Jax Book Nook

Attention to all my readers! Both of you! Starting next week, I will be posting excerpts of my novel, Beer Run, on this blog, for free up to the First Thirty pages! Yes! You can read the first part of my book before ponying up the cash for the rest of it! Hooray!!!!!

First, I will be on the podcast “Most Writers are Fans” tonight with Terry Bartley. Terry is another author in the Charleston, WV area and we are going to talk about Beer Run and the writing process.

Also, if you finish Beer Run, first, thank you for taking interest in my writing, but also, please review me on Goodreads! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/63275013-beer-run?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=oDKkHsZx7p&rank=19

Beer Run is now available in print!

Ebook: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLSVRZN5  

Print: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLR6TSZN

My premier novel, Beer Run, is out on Amazon! https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BLSVRZN5/ref=sr_1_10?crid=1D75ISDSHRVP8&keywords=Beer+Run&qid=1667939052&s=books&sprefix=beer+run%2Cstripbooks%2C106&sr=1-10

Thanks to everyone’s support along the way, especially Solstice Publishing! http://www.solsticeempire.com/

Another post over a Twitter argument. Not really an argument. More like a philosophical question. Someone asked whether I liked Halloween better than Christmas. Answer: absolutely.

You might balk at this answer. “Are you saying that candy is better than presents?” No. I’m saying that neither of those things should be the primary factor we use to judge a holiday. If I had it my way, the gifts we get at Christmas would be better spread out over the course of the year for multiple holidays, anniversaries, and birthdays etc. No need to have them all at once. What are you getting your kids for the Fourth of July this year?

And let me point out that the gifts really are important for that demographic: kids. Adults can buy their own gifts. Kids generally need a special occasion to get toys. Why is Christmas the designated special occasion and not Easter? Who knows! Seems random to me. For most adults, Christmas isn’t that special for the same reason summer isn’t that special. It’s really just another day where we eat special food, have parties, sing songs, etc.

My point is that once you get outside the presents for kids, which can be redistributed to other special occasions, Christmas is actually a fairly tyrannical holiday. Every year, retailers start using Christmas as a selling point earlier and earlier. Normally, it’s October, but in some places, I’ve even started seeing Christmas creep into September and even August. At first, it’s just silly, but then in November, we really start getting serious. It makes the other holidays around it, Thanksgiving and New Years, practically disappear, and God help you if you’ve got a birthday in December (you’ve probably never gotten a real birthday gift in your life).

Not only does Christmas show up rudely early, it leaves unfashionably late. If you leave pumpkins out too long, they rot, so most people know to trash them quickly. Even complex decorations come down after Halloween rather quickly. Maybe hanging corpses, headstones, and spider-webs detract more from property value than trees and lights. Christmas decorations stay up until February. They’re like a party guest that doesn’t leave.

Maybe that’s because the majority of us only put them up under compulsion in the first place. Christmas Trees and lights are labor intensive to put up and most of us don’t know why we bother other than the fact that everyone else is doing it. Don’t decorate your house on Christmas, people accuse you of being Scrooge. When was the last time someone made you feel awkward for not decorating your house for Halloween?

I guess that’s the heart of my thesis: Christmas is coercive. Halloween is libertarian. Through a series of mutually enforced cultural norms concerning gift giving, decorations, carols, and movies, Christmas forces you to go along with the mantra that it’s the most wonderful time of year. Halloween doesn’t mind if you ignore it completely. Dress up, don’t dress up. Jack Skellington doesn’t care.

The movies associated with each respective holiday say a lot. Halloween movies are…horror movies, which Americans enjoy watching all year round. There are a few movies that are centered on the holiday itself but not many. Halloween gives us an excuse to watch movies we like watching anyway. Christmas movies on the other hand are all pretty much about Christmas and most of us wouldn’t watch one outside of the months of November through January. The exceptions might be “Christmas” movies like Die Hard or the Nightmare Before Christmas which aren’t really Christmas movies. Traditional Christmas movies like It’s a Wonderful Life and A Miracle on 34th Street function like Soviet propaganda films, force feeding us a message about how wonderful Christmas is. There are a few such movies that qualify as watchable, most notably Home Alone and Elf. Funny thing is that Christmas even ruins those movies. Now you can only watch Home Alone during Christmas time so you may as well do it now! Nobody will ever ask you why you are watching The Exorcist in March.

Christmas is so coercive that it controls other holidays. We’ve already talked about Thanksgiving and New Years. What’s really frightening is Hannukah. Hannukah didn’t become the Jewish equivalent of Christmas until the Christmas season became so overtly totalitarian that Jewish people in America felt the need to pump Hannukah up in order to compete. It was actually a minor holiday. Every year we get sermons from pastors and priests about how we shouldn’t let Christmas take Advent away. I say this sermon is unrealistic in this day and age and should be replaced with “Don’t let Christmas take away All Saints Day.” All Saints Day and its better-known companion, Halloween, don’t intrude at all, on the other hand. They make so little nuisance that every year in Halloween’s shadow we have an angry argument over Columbus Day, a trifling holiday if ever there was one, and Jack Skellington just smiles at us while we make fools of ourselves.

I know you all are bringing up the gifts again. If parents didn’t give kids gifts on Christmas, they wouldn’t give them gifts ever we are told. I think that if we hadn’t specifically designated Christmas as gift day that parents would space their gifts out more. Concentrating all gift giving in one day has had some really negative social consequences. It begins in grade school where it becomes clear that Santa favors the rich kids in town not the best behaved. If gift giving was spread out more evenly, income inequality might not be so obvious. Thus, Christmas becomes a dick measuring contests to see who can get the best haul. This continues itself into adulthood with Christmas decoration contests resulting in lighting displays so bright they are a danger to low flying aircraft. Christmas becomes an opportunity for Americans to one-up each other with Veblen goods. (Real economic term). It has gotten to the point where we expect to see people to stampede each other the Friday after Thanksgiving every year. I don’t even go outside on Black Friday. Forget the movie series. Go to the mall the day after Thanksgiving and witness the real Purge.

While Christmas drowns in commercialism Halloween actually fulfills the role of an actual holy day: getting people to behave better. On Halloween people send their children out, often unattended, to the homes of their neighbors asking for candy, and the neighbors usually respond by providing the candy without any kind of compulsion, governmental or not, or even complaint. It’s an act of faith. People dress up and go to parties with their friends and neighbors and have a good time. Sure, teenagers used to make trouble, but Hell Night’s been relegated to myth at this point.

When I was growing up, Christians would denounce Halloween as the devil’s day, but it’s probably Satan’s least favorite day of the year. People go around dressed up as evil incarnate in an obvious attempt to make fun of him, the most prideful being in existence. They watch a bunch of movies reminding people that evil is real, a fact he’d rather they forget. Children go around getting candy for free from people too happy to give it to them. No commercialism. No shallow competition. No one trying to politicize the whole thing by claiming some kind of “war on Halloween.” Just people leaving their house and conversing with friendly neighbors. If I were Lucifer, I’d find the whole thing rather depressing.

I propose we take this moment as an opportunity to fix Christmas. Now, we can’t make Christmas just like Halloween. Jack Skellington proved that for us. What we need to do is somehow fix what has turned Christmas into this miserable black hole of commercialism and politicization. Once again, I think it all has to do with the gifts. Now, kids need gifts, and there is some truth to the idea that parents wouldn’t buy their kids gifts unless the Christmas spirit forced them to. That’s why the way we fix Christmas is by making multiple Christmases: namely four of them. You see, Christmas used to be one of four dates on the western calendar that divided the year into four quarters and each had its own holiday: Feast of the Annunciation, the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, Michaelmas, and Christmas. These holidays got kicked to the curb as industrialization required a more standardized calendar, but with manufacturing now increasingly being done by robots, who’s to say we couldn’t do with another three days off? Hell, we could even give back Presidents Day and Columbus Day, and any other holidays we don’t care about. We don’t even have to make them particularly religious. The Nativity went by Midsommer sometimes, and the Annunciation was called Ladyday. That might offend a predominantly Protestant culture, but we can negotiate on the names.

More importantly, think of what this would do. By telling parents to give presents four days a year, they would no longer feel pressure to overdo it on Christmas, and the competition of who got the better haul during recess would end. Decorations would be simpler and easier to put up and remove. The business cycle would even out. Toy stores wouldn’t need to wait until November to reach the black. None of these holidays would be important enough on their own to overpower other holidays. Thanksgiving and New Years would actually mean something again other than being placeholders for Christmas. No one would ever tell someone born on September 13 that he should just wait a few weeks for Michaelmas. Turning Christmas into “Present Day” has ruined Christmas by making it too important. We need to spread some of that importance out to other holidays, and a funny thing will happen. We might actually start to enjoy Christmas again.

As it stands, I’m enjoying some last-minute Halloween fun before bracing myself for the grind of the upcoming Christmas season. Happy Halloween, and if a man in a red suit shows up at exactly midnight tonight pointing at his watch, tell him to buzz off.

Fellow writers, lend me your ears, I come not to bury bad horror movies, but to praise them. I am talking not about the horror movies that keep you up at night, but rather those horror movies you put on when you’re trying to go to sleep. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Scream 4. Saw VI. Annabelle. Ouija. The stuff AMC puts on the week before Halloween at 2 am. The convoluted plots. The stale dialogue. The nonsensical resurrections. The monsters that somehow survive with an axe sticking out of their heads.

I’m not talking about horror movies like Troll 2 and Plan 9 from Outer Space, which are unintentionally hilarious. I’m talking about movies that are intentional cash grabs aimed at teenagers who want to see one more cheerleader get beheaded. Why do I like these films? I guess that I would have to say that I watch them for the same reason I listen to podcasts: it’s something to put on in the background, occasionally something interesting happens, it might be the debut film for a young director or actor who went on to better things, and maybe, just maybe, you find one you like.

Finding a film that everyone else agrees is a complete disaster, except for you, is one of the underrated experiences in consuming media. I thought the first Live-Action GI Joe movie was as bad as Hollywood gets, and most of the critiques agreed with me. Audiences loved it though. When the sequel came out, both critics and audience finally saw eye-to-eye and decided it was crap. Then I saw it, and I thought it was a lot better than the first movie.

Occasionally, your favorite bad movie gets a following, like Baseketball. Or more to my original point, Halloween III. I bring this up because on Twitter a few days ago, someone tweeted “Eight more days to Halloween. Who remembers?” I responded, “Silver Shamrock!” My fellow writer then posted a scene from the movie showing a flashing, neon pumpkin. Like two fishermen looking at each other on a lake in an early morning, there was a recognition there.

Halloween III is the Halloween movie best known for not having Michael Myers in it. You may wonder that such a movie exists because it seems contradictory, but this was the original plan. Halloween was not originally meant as a slasher series showcasing the same monster over and over again. It was originally meant to be an anthology horror series, but it was attached to the character of Michael Myers after the first two movies because the story written for the first movie was too long to be told in one film. When Halloween III came out, audiences came to the theater expecting to see everyone’s favorite knife wielding Shatner enthusiast terrorize small-town Illinois again, only to find a Myers-less story taking place in Northern California involving robots and murderous Halloween masks. They weren’t pleased, and Halloween III went on to be one of the most hated movies in horror history, as far as the general public was concerned.

The people behind Halloween got the message and dropped the horror anthology concept, making every movie since then about Myers, to the point of making sure his name is in the title. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween 7: Michael Myers, Michael Myers, Michael Freakin’ Myers. Okay, that last one I made up, but you get the point. They brought Michael back in spite of the fact that the second movie killed Michael by literally blowing up his body. This trend continues today, with Halloween Ends, where Michael once again takes another stab at the town of Haddonfield. (And another stab. And another stab.) Clocking in with Rotten Tomato scores in the same range as congressional approval ratings, I’ve got to think that this dead horse has been beaten enough that when they call the film “Halloween Ends,” they’ve got to be serious about it. We all know that they aren’t, and that soon a reboot will be in the works. It keeps making money, so they’ll keep doing it.

It’s a travesty. Not only have they turned Michael Myers, a character that set the world ablaze in 1978, into a joke, they turned away from what could have been an interesting idea in the horror anthology concept, and Halloween III shows this. If you sit down and watch the thing without any preconception about what it should be about, Halloween III is a decent horror movie. It’s not a monster story. More of a cult story. It has a compelling protagonist who is good, but not so good that it irritates the viewer. We see him hitting on women in a way that wouldn’t be acceptable today but was probably a lot more normal in the early 80s, to say nothing of the day drinking and bad haircuts. The plan the antagonists have is truly horrific, and it has more than a few frightening scenes (particularly the one where we see what the masks actually do). The plan isn’t revealed until the third act, but the film makes sure not to start off slowly, beginning with a man being chased through a junkyard, who is later murdered in the hospital by a self-immolating robot. Behind it all is a message about exposing children to commercialism and advertising, in a decade where cartoons would be made for the explicit purpose of selling toys.

Audiences initially hated it, but Season of the Witch has developed a following over the years. Horror anthologies were a real thing in the late 70s, early 80s, with movies like Creepshow. A few years back, a series called “VHS” on Netflix brought back the concept through a found footage angle. I was a real fan. Alas, despite the following such movies had, it didn’t bring in the big bucks studios look for, so the trend died a second time. The effort-to-cash ratio of creating original stories every year compared to just throwing the same monsters at us over and over makes Hollywood interest fleeting. Hope springs eternal, however. Maybe if “Halloween Ends” bombs badly enough, someone will think “maybe we should take a risk this time.” Or maybe they’ll start talking about the next reboot.

EDIT: Originally, I said that the original Halloween was just too much for one movie. Since then, I’ve read that Halloween II was only created after the success of the first one and the original Halloween was meant to be a one off. I guess the temptation to reach for Mike Myers developed even faster than I thought.

Update on Beer Run. I have worked with my assigned editor and we have gotten the book proofread and ready for publication in record time. One step further along the journey. Thanks to my editor, Brian Cavit, and Editor-in-Chief, Kathi Sprayberry. I hope to have further updates for you soon.

I finished the first season of House of Dragon. I’d give it a six. I’d give Rings of Power a seven. Rings of Power is a less faithful adaptation of Tolkien’s world than House of Dragon is of Martin’s, but I just like Tolkien’s world better. In Westeros, you have betrayal, deceit, and skullduggery winning out over virtue. At the edges, you have betrayal, deceit, and skullduggery winning out over virtue with zombies and dragons. In House of Dragon, betrayal, deceit, and skullduggery win out over virtue in the past. Chances are, with the upcoming sequel series, betrayal, deceit, and skullduggery will win out over virtue in the future.

Tolkien has the opposite problem where evil is always punished and good rewarded, but that is more interesting in my view as good is fundamentally creative, as shown by how much larger Tolkien’s world is. Westeros has Essos. Middle Earth has Valinor, Numenor, and Beleriand, and all the parts of the map you don’t get to see. That’s to say nothing of the thousands of years of history Tolkien thought up to fill the back pages of the Lord of the Rings. The back pages.

And the future, well that’s pretty extensive too. You see, Tolkien set Middle Earth in our world, just thousands of years in the past. He didn’t imagine it happening on another planet. History is our history. The problem with that is: look at the map. If you read Karen Wynn Forstad’s Atlas of Middle Earth, you can see the full global view of Middle Earth, with Valinor in the West and some mystery continents to the East. We would interpret both as being the Americas. There’s even a continent that looks a lot like Africa directly to the south of Middle Earth. The far eastern half of Middle Earth looks like China and Siberia. The problem is Middle Earth itself, where most of the action of the books happen. Frankly, it looks nothing like Europe. Yeah, if you squint your eyes, Tol Fuin might look like England, though it’s really more like Iceland, and the peninsula over the bay of Forechal looks a little like Scandinavia. But no, Middle Earth doesn’t look like Europe at all.

So, how did Middle Earth become Europe? Tolkien doesn’t say directly, but based on past events, we can guess what happened. The continents have changed twice in Tolkien’s history of Middle Earth, once at the end of the First Age and then again with the Akallabeth. Both of these events involved supernatural forces intervening in the world. In the First Age, the Valar, upon hearing Earendil’s plea, intervened in Beleriand to destroy Angband and capture Melkor, inadvertently causing most of Beleriand to sink into the sea. In the Akallabeth, Ar-Pharazon invades Valinor after being seduced by Sauron and Eru intervenes, causing Numenor to sink into the ocean and removing Valinor from the circles of the world. If the continents are changing shapes, the Ainur or Eru Himself is intervening.

So, why would these otherworldly powers intervene to make Middle-Earth look like Europe? Once again looking at the two prior examples, there are two possible scenarios.

The first possibility is that Gondor, after retaking Arnor, Umbar, and the Eastlands, becomes as tyrannical as old Numenor. In this situation, Aragorn’s descendants dominate the entire continent, including the dwarves and the hobbits (the elves have sailed west at this point), and are enslaving people left and right. Worse than Sauron.

I don’t think this would do it. You see, the Valar didn’t call on Eru to change the face of the world because Numenor had become tyrannical. They did that because Ar-Pharazon invaded Valinor with his grand armada. Valinor has been removed from the circles of the Earth, so any evil Gondor wouldn’t be able to repeat this transgression. It’s not in the nature of the Valar to intervene just to save humans from themselves. They hesitated to invade Beleriand in the First Age until the elves were pushed to their limit by Morgoth. They only sent the Istari in the Third Age to fight Sauron, and even then they only sent a few, relatively low-powered Maia. The Valar don’t intervene in human affairs unless there is a problem humans can’t really deal with themselves, and any problem caused by humans can be solved by humans.

The second possibility is more likely: namely, that we live in an alternate world where Sauron won. It makes perfect sense. Just imagine that Sauron got the ring. Maybe Frodo and Sam get captured pretending to be orcs. Sauron gets the ring, retakes physical form, and then rolls over Gondor and Rohan. He has a little trouble taking Lothlorien, but soon he’s plowing through Rivendell and the Shire. Then he takes Lindon and game over.

The Men of the West, after initial resistance, bow down and worship Sauron. It’s not unusual for men to do that in Tolkien’s world. The dwarves, elves, and hobbits refuse, and Sauron wipes them all out. (This explains why there are no dwarves, elves, or hobbits in our world). The Valar look at this and decide, understandably, that their expeditionary force led by Saruman has failed. Rather than leave Middle Earth to its own devices, the Valar intervene like they did in the First Age. This destroys Sauron, but it reshapes Middle-Earth to look like modern-day Europe. It’s the only theory I can think of that makes sense.

It explains the shape of the continent. It explains the lack of dwarves and hobbits in our world (the elves were leaving for the West anyway). It explains a lot of human history. Seeing evil triumph like that at an early stage of development would leave quite an impression on us. Yep, we do live in a separate world from Middle Earth. We live in the world Sauron won in. Let that marinate for a while.

I might find it tough to write long blog posts. My day job as an attorney is heating up. We are approaching some deadlines in one case, and discovery is heating up in another. I think a lot of attorneys want to be writers. How you balance one with another is beyond me, yet somehow I manage it.

In the event someone should read this, I wonder if I could ask how you juggle the two. I assume most people in the writer-verse have day jobs, as very few people can live off writing alone. I have to write to keep me sane from my day job. Being an attorney can drive you crazy. Dealing with opposing counsel can be frustrating, especially when they take absurd positions for no reason other than delay.

I think that’s what drives me nuts so much about law. When your clients has bad news coming, you seek to procrastinate. I am a dedicated anti-procrastinator. Putting things off constantly drives me batty. It’s the same reason I critique short stories for Critters the first day possible. I want to get it out of the way.

Anyway, blogging might be sporadic, but then again, being busy hasn’t stopped me before.

I suppose I should elaborate on Beer Run, since I am trying to sell it. Maybe I should say what Beer Run is “about” rather than what it’s about. I’ve already summarized the first part of the plot. Now I’d like to answer why I wrote it.

I’ve had some bad work experiences. My first job was at a newspaper. The editor there was abusive, and my co-workers refused to show me how basic office equipment worked. Working there, I would have problems with people refusing to recognize me when I introduced myself to them, and then they would be mad that I didn’t know their name. It’s tough to talk about. Things didn’t get better as my career in journalism, then in law, went on.

The workplace seems to be this uniquely cruel place where hierarchy matters more than morality, X means Y if the boss says so, and the least important person in the room is always you. You go from college, a place where there is a real sense of shared values and where you have a sense of self-worth, to the workplace, where you represent a drain on revenue the management is trying to find a way to cut. I’ve been to places with turnover rates so high, at some point they stopped putting new associates on their website because it was simply too embarrassing. One place hired me, making me move halfway across the country and forcing me to take another bar exam, and then closed the office I was at seven months after I arrived. I once got laid off five months after buying a house and two months before getting married. My last job before this made its associates work twelve hours a day during the week and Saturday mornings. I genuinely considered it the best job that I ever had. They at least showed me how the copy machine worked.

Then, I got my current job. The management is diffuse. There are actually more partners than associates, so the power isn’t concentrated in one person. The CEO, despite being one of the busiest people I’ve ever met, is a genuinely nice guy. I normally get home at 5:30, after picking up my son. It’s given me time to have children, take up writing books, and even get published, all while giving me a very decent income. I have been there for three and a half years and barring a writing career that makes me somehow rich, I’m planning on staying.

Still, the bad memories I have from past employers still haunt me. I’ll get angry at random times. I keep flashing back to ass chewings from years past. I’ve gone to therapy over this, but nothing seems to completely put those scars behind me.

Suffice to say, my main character, Bill, has the same problems. Based on the character Acting-Ensign Wesley Crusher from Star Trek: TNG, Bill Stiltson worked as an “Acting-Ensign,” (more like an intern) on a Starship call the Starstorm when he was a teenager under Commander Michael Krieger. I imagine Krieger being based on Will Riker, only more like what someone like Riker was really like. He’s a tyrannical monster who bullies Bill mercilessly, and even years later, in an entirely different life, those memories haunt Bill.

Bill now runs his own brewery, with his own employees, and his own intern. He buys an illegal android from a bankruptcy trustee, who has both prodigious talents far beyond the average barmaid and the mind of a child. Bill, after receiving abuse at the hands of his “superiors,” is now in the position of being an authority figure himself. The story is about Bill trying to be better than the abuse passed down to him.

Does he succeed? You will have to read to find out! But, yes, he does better. You should still read to find out how.