Hello, friends!

First of all, a huge HAPPY BIRTHDAY to my wife, just in case we didn’t all shower her with enough love over the weekend. This all wouldn’t be possible without you and I am dead serious. (As I type this my daughter is banging on the door and sticking her fingers under it, trying to break in with all the coordination and mindless intensity of a zombie…)

Also, as a side note, I have never seen anyone more excited to be gifted a “grabber” than my wife. You know—those long sticks with claws at the end, pull a handle and it grabs stuff. As a pregnant lady, bending down to grab stuff is hard—so is climbing on things to reach high stuff. My half-joke gift turned to her spending a half-hour excitedly coming up with half-a-hundred uses for the thing.

Second, I’m going to throw you for a really weird mash-up. Are you familiar with the song Running up That Hill (A Deal with God), Kate Bush? (My favorite version of the song is the Jonathan Young cover.) Also, are you familiar with Face/Off, the Nic Cage and John Travolta 1997… classic? Well, whenever I hear the line, “Get Him to swap our places,” some part of my brain always thinks “faces”… and suddenly my brain fills with Nic Cage pretending to be John Travolta pretending to be Nic Cage.

Discussions—Across the Spider-Verse

Here is where I respond to some feedback that I received on my blog post of two weeks ago.

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Response: Miguel was a narcissist/hypocrite/liar/otherwise flawed, and that’s why he revealed everything to Miles! It was his villainous fatal flaw!

Me: Not what I got out of the movie, but certainly possible. Since it’s really only half a movie, we’ll see if that’s confirmed in the sequel. (It was originally advertised as Part 1 and Part 2. Now I don’t see “parts” being mentioned at all, so I think it’s been re-positioned as Across the Spider-Verse being the middle of a trilogy and Beyond the Spider-Verse being the conclusion, but Across the Spider-Verse feels much more like a Part 1 than a trilogy middle. Which kinda makes the Miles Morales animated movies… a duology of three movies? Ugh.)

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Response: Miguel’s knowledge of the multiverse is flawed, and there’s a lot of in-movie evidence that the “canon” doesn’t really matter. For example, Pavitr Prabhakar’s “canon” event wasn’t precipitated by a battle with his nemesis, but by the invasion of another villain from another universe; also, the near-destruction of his universe looked nothing like the destruction of Miguel’s adopted universe. Other universes didn’t start to blip out of existence when “canon” was messed with (alternate Vulture in Gwen’s universe and, especially, everything to do with protagonist Miles being Spider-Man rather than the Miles of Universe 42 point this direction). Finally, Miguel isn’t worried about Miles’ universe being destroyed, despite him interfering with Miles’ ability to do anything about an upcoming “canon” event!

Me: I find this argument compelling—I think it’s nearly guaranteed to be addressed in the next movie. I also think all of the above points toward Miguel either having flawed knowledge… or it proves the above theory, that Miguel is a liar. (Maybe even both.) Maybe Miguel knows that things don’t work the way he preaches, but he uses convenient events to push the narrative and retain power. We won’t know until Beyond the Spider-Verse.

That said, one issue with a half-movie is we don’t know until the other half comes out. I only have this movie, and in the context of this movie alone, I find Miguel inconsistent in a way that doesn’t make me think “There’s something more going on here,” but instead think “The writers should have ironed out these wrinkles.” Maybe all that will change on a rewatch after seeing Beyond the Spider-Verse… Who knows?

I think part of the reason it doesn’t work for me in this movie is the fact that all known multiverses have a Spider-Man archetype. In addition, even when the “purity” of canon isn’t followed in the way Miguel preaches, the Spider-Man archetype still remains in every universe. Look at Pavitr and Miles: for both, things did not happen in the “pure” canon way that Miguel is trying to protect, but the same general pattern is being followed. Unless Beyond the Spider-Verse reveals that Miguel is hiding dimensions without spider-people that are totally fine without them, the only real conclusion is that for some reason the multiverse is designed to spit out the Spider-Man archetype in some shape or form, even in wildly different dimensions that wouldn’t reasonably do that (especially not with 100% spider-presence consistency). Now, maybe that’s something that’s just supposed to be handled by suspension of disbelief… but mine was torn away already.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at about 90,000 words.

I’m struggling a bit again. I had to take some time to reset, look at my goals, reread what I had written, and find the thread I was previously weaving. That took a lot of time and, combined with work being almost all-consuming last week, I’m somewhat surprised I got anything done. Also, my list of future edits keeps growing and growing… At this point my draft one might be more an extremely detailed outline for plot events, set pieces, and character arcs than anything else, with everything getting shuffled around in draft two. We’ll see. My writing group keeps having fun and positively engaging with the story, so that helps me keep up my motivation to push further. (I believe in this story, and that’s my primary motivation to push forward, but sometimes when I’m stuck in a slog from week to week I need outside pushes to keep up momentum.)

Still thinking this story will be close in length to what The Failed Technomancer was, about 150,000 words. We’ll see. I’m writing the book in fairly clean parts, and each part is sizable, so maybe it’ll work better as a series of shorter books (with an omnibus edition) rather than one gigantic one as the only version.

Anyway, here’s an eyeball-finger-spider-creature. I told my brother about a monster I was considering introducing at the end of Hazel Halfwhisker (things get weird), he told his wife about it, and after a few hours I got a text with this image. He told me the very concept horrified him, so I think I’m on the right path for the dramatic, dangerous set pieces of the climax.

Send-Off

What weird combinations of ideas frequently cross your mind and make you wonder why your brain keeps presenting them to you?