Erik Wecks's Blog
January 5, 2023
My Literary Agent is the Best!
/*! elementor - v3.9.2 - 21-12-2022 */.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-stacked .elementor-drop-cap{background-color:#818a91;color:#fff}.elementor-widget-text-editor.elementor-drop-cap-view-framed .elementor-drop-cap{color:#818a91;border:3px solid;background-color:transparent}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap{margin-top:8px}.elementor-widget-text-editor:not(.elementor-drop-cap-view-default) .elementor-drop-cap-letter{width:1em;height:1em}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap{float:left;text-align:center;line-height:1;font-size:50px}.elementor-widget-text-editor .elementor-drop-cap-letter{display:inline-block} Well I just finished doing my annual planning for the year, and it’s been a great year personally and professionally. As I said in my last post from about a year ago, I have an agent! In the fall of 2021 Elisa Saphier from MacGregor and Luedecke agreed to take my character-driven book Sugarbug to market. And as I look forward to 2023, I wanted to pause and sing her praises.
Elisa works hard for her clients. She put together an excellent package that took an obviously difficult manuscript—not that many editors would even consider a pandemic book—and got us some great results. The book has yet to sell. (Yes my friends, even after you take years to get an agent, it can take years to actually sell a book. If you want to be a writer, learn to run marathons, not sprints.) But over the course of the year she continued to find new editors that would be a good fit for my work. When I wanted to give up, she didn’t, insisting that we were getting a significant amount of positive feedback. In fact, she’s back at it again here in January with a new list of editors. Clearly, she believes in my book. That’s all I can ask.
Another reason I love my agent is that she communicates well. I get short monthly updates regarding what she’s sent out in the last month and what she plans to send out next month. All of that communication has kept me from going crazy or diving into the conspiratorial defensive parts of my mind. (Trust no one!) Elisa’s communication also extends far beyond just telling me about her hard work on my behalf, she also is an excellent first reader for my manuscripts. In both Surgarbug, where she was a formal beta reader even before she became my agent, and in my work in progress, Elisa’s instincts have been superb. Recently she kept insisting that I needed a different opening scene for my work in progress. I didn’t really agree because I really loved my darling. Well sure enough I eventually wrote myself into a corner and spent yesterday crafting the scene Elisa said the book needed.
Finally, Elisa Saphier cares about books and authors. I once asked her years ago, when she owned a bookstore, “why books?” She looked at me with heat almost bordering on anger and said, “Books save lives.” In books we human beings find that we are not alone. We find that there is a better perspective than our own. We learn to love people who behave strangely to our eyes. Elisa Saphier knows this to her very core. She and I come from very different places in the world. I am a mostly straight-hetero-white-cis-male who still clings to some semblance of his childhood faith, though most of my family worry about my soul. She is an atheist lesbian, who grew up Jewish. She has every right to dismiss me, to declare the package too dangerous, too deluded by privilege and circumstance to be worth her time, but I have never seen her do that to anyone. Instead, Elisa Saphier makes me feel seen and she draws the best of me into my work. I don’t know what else you could ask for in an agent.
The good news for any of you fans is that I hope to have another manuscript to Elisa by the end of the year if not the first quarter of next year. All the Little Cuts and Disappointments (working title), centers on a man who comes home to find his wife having an affair with their evangelical pastor. Similar to Sugarbug the book tells the story of a hetero marriage in crisis and what it takes for a couple to see each other eye to eye. I’m looking forward to getting it in your hands someday. One thing I know, there is no one I would want more as a midwife to those efforts than Elisa Saphier
December 27, 2021
Regeneration
regenerate verb
re·gen·er·ate | \ ri-ˈje-nə-ˌrāt
intransitive verb
1: to become formed again
2: to become regenerate : REFORM
3: to undergo regeneration
transitive verb
1a: to subject to spiritual regeneration
b: to change radically and for the better
2a: to generate or produce anew
especially: to replace (a body part) by a new growth of tissue
b: to produce again chemically sometimes in a physically changed form
3: to restore to original strength or properties
For me, the end of 2021 feels like a beginning of sorts, but human beings—at least adult human beings of a certain age—don’t start fresh, so it also feels like an ending. I’m pleased to announce that my fourth novel, Sugarbug, has quality representation and will be headed out on submission to publishing houses in the new year. It’s really not anything to announce yet. It’s like announcing that you have found a seed. It might become something. It has potential. Or maybe it’s like saying your seed has germinated.
However, for some of my readers Sugarbug will feel like a hard turn, so I thought I ought to take a moment here at the precipice to explain what I’m leaving behind and what I’m keeping as I move forward.
The genesis of this change really started in 2015 when I attended Worldcon 74 in Spokane, Washington. I remember four things about that convention. It was smokey from nearby wildfires. Brandon Sanderson was a cool cat. The panel asking “can you have too much violence in fiction?” was so stacked with horror writers and other aficionados that the question was answered was with a resounding “no” within thirty seconds. And I ended up in a coffee with two editors from Orbit books where I felt like a guy speaking Quenya at a convention where everyone else was head butting and yelling “Qapla.” (I see you my people.)
Those last two experiences left me sitting on the lawn staring at blades of grass trying to understand what it was I wanted to write about. What was the thing that kept me going? The genesis of my sortie into writing fiction had been about writing a male coming of age story that included markers familiar to me, including sex, commitment, and children. That fight to see American male culture gain a measure of emotional IQ, value intimacy, and respect diversity felt urgent to me then, and it feels no less urgent to me today. My Pax Imperium space opera universe was the result. By 2015, I had two novels published, a handful of devoted fans, and a good track record of positive reviews. What I didn’t have were sales.
After reminding myself why I wrote, I soldiered on until 2017 when I published the third novel, Gravlander. The book landed with a thud. I got a few sales from fans, and they wrote positive reviews, but the book went nowhere sales-wise. When sent out for a professional review through net-galley, no one seemed to want to touch it, and the one review I did get back was apoplectic about the fact that I dared create a space opera book centered on the trauma recovery of a female character. The one star review was personal and unnecessarily spiteful. The irony of getting red-faced angry about me writing a book about a person learning to manage their emotions seemed very lost on the male reader.
It was after the publishing failure of Gravlander that I decided it was time to change genres, to find an audience more receptive to my interests. The resulting book, Sugarbug, is a “book club” novel set in the present in the midst of an alternative COVID pandemic. The mission is still the same. I tell stories of personal, usually male, transformation and regeneration. I always have, and I always will, and there are many more to come. I almost always have at least three ideas in my head for viable novels and the time to write only one of them. I’m looking forward to the next one down on paper in 2022. It’s going to be a good year.
March 17, 2018
What is Aetna Adrift’s take on Misogyny?
I feel the need to explain myself. I will make clear why later.
I believe that a major marker of the move from boyhood to adulthood for a heterosexual man is when they grow out of their “means to and end” thinking about women. It’s a theme that comes up in my writing time and time again and will continue to do so. I can think of two short stories I’ve written where this maturing process has a role to play, and most prominently this growing up provides the backbone of Jack Halloway’s emotional arc in Aetna Adrift and continues to be the backbone of his arc in The Far Bank of the Rubicon.
But when we start Aetna Jack is a misogynistic douchecanoe living in an unsustainable sexual fantasy. He’s a player, and he’s forty. (It’s a pretty long run for a player, but not so long when you consider that in the Pax Imperium universe people live to between 120 and 130, with exceptions living to 180 or more.) Jack evaluates women—all women—based upon their ability to make Jack happy. So a woman like his assistant Molly is a valuable part of the team at work because she does her job well, and in Jack’s mind it doesn’t hurt that she’s pleasant to look at, but that is as far as his thinking goes. It never occurs to Jack that Molly is a person like him with fears and desires of her own. Likewise, Anna is for Jack a confusing intrusion, a fly in the ointment of his invulnerability. He cares, although at the beginning I don’t believe Jack could articulate even that simple thought. He only knows that he likes sex better with her than he does with anyone else.
No woman dares directly challenge Jack’s point of view on the world until Chapter 5, and that challenge comes from a married woman who has a post birth mother’s body that Jack doesn’t find pleasing. And so, Jack dismisses her right from the start and sees her challenge as some kind of stress based hysteria, a position that her husband seems to support. (The Unity Corporation is a misogynistic world. That’s the point.)
All of this can combine to make the opening chapters of Aetna Adrift a very difficult read for some women. More difficult still, I wrote Aetna Adrift in close third person. I think that close third is the point of view that asks the reader to identify most closely with the point of view character.
When I read first person point of view, I can always say to myself, “That’s not me. I don’t think that way.” Also, the character is telling you a story about something that happened in the past, and they have their own point of view on that story. If the character is growing up from their misogyny that will be clear in how they tell the story. This is true in my story Eighty-Three in which the narrator tells you that he is embarrassed by his past behavior right at the beginning. This makes his journey a much easier read because we know the outcome from the start. The tension in the story lies elsewhere. I give the readers in Aetna no such luxuries.
When a reader reads a book in close third person, they experience a world in which the narrator’s voice is not quite the same as the point of view character, but it’s not quite different either. The effect is to demand that the reader identify more closely with the point of view character than either third person omniscient or in first person, both of which have distinct narrative voices. In Aetna, I ask the reader to ride along with Jack as he stumbles backward toward intimacy and love. And even at the end of the book, I wasn’t willing to tie it all up in a bow. Jack may have learned to love one woman, but as the very last scene makes clear, he’s still wrestling with seeing all women as people, and as the beginning of Far Bank makes clear, he still has a lot of work to do to learn what it means to love and support a person as an individual.
For some women being asked to identify with Jack is a bridge—or maybe several bridges—too far, and I want to say I understand. It’s okay. No one has to like Jack. Considering what so many women have to live through, it’s understandable that they won’t want to have the requisite compassion to read Jack. That’s just fine.
But I wrote it in close third on purpose. I wanted men to have to challenge their presuppositions about women. Early on I got a review back from a writer friend who said, “So are you arguing that all casual sex is an act of manipulation?” Maybe? All is a strong word, but I think manipulation is a very strong component of most if not all casual encounters. I would say this, I believe that the seduction leading to casual sex is often an act of socially acceptable manipulation. (If it’s not manipulation, why the alcohol to impair judgment?) In another instance, I had another guy tell me I made him really angry when Anna didn’t just go along with Jack’s wishes at the beginning of the second book. That made my day then and still makes me smile today. If I can challenge heterosexual guys to think a little, to look around them and see people as more than a means to an end—even a caring good end—then I will have accomplished one of my goals for Aetna.
Aetna Adrift got a one star review on Amazon this week and I’m okay with that. I don’t really tend to freak out about critical reviews. I actually tend to find them useful. But this particular type of review has happened twice with Aetna. (The first time was on a blog which has since been removed from the internet.) This particular review insinuates that the book revels in misogynistic fantasy and by implication that I do as well. It doesn’t. I don’t. It sets up an exaggerated misogynistic dystopia in order to undermine it. It seeks to end misogyny not support it.
Again, do I have compassion for someone who reads my book in that way? Yes, wholehearted and unreserved. A reader’s experience is their own, and it’s painful to ask women to identify with a misogynist who’s acting out. That alone wouldn’t lead me here to explain myself, but when the implication of the review misreads me as a person, that stings…enough that I haven’t slept well the last couple of nights. When that review is now ranked as the most helpful review on Amazon, that stings even more because it will affect sales going forward. When it’s clear that a reviewer couldn’t finish the book and still felt qualified to comment, it makes me feel powerless, as if my personal reputation is in the hands of another.
All writers, and artists, have to learn the skill of resilience, and all of them are misread at one point or another. This isn’t a career ender. It’s just another stop along the way. But it does feel necessary to set the record straight, at least here.
BY THE WAY, IF ANYONE WHO READS THIS GOES OUT AND IN ANY WAY HARASSES THE PERSON WHO WROTE THE REVIEW, I WILL PERSONALLY BECOME THEIR FIERCEST ENEMY. TO DO SO WOULD GO DIRECTLY AGAINST THE COMPASSION AETNA ADRIFT EXISTS TO CREATE. THE WHOLE POINT IS FOR HETERO MEN TO LEARN TO LISTEN TO WOMEN, TO SEE THEM AS PEOPLE, AND TO UNDERSTAND THE HORRIFIC THINGS A MISOGYNISTIC CULTURE FORCES THEM TO DO. IF YOU’RE NOT ON BOARD WITH THAT, MOVE ALONG AND FIND ANOTHER AUTHOR. I’M NOT YOUR HUCKLEBERRY.
(Whew! I feel better. Maybe I will sleep well tonight.)
January 5, 2018
Pax Imperium Trivia Contest, January 2018
I hide easter eggs in my books, all the time. These connections can be large or small. I find them enjoyable to write, but I write them for you to enjoy. However, I know that many of my readers have missed them completely. It’s just been too long between each book for readers to catch them, and they’re often quite small, a sentence here or there. To help you find them, I decided to highlight one a month with a Pax Imperium trivia game.
Rules:
1. One winner will be chosen from the correct answers. The winner will receive a $10.00 Amazon gift card.
2. Contest ends at midnight January 15th, 2018 Pacific (PDST).
3. To enter the contest add your answer in a comment below this post
Question for Januray 2017:
The House of Athena traces its ancestry back to which early settler on Athena?
Post your answer in the comments below for a chance to win. Good luck.
December 1, 2017
December, 2017 Pax Trivia! Win $10.00 at Amazon.com
I hide easter eggs in my books, all the time. These connections can be large or small. I find them enjoyable to write, but I write them for you to enjoy. However, I know that many of my readers have missed them completely. It’s just been too long between each book for readers to catch them, and they’re often quite small, a sentence here or there. To help you find them, I decided to highlight one a month with a Pax Imperium trivia game.
Rules:
1. One winner will be chosen from the correct answers
2. Contest ends at midnight December 15th, 2017 Pacific (PDST).
3. To enter the contest add your answer in a comment below this post
Question for December 2017:
During the First Pax Imperium War, Jack Halloway receives a smuggled tape of a Brunswickian special forces captain who single-handedly destroyed the Brunswick gate station, allowing the allies to hold the system for five more days. Showing this interview to Anna allows Jack and Anna to begin to track the movements of Elijah Summers during the war and puts them in a position to try and stop him on Pontus.
What was the name of this special forces captain and what story tells of her mission to destroy the station?
Post your answer in the comments below for a chance to win. Good luck.
The Pax Imperium Knowledgebase is Live!
I’ve been talking about it for a couple of years now, but I finally did it. The Pax Imperium Knowledgebase is up and running. This is your glossary for all things Pax.
What’s the Purpose?
In truth, I wrote the knowledgebase to make sure that I didn’t lose track of a character’s name or a ship’s name. So this is really my tool to keep my names and places straight, which will be important in the forth coming Athena’s Revenge, which will revisit many of the places and ships already mentions previously. I decided that rather than keeping these notes to myself I would publish them and give you my fans access to them.
How Can It Help Me?
Do you ever get the sense that you heard a name somewhere before? Or are you curious about when a character, a planet, or a technology was first introduced? This is where you can go to find out. This also where you can go to find out more about the system of gate travel that allows the Pax Imperium to exist. The database is searchable, or you can look through each of the categories and find what you’re looking to find.
What About Spoilers?
I did my best to keep the information as spoiler minimal as possible. My strict rule was that I would present a person or a ship in the way they first present themselves in the Universe. There are a few exceptions but mostly I stick to this rule. I also try very hard to not give away the plot of any Pax Imperium Story. So is it spoiler free? Mostly. I did my best. If there are entries that spoil something for you, please write me at erikwecks@gmail.come and let me know what I need to change.
Can I edit entries?
Not at this time. This isn’t quite a Wiki. I needed the site to be as spoiler free as I could make it, so I’m not willing to open it to editing. However, if you’re just dying to see something added or have an entry changed, pleas feel free to shoot me an email and I happily consider your suggestions for inclusion, and who knows. I might even give you editorial privileges.
What is included?
Right now I have included documentation from Brody, Aetna Adrift, and The Far Bank of the Rubicon. I intend to add Gravlander, the three remaining short stories, and Athena’s Revenge after I finish the latter.
Take a Look
November 14, 2017
Hell Hath no Fury Like a Fan Base Scorned
(The following contains only minor thematic spoilers for Star Trek Discovery and might help you decide if you want to watch it.)
There’s an implicit contract between the Star Trek franchise and its fandom and it goes something like this: The future will be remarkably better than the present because humanity will grow. Star Trek argues the saying “the more things change, the more they stay the same” is a dangerous lie that undermines and distorts human potential. This optimism about human potential and growth is what has made Star Trek different from every other space franchise. In a sixties in which America was throwing off the oppressive conformity of the post war decade, is it any wonder that the original series touched something? Star Trek the original series says, not only will we go to the moon, but we will go further, and we will be better for it.
But the implicit contract with fans goes a step further. Part of the appeal of every Star Trek product is that you go in knowing that you will, in general, see humanity at its best facing down problems that we twentieth century mortals would fail. In this way Star trek functions to call out the best in its fans, to challenge them to evolve and become more like Kirk, Picard, Sisko, and Janeway, and less like the villains these upright and honorable heroes face down each week.
If there are exceptions, they prove the rule. Consider this clip my favorite episode of Deep Space Nine, In the Pale Moonlight. For me it’s the greatest moment in Star Trek history.
In this moment we learn that Sisko is better than us because he can’t do what needs doing without cost to himself. The terrible cost paid? A dirty conscience—a penalty Sisko thinks can live with. This episode and the one before it Inquisition are two of the most hotly debated Star Trek episodes ever produced precisely because they challenge the vision of the future in which humanity has it all together. But in the end, they only provide a needed contrast, a way to highlight the true culture of Star Fleet. In Star Trek, humanity has become honorable, and fans watch it to enlarge their hope that in the future we as a species will follow that path.
Every show, and every film has been faithful to this vision, until now. Star Trek Discovery has gleefully placed a photon torpedo right through the vulnerable neck of this contract, and he’s sitting in the captain’s chair, and I think fans have a right to feel betrayed. This isn’t the Star Trek they love, not by any means. Captain Lorca would murder and lie every day of the week and twice on Sundays if it would bring him a victory in the Federation war with the Klingons, and he’d have no twinge of conscience at all. Worse still he is the Anti-Picard. A devil who regularly manipulates his crew for his own purposes, using their naivety and Star Fleet goody-two-shoes attitudes for his own dishonorable purposes. This is a universe in which humanity has not finished its evolution.
I understand their anger, but I don’t share it. In fact, I think that the first nine episodes of Star Trek Discovery have been one of the most enjoyable media experiences I’ve had in a long time. I can’t recall the last time a Star Trek show had me cry, and I did cry during episode nine, and I was glad about it. That might be a first for me when it comes to television. I’m a writer, and most of the time when you ring an emotion out of me, I know I’m being conned. I can see the man behind the curtain, and I am pissed that you made me feel anything. (I’m looking at you Sherlock.) Not this time. This time I loved it.
Are there problems with the show. Yes, tons. A long list of them that I won’t mention here. Most of all, I’m not at all sure that I trust the writers. I’m not sure they understood the contract when the broke it. And so I’m not sure they won’t permanently screw up a franchise that was already reeling from J.J. Abrams. There’s a lot riding on Discovery, if it goes badly Star Trek could end up in the dustbin, and CBS will have no clue what they did. They already decided to sue their fans and set harsh rules on fan films, a totally stupid move. Managing a fanbase is an act of judo not karate, you don’t attack them, you use their momentum to make them go where you want them to go.
STAR TREK: DISCOVERY. Photo Cr: Michael Gibson/CBS © 2017 CBS Interactive. All Rights Reserved.
So why don’t I share a fan’s anger over the loss of an optimistic future in Discovery? There are a couple of reasons. First, the optimistic future is all over the Discovery, it’s just not in the Captain’s chair. The values of Star Trek reside in the crew, and that is a major change, but IF—and it’s a huge if—the writers allow those values to rise to the surface and overcome the broken humanity on the Discovery, then we will have something. The franchise might be preserved. My writer “spidey sense” is that this is the direction of the overall plot, but it remains to be seen what they do long term because this battle between the captain and the values is set up as the central conflict of the show. It’s like a “will they or won’t they” dynamic on a rom-com. When they do, the show is over. So I worry that they will extend this battle far too long into the future, but there is still a chance the writers will handle it well.
Second, the zeitgeist has changed since 1966 or even 1996, and I think this dynamic of the crew at first being manipulated by and then hopefully fighting against the captain is a good metaphor for the present. No one trusts our government in the United States, and outside of the bros in silicon valley, technology based optimism has rightfully tempered. If the values of decency and optimism and hope reside anywhere, it is with the people of the United States, and not with her Captains. In this way, I think Discovery is right to put the values of Gene Roddenberry and his vision of the future under stress. In so doing the show challenges us to preserve them and not be naive when the politicians come calling and ask us to use them for their own purposes.
The jury is still out on these two hopes of mine. It remains to be seen if Discovery will place Star Trek values back at the center of the franchise. I for one hope they will. I hope this will mean a comeuppance for Lorca and not a redemption. I’m secretly hoping that Michael Burnham will face the same decision she did in episode one and have to make the same call. That would be good television indeed.
November 3, 2017
Pax Imperium Trivia Contest! Win $10.00 at Amazon.com
I hide easter eggs in my books, all the time. Did you know that a character from each of the four stories in Unconquered is either mentioned or appears in The Far Bank of the Rubicon? These connections can be large or small. I find them enjoyable to write, but I write them for you to enjoy. However, I know that many of my readers have missed them completely. It’s just been too long between each book for readers to catch them, and they’re often quite small, a sentence here or there. To help you find them, I decided to highlight one a month with a Pax Imperium trivia game.
Rules:
1. One winner will be chosen from the correct answers
2. Contest ends at midnight November 15th, 2017 Pacific (PDST).
3. To enter the contest add your answer in a comment below this post
Question for November 2017:
Calliope is the name of a warship in the Pax Imperium universe. An event involving that ship has a significant impact on two major characters in the Pax Imperium. I want to know which two Pax Imperium stories mention the Calliope, what happened to the Calliope, the two characters affected by the Calliope, and how the Calliope changed their story.
Post your answer in the comments below for a chance to win. Good luck.
(If it were me I’d totally do a word search on my kindle.)
October 28, 2017
Star Wars, Civil War, and Suppressors
The day after the Las Vegas shooting Hillary Clinton tweeted, “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get,” which caused the Washington Post to write this story titled, “Why the debate over gun suppressors isn’t really relevant to what happened in Las Vegas.” The article explained that suppressors don’t work that way. A gun of the type used by the shooter makes quite a loud racket even with a silencer. People would still have run from gunshots.
Where did Hillary Clinton get the notion that an assault rifle could be made quiet by a silencer? I don’t know, but probably the same place where I did. The movies, where a silencer sounds like this:
Compare that to this video of an American military sniper training in Afghanistan:
So you’re probably not sneaking up on the sergeant major with that sound.
Clinton’s mistake illustrates why I am not a big fan of the overall tenor of violence in current storytelling (visual and written). Its lack of balance fools all of us into thinking differently about how violence works and its effects, and that makes all of us less capable of making good decisions when our government decides to use force on our behalf.
That’s one of the main reasons I wanted to tell the story I did in Gravlander. I wanted to show that a story that dealt somewhat more accurately with the aftermath of violence could still be entertaining. You can judge the results for yourself. I think I succeeded, and so do my core group of fans.
One area that particularly disturbs me in most films and novels is the lack of conscience, grief, or unforeseen consequences when violence is used by the good guys. I’m not a pacifist. In fact, I have a bit of a hawkish streak that I have to consciously keep in check. (It’s one reason I would make a terrible President. At first, I supported Bush’s Iraq war because I trusted Colin Powell. Yeah, mea culpa.)
But I tire of story telling that let’s X-wing pilots kill people hidden in their various masks without any thought to their humanity. The masks are necessary so that we the audience are spared their dying faces. Death in any meaningful sense would make Star Wars movies too heavy and damage the brand. Unless something changes, no one will ever die from a severed artery in a Star Wars film like they do in Iraq or Afghanistan. And better still, since we have conveniently manufactured an army of clones (episode 1-6), we need not worry about a child whose father will not come home or any other “collateral damage.”
The Marvel Civil War movie at least nods to the consequences of unchecked violence, but feels to me to be the exception that proves the rule. It exists so we can get back to Thanos and the coming infinity stone war. (Hey, the whole of the universe is at stake, right? What’s a few skyscrapers compared to that.) Civil War is also capped with the most ridiculous civilian revenge plot imaginable. I should be clear, I enjoyed Civil War as a film until the story collapsed under its own weight after the airport fight scene, just as I enjoy the Star Wars films.
But I wonder what it says about us as a nation that we seem to have a much higher craving for these kinds of films with their exaggerated heroism and violence without consequences than we do for stories that offer more realistic pictures of the human condition. Escape? Certainly. I’m all for it. I write it. But escape all the time, or even most of the time, I worry about. I worry even more about those who escape without being mindful that they are doing so.
There were several people who were armed and ready at the concert in Las Vegas. None of them fired back. Somehow, for each one, the heroic scenarios they imagined in order to carry a gun didn’t turn out like they thought they would.
October 25, 2017
Gravlander is Available in Paperback and Kindle
Gravlander has finally landed!
Here are all the links you need:
