Hello, friends!

Niko at Niko’s Book Reviews was kind enough to do a review of The Failed Technomancer—thanks, Niko! I appreciate the honest feedback.

You mentioned that you kept expecting the book to be something that it wasn’t. In particular, the series name, Robot Cannibal Apocalypse, led you to believe that the book was going to be humorous when in in reality it was a much more serious book.

Well…

…

Yeah. You’re right. The Failed Technomancer was my debut novel and, as a one-man operation, I had to teach myself how to market and set expectations. And, well, it was a first-time effort, and I learned a lot. Personally, I love the series name—despite how admittedly ridiculous it is—but I think I’ll need to let it go in the future. Oh well.

(Me calling it a series when there’s only one out right now and the sequel is long in coming is kind of a punk move anyway.)

I did find it very interesting when you mentioned that this book felt a lot like a LitRPG book, just without the in-world context of being an RPG (or otherwise referencing a game/game elements/game tropes). This is the first time I’ve heard that comparison. I’ve never actually read any LitRPGs, but I was an avid tabletop gamer, and perhaps that unconsciously bled over.

Very interesting. Thank you again for your review and your feedback!

Unrelated to Niko’s review, I finally received a certificate documenting my silver honorable mention at Writers of the Future:

Woohoo! Got a little crunched in the mail, but that’s all right. Thanks again to Writers of the Future!

As a final introductory item, I did get a little political in my blog post last week. I want to reiterate that I have no intention of that becoming a regular thing. I’m not as opposed to mentioning such topics as I used to be, but I want to exercise a lot of restraint—I think it important to keep this a space almost entirely focused on discussing culture through the written word, film, and various games. Speaking of which…

Bloggyness Review—Godzilla Minus One

I enthusiastically recommend this movie. If you already have a Netflix account (in the US), you can watch it there—but it’s absolutely worth renting or buying.

Given how popular Godzilla Minus One was when it first came out, I’m confident that you’ve heard about it before, so I’ll be brief in the overview: the movie (made in Japan) is about a kamikaze pilot who survived WWII, which is a great shame to him. He must rebuild his life in a slowly rebuilding Japan, including slowly opening up to a found family. Meanwhile, Godzilla shows up and starts kicking Japan in the kidneys while the nation is already in a fetal position, and our protagonist is one of the few people who can do anything about it.

When I turned on Godzilla Minus One, my wife didn’t assume it was going to be much of a movie, as she started finding chores to do. It didn’t take more than fifteen minutes for her to be completely absorbed, sitting right next to me with her eyes glued to the screen, for the rest of the two-hour runtime.

I also absolutely loved the focus on regular people saving the day in this movie—regular, private, imperfect citizens, with families and other things on the line, stepping up and coming up with the best solution and then enacting it. Inspiring.

That’s my review. I don’t want to spoil more of the movie than the above spoils, because it’s worth going in as unspoiled as possible. That said, I went into the movie with major moments already spoiled, and I still found myself moved to tears at the climax. As a result, I think this is a movie that will find itself infinitely rewatchable.

If you care, the movie does have a few special effects that look cheap, and the opening thirty or so minutes of the movie are pretty slow. These items are by no means killers for the movie, at least they weren’t for me.

Also… in my head-canon, the last five or ten seconds of the movie don’t exist. I think the rest of the Godzilla Minus One makes a beautiful package, and the last few seconds does everything it can to undermine some incredible emotional payoffs—unless there’s a sequel? But, man, it would be exceptionally difficult for a sequel to live up to expectations when this movie ties everything together so well at the end.

Toho, you done did good. The American Godzilla movies are just big dumb monster movies (but, admittedly, a lot of fun if that’s all you want), while the last two Japanese Godzilla movies (at least) successfully have both amazing monster action and human characters that I not only don’t fast forward through, but also find myself extremely engaged with, proving you can have your cake and eat it, too.

Here’s a dumb question: why doesn’t Godzilla look like a big fish? In so many stories, this king of the monsters has deep aquatic origins, yet he’s perfectly built for maneuvering on land. This isn’t a detail that actually matters, but as a chronic world-builder that always made me scratch my head.

Writing Updates

I mentioned last week that draft 1 of Hazel Halfwhisker was finished and that I am moving on to draft 2—but I also mentioned that a good chunk of draft 1 currently exists in outline form only, despite there being nearly 100,000 written words. As such, maybe it would be more accurate to describe this draft as draft 1.5. It is true that I am going back to the beginning and revising a few things, but I’m also going to take every note that isn’t a scene and, if I think it needs to exist in the book to make it the best book possible, turn it into an actual, written scene.

Progress is going well. Even with distractions, over the course of the week I have edited and revised my way through 32 pages of a 182-page document. That’s roughly a sixth of the way through, and part of that time was spent completely rewriting some scenes from new POVs, which is much more time-intensive than editing and revising. Not bad for no more than roughly an hour a work day of writing time.

Here’s an unexpected obstacle I ran into: I duplicate the manuscript that I’m working on a lot. Whenever I start changing or revising things, I duplicate the old manuscript as a record (or a resource to draw on later), resulting in me having dozens of differing copies of the manuscript by the time I actually finish the real draft 1. But for some reason Word had a glitch that wiped out most of the comments I left to myself at some point… I had to dig through my older manuscripts to find them and re-insert them in my current manuscript. That took a lot of time.

The current plan is to finish draft 1.5, at which point I will set aside the book for however long I need to create the audio book for Inner Demon and then self-publish that with the ebook and print versions simultaneously. That will involve finding an artist, getting someone to clean up my audio, seeing if I’m happy with the results I get from using Vellum to create the ebook and PDF versions of Inner Demon, and so forth. I don’t know how long that will take, but I don’t predict it will be speedy.

Quality matters more than speed—but if I can publish Inner Demon this year, then Hazel Halfwhisker next year, I’ll hit my goal of a book a year for three years, which is pretty good for a guy doing it almost entirely on his own with little experience in the business side of publishing. I still want to keep up that record going forward, but since I’m not writing anywhere close to full-time, we’ll see…

Send-Off

Are you a Godzilla fan? Do you care about the differences between American and Japanese Godzilla? Do you prefer the old animated series? Let me know!