E.R. Torre's Blog, page 63

You can now ignore just about every opinion I have…

I’m three songs into the seemingly universally loathed Lou Reed and Metallica album Lulu…

…and I kinda like it!

My understanding is that David Bowie loved the album though acknowledged it was ahead of its time.

Perhaps.

Look, its an oddball album with some very oddball lyrics (the first lines in the very first song are very off putting and borderline idiotic).

And yet… I’m digging what I’m hearing. I won’t say the album is up there with the great works of Lou Reed (both solo and with The Velvet Underground) or Metallica, yet its interesting, IMHO, in its own weird way.

POSTSCRIPT: Ok, so I’ve made it through the entire album and my earlier comments still apply: I feel this album is far better than the absolute calamity so many -critics and fans alike- thought it was.

On the other hand, it does contain more than a few rough edges and weird/crude/unintentionally(?) funny lyrics which can be off putting to audiences.

Further, I can see why David Bowie liked the album: In many ways it reminds me of Bowie’s 1. Outside. While 1. Outside is a stone cold classic, Lulu is a decent enough stab at avant garde which, at times, slips into silliness.

Still, I repeat what I said before: It’s far from the absolute calamity people felt it was.

2018 (soon to be) in the rearview mirror…

Over at Salon.com, author Mary Elizabeth Williams notes sanguinely…

2018 Has Been The Longest Year Ever

She lists a bunch of stuff that’s happened… I recall it all… but what’s shocking is that it all happened this year.

Holy Moley!

So much stuff has happened this past year, much of it related to Trump and his highly competent and not at all corrupt (cough) government, that it’s hard to keep track of everything going on.

Ah, for the days when things were calmer and we weren’t lurching from one “big” news event and into another!

Nightflyers: Season 1, a (partial) review

Presented on the SyFy Network and based on a short story by George R. R. Martin (Game of Thrones), NightFlyers is a science fiction/horror hybrid involving a spacecraft heading out into deep space to try to contact an alien race, and the eerie things the crew encounters as they travel on.

The show’s been on for a while now and, at least according to IMDB, the first season has 10 episodes, all of which have been shown.

I set my DVR to tape the season and wound up watching the first three episodes in one sitting and enjoying myself reasonably well.

The show features a smallish “central” cast in an enormous star ship that, as I mentioned above, is on its way from Earth to meet up with an alien race somewhere out in the distance.  Earth is apparently dying out and it is hoped contacting the alien race will help them to save humanity…

…or some such.

Again, I enjoyed the first three episodes fairly well, though it seemed like the makers of the series were deliberately withholding some information and/or were simply inept at presenting the information clearly.

For example, within this star ship is a psychic individual who, other crew members have stated, was responsible for some kind of mass killing.

Or was he?

He is initially presented as potentially evil and dangerous character but as those original three episodes play out, we get a sense that he isn’t quite as dangerous as something which lurks within the vessel’s machinery itself.  The reveal of what that is is… ok… I suppose, but hardly shattering.

I left the show and returned to see the fourth episode and, in the interval of time, I found my opinion on the show had soured somewhat.  The fourth episode wound up being something of a chore to watch and it occurred to me that the series is being deliberately obtuse to the point of being frustrating.

In four hours of time, I as a viewer remain unclear why exactly the potentially dangerous psychic individual was brought on the ship.  It was stated he was there to communicate with the aliens psychically, but a later episode shows his ability to psychically “talk” to anything beyond humans is at best very limited.  So it would seem the risk of taking this potentially VERY dangerous individual on this vessel was a risk maybe not worth taking.

Further, the big reveal of the entity within the vessel itself also seems like a very idiotic thing.  I mean, how could so much money, time, and effort be made on building this massive star ship and then essentially load a (SPOILERS!!!!) person’s “soul” into it, especially one that is oh-so-hard to get along with.

Again, I’ve made it only four episodes into the series but as of now, I’m wondering if I’m going to make it through the remaining six.  Further, this series is based on a short story/novella by Mr. Martin so one wonders if a second season is in the offing and whether the makers of this series are stretching the story waaaaay too far out.

At this point and without having seen the rest of the series, I have to sadly say the show is a thumbs down from me, despite some decent acting, effects, and a somewhat intriguing initial premise.

Corrosive Knights: Mechanic, one more update!

I’ve said it before and I’ll repeat: It’s been an incredibly busy month plus for me.  I’ve finished off Legacy of the Argus, the concluding chapter in the Corrosive Knights series (but there will be more stories set in this universe to come, stay tuned!).

Because we were reaching the end of this seven book series, I wanted to go back and re-do all the covers to the various books (all but one, we’ll get to that in a moment) as well as do something different with the cover to Legacy of the Argus.  I found the ebooklaunch.com company and they’ve done a smashing job getting the covers done for me.

Along with all that work, I revised Mechanic because a) it is the first book in the series and I wanted to make sure it was as good as it could be and b) because it was the first book in the series and I did so much work since that point I was certain I must have improved as a writer if only a little and therefore it was worthwhile to give the book one more -quite possibly final!- revision.

So I did that but, afterwards, felt there was one more thing that needed to be done.  Of the various Corrosive Knights books covers I did, Mechanic was my favorite and, even when I hired ebooklaunch.com to do the covers, I wanted to keep Mechanic as it was.

The problem, though, was that as I got all those other covers done, the cover to Mechanic began to look less and less like it was part of the series.  I wanted to make the book’s spine and back cover fit into the work of ebooklaunch.com and decided, several days ago, that I would also do a slight change to the Mechanic’s cover.  To wit: Have the logos on the cover fit in with the other covers.

So, without further ado, the “new” cover to Mechanic!

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Now, all the covers together…

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I’m as happy as I am exhausted but the work is done.  The complete seven part Corrosive Knights series is finalized and, as a very welcome bonus, I’ve got time to enjoy the remainder of the Holiday season and New Years without having to go back and work on these particular books!

But that doesn’t mean I’m doing absolutely nothing for the rest of the year.  Remember the Epilogue book I promised, the book that would be #8 of the Corrosive Knights series?

Suffice to say, I’ll now get to focus on it as I wanted to.  Properly!

SuperBowl halftime show…

Found this article regarding the upcoming Superbowl half-time show, and the fact that they have Maroon 5 performing but the band is having a hard time getting anyone else to play with them (the article was written by Randall Colburn and presented on avclub.com)…

No one wants to play with Maroon 5 at the SuperBowl Half-Time show

The upshot of the article, if you’re too lazy to click on it, is that while Maroon 5 has committed to playing at the upcoming SuperBowl Half-time show, it appears many artists are boycotting the event and/or are not interested in performing because of the way the NFL treated -and is still treating- Colin Kaepernick.

If you’re unfamiliar with that whole saga, basically Mr. Kaepernick took a “knee” on the sidelines during the National Anthem played before each game’s beginning.  He was protesting the way African Americans are treated in the US and the way some are harassed or much, much worse by the police and the criminal justice system.

I never had a problem with the protest.  It was peaceful and it addressed something that should, IMHO, be addressed.  However, many on the “right” viewed this as being disrespectful to the flag and Mr. Kaepernick was eventually let go from his team and to date hasn’t had any football team look into hiring him, even though he is still a young and accomplished quarterback.

The fact that music acts are potentially boycotting the SuperBowl’s Half-Time show while team owners -some whose teams desperately could use a quarterback like Mr. Kaepernick- have been completely silent regarding hiring him shows to some extent the divide in this country.

Powerful/successful music acts can certainly choose not to have anything to do with the SuperBowl while on the other side team owners worry that if they hire Mr. Kaepernick they may face protests or worse from their fans and others.  Like it or not -and I do not- Mr. Kaepernick has become something of a lightning rod in these times and I can sympathize with owners who are hesitant to hire him while, simultaneously and perhaps more than a little hypocritically (after all, its not my money), wish some brave owner would go against the grain and freaking hire him already.

Ah well.  In a way, this is one of those Greek-like dramas that may never be resolved in any meaningful way.

Corrosive Knights, 12/13/18 update: Mechanic (redux)

A few days back (you can read it here) I noted that I was revising Mechanic, the first novel in my Corrosive Knights series…

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I wrote back then that I’d announce when the book was revised and listed at Amazon and that day has indeed come.

The Kindle version of the book is online and available (if you bought the book before, you can “reload” it and the new version will appear).  I just posted the paperback version and, hopefully, later today or tomorrow the revised version will be the one available for purchase.

As I noted in the previous column, I decided to “revise” the first book because it had been many years since I last looked at it and figured there were likely things within it -mostly be grammatical/spelling issues- needed to be addressed.  After all these years, I reasoned, I’m likely a better author and given that this is the first book in the series and should be as “good” as it can possibly be, it was incumbent on me to give it one more, and perhaps one last, revision to make sure it was as absolutely good as I could make it.

But what worried me, and what I absolutely DID NOT want to do, was make any major changes to the story.  I also didn’t want to do what George Lucas did with his revisions of the original Star Wars trilogy, add a bunch of new nonsense that didn’t necessarily add to the story and might well slow it down.

I feel I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.

Mechanic, as it stands now, is a slightly shorter novel (the final page count was exactly 1 page less than the original page count!).  The vast majority of things I fixed were small, usually involving unnecessary or awkward words/phrasing.

There were also two pieces of information, one presented in the opening chapter and one later on, which needed to be revised because they didn’t fit in with the continuity I established in later Corrosive Knights novels.  Again, nothing HUGE, just stuff I originally wrote in Mechanic which, as the series played out, was refined for the better and needed to be fixed so that it fit in better with what was to come.

Believe it or not, the dialogue in this book remains at least 95-98% unchanged.  There was one tiny paragraph where a character thinks about something and I feltit  would be better for the character to say this out loud and then have someone else react to the comment.  Humorously, I hope!

But, again, really small stuff.

If you’ve read the book before and you were to read it now, I suspect you’ll wonder why I bothered since, in the end, the changes are smallish.  Its a fair question, but as I also mentioned in the previous posting, I always felt Mechanic was a shark of a novel:  Lean, muscular, without an ounce of fat and slicing through the water like a machine.

The changes made to this book, smallish though they may be, I feel makes it even more like that proverbial shark.

And I couldn’t be happier with the end result.

Give it a try if you haven’t.  It’s a blast!

Corrosive Knights: Comments and Updates, 12/10/18

Lev wrote the following:

Love your series, just bought book #7. Will there be a book #8 – the epilogue and when?

First and foremost, thank you so much for the very kind comments you offer as well as the fact that you’ve decided my work was worthy enough for you to spend your hard earned money on buying it!

Will there be a book #8?  The short answer is: Absolutely.

But…

Here’s the thing: The 8th Book in the series is, as I’ve noted many times before and you’ve noted, is an “Epilogue”…

[image error]See, that’s how I’ve listed Book #8!

…as such, the Book effectively closes the door on stories featuring at least two of the major characters I’ve introduced in the series (I’ll not say who they are!) and I’m not sure I want to close that particular (pardon the pun) book on them quite yet.

Author Agatha Christie, during the heights of World War 2 and the London Blitz of 1940 and fearing that England -and she- would not survive the war, wrote the novel Curtain, which was the “final” and “concluding” story featuring what was arguably her biggest, most beloved creation, detective Hercule Poirot.

Ms. Christie put the novel in a lock box, intending it to be released only should she not survive the bombings and/or war.

Ms. Christie, England, and the world survived the war.  Ms. Christie kept writing new novels at an astonishing rate, including new novels featuring detective Poirot, but she kept Curtain in that lock box.  The novel would not be released until 1975, very shortly before Ms. Christie passed away in January of 1976.

Now, without sounding too obnoxious, I sometimes think that maybe Book #8 in the Corrosive Knights series, or what I call the “Epilogue”, once fully fleshed out (I already have most of the novel written, believe it or not!), should also be kept in my own little lock box and released when I’m certain I don’t want to write any more Corrosive Knights novels.

So the short answer regarding Book #8, “Epilogue”, is: I WILL write this novel in the next year.  It WILL be done.  But it may not be released right away.  I may give myself a few weeks/months to think through the whole thing and see if I do want to release it or, perhaps, work on a different Corrosive Knights #8 novel and, in time, release the Epilogue when I feel its worth doing so.

Moving along, Lev, I hope this answers your question!

To you and those who have read my books and enjoy them, I ask a big favor: PLEASE write reviews for the books and post them either to Amazon or, at the least, offer a star review for Goodreads (if you read the Kindle edition of the books, you get the chance at the very end to click how many stars out of 5 you feel a book merits).

I jokingly say that if you loved my books, write reviews praising my oh-so-magnificent work.  If you didn’t, then don’t bother!

Corrosive Knights, a 12/7/18 update… Mechanic!

A couple of days ago I noted I’d be revising Mechanic, the first book in my Corrosive Knights series…

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The last time I did any sort of revision on the book, I found, was way back in 2011, so its been roughly seven years since I’ve re-read the book.

I wanted to revise it because it has been so long since I worked on it and figured if I was going to revise the covers to the series (already done), I might as well make sure the first book of the series is as good as I can possibly make it, given that for many this will be their jumping in point in this series.  If the first book doesn’t work for a potential new reader, chances are they won’t bother with the other books.

Added to that is the fact that I feel as a writer I’ve improved.  Hell, if I haven’t improved my skills in the seven plus years and six new novels made since Mechanic, then I don’t deserve to continue in this field.

But I’d be lying if there wasn’t a hesitancy to doing this.

In my previous post I noted I didn’t want to pull a “George Lucas” with Mechanic.  I wanted to “revise” the book and make sure there are no grammatical/spelling errors and ensure the reading experience is a smooth one.  What I absolutely DID NOT want to do is “re-do” the book and make it something all new and very different.  After all, there are many people out there who read the novel as it originally was (and, for the time being, is) and may react negatively to the author “meddling” with what they liked to begin with.

With that in mind, I began in earnest yesterday to re-read and do the revisions on Mechanic and, in that first full day, nearly made it to the book’s half-way point.

What fascinates me about reading the book after all these years, and after finishing the series, is that there were a few things right off the bat I needed to add/change.  Small details, mind you, and not BIG things.  As I worked deeper and deeper into the series, for example, I came up with certain names for things that I didn’t bother with back then.  But apart from those minor changes meant to make the book fit more snug into this series, for the most part I’ve kept to my word and cleaned up grammatical/clarity issues.  The dialogue remains the same, the story absolutely remains the same.

And you know what?  Despite the fact that I feel I’m a better author today than I was back then, the story and the way I originally wrote remains, IMHO, very strong.

Mechanic is the shortest, length-wise, of the Corrosive Knights novels.  When I presented it to a friend of mine, I told him the book was like a “shark” in water, a novel that doesn’t waste the reader’s time and moves along from scene to scene with minimal “fat”.

Curiously, most of the revisions I’ve done to date tend to involve eliminating lines or words here and there and making the novel even more like that shark in water.  I suppose I’m doing the exact opposite of what Mr. Lucas did with his original Star Wars trilogy*.

In the next couple of days I should finish the read-through and, following that, I’ll put the revisions into the document.  I’ll let you know when the new -and hopefully improved!- version is ready and released.

*****

*Regarding the Star Wars trilogy and Mr. Lucas’ revisions of it: I have ABSOLUTELY NO PROBLEM with Mr. Lucas going back into those films and adding things he wanted to add but wasn’t able to way back when or decided, afterwards, was worth revising.  Hell, I have no problem at all with him making the films something far different than what they originally were.  They’re his films and he has every right to do what he wants with them.

My problem with Mr. Lucas is his stubborn insistence on not releasing the original theatrical cuts.  Do with your films what you want, but give audiences the ability to see the versions they originally saw way back when as well.  Hell, its a win/win situation for him, as far as I can see, to release his “new” version along with the original.

Yet he steadfastly refuses to release the original films in their original form and that, to me, is a crying shame.

Corrosive Knights, a 12/5/18 update… and… Whew!

As you’ve no doubt noticed, there have been a dearth of updates/blog entries as of late ’round these parts.  Usually, I’m looking around and offering my 0.02 cents about many (too many!?) things.

Well, the reason I’ve been rather quiet is because not only did I finish up writing Legacy of the Argus, the seventh and concluding novel in the Corrosive Knights series, I’ve contracted ebooklaunch.com to re-do the covers for books #2-6 of the series along with doing the cover to Legacy.

But hiring them was just the first step.  Being something of an artist myself (cough), I’d work on rough versions of the covers as I was hiring them and sending those roughs out to them to use as the basis for the covers they came up with.  Then, when I’d get their versions of the covers, most of the time we’d go through a few “drafts” before hitting on the “right” cover to use.  To be fair, though, there was at least one cover, that of Nox, which they hit at the first go and I didn’t feel any more work needed to be done.

And while doing all that, I was preparing the paperback versions of the books, which meant going back to the original book files (not an easy task…I had to make sure I had the right files!), making sure I fixed any glitches (grammatical or spelling) that I was aware of in the earlier drafts and taking care of them.

Right now, I finished going over all the books but the first so that when I get the paperback cover files in the next few days, I’ll send both the new covers and revised/corrected novels in to Amazon.  While I can’t promise you ALL the grammatical/spelling glitches were found and taken care of, I’ve done my level best to go through these books and give it my best shot.

As for the first book in the series, Mechanic, given how long ago I wrote it, I’m going to spend a little more time on it.  In the next few days I’ll read through the entire book and see how it works while fixing any problems -if any- I may encounter within it.

No, I won’t pull a “George Lucas” and reinvent/rewrite the book.  Her story will remain as it is, but I figured given its age I needed to do a more thorough read-through and make sure everything within is smooth.  I figure in all the years between making that book and Legacy of the Argus, I’ve become (hopefully!) a slightly better author and am capable of smoothing out any rough edges while strictly adhering to that novel’s story.

Truthfully, I don’t anticipate any major changes!

So, for now, that’s what’s left on my creative “plate” for what’s left of this year.  It’s been a wild 10 or so years of writing the Corrosive Knights books and now that the main story is done, I want to make sure that in 2019 they’re cleaned and polished just right.

Onward!

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John Allen Chau…

Is the name familiar to you?

If you’ve been following the news …well, the news outside of whatever latest lunacy Donald Trump’s been involved in… John Allen Chau is the Christian missionary who earlier this month went to a remote Indian island with the intent of converting an isolated tribe there to Christianity.

He was killed by the remote islanders, who are isolated and have had no outside contact with “civilization” and thus know nothing about Christianity or current events and, no doubt, came to view Mr. Chau as a threat to themselves.

Over on Slate.com I found this fascinating article by Ruth Graham titled…

Martyr of Dickhead?  Why missionary John Allen Chau’s death on a remote Indian is so unsettling to Christians

Christian missionaries entering potential “hostile” territories is nothing new.  Part of their mission (they are “missionaries”!) is to convert people to the Christian cause, and no doubt Mr. Chau viewed his outreach as trying to spread the word of God to those who needed it.

The article is most fascinating in the early paragraphs, where the author offers the following history:

In January 1956, five young American missionaries decided to make contact with a small tribe of natives in eastern Ecuador, with the purpose of converting them to Christianity. Instead, just a few days after their first direct contact with the group, they were speared to death on a secluded beach. News of the missionaries’ deaths spread quickly in the United States. Life magazine devoted a 10-page spread to the story of “five devout men who sought to bring the word of God to a fierce tribe of Stone Age savages.” The reverence for the missionaries went even deeper in Christian circles, where believers saw the men as martyrs killed for their faith.

Back in 1956, the author goes on to note, the killing of these missionaries was viewed as a repugnant act by a “savage” people.

Today, as you can tell by the link/title of the article presented above, society’s views of missionaries has changed.  While Christians no doubt view Mr. Chau’s death with sympathy and outrage, clearly there is a large segment of people out there that view his actions as the height of hubris/arrogance.

In other words, he got what was coming to him.

Now, I view his death as a tragedy.  Then again, I feel anyone with a sliver of a pulse should view the death of any young person by such violence as a tragedy.

But another part of me completely agrees that he was a well-intentioned but supremely arrogant man who walked into a very dangerous situation and -surprise, surprise- met his end because of that arrogance.

I can’t help but think of the longer history, though, well beyond 1956 and the way Christianity in general has spread throughout the world.  The Crusades, for instance.  The initial forays into the “New World” and the way the Native Americans in South and Central America were treated and at times violently forced to convert.  Hell, our own U.S. history and the way we’ve treated Indians.

What fascinates me the most about this article is that it shows a societal/world view certain shift in perspective.  The “civilized world” no longer automatically sides with the zealous missionary and his holy crusade.

We have developed the capacity, maybe several hundred years too late, to realize that our world view shouldn’t be imposed upon others, that a rarity like the remote tribe in that Indian island should be allowed to live their lives in peace, as they have for generations, and we have no right to impose upon them.

A fascinating shift, for sure.