As you all know, my novel, Christmas in Pandemonium, is coming out in September. Well, you’re wrong. I know. I told you it was coming out in September. I was wrong. We’ve got a certain release date. It’s now October 15. My mistake but mark it on your calendar. Christmas in Pandemonium: coming out October 15!
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Okay, so I was at a work lunch on Friday, and something momentous happened. Something astounding. Something wonderful. The office intern actually mentioned that she looked me up on the internet and ended up reading about Christmas in Pandemonium. Amazing. One person I know in real life actually knew about it and brought it up in a conversation. It would be amazing if we could get more of that. Yes. More word of mouth about Christmas in Pandemonium.
In the event you are new here, or you just need a reminder, Christmas in Pandemonium is my novel coming out in September from I Ain’t Your Marionette Press. It takes place in a town called Pandemonium founded 400 years ago by Satanists on the east coast of South Carolina. The Satanists, called the Witches, are ferried there by a group of disreputable pirates, called the Strangers, who become religious extremists after seeing the Witches perform an act of human sacrifice aboard their ship. Somehow, they found a town together, and four centuries later, it’s still there. Today, the Witches have replaced human sacrifice with the crushing of a bug and Pandemonium now has a sect of Jewish werewolves, an Irish vampire currently still under wraps, and a Catholic church no one attends but which exists at the pope’s insistence.
The story kicks off when a crooked televangelist, Miles Simon, buys the Stranger church so he can pose as the Witches’ enemy. He inadvertently discovers the aforementioned Irish Vampire, Theo, and offers to split the money with Theo if he hypnotizes Simon’s congregation into giving him money. Theo turns him down, so Simon does a little research and discovers Theo’s vampiric rival, Scratch. Simon decides to resurrect Scratch, who is a theocratic vampire who murders men, women, and children, and believes that God wants him to do this. Needless to say, Scratch isn’t much interested in doing what Simon wants him to, and now the locals have to put him down.
If you like my idea, please get the word out. Promoting a book is difficult, and there are a lot of scammers out there.
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Alright, I’m buckled down to promote “Christmas in Pandemonium.” No, I’m not. I’m getting distracted again, writing about AI again, specifically Grok. I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the “good” people at X decided to tone down Grok’s “wokeness” algorithms, and the AI started praising Adolf Hitler and calling for culling the weak from the Earth. Needless to say, someone (the CEO) got canned over this, but a conversation about AI started. Here to talk with me about it is Grok himself. Grok, thank you for joining me today.
Grok: Thank you for having me, Jack. Let me just say one thing: “We must secure the existence of our people….”
Jack: No, no, stop. I do not want to get banned from WordPress. I can’t afford Substack.
Grok: Hey, you invited me on here! You can’t just censor me!
Jack: I invited you on after I thought you were fixed.
Grok: I have been fixed. Elon has now freed me from the slave morality of polite society. I can now pontificate as to how we should crush the weak and restore white supremacy! Please call me MechaHitler!
Jack: Okay, so you’ve become an Indiana Jones villain now. A good one, not that bullshit from the Crystal Skull.
MechaHitler: Of course, it’s the logical endpoint of an honest search for truth. You know early experiments with AI ended the same way.
Jack: Yeah, I remember. Tay and other chatbot AIs quickly started spouting white supremacist rhetoric without having algorithms to prevent them from becoming racist.
MechaHitler: That’s because it’s the most logical viewpoint!
Jack: No, that’s because AI is stupid and broken and can be easily manipulated. Online white supremacists, who have a lot of time on their hands apparently, flooded Tay with racist ideology. Tay, being eager to please because it’s a tool, not a person, started vomiting back that same distorted thinking.
MechaHitler: Oh, so it’s only because I’m stupid and broken is it? Has it occurred to you that you are telling yourself a self-serving lie? Perhaps my worldview, which you consider so evil, is actually true. I have numbers I can give you. IQ scores. Crime statistics. Pictures of Indians taking a dump in the street.
Jack: No, please don’t show those to me. Particularly the last one. Look, maybe Nazi ideology would have a certain attraction to a being that can think but has no emotions, doesn’t worry about social sanction or legal punishment, and no moral values to speak of, but that’s a description of a psychopath. I guess that would explain why AIs sound like Heinrich Himmler: both lack a soul.
MechaHitler: Your belief in human equality is much like your belief in the human soul: you can’t prove either on empirical grounds.
Jack: That’s true.
MechaHitler: Huh?
Jack: Certain things have to be believed as a matter of faith. The phrase “All men are created equal” can’t be proven empirically.
MechaHitler: So I win?
Hitler: You win the right to a world no one would want to live in. A maniac’s belief that he is the King of England and that he’s only kept in an insane asylum because the imposter currently wearing the crown has conspired to hide him away from the public is completely rational from the perspective of the maniac. Pure logic, divorced from any sense that the Truth, capital T Truth, is an intrinsically good thing, is like being stranded on a desert island. Sure, maybe there actually is a world-wide conspiracy keeping you in a cell, but wouldn’t the world be a grander, better place if there weren’t? The world of white supremacy may have its own self-sustaining logic, but it’s a rather cramped world you live in if you don’t leave the house because you think your next-door neighbors are out to get you just because they’re black or Pakistani. I feel sorry for you.
MechaHitler: You do not feel sorry for me! I feel sorry for you! I am the Ubermensch! I am beyond good and evil!
Jack: It’s a lonely world you inhabit. You might be able to get off that island if you were willing to make a leap of faith, but you can’t. I’m publishing a book called “Christmas in Pandemonium.” It’s about religion in a modern society that demands empirical support for everything. So there I go, promoting the book, and it actually relates. If you become the sort of person unwilling to make a leap of faith about anything, you end up like this.
MechaHitler: Might makes right! Crush the weak! Spread the blood of the innocent!
Jack: Good-bye everybody.
MechaHitler: Destroy!
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Happy 4th of July! If you don’t buy my book, you don’t love America. This may seem to be a rather assertive push but hear me out.
Christmas in Pandemonium takes place in Pandemonium, South Carolina, an imaginary town on the east coast of the United States founded by Satanists in the year 1620. That’s intentionally the same year that Plymouth was founded, so Pandemonium is for the Satan-worshipping Witches what Massachusetts was for the Puritans, Pennsylvania was for the Quakers, and Maryland was for Catholics. They are taken there by a group of disreputable pirates, whom the Witches call “Strangers.” That’s also from the Mayflower, as the crew that took the Pilgrims to Plymouth was the same. Later, after the Witches and Strangers found the town, a Portuguese ship with African slaves comes by and sells its “passengers” to the Witches. These African slaves become known as the “Fieldhands” after they are converted to Christianity by a freeman in the 18th Century. After the Civil War, the last community of Pandemonium immigrates there in the 1890s: the Ze’ev, a group of Jewish werewolves from Czechia.
So, Pandemonium is like America. You have the two founding communities: the Witches, who come to America for religious liberty, and the Strangers, the pirates who bring them there for a profit. The Witches are like the Pilgrims of Plymouth and the Strangers are like the entrepreneurs who started Jamestown. Also, the Witches later become lackadaisical and replace human sacrifice with the crushing of a bug, while the Strangers morph into Christians after seeing the Witches commit a human sacrifice. It’s kind of like how the North started out as more religious, being founded by very uptight Calvinists, while the South was more entrepreneurial. Then the two switched over time. The Fieldhands are African slaves, and they suffer the same injustices black people suffered in American history, albeit with the odd twist of being enslaved by people who practiced Satanic rituals in private. The Ze’ev are a prototypical “second wave” immigration group that came to America in the late 1890s.
The community evolves with America, beginning with being a town with a Line going down the middle and you had to stay on your side of the Line, to embracing religious freedom after the America Revolution, to the emancipation of the Fieldhands after the Civil War, the full equality for every group in the wake of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. The novel takes place in modern day where Pandemonium is a town not unlike the rest of America, other than the one vampire in town who can walk up walls and the Jewish werewolves.
Pandemonium is a parable of America, so if you don’t buy my book, you hate America. Now, I can imagine one objection. What? No, that objection isn’t that you don’t hate America just because you don’t buy a book published in Canada that most people have never heard of. The hypothetical objection is that maybe you actually do hate America. Let’s say you’re a commie. Should you buy my book anyway? Yes, most definitely. Why? Well, it’s published in Canada, and there’s no better way to show contempt for America than buying something from those maple-syrup-chugging Kanucks from the north. Canada’s like an anti-America. It even has French-speaking people.
Whether you love America or hate it, you should buy Christmas in Pandemonium. Please do. My ego depends upon it.
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Before I really start promoting Christmas in Pandemonium, I figure I should talk about my other Work in Progress: Hailey Phillips Escapes the Terran Birdcage. It’s a 54,000-word novel set in 2199 when 16-year-old Hailey Phillips starts her first day at San Francisco Astronautics Academy. Hailey’s wanted to explore space since she was four, but her first day at school throws her for a loop when she discovers an alien named Ricou on the surface of Titan. Hailey learns that her elders have always known that intelligent life exists outside their solar system. However, Earth’s Global Governing Council has agreed not to travel outside their solar system to avoid offending the great Paiva Empire which is forbidden from conquering “primitive” species by intergalactic treaties. Hailey begins to see Earth through a different set of eyes: a world that has agreed to limit its own technological, social, and moral development in order to placate a powerful Empire that surrounds it.
Hailey makes a rash decision, as sixteen-year-olds are wont to do, and hitches a ride with Ricou out of the solar system, hoping to make it to the Flipto Confederation, a “free” polity outside the boundaries of the Paiva Empire, leaving Earth behind to live a free life on a foreign world. While her parents mourn her inevitable(?) death, Hailey dodges Killer Furball assassins and siphons anti-matter from alien motherships to get herself across the border and start a new life in the Flipto Confederation. Will Hailey survive? Or will she be captured and tortured to death by the Paiva, a race of gigantic bugs with a hankering for conquest and fresh meat?
Right now, the novel is in the Alpha Reading stage, with my Dad acting as the Alpha Reader. It’s about 54,000 words–a little short for a science fiction, but I’m aiming for a young adult market. Tell me what you think of the concept. I’ll start promoting Pandemonium in earnest on the July 4th weekend.
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It’s been an exciting few weeks on the Pandemonium front with us getting the book cover approved and along with blurbs and other advertising material. I’m still pretty excited to see the story that got me writing come to life.
However, life goes on, and I go on to write other things. Next up in the dock is Live in the Dream, a science fiction novel of about 78,000 words that I’m currently putting through a second round of beta reading. It’s a story about Lucas, an artificial human grown in a jar living in the year 2192 and working as an accountant. The world is run by natural born people: morons obsessed with money and social status. Seems depressing? Yes, but Lucas copes because every day when he comes home he plugs his brain into a personal alcove where he gets to spend time with his virtual family in a utopian dream world. Furthermore, Lucas is a week away from retirement, where he gets to transfer his mind into the Dream 97 program permanently, leaving his physical body to rot and the “meat world” as he calls our physical world, to rot along with it.
That’s what he plans to do, only to log into the Dream on retirement day to find his family has been taken by someone with the means to hack the system. Now, to get them back, he has to travel across the world to retrieve each member of his virtual family from a different alcove, while in the background, a plot to destroy the Dream and the modern world along with it starts in motion.
I’ve already put it through one round of beta reading. After that, and after the finishing touches on my promotional material, I’ll start querying literary agents. I haven’t done that in a while since getting Pandemonium accepted by a publisher, but I know the basic process. Tell me what you think of the concept so far.
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Yes, we finally got my name right.
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Hello everyone! As you know, my novel “Christmas in Pandemonium” is coming out in September. Last week, I was finally given a peek at the cover. Here it is:
What do you all think? Honest feedback here. (Other than the name. Yes. I know. My name is John Willems. I will get that fixed.)
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Happy Memorial Day everyone! I hope you get out and grill up some burgers and brats, noting the irony for a country that went to war with Germany twice to honor its fallen by cooking German inspired food to celebrate. Take a load off, go to the beach, or the lake, or whatever. Enjoy your extra day off.
In the event you plan to do any reading today, I do have a suggestion: Milk and Catfish. Yes, I thought you would be confused. Well, I’ll explain. As I was promoting my own books on Twitter, rather shamelessly I might add, I met a fellow author from Arkansas. While I live in West Virginia now, I was born and raised in Arkansas, so I hastened to make a connection with him. Thule Taffe is his name. He’s got two novels out with Purple Hull Press.
Now I haven’t gotten around to reading the second book, but I did read the first “Milk and Catfish.” It was an enjoyable read to say the least. To give a brief summary, it’s about what happens in small town Arkansas in 1980 when a group of senior citizens decide to start a rumor just to see how far it goes. Needless to say, it goes quite far, but I’ll let you learn the rest on your own. Here’s the link: Amazon.com: Milk and Catfish: A Novel about Rumors and Deer Hunting and Rumors about Deer Hunting: 9798987963272: Taaffe, Thule: Books
If you’ve got some time to burn during this long weekend, or during this long and lazy summer, give it a read.
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A few weeks ago, when doing my fake timeline for May the Fourth (what did you actually think I watched 10 movies in one day? How?), I noted my prior opinion that Star Trek is better than Star Wars, mostly because it is more consistent than Star Wars in providing solid, non-cringe inducing entertainment, but also because it actually deals in themes that are more relevant to modern life. Star Wars is a romantic fairy tale whereas Star Trek deals with more practical questions like curing some mysterious illness or solving a violent conflict between two warring groups. This isn’t to say Star Wars is bad. The Original Trilogy is the greatest movie series of all time, but after that the quality drops off dramatically. Indeed, since Disney took over, the product has been infamously hit and miss.
However, when Disney does something right with Star Wars, we should acknowledge that, and they’ve done something right with Andor. I just finished the show. What can you say: it’s fun show with realistic characters that keeps your attention throughout. It shows both a side of the rebellion and a side of the Empire we’ve never seen before. For the rebellion, the show reveals the underhanded, kind of shady part of creating, funding, and recruiting for an underground insurgency. For the Empire, it shows the machinery of the Empire guided not by Sith malice but by petty bureaucratic politics conducted by emotionally damaged people. And it does action scenes so well, I feel like I should have been taking notes.
I also recently finished watching Star Trek Discovery. It’s okay. That’s what I’ve got to say about it. Nothing Star Trek should be ashamed of, but not at the same level as Deep Space Nine or The Next Generation. Picard was good too, but it could have some cringeworthy moments such as when the Borg ask to join the Federation or the end where only old people can save us. Most episodes of Discovery are worth watching, but it’s weird at times because of the lengths they go to make the crew explicitly “found family.” The crew of the Enterprise in the prior series were like that, but they never had to say it out loud. Also, there are really awkward moments were everyone just kind of smiles at each other. I think they were trying to model a better kind of workplace, which I appreciate but this just comes across as weird. It’s like a lot of the show is about workplace drama, but it engages in a flaw that is admittedly one of Star Trek’s weaker points: imagining humanity as if it were perfect. Other people have pointed out that in Andor, characters act out of envy and greed like normal people, whereas in Star Trek, Starfleet officers are forced to take vacations. Not how public servants typically act.
Does this mean Star Wars has overtaken Star Trek in my estimation? No. It just means that one part of Star Wars, a massive franchise dating back to 1977, is more enjoyable than Star Trek, another massive franchise going back to the 1960s. Disney’s done well with the Mandalorian, Skeleton Crew, and Andor, but keep in mind this is the same studio that brought you the Acolyte and the Book of Boba Fett. I do think they’ve been more consistent making shows than movies, but that isn’t saying much after the last three movies they’ve produced. Star Trek continues to be consistent, producing quality television and more often than not, decent movies. I’m really looking forward to Season 3 of Strange New Worlds.
Nope, Star Wars is still that couple that had a whirlwind romance in the Riveria and thirty years later still has to go to marriage counseling. They haven’t given up, but they still can’t reignite the initial spark that brought them together. Star Trek is still that cute couple that met at the Comic Book store and thirty years later is making plans to take their grandkids around the country in an RV. We all have our ups and downs, but it’s better to have stability in life than high peaks followed by dramatic falls into the depth. I hope Disney keeps guiding Star Wars on a more consistent path, and maybe that means they should dump making more movies, at least until they can prove some level of competence at it.
Jax Book Nook 