Jax Book Nook

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.

It occurs to me that in between getting into fights on Twitter and venting my spleen about the hazards of modern writing, that I haven’t written much about this blog’s reason for being: namely Beer Run. Basically, it’s a Star Trek parody crossed with an exploration of what life must be like at the Mos Eisley Cantina. It takes place in a world very similar to the intergalactic federation of planets (It’s called the Democratic Union of Planets) guarded by a Starfleet like organization (called the Intergalactic Navy or IN).

The main character, Bill Stiltson, could have had a career in that. He certainly had the technical skills for it, being the son of the great Prof. William Stiltson, inventor of the android with positronic brain. It’s just that after being “acting ensign” for the tyrannical Commander Krieger for his teenager years, Stiltson, based on acting ensign Wesley Crusher, has no interest in being in the Intergalactic Navy and instead runs a brewery in Lunar City on the moon, which is contained in a terraformed bubble. At his brewery, he has employees from other planets, a waitress he dates off and on, and an intern just below the drinking age. His customers include conspiracy-believing xenophobes, aliens who design gravity systems while working remotely, and a solid 10 nymph who won’t give Bill the time of day.

Bill has no interest in politics or space exploration, but alas, these things have an interest in him. Bill buys an abandoned android off a bankruptcy trustee to work in his bar, illegally, as private citizens aren’t allowed to own androids. When Commander Krieger warps his ship into the sun, killing over a thousand people, the government sends an investigator to Bill to see what light he may shed, with his illegally owned android serving drinks behind the bar. While I can’t give away the entire plot, suffice to say Bill gets caught up in a conspiracy. Hope I have enticed you. More later.

So, as part of this book promotion, I have to be on social media. It’s part of advertising Beer Run. This has introduced me to the world of Twitter. My first tweet. “I am now on Twitter. The world will now be able to hear my thoughts. And I’ll say something really offensive and embarrassing! I will get canceled! Then I’ll get fired! My wife and kids will leave me! And I’ll be eating beans under a bridge! Wait, why am I joining Twitter again? Oh yeah! To promote my upcoming book, Beer Run, coming soon from Solstice Publishing!”

Tongue in cheek, of course. If you want to actually see my offensive and insensitive comments, you have to buy the book first. I want to get paid before becoming a pariah. But I did get into one Twitter fight. You see, someone asked the Twitterverse to rank the season finale of Rings of Power on a 1-10 scale. Everyone else was giving it either a 1 or a 2 or a 9 or a 10. I gave it a 6 I like the show overall, but there are a few parts that don’t work for me. What annoyed me with this episode is that they kept Sauron’s identity “secret,” and yet the fans guessed it correctly before the reveal: Halbrand is Sauron. They also had this Stranger who they teased might be Sauron, and a group of messengers who looked like the leader might be Sauron. The Stranger was pretty obviously Gandalf, at least from where I was standing.

Anyway, I pointed this out and someone responded by saying “Yeah, like Season 8 of Game of Thrones proved that subverting expectations always works.” The problem with this response is that the showrunners were obviously trying to subvert expectations with Halbrand, but they failed. Their foreshadowing was too obvious to pull off the surprise. He was ironically right. Subverting expectations doesn’t always work. And this was a classic example of it.

Here’s the deeper point I’d like to make in this blog post, and I’d like to start by being controversial: I liked the ending of Game of Thrones. It was a return to form for a show that subverted expectations by killing off Ned Stark in Season 1, ended Season 3 with the Red Wedding, and then immediately followed up by killing off Joffrey, letting you know that the blood rains down on the wicked as much as the righteous. If anything, the show had become too conventional since bringing Jon Snow back from the dead.

Furthermore, it did something that is very risky in this day and age: hold a mirror up to the audience. That Danaerys Targaryen is not a nice person is something that is obvious once you look at her actions objectively. Sure, she freed slaves. And she crucified people. A lot of them. But they were bad people, so we cheered for her. Tyrion tried to negotiate a peace with the slavers. She lost patience with that strategy and burned them alive. She invaded cultures she knew nothing about and imposed her rule on them using brute force, both in Slavers Bay and on the Dothraki. What happened at King’s Landing shouldn’t have surprised anyone, but we saw the story from her perspective and she was the hero of her own story. Don’t blame the showrunners if you named your kid after her. Blame yourself for not seeing that committing war crimes against bad people is still committing war crimes.

I also liked the Last Jedi. There I said it. Wasn’t overly impressed with it. A little like Rings of Power, but it wasn’t the disaster people kept complaining about. The movie had some flaws, but the complaints were too silly to hate the movie that much. I heard complaints about the science of the movie. It’s Star Wars, not Star Trek. They don’t care about science. It’s a movie series based on pure romanticism. Rose is an annoying character, they said. Well, I find Rose to be less annoying than constantly shoehorning in old characters for the sake of fan service, or keeping old characters alive despite them being blasted into space. Once again, on a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being the Wilhelm scream and 10 being Jar Jar Binks, I’d give Rose a 3. The biggest complaint had to do with the portrayal of Luke as this bitter old man. The problem is that everything Luke said about the Jedi was accurate. They did fail the Republic. And then the complaint came about Luke being able to project himself onto another world. You mean you can believe in a force that can move objects, brainwash stormtroopers, and speak to the dead, but astral projection is a bridge too far?

Then came the next movie which undid everything. No, literally, they tried to undo everything. Rey’s parents weren’t junkies anymore. She’s the emperor’s granddaughter. No longer are people unwilling to help the desperate Resistance. Instead, random groups without coordination will just show up out of the blue. Kylo Ren and Rey actually do end up together in the end, despite that making no damned sense. Did Rey just decide one day, “Yeah, you may have killed Hahn, but I forgive you, baby?” Rise of Skywalker represented the triumph of fan service over cinema that challenged the audience.

Of course, the entire sequel trilogy was fan service. The Force Awakens was basically a New Hope all over again. They started on a desert planet and even created a new Death Star. Even the Last Jedi made its ending a tribute to the fans. The reason for this was obvious: to distance itself from the prequels as much as possible.

Let me state this: the prequels were not good movies. In the original Star Wars, when Hahn and Luke are trying to free Leia, Hahn gets into an awkward conversation while trying to impersonate a prison official and then blasts the communicator, saying “I wasn’t wanting to hold a committee meeting.” In the Phantom Menace, there is an actual committee meeting. The acting was wooden, and some of the lines were infamous. (“I don’t like sand.” )In between the excessive CGI, the annoying kid, and the racist stereotypes right from the 1930s serials George Lucas was ripping off, we can safely say the films missed the target.

What we can say is that Lucas was aiming at something challenging. Unlike the original series, the prequels are morally complex. We know from the start that Anakin will one day be Darth Vader, and yet we’re supposed to cheer for him. Far from being angels of light, the Jedi are found to be capable of deceit and cunning. We know the creation of the stormtroopers isn’t a good sign, but at first, they’re very helpful in fighting the trade federation. We’re made to cheer for people who we know will be the villain someday.

Finally, Lucas says something important about why free societies fail. It’s just like Padme said, we lose democracy when we lose faith in it. It begins with a crisis that makes the limited government look weak. In this case, the Trade Federation keeps rebelling. The government expands its powers, with the creation of the clone army. Term limits are cast aside. Special powers are granted to the executive. All in the name of dealing with the crisis. Then there’s the appeal to unity for the sake of unity. “The politicians should just get together and decide what’s good for the people, and do it.” “They do, but they can’t agree.” “Someone should make them.” “That sound’s like a dictatorship to me.” “Well, if it works.” This is a conversation between Padme and Anakin, but it could be happening in every barbershop in America. The average American is bombarded with news telling him that the world is going to Hell in a handbasket and that our politicians can’t agree on so much as what direction the sun rises in. America’s democratic institutions are under attack because we’ve lost faith in the ability of those institutions to handle the problems of the modern world. In between the jumping Yodas and constant attempts to claw characters from the old trilogy into the new one, George Lucas made a very prescient point about free societies. They’re based on an act of faith.

So what’s the point of this very loooong rant? I appreciate what George Lucas tried to do even if he failed, and I appreciate what the Rings of Power tried to do, even if they failed. So, Amazon, bad job subverting my expectations. Thank you.

This is a continuation of my last post, which just got cut off. Never had a blog before. Need to learn when they have their limits. Anyway, as I was saying, Tolkien had certain elements in his stories that would be considered bad storytelling today. Peter Jackson dealt with this by cutting those parts or making small changes. We may judge him for that, but here’s the thing, in the modern world of novel writing, things wouldn’t be much different.

When I started reading, I learned about this thing called “bad writing” and “good writing.” Bad writing leaned too heavily on exposition, engaged in constant head hopping, used brand names, and introduced too many characters, i.e., all the stuff I do. Good writing concentrated on action scenes, stayed from one perspective per chapter, avoided adverbs, and made you care about the characters. Good writing was short, cutting all the unnecessary fat, and it used strong verbs. As I pointed out in my earlier post, by these standards, Tolkien was an awful writer. So were a lot of old writers. Doestoevsky spends so much time on exposition, he’s practically writing an editorial. Douglas Adams went on tangents that took up nearly half of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. And all of these writers made extensive use of omniscient viewpoint, which is now considered verboten.

The standard explanation for this is that people had different tastes in the past. However, I’m not willing to merely accept that people had different tastes without asking “Do we have better tastes now?” After learning from a few tough reviews what the expectations of modern writing were, I wrote Beer Run. Now it’s getting published! Which is great! A dream come true! I thank the people at Solstice Publishing for making it happen. (www.SolsticePublishing.com) However, one beta review I got sticks with me.

“It’s like an episode of a TV show.”

He meant that as a compliment, and why not? There are a lot of good television shows out there. There’s nothing wrong with a book that is like a TV show. It’s compact. It has memorable characters and a limited cast. There’s humor and action. Witty dialogue. Little to no exposition. The world is relatable and doesn’t require that much exposition to explain. That’s largely due to the fact that the world borrows a lot from classic science fiction and our own world. A story about a microbrewery on the moon in a Federation-like world depends on the reader to understand the Federation and microbreweries, something the general public is already familiar with.

The more I think about it, the more I come to the conclusion that the rules of modern writing appear to turn books into inferior movies. The perfect modern book is comprised of action scenes interspersed with dialogue. Sound like something you know? The golden rule of “show, don’t tell” tries to turn literature, a written medium, into a visual medium. The problem is books are not a visual medium. A camcorder will be able to show better than the most skilled novelist. The strength of literature is storytelling. There’s a reason that Hollywood scours novels and comic books for its latest blockbusters. And then Hollywood started running out of ideas. It seems that novels are imitating visual media without realizing how dependent visual media is on literature. Hollywood likes fantasy and science fiction, and those things are tough to do when the norm is a limited third-person perspective, cut exposition, and minimizing the number of characters.

If I were to give advice to myself three and a half years ago when I started writing, I would tell myself to learn these modern rules if you want to get published. It’s good advice for writers. I’m not sure it’s good for writing. Imitating visual media in the stories we tell puts novels at a disadvantage and it limits the kinds of stories we can tell. Just a thought.

Like many people who started writing after COVID, my experience in reading ill-prepared me for publication. What I mean is that when I read for pleasure in the past, I read a lot of books that are, as you say, old. Well, old in that they weren’t written this Millenium. Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, A Confederacy of Dunces, old-school Stephen King, and above all, J.R.R. Tolkien. I grew up reading the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, though I didn’t get to the Silmarillion until I was a young adult. Some books are meant to be read over a lifetime.

I bring this up because I am currently watching the Rings of Power. It’s been subject to all kinds of complaints. Some of these center around the race of the actors, which I find less racist and more pedantic. No, there probably weren’t black people in prehistoric Europe. Shakespeare had no black actors to play Othello. He just told the crowd that Othello was a moor and expected them to use their imaginations. I wonder if some of those people did stomp out in protest, and no doubt their descendants are the people now bitching and moaning about black elves.

A better point being made is that the Rings of Power isn’t true to Tolkien because it gets the events of Tolkien’s world out of order. The show takes the timeline of Tolkien’s world and condenses it. Galadriel was a warrior…in the First Age. The Ring was forged in the first half of the second age. Numenor fell in the second half of the second age. Gandalf and the Balrog both appear, despite the fact that in Tolkien’s time line, neither show up until the Third Age.

However, it is unlikely that Tolkien’s work would ever be translated to the screen as he intended. That’s because his type of writing doesn’t map onto our modern idea of good storytelling. It includes unnecessary characters like Glorfindel and Tom Bombadil, employs an omniscient viewpoint, and involves long bits of exposition. Tolkien cared very little about the golden rule of modern writing “show, don’t tell” as he spent hundreds of pages telling us about the history of Middle Earth in the back of the Return of the King.

However, I wonder if this means that Tolkien was a bad writer (unlikely) or if our ideas of what constitutes good writing are deficient (more likely). In any event, it is unlikely we will ever see Tolkien’s vision on screen. And I think maybe he would prefer it that way. Tolkien was pretty reticent to allow his movies to be adapted. Something will inevitably get lost in translation.

Hello, this is Jack Willems of Charleston, West Virginia. I am a new writer who just published his first novella: Beer Run, with Solstice Publishing. It is currently in the editing phase. =http://www.SolsticePublishing.com

I was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1986 to a middle-class family.  I lived in Searcy, Arkansas as a kid until I went to a boarding school run by Benedictine Monks for high school After high school, I attended the University of Arkansas on a full scholarship, graduating at the top of my class.  I then attended Harvard Law School, serving as an editor for the Journal of Law and Public Policy, publishing a case review. I then came back to Arkansas, and after a short stint as a law clerk for the Arkansas Supreme Court, I have worked as an attorney ever since.  My job has forced me to move a few times, and I am currently living in Charleston, West Virginia, working as an attorney primarily in litigation and real estate. 

            I met my wife Rachel while I was still practicing in Arkansas.  She was getting her Masters in Music at the University of Memphis on the other side of the state.  We met online and hit it off immediately. We drove five hours each weekend to see each other. We married in October 2015, and we had our first child, Francis Timothy Willems, February 2021.  I have two brothers, one who still lives in Arkansas and another who lives in New York City. 

            Since I started writing I have been published twice. I published a short story called Identical to the Real Thing in Synthetic Reality Magazine. I also published A Probing Interview in Literally stories. I am now in the process of publishing my novella, Beer Run.

I started writing at the beginning of the pandemic.  I think a lot of people did, but I wanted to write as a way to deal with some negative life experiences that I had, particularly in the workplace.  My wife wanted me to start writing again because she could tell I was having some problems coping. 

Beer Run takes place in the year 2538 in the Democratic Union of Planets. While many promising young men aspire to join the Intergalactic Navy and explore the universe, Bill Stiltson, son of the inventor of the artificially intelligent android, just wants to run a microbrewery on the moon. This is why he illegally buys an abandoned android, whom he dubs Cassandra, and covertly puts her to work behind the bar. However, Bill is thrown into a mystery when his old commander flies his ship into the sun, killing everyone on board, and Bill becomes a part of the investigation. Bill and Cassandra, along with Bill’s adopted android brother, Isaac, get drawn into a Luddite conspiracy.

Right now. I working on getting Beer Run published. I may have excerpts of it later. I may have other writing. Right now, I’m just finishing up my first post.