Hello, friends!

To my brother, if you see this, happy early birthday. You’re one awesome kid.

And to you, too, random internet visitor, if it is your birthday now or soon, I wish you a happy birthday, too. Unless you hate birthdays. Then may it be suitably whatever-emotion-tickles-your-fancy on this bland day of no particular importance.

A very merry un-birthday to everyone else!

The Failed Technomancer, chapter 30, is now live! Cortex and Hannah go for a walk deep within the bowels of Id’s rozie factory… I wonder what they will find there?

Bloggyness Review: The Gruff

The Gruff is a nine-minute indie short film by Righteous Robot/Julian Curi. This film is a passion project that took Julian about three years to make (by his reporting), but he managed to gain a fairly active following leading up to its release by regularly sharing clips and behind-the-scenes looks at his process. I discovered this short film about a month or so before its release.

Judging from clips leading up to the formal release of The Gruff, I expected it to be a cute, stylized story about a super spy, with a B-plot involving her dad. What I got was so much more. In reality, The Gruff is a deeply heartfelt story about relationships and connection—that just happens to also feature a super spy.

And be entirely made by filming paper.

Truthfully, I don’t want to say too much, because I don’t want to either spoil it or set up unreasonable expectations. Just go watch it. It’s only nine minutes. I enjoyed watching it with my wife on our TV, but anyone stretched for time could make it work by watching it on his phone during his bathroom break.

Bloggyness Review: Damsel (2024)

Damsel is a fantasy movie released recently on Netflix. Starring Millie Bobby Brown (the Stranger Things girl), Damsel is about a woman who marries a prince and, rather than being saved from a dragon, is unexpectedly sacrificed to it.

To be brief, Damsel is fun, disposable entertainment that you will probably talk a lot during. I doubt that I will ever think of it again after finishing this review, but it had just enough excitement that I willingly stopped playing the Pokemon ROM hack that was distracting me when my family put the movie on. It’s far from a perfect movie, and has little to nothing in the way of depth, but if you’re watching Damsel then odds are you aren’t looking for grand cinema; you just want a simple, good time, and to eat some popcorn.

There were a handful of things about Damsel that I really liked. And most of them revolve around the dragon herself. This movie makes a very smart move by keeping the dragon largely hidden from sight for about half the runtime. This keeps the dragon scary, even after we’ve seen a lot of what she can do and learned fully what she wants. I was worried the movie was making a mistake when we finally did see the dragon clearly, in her entirety, but was pleasantly surprised when the movie mostly successfully transitioned to making you empathize with the dragon at that point, rather than keeping it an object of terror. (It definitely helped that I quite liked the dragon’s design and her voice.)

Millie Bobby Brown also did a pretty good job. I didn’t for a moment believe she—or her character—was capable of many of the physical feats she pulled off in this movie, but I did feel pretty invested when she got ahead by relying on her quick wits rather than her tiny muscles. As well, Brown does a good job at relaying the terror of the moment—being sacrificed to a dragon—and then transitioning from fear to internal strength. (If only she had looked like Luisa from Encanto, then she would have excellently encapsulated every aspect of her character.)

As for the things I thought the movie lacked, there were a lot, but none of them stopped me from having fun. If anything, pointing out and laughing at this movie’s flaws with my family heightened our enjoyment.

Damsel works when you don’t think about it too hard; unfortunately, it doesn’t take a lot of thinking for you to poke holes in nearly every aspect of this movie. (Spoilers ahead, this is your warning.)

A major issue is the movie’s very premise. Hundreds of years ago, a king and his men found a dragon’s lair and killed the dragon’s three hatchlings. Enraged, the dragon killed the king’s men and told him that he would sacrifice his three daughters to her (the dragon), and that his family would continue to do so every generation so long as the dragon lived. The dragon wanted (and wants) that family to be constantly crippled with the same feeling of loss that the dragon feels. If any generation fails to comply, the dragon would kill the entire family line currently alive, along with a bunch of other people in the kingdom. Well, fast forward to the present day (relative to the movie), and the family has since discovered some key facts:

• The dragon isn’t watching them very closely and has no idea if the damsels sacrificed to it are actually children (or otherwise blood relativess) of that family.
• The dragon determines whether the damsels sacrificed to her are of the family based on whether or not the damsels have the smell of that family’s blood in their veins.
• The family can make a damsel smell like them by putting a tiny bit of their own blood in the damsel’s veins; cutting palms and holding them together for a few seconds suffices for this purpose.

Smart villains would take this information and round up some peasant girls and sacrifice them to the dragon. The dragon never follows up and entirely relies on its nose to suss these things out, so it would never know the difference. Instead, this family makes the significantly dumber decision to wed their sons to the daughters of distant kings (paying enormous bride prices in the process), and then sacrifices those girls after doing the blood-brothers-thing. This left me wondering how not once, in three hundred years, at least one king decided to look into why his daughter no longer sends him mail anymore and, once he figures out that his daughter was fed to a dragon, declares war, or otherwise seeks retribution.

The movie is full of details like the above that probably could have a satisfactory explanation, but we as the audience are never given a reason to believe the writers cared to think of any. They had their concept—reversing a trope by having the damsel be the hero rather than in distress (although, ironically, the damsel does rescue another damsel in distress that was kidnapped by the dragon)—and that’s all they cared about. Making the scenario internally cohesive didn’t seem to matter.

As another example, we as the audience are never given a reason to believe that the dragon has given the family much in the way of a schedule, with regards to presenting and sacrificing damsels. Smart villains would, therefore, spread out when they invite girls over to marry the prince and then get fed to the dragon, because if they start to overlap the visits of sacrificial damsels then the damsels might notice each other and start to catch on that something funny is happening.

Finally, there were a lot of plot details that could have been handled a lot better, For example, the prince, early in the movie, is given promise of an arc: he shows regret and remorse for what he is doing. The audience is given reason to believe he’s being manipulated by his super evil mom, meaning he could have a change of heart and try to save the damsels. This goes nowhere. The prince is never developed, the prince never moves toward redemption or toward embracing the dark side, he just sits on the fence and then dies at the conclusion.

As yet another example, the evil family in general is very underdeveloped, despite being so key to everything that happens in this movie. As a result I didn’t feel much of anything when those royals got their comeuppance, beyond disappointment at all the plot threads that had just been burned.

The only real egregious mistake this movie makes (repeatedly, admittedly) is not trusting the audience at all. When a secret gets revealed, this movie does not believe in subtlety, instead hammering the intended connections into the audience’s skulls with two or more flashbacks apiece. As an example, once you see the three dead baby dragons you immediately know why the dragon is doing what it is doing—you don’t need a voiceover from the evil queen followed by a boring flashback explaining how an ancient king killed these baby dragons. Especially since both the voiceover and the flashback only exist for the audience. The protagonist damsel doesn’t hear or see either, and is left to piece things together in the same way the audience should be.

If you’re already paying for Netflix and you don’t know what you want to watch one night, Damsel is good, brainless fun. Grab a bag of popcorn, make sure your family or a big group of friends are there, and have a good time.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is almost at 52,000 words. That’s about a nine-thousand word jump from last week. Wow! And that’s without me needing to pad my numbers a bit by explaining how I edited out a few thousand words before starting my no-editing-till-THE-END-writing-experiment, making the manuscript word count numbers I reported not truly represent how much I actually wrote. Woo!

Hazel Halfwhisker is an adventure story, and the adventure is well underway. These little mice have survived dog attacks, killer bats, and cultist rats by this point, and I have a lot more planned before THE END.

As for Inner Demon and The Courage in a Small Heart?…

Well, it turns out I have been way too generous with my timeline of when I expected to hear back on Inner Demon. Baen Publishing has a slush pile turnaround time of approximately 12–15 months, and the email I received from them telling me that they’d received my manuscript is dated June 2023. So I shouldn’t hear from them any earlier than June, and I may be waiting as late as September. Bummer. But, I did this to myself by getting my calendar math wrong.

If Baen doesn’t accept Inner Demon, I might submit it to another small-or-middle publisher. Might. I’ve already queried over two-hundred agents (according to the spreadsheet I keep, anyway), and while discovering publishers that accept unagented submissions breathed a little life into my drive to query, I really just want to publish and move on to the next project. Inner Demon has been done for a long time. If I can’t publish in 2024 through a publisher, I’ll self-publish and start posting chapters here.

(For the record, I like self-publishing. I think, more and more, it’s the way of the future for authors looking to make a career. However, paying for cover art, advertising, and other aspects of a high-quality and high-sales novel isn’t cheap, hence my desire to find a small-or-medium publisher to help me with those parts.)

As for The Courage in a Small Heart, I submitted that story in the 2024 Writers of the Future contest, Q1 portion (which actually started in 2023). The submission period for the Q2 contest ends March 31st. So they have to decide on the Q1 winners before then, right? So they can fully turn their focus onto the Q2 contest submissions?

I can hope, anyway.

If I don’t win that contest, or at least place with promise of getting in the anthology, then I’m going to immediately turn around and publish The Courage in a Small Heart here. And I think you all will love it.

Send-Off

Have yourself an excellent birthday week! Or a merry un-birthday week! If you watch either The Gruff or Damsel (2024), let me know what you think about them!