Jax Book Nook

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.

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