Aaron Saylor's Blog, page 5

Dogwoods vs. dog shit.

OK, folks. I meant to tell you this earlier. As you may have noticed, Adventures in Terror with Jasper Bohanon: Book One didn’t come out in December, even though it’s actually finished. Here’s why.

As the book came down the homestretch, I began wondering if it was really the best idea to split it into Book I and Book II. After much consideration, I have decided against that. Sometimes it seems important to have a lot of different titles out there, the notion being that there are a lot of bottles floating in the sea and the more bottles that have your name on them, the better chance that you’ll get lucky and somebody will actually pluck one out of the water, like what they find, then go diving for more bottles with your name on them.

But really, this goes against my most basic philosophy, which is that QUALITY RULES ALL. Or how about this: dogwoods are great year ’round, but dog shit sticks around for only a few days before the bugs eat it. Better to write and release one strong piece of work than rush out several mediocre ones just for the sake of having a longer list of search results under “Aaron Saylor.” I have to remember why I am doing this: not to make money, not to get Facebook likes, not to have Twitter followers. I’m doing this for the stories. I think they are worth sharing.

The truth is, Adventures in Terror was originally conceived as one book, then later split to A) allow me to release it sooner because I love it that much, and can’t wait to get it to you, and B) have two separate titles. In hindsight, that was a bad choice. But I’m fixing it.

The story was first plotted as one book, and I know – I guess I’ve always known – that as one book it should remain. Trying to make it something it isn’t will only hurt. It’ll hurt the book, it’ll hurt Grady and Jasper, and worst of all, it’ll hurt me. The publishing world is tough enough as it is, cluttered with mediocrity if not outright garbage, and I’d prefer to put out the very best book I can. If it takes a few more weeks, so be it.

I promise, the world will get Adventures in Terror later this year. If the wait breaks your heart, I’m sorry. I truly am. Just know that that we’ll both be the better for it, okay?

preview ADVENTURES IN TERROR!

You can now read a preview of Adventures in Terror with Jasper Bohanon, an 11,000-word story called “Me and Jasper and the Summer of ’86.” It’s an e-book exclusive, but never fear — if you can read this post, then there’s also a free Kindle app for whatever device you’re using.

The story will give you a good idea of the novel’s nostalgic flavor, which draws heavily on horror, science fiction, and other popular media from the ’80s and ’90s. (For some of you, the cover above is a dead give-away about that.) But don’t just take my word for it – click on the story link and see for yourself. And if you enjoy “Me and Jasper and the Summer of ’86” (like I think you will), feel free to spread the word and leave your review on Amazon and Goodreads!

RIP, Ms. Howell.

Fold your paper to the margin one last time. RIP, Ms. Howell. (Borrowed that from April Dawn, but it seems like the best line to say.)

My 6th grade English teacher passed away yesterday. She was from a different part of the world – the northeastern U. S., I think, Massachusetts or New York maybe, although I really can’t remember for certain and anyway, it might as well have been the planet Saturn to a 12-year-old from Eastern Kentucky . She favored Hush Puppies shoes and horn-rimmed eyeglasses that were a few years out of style, and never could quite get her pants long enough. Maybe that was because she was eight feet tall. She looked eight feet tall to me at the time. I still remember her looking like that, too; isn’t it funny, how we move along in our lives, but we think of people as they looked when we first knew them, as though they looked that way for the rest of their lives?

Also, Ms. Howell drove a dark green Volkswagen. It was an older model, a little beat up, and there were places where the paint peeled and you could see the primer underneath. I doubt she cared much, though; she never seemed like the type to be bothered by something as small as that. I like to think she drove that car for her entire life and I suppose that’s just something else she will always have in my mind. Right now, I can’t remember if it was a Rabbit or a Beetle but I’m pretty sure it was one or the other.

Oh. I do remember that she taught in a Vietnamese village during the War. I remember that clearly because she talked about it sometimes in class. Even as a kid, I thought teaching Vietnamese villagers was a pretty damn brave thing to do; I hate to go outside in the rain, much less halfway around the world where it rains artillery shells and napalm.

In sixth grade, most of the kids thought Ms. Howell was pretty weird, and I’d be lying if I said I was any different. But looking back on it through the years, I started thinking of her as one of the coolest teachers I ever had. I don’t know how much she might have changed over the years, but I don’t need to know. Sometimes I just prefer to keep people the way they were.

Aaron

P.S.

I posted this on Facebook yesterday, but have now added the link to Ms. Howell’s obituary. There’s a picture, and it looks exactly how I remember her, except with bigger eyeglasses. Also, the obit confirms that she was born in Queens, New York (not Massachusetts), on Christmas Day. How about that.

ADVENTURES IN TERROR… coming soon.

 

I want to share something with you, just because I’m excited about this book. Here is the complete chapter listing for ADVENTURES IN TERROR WITH JASPER BOHANON, BOOK ONE: 1975-1996. And to quote a refrain from the book, maybe you know what’s comin’, and maybe you don’t.

- Home

- Jasper

- Me and Jasper in the Summer of ’86

- Infinity

- Me and Jasper and the Bitch in the Woods

- Me and Jasper Save Evie from the Dead

- Banshee

- Church Ladies

- Me and Jasper and the Satanic Panic

- Darkness

- Midnight

- Me and Jasper Down by the Meth Shack

- Graduation Day

- Me and Jasper and the Return of the Hopkinsville Goblins

- Harbingers

PART II: Why I hate the show JUSTIFIED, even though I have never watched it, and never will.

Okay. Before I finish this story, there’s a little clean-up required. A couple of you pointed out that Part One might be construed as taking a shot at the Clay City police department in general and Chief James T. Kirk in particular for their interaction with the Justified reps, which is not at all what I intended. I apologize for not being clearer. I’ve got no reason to impugn James – he always seemed like a good guy to me and I’ve no reason to think he’s anything other than a good Chief, too. That’s worth saying.

I stand by the “O.J. is innocent” story, though.

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As promised. Back to Sewerville.

Like I was saying in the last post, my friends got an audience at the F/X network and pitched them the story of Sewerville. While this is happening, I am back here in Lexington, KY, oblivious to all of it, until one day I get a phone call from my friend telling me about his meetings, and asking if I would be interested in pursuing The Mountain as a television series.

Of course I was interested. This was in 2007, seven years after I first came up with the story, and by then I was interested in pursuing just about any route that would get the story to a bigger audience. If someone had offered to put it on with a college drama class I’d have jumped at the chance. I actually even considered adapting it into a play and trying to get a slot performing locally with mostly my friends in the cast, none of whom have any acting experience that I know about., not to mention the fact that I have zero experience a) writing a play or b) directing a play.

(We actually did do this when I first started writing the script. We read the opening scene in the living room of my apartment, with Daxon Caudill playing the key role, and quite well I might add. Maybe someday…)

So we worked on developing Sewerville as an F/X show. Notes and drafts went back and forth and after a few weeks, we had a basic episode-by-episode synopsis for the first season (12 episodes in all), and a script for the pilot. You can read the pilot here – if you’ve never read a screenplay, the red text and asterisks in the margin signal revisions made along the way – and you can read the synopsis here. I’m putting them out there for the same reason I wrote the novel. No need to keep it hidden in the desk forever. And who’s going to steal it now, anyway?

By the way, the script is rather salty. If you are sensitive to that, this is me saying I’m sorry in advance. I just let it go and figured that if they cut 95% of the profanity the show would still have the most cursing in TV history, which in itself would be worth at least a little bit of notoriety. The Scarface method.

Aside from all the cussin’, now that I’m reading the pilot script again for the first time in a few years, I’m reminded of all the things I liked about it in the first place.  The story features all of the darkness and family drama that eventually wound up in the novel Sewerville, and also – especially – the hazy, dreamlike memories that later became such a big part of the book. It’s these moments that I think helped move Sewerville away from the toothless hillbilly stereotypes that have dominated so many Hollywood representations of the Appalachian region in shit like Next of Kin and The Beverly Hillbillies. Moments that would have made Sewerville the series seem different, like this:

 

Overall, I was pretty happy with our work. I figured that if F/X was intrigued enough with the idea to ask us for a pilot script, then the script I wrote would not disappoint.

That’s when the notes started rolling.

Over the course of a year and half, we got notes, suggesting one change or another. Most of them weren’t really that major, so I was happy to oblige. The thing is, by that time even at my (very) low level on the food chain, I knew that when you gave people your script with the hope that they would put up the money to give it life onscreen, those people wanted input. That input meant they gave you notes.

Sometimes the notes were valid, and sometimes they were awful. If I thought it was valid, I had no problem making the change, because after all, that’s just constructive criticism. You know – everything for the story. If the notes were bad… well, usually there were enough good notes that you could use those, show you were paying attention to the input you’d been given, and that would mostly satisfy. Occasionally a producer or other reader would be truly married to an idiotic idea and you’d have to plead your case, but really, that didn’t happen to me that often. Most of the people we worked with in trying to get Sewerville made for TV or film gave us legit ideas to consider.

Anyway, back and forth we went for something like a year and a half.

Characters came and went, plot points changed, but overall the basic story remained the same. We made incremental progress, but it was progress just the same.  And like I said, I’d been working on this thing off and on with different folks for seven years now, so I was used to moving at a snail’s pace.

After a few months, we were given word to try telling the whole thing from a female perspective. Supposedly, F/X was by that time looking for series with strong female leads. In hindsight, I should have known that was the beginning of the end, but at the time I just figured it was one last hurdle, hopefully the final hurdle, and an opportunity to get creative.

We did that.

And it sucked.

Personally, I think I write good female characters. (Maybe everyone who writes female characters thinks they do it well.) I was “raised by women” as the saying goes, and ain’t ashamed of it one bit. My mom and her sisters taught me a hell of a lot about this world, and they still do, every day. Between mom and my aunts and my sister and two first cousins who are just like sisters, my brother and I were often surrounded by women and you just can’t help but learn something about them in that situation. Or so I’d like to believe. And of course, eight years ago I met my wife, and she’s perfect, so that helps, too.

Still, Sewerville from a woman’s point of view – that sucked. Was it the idea? I don’t know? The writing? I don’t know. But it was something. We batted that back and forth for a few months.

Then nothing.

After that, I didn’t hear about Sewerville for a while.  This didn’t surprise me, since the last few years had seen plenty of times where I didn’t hear about it for a while. I just let my friends in L.A. do their thing, knowing they would call when the time was right. You can drive yourself crazy waiting by the phone and by then, I was master of not doing that.

At some point, Leslie and I were at a movie theater. I don’t remember the exact location and I have no idea what film we were there to see, either. All I know is that the pre-movie ads started playing and right there in front of me unspooled the first preview for Justified on F/X.

Leslie was actually the first one that realized what we were seeing.”They stole your idea!” she said. I wasn’t far behind her, though, and just buried my face in my hands.

I knew they hadn’t stolen my idea – after all, Justified is based on some Elmore Leonard stories, the first of which dates to the early ‘90s – but as soon as I saw the trailer I also knew exactly what happened to our show. F/X had kept us in development while they were developing Justified simultaneously, making sure that we couldn’t take Sewerville to another outlet and perhaps beat them to the punch with a gritty, morally gray show set in Eastern Kentucky while never having any real intention to put our how on the air.

This is actually not uncommon.  Television is a business and networks have to protect their interests. If you’re F/X and you’re going to air a violent crime drama set in the rural South – a risky prospect at the time, regardless of how successfully it turned out —  which one are you going with: Elmore Leonard’s Justified, or Aaron Saylor’s Sewerville? Well, who the fuck is Aaron Saylor? Exactly.

So I don’t hold any anger about it. Actually, I do hold some anger, but I try to think about things in a cold, logical, objective way and keep myself from losing my mind at a bitter young age. Like I said, it happens. It happened. Time to move on.

In this case, I moved on by writing Sewerville, the novel. I don’t work much on screenplays anymore, either; I’ve gone back to prose, where I can control 100% of the story and not have to worry about budgets or notes from others. I can write the story my way and live with results. I’ve published a collection of shorter works with my friend Kevin Hall (Lost Change and Loose Cousins), and later this year my next book Adventures in Terror with Jasper Bohanon gets released into the world. After that, I’ve got a few other things working, and sooner or later I’ll get back to the long-threatened Sewerville: Book II, which expands the story into the corrupt halls of state government and interstate drug trafficking.

Mostly, the F/X stuff with Sewerville is buried behind me. It comes up every now and then and I just laugh. “The book is way better,” I’ll say. (It’s true, by the way.)

But this week, seeing that photo of Justified invading the very place where I grew up, that just sucked for me. I have to tell you that.  It sucked for me hard. But now, I’ve written about it, you’ve read about it, and I feel better. By the way, this story in two parts is far and away the most read posts on both Sewerville.com and my Facebook page. Thank you for indulging me.

People seem to compare Sewerville to Justified a lot. They mean it as a compliment and I honestly take it that way. Still, it’s a pinprick at my soul every time. I appreciate the positive associations, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit they make the bile rise in my throat just a little bit.

It’s a Me problem. I get that.

Do I hold anything personally against the makers of Justified? No. (Would they notice, even if I did? No.) Timothy Olyphant could well be a swell guy. Hell, I like his work, especially in The Crazies and Live Free or Die Hard, which seemingly everyone else hated. Elmore Leonard’s dead now but I always like his work, too. The Justified gang that visited Powell County aren’t just a bunch of assholes, either; they don’t know me and as far as I know they don’t anything about Sewerville or its brush with their network. They were just doing their jobs. I may have felt it like a swift kick to the taint, but still, they were just doing their jobs.

To repeat: I am not here to crush the show. That would be stupid, like farting into a jet engine; it might make a little noise but ultimately the only thing it’s gonna do is burn my ass. All I’m here to do is explain something that hit me yesterday, when that innocuous photograph came across my Facebook news feed. I have been open about the fact that I’ve never watched Justified, other than the few minutes of footage that played in that theater a few years ago, promoting the series debut.

As the title of the post says, I’ve never seen the show, and I never will see the show. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t watch it, though. Have at it. Maybe it’s great. But to quote Pulp Fiction, sewer rat might taste like pumpkin pie, but I’d never know ‘cause I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.

Done.

Why I hate the show JUSTIFIED, even though I have never watched it, and never will.

Yesterday, a picture came across my Facebook feed from Back Home, and it kind of broke my heart. Those of you that know me best know that heartbreak is not something to which I often admit, but this time… yeah. Heartbreak.

Apparently some folks from the F/X television show Justified were in town, doing research for their series. “Back home” for me means Powell County, Kentucky, forty or so miles southeast of Lexington and more or less the sort of small Kentucky town where most of Justified reportedly takes place.  I say “reportedly” because although I am vaguely familiar with its trappings, I’ve never actually seen the show, and for a particularly good reason which I am about to explain to most of you for the first time, I never will.

More on that in a minute, though. For now, just know this picture came across my news feed and as soon as I saw it, I hung my head, smacked my fist on the table, and typed a few different angry Twitter and Facebook updates that I immediately deleted before I made too big of an ass of myself in public. I did manage a single, somewhat sane post about it, though, in sharing that pic through my page so the rest of the world might somehow share in my miserable moment. (Didn’t you?)

Anyway, here is my post, and the photograph in question:

 Yes, that was the “sane” version of my post. The first few attempts were a bit more harsh and featured many, many F-bombs.

So who are the people in the picture? The gentleman in the police uniform is James T. Kirk, police chief of the Clay City department , Clay City being one of the two primary towns in Powell County. (I grew up on the other, rural end of the county.) Yes, his name is really James T. Kirk, at least, he told me it was really James T. Kirk back in the days when we both frequented the same public basketball courts. Another funny story about him is that in 1994, he was playing outfield in a baseball game and in between pitches, shouted “O.J. IS INNOCENT!” and shut the game down for a few seconds while everybody paused to control their laughter. This was maybe 2 or 3 days after OJ Simpson killed his wife and her boyfriend. It really doesn’t have anything to do with this story I’m telling you now, I just find it amusing.

Anyway, James T. Kirk. Chief of Police in Clay City, Kentucky. I am sure that his nose for justice is a bit more refined these days.

The rest of those people in the picture? The guy in the red shirt could be local, I’m not sure; he kind of has the same haircut I do. The other folks, well, those must be the aforementioned Justified folks. I don’t know any of their names and they certainly don’t know mine, but I do know that seeing them in Powell County, Kentucky, smiling and playing up their “Hollywood” status, makes me want to pick up my chair and shove it clean through the center of this damn computer screen.

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Chances are, if you’re reading this, you are aware that I wrote a novel a couple of years ago called Sewerville. (If you’re not aware, and you were wondering why this site is called Sewerville.com, consider that mystery explained.) It’s a dark, emotional book, with a clutchful of amoral characters – mountain gangsters, corrupt lawmen, drug dealers, drug addicts. Crime abounds; a lot of people die. A dead cow even figures into the plot. It’s pretty seedy stuff, as you would expect from a book subtitled  A Southern Gangster Novel. Also as you would expect from a Southern gangster novel, family ties and dark histories run throughout.

I don’t mind saying, I’m proud of that book.  (I also don’t mind saying that if you haven’t read it, you should saunter on over here and remedy that situation.)  It expresses what I wanted it to express, readers give it mostly positive reviews, and I guess a writer can’t ask for much more than that.

Full disclosure: there are a lot of places and characters in Sewerville that are taken from Powell County. Those close to me already know that, and those who aren’t close to me probably still assume it. Nothing’s ripped straight, but a lot of real bits and pieces are combined to make a new, and yet still familiar, fictional whole. Some might cringe at the nastier parts – the meth making, the prescription drug abuse, and so forth – but hey, that’s the way it is. Not just in eastern Kentucky, but throughout rural America.

I always thought somebody could make a movie set in that world. In fact, I’ve been trying to do that for several years.  Sewerville the novel actually began life as a screenplay called The Mountain, which was named for the Steve Earle song of the same name about Eastern Kentucky coal miners that features these lyrics:

I was young on this mountain but now I am old  

And I knew every holler, every cool swimmin’ hole  

‘Til one night I lay down and woke up to find  

That my childhood was over and I went down in the mine

There’s a hole in this mountain and it’s dark and it’s deep  

And God only knows all the secrets it keeps  

There’s a chill in the air only miners can feel  

There’re ghosts in the tunnels that the company sealed

For me, those lines are about so much more than coal mining. They’re also about how we’re haunted by our own pasts, and how hard it is to outrun the ghosts no matter how hard we try, and how in a place like fictional Sewardville, Kentucky, it’s just about damned impossible.

Like I said, I thought it would be a good movie.

At the time I was first thinking that, I also was trying to break into the world of screenwriting. I had written a few that were mostly bad, and a couple that I thought were pretty good. The Mountain was the third. I wrote the screenplay in the latter half of 2000, while I was working for a production company in Nashville, and I felt like it was the best I could do at the time. Upon completion, I gave it to the folks that owned the production company, (I’m keeping them anonymous here) and as it turned out, they liked the story as much as I did. I figured, okay, these guys love it, this will be easy. We’ll get this thing made in a year or two and my screenwriting career will take off like a jackrabbit with a lit firecracker up its ass.

Now understand, I know very little – I know less than very little – about the film business. Actually I know only one thing: it takes a fucking miracle to get a movie made. It takes a fucking miracle, and that is the absolute truth. It’s just too easy for people to find an excuse to tell you “no, ” for marketing reason this or budgetary reason that. Whether we’re talking a big studio tentpole with a $250 million bankroll or the tiniest independent film financed by the savings accounts of dentists and foot doctors, trying to get a “yes” on these things is like trying to squeeze water from your own belly button. Yes, some people have done it, but nobody’s ever had fun doin’ it.

And when it comes to The Mountain, my friends have gotten close to a “yes” more than once.  So far, though, it just hasn’t happened for us.

One of the times we got the closest, thought, was in 2007-8, when my friends approached a prominent cable channel with the idea for a television series based on The Mountain. The show would be set in the same Eastern Kentucky world as the film script; the main story and characters would be the same, plus we’d add several more characters and plotlines, enough to flesh out the show universe and support  an entire series across multiple episodes and seasons.

Basically, the first twenty-five pages of the screenplay were expanded and became the pilot script, while the rest of the movie’s plot played out over the course of the first season, along with all the other new ideas we worked in.   I thought it was a little weird at first, thinking of our little movie in this new light, but by the time we put together the whole story, I could see it really working. It was a solid, emotional tale, and just as importantly, it had a unique setting and group of characters that just weren’t on TV at that time.  If they were on TV, they were hillbilly caricatures. We made them something more. Our story was dark, violent, but also (I dare say) thoughtful.

The contacts at F/X agreed.

F/X, the home of Justified.

This was before Justified, of course.

More accurately, as we would find out later, it was at the same time they were developing Justified.

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PART II of this story comes tomorrow. Just to foreshadow, I’m not suggesting Justified ripped off The Mountain/Sewerville; I’m being very clear about the fact that they were only developing both at the same time. It happens. From what I understand, it happens a lot.

But this story is not about Justified.  It’s about Sewerville, and it’s about me. And I’m going to tell you the rest of it in a few hours, because that picture of some Justified folks showing up in my home county – the county that served as the basis for the novel Sewerville, which came from the script for The Mountain, which became the would-be television series that was in the hands of F/X at the same time as Justified, the same Justified which today reaps critical acclaim and millions of fans… well, like I said. That picture of Chief of Police James T. Kirk and the smiley folks from F/X peeled back an old wound.

So, I had a little heartbreak yesterday. Bear with me on this.

See you tomorrow.

Aaron

Some Tips And Tricks For Writing Good Horror Fiction

Aaron Saylor:

Some folks out there could really use this advice.

Originally posted on PekoeBlaze - the official blog:

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when I really discovered horror fiction, but it was probably when I was about thirteen or so and happened to discover a copy of “Assassin” by Shaun Hutson on a market stall.

The cover art was wonderfully grotesque and vaguely reminiscent of the old 1980s video nasties with “PREVIOUSLY BANNED” stamped on the cover which I used to notice in video/DVD shops but, unfortunately, looked far too young to actually buy. Of course, after noticing the thankful lack of an “18 certificate” on the cover of “Assassin”, I bought it immediately.

It was nothing like any of the watered-down Young Adult “horror” stories I’d read before and it seemed exactly like what I imagined the “PREVIOUSLY BANNED” horror movies would be like (of course, when I eventually bought a few of these, I was actually kind of disappointed…) It was gruesome…

View original 1,926 more words

Album review: Josh Nolan, FAIR CITY LIGHTS

Fair City Lights, the debut album of Kentuckian Josh Nolan, wears its influences the way an old man wears his jailhouse tats — the jagged ink not only sits there on the surface for everyone to see, it also burns in the skin, through the layers, into the marrow. It’s not just part of the old man; in a lot of ways, it’s who he is.

I’m guessing music is that tattoo for singer-songwriter Josh Nolan. It’s not just a part of him; it’s who he is. 

The classic bloodlines come through clean when you listen to Fair City Lights – bits of Springsteen there, Ryan Adams over here, John Prine and Neil Young, and Tom Waits over there, with lesser gods like Colin Linden, Loudon Wainright III lurking around the edges. But really, that’s all you hear – bits of the classics. Tributes, really. The rest is absolute, pure Josh Nolan, running his influences through a cement mixer, creating something unquestionably his own, singing about small town hearts and big-city dreams in a way that I haven’t heard in a long time.

In a world filled to the point of bursting with ironic songwriters and cookie cutter folk acts, it’s good to hear some straight up rock music again.

Though Nolan’s influences are apparent, he’s not running away from them. At times he even seems to be playing a game with his audience, tossing in the occasional ‘70s songwriter lyric or musical reference, just to see if we’re paying attention. “Between the Lights,” the album’s Mellencampesque finisher (Mellencampesque? Has that word been used before?), features an extended, rapid-fire string of references that start with Springsteen’s “Mary’s dress sways as the screen door slams” then rolls on through Bob Seger, (“way out past where the woods got heavy”), Don Maclean (it all dried up, but we made it to the levy”), and more.

In a lot of ways, Fair City Lights isn’t just a throwback, it’s a time capsule. These songs feel right at home in the rotation with the aforementioned Prine, Waits, et. al.. And let’s not forget Springsteen. Above all, Springsteen floats above this record like a favorite uncle looking down from Heaven – and not the bombastic, quasi-religious, borderline self-parody Springsteen that’s roamed the earth since he got the E-Streeters back together in the early 2000s, either. No, Josh Nolan has more in common with the early Springsteen, the Greetings from Asbury Park/Born to Run/Darkness on the Edge of Town/The River Springsteen, in no small part because his own natural voice sounds not just a little like the Boss of that era. Songs like“Come Mornin’”and “Do It Right” echo folky Bruce perfectly, while the screeching guitar (and accompanying glockenspiel) that opens “Waitin’ on the Night” proudly gives a shout out to Born To Run in a way that few folks even attempt these days.

That’s not to say that Fair City Lights is some shallow whipped-cream imitation of the real thing. Truth be told, it’s far from that. As any drink snob can tell you, the best wine or bourbon is so much more than the sum of its ingredients. I’m no alcohol connoisseur – I’ve never been able to taste plums or currants in my cabernet no matter how much the label says they’re in there -  but I damn sure know great music when I hear it. Josh Nolan and Fair City Lights fit the bill.

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Fair City Lights hits itunes, Amazon.com, and Spotify, among others, on April 4. Visit Josh Nolan at joshnolanmusic.com

So long, True Detective. We will miss you.

My thought about the True Detective finale: as a season ender, greatness. Moody, haunting, and thought provoking, just like we all wanted. But as a series ender — and let’s face it, this series is over, with brand new characters and storyline for next year — it didn’t quite fulfill the promise of what came before. Too many threads and allusions left unattended. I’ll take this back if they pick up the storyline next season, using different main characters to attack it from another angle, but I haven’t seen any suggestion that’s happening.

And here’s one SPOILER ALERT: that spinning blue vortex at the end could work so much better if they would just stop saying it was one of Rust’s drug flashback hallucinations. (Or so I have read in a few reviews and interviews today.) Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if they left it open to interpretation?

ROBOCOP does it right.

Let me make this quick. Has nothing to do with writing but as you know, I like to post about my favorite movies and television shows on here as much as I do about my books, because I think it’s all intertwined in the total package of Me. And dammit, this is My blog.

The new Robocop is without question one of the best – if not the best – of all the science fiction and horror remakes/reboots we’ve gotten in the last decade or so. I had expectations going in based on the many trailers that were released, and I did not walk out disappointed.

I consider myself a connoisseur of the original Robocop. It’s one of my favorite movies and I’ve seen it way more times than I could ever count. I usually write to movies playing in the background, and it’s high in the rotation, right up there with the Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Alien, and Friday the 13th series(es?). Never cared much for the Paul Verhoeven-less Robocop sequels, but still, I love the first one.

I put the 2014 version right up there with it.

Now, these are two different types of films. No question. And for me, each version is superior to the other in some areas. The best way I can describe it is to say that the 1987 version was perfect for the 12-year old Aaron, and the 2014 version is perfect for the 38 year old Aaron:

1987 ROBOCOP strengths: social satire, cartoon violence, theme music, classic lines, (“Can you flyyyyyyyy, Bobby?,” “BITCHES LEAVE.”), the characters of Bob Morton and Clarence Boddicker. The 2014 version never even attempts a Clarence Boddicker-type character, which is a smart move, since there can be only one Clarence J. Boddicker.

2014 ROBOCOP strengths: political satire, human drama, action, special effects, Gary Oldman as Dr. Dennett Norton, and most surprisingly for me, Joel Kinnaman in the Alex Murphy/Robocop role. He’s better than Peter Weller. I hate to admit that, but he just is.

Robocop is in theaters right now. Go see it, okay?