, and two officers engage. No matter who is being beaten, or who is doing the beating, it's a crapshoot whether or not the victims will turn on the responding officers or not.
It's depressingly easy to call that one.
On the other hand, my family is awesome. We watch TV shows on playback, with the pause button ready, because we're all -- all of us -- ready to rewrite the episode, or call where the episode is going. Sometimes, we prefer our endings to the episode than what we get.
The family films have always been Die Hard for Christmas, Blown Away for St. Patrick's Day. 1776 and Yankee Doodle Dandy and Independence Day for July 4th. Mother's day is The Manchurian Candidate, and father's day is The Empire Strikes Back.
We spend family time talking about philosophy, Ronald Knox, GK Chesterton, and the faith, because it's a living thing that we understand and enjoy and apply to our lives, without having to worry about having holier-than-thou rollers in our midst.
Sometimes we talk current events, because the family motto is that we exercise our freedom from the press.
I never really had a rebel phase. Because teenagers are morons, and I didn't want to go near them. I'm the nutbar who waits for marriage, so dating was interesting (read: nonexistent).
Now, riddle me this -- how alike is my family to yours? Granted, if your family is miserable, I can't help you, you don't necessarily have a basis for comparison.
Granted, on the other hand, the more and more I socialize with my fellow Puppy supporters, the more I realize I'm really boring in comparison.
I am a Catholic, born and raised. For me, I'm not sure I have faith. I know there is a God, and, frankly, the tenants of the Catholic church just make sense. So does natural law. I don't think I've ever had a crisis of faith, because all of the arguments I've heard from anti-Theists are stupid, self-centered and arrogant. All the arguments I've heard from simple atheists are .... "I don't believe. Who cares?" And we go on our merry way.
I grew up as the standard fat nerd. When I was in sixth grade, I read The Once and Future King and Mary Stewart's books on Merlin (yes, even The Wicked Day). I read them both for fun.
When I was 16, I wrote 400,000 words of a space opera in my free time. (Yes, I have to rewrite some of it. Also, I have to find the time when I'm not getting requests for Sean Ryan novels and vampire sequels.)
The week after my 18th birthday, I unleashed a song parody of "I have a little list" from The Mikado. I had modified it for my high school, and it had gotten out into the wild. If you've heard the song before, you can understand why that's a problem. If you haven't, go check out a copy on YouTube.
If you've heard the song, and can't figure out what's the matter, I will give you a little bit of context. I was born in March of 1982. So I became 18 in March of 2000.
For those of my readers who might be too young, I'll spell it out. This happened the month before the first anniversary of a school shooting at a place called Columbine.
So ... yeah, you can imagine how well that went over. Though I do have relatives in the legal professional, so that ended as well as could be expected. This is sadly the most interesting thing in my personal life that might be of interest.
When I was in college, I had heard of Krav Maga, and tried teaching myself. And dang, it's fun. Then I took classes, and kept ending up with something going wrong just before my level 2 test. Yup. Murphy's law.
And the majority of the past ten years has been dedicated towards my books. Thankfully, at current rate of speed, I'm starting to catch up for a book a year (right now, call it seven).
So, depending on your point of view, I'm very well adjusted, and I'm a little boring. I've never had any major trauma, and I've been fairly restrained. Then again, that's mostly because I don't want to end up in jail.
But my acquaintances have multiple personalities, and panic attacks and ADHD, and that's just one person. The others are even more colorful.
But, considering how much I've gotten done in the past year alone, it's been an interesting little ride. I have the potential for a shot at a Hugo -- for Sad Puppies Bite Back, if nothing else. Not bad for someone who's only had this blog for 6 years. With luck, my current publisher (Damnation was bought out) wants to get all of their backlogged books published by July. Which kinda means that I'm going to have three books published this year from the publisher, and a third published via self-publishing. And all I have to do is figure out which I want to read at LibertyCon.
Also, maybe a forth. I think I've rubbed the serial numbers off of Sad Puppies Bite Back that, if I should get a Hugo, I'll probably publish it for $.99. We'll see how things turn out by the end of the year.
But not bad, huh? It's a start.
What started off this little reflection on my life? I'll give you a hint....
Page Zaplendam debuts on The Catholic Geek to talk of Regency Vampires, villains, and Catholic fiction, with our host, Declan Finn.
Page Zaplendam is the debut author of Order of the Blood, a Regency Vampire fiction novel. She writes about vampires, a dark age future, and writing. You can find her on FB and Twitter, or on her blog pagezaplendam.com.Page Zaplendam is the debut author of Order of the Blood, a Regency Vampire fiction novel. She writes about vampires, a dark age future, and writing. You can find her on FB and Twitter, or on her blog pagezaplendam.com.
I mentioned in the previous post that you have to have an odd sense of humor to enjoy some of these songs.
Now, just imagine your average British recruit in the 1960s, with a recruiting Sargent spinning yards about pulling duty in the post-war Berlin ... and meanwhile, the recruit is sent to Northern Ireland. Talk about your bait and switch.
For the record, "crag" [sic], pronounced "crack," is Irish slang for a good time.
Yup, another excerpt for Set to Kill. Sorry about that. I guess you'll just have to lived with it a little. Yes. I would have done another article, but these took the wind out of my this week. I just broke 46,000 words on the book in the last two days, as well as wrote the large blogs.
So I'm moving as fast as I can.
With any luck, you can probably finish It Was Only On Stun!, perhaps the Pius Trilogy, before I'm done with this.
Enjoy.
* * * *
Mercenary and part-time
assassin Michael DeValera looked through his telescopic site at the
body of Sean A.P. Ryan. The target was down, one solid impact in the
chest. Cracked sternum? Check. The bullet should have punched a hole
in him big enough to see from there, with enough blood spatter to
look like a mosaic, but the traffic swarmed around Ryan, blocking
DeValera's view.
Everything was according to
plan.
Obviously,
it was far earlier than he had expected. He had spent hours last
night putting up the arrangements, killing the right guards, cutting
the hole in the window. Ryan had to come to the Weston sooner or
later, and the decided lack of traffic comparative to the other
hotels, together with its one good
main entrance, made it inevitable that the target would wander into
his sites sooner or later. Though he had expected it later, in the
evening.
A door smashed in behind
DeValera, and he smiled.
“Release
your weapon, fiend, or die.”
DeValera looked over his
shoulder. It was the elf, swathed in black silk, almost ninja-ish.
That would at least explain how he got there so fast. The blond freak
seemed to appear and disappear at will.
DeValera dropped his rifle in
the extended window sill flower planter at his feet, then stood,
turning to face the thing calling itself an elf.
DeValera looked the blond up
and down. “What are you?” he asked in his perfect diction.
“Dressed for Halloween?”
The elf's eyes narrowed. “You
shall pay for what you have done, villain.”
DeValera smiled. “Come and
get me, little man.”
The elf took one step forward,
and stopped when he heard the click of a land mine under the carpet.
DeValera raised a perfectly
black eyebrow. “Really? You caught that? Oh well, better luck next
time.”
The elf's mouth tightened. He
reached behind his back and flicked a knife right at DeValera's head.
It bounced off of the sheet of bulletproof glass cutting them off
from each other.
“I
did my homework on you people,” DeValera gloated. “I don't get
caught.” He pulled a Zippo from his pocket, light it, and dropped
it in the ledge flower pot with the sniper rifle. The thermite in the
pot burned bright and hot in an instant. “Ciao.”
DeValera started for the wall,
tapped a button in his pocket, and the breacher explosives he put on
the wall blew up, creating an easy opening for him to step through,
leaving the elf to die.
After all, his mines came with
a 30-second timer delay. The elf would either step off and die, or
stand there and die.
He was three floors away when
the mine finally exploded.
At least Ryan stayed in one
piece when I killed him.
This one won't be so lucky.
But this time was a little different. I don't recall how the conversation started, but I remember vividly where it ended up. You see, he was an immigrant from Ireland, and he had just done a seven year stint for murdering his sister's rapist.
Yup. Situation normal for me.
If you are somehow shocked or surprised, don't worry, I wasn't. My attitude was to shrug. I'm relatively certain I would be interested in doing the same if I had been in his circumstances. My Irish compatriot elaborated, stating that he had felt nothing while he offed the son of a bitch in question, and casually mentioned that he cared about who he cared about, and wouldn't have felt much of anything if he had killed any other random person in the area -- though he was careful to point out other people to use as his example. He wasn't trying to intimidate me, merely trying to illustrate a point.
What I didn't know then, but know now, is that sociopaths come in several varying flavors. Though how much of that is "sociopath" and how much is "I scared the shrink" is a topic for another day. In America, the American Psychological Association has decided to make psychopathy and sociopathy lumped into "anti-Social personality disorder."
My general attitude is to say "Oh, screw off."
Let's be real for a moment, shall we? If someone comes into my home and I kill the little bastard, I may be affected by many things, but I will not, under any circumstances, feel guilty over murdering him, her, or it. Given how good I feel after a rousing class of Krav Maga, I may -- and I stress MAY, in large capital letters, as I have never done it -- even feel good about having killed the intruder, if only for no other reason than I survived the ordeal. This would probably have me labeled as a sociopath by most professional shrinks.
Should a someone in the military feel even a speck of guilt over having killed someone trying to kill them? They might, but are they obligated to? Nope. Sorry, but when people are shooting at you, shooting right back at them is the only reasonable course of action.
But if they don't feel guilty about it, congratulations, they get the label of sociopath. And, of course, baby killers, and monsters, and murderers and ...
Yeah, they should just shut the hell up. I call BS on the whole concept of a soldier being automatically "a killer," with all the negative connotations that usually comes with.
It's not even the worst Daniel Craig Bond film I've ever seen.
However, this is the one that pissed me off the most.
Let's start with the good elements: The bit players were great. M, Moneypenny, and Q were quite enjoyable. Even "C" was entertaining, played by Sherlock's Moriarty, Andrew Scott, who is for once, UNDERacting -- and you know he was hired by the Bond people because they particularly wanted to have him fall from a great height, to his death ... because they didn't kill him like that in The Reichenbach Fall, and the Bond people rectified that.
As for the rest of the film?
It sucks. It's dreadful. It's confusing. And worst of all, it's BORING.
The plot is simple: Judi Dench's M has one last mission for Bond -- an assassination, then show up at the funeral. Bond goes, seduces the widow of the man he just assassinated, and is pointed to a secret meeting of Spectre. Bond overhears a name he knows, sees someone who is dead, and is promptly chased out of the meeting. Bond hunts down the person whose name he overheard, and is told to go pick up the girl of the day to find out more. She is of course kidnapped.At this point, I start having major problems.
When the Bond girl du jour is kidnapped from a clinic that looked like it should be owned by Telly Savalas in On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Bond chases the bad guys' three car caravan with a plane. Yes. he's using a plane to chase cars. Now, I've seen Bond films where he is chasing someone through the streets of Moscow on a tank, and where he's been chased down a snowy mountain where Bond was using only one ski ... and yet, somehow, those feel far less absurd than this chase with the plane. Also, those were at least entertaining.
The editing is terrible. At least, I presume it's editing, and not just a terrible script. One moment, we see Bond standing in front of a clinic in the Alps as the bad guys drive away, and the next, he's in an airplane flying after them. Where was the plane? No idea. Did we see it at all in the film before then? Nope. Does he explain? Not at all. It gets worse later on, where Bond gets out of an empty, abandoned and gutted building before it explodes .... by riding out on a perfectly good and usable speed boat that's apparently just left under the building. Yup. Apparently, speed boats are so disposable, it was just left there.
