About 24 years ago, I went to the theater and watched Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I don’t remember that much about the movie, other than it had some imagery that disturbed me. One thing I do remember is that the experience of watching that movie taught me something about villainy that I’ll never forget. That is, my favorite villains are the ones that seem like they could be a real person.

Mustache-twirling figures in dark robes, cackling as lightning crashes above in a starless night sky… there’s a time and a place for those characters, but they’ve never been my favorite. I like villains that are more like Macbeth. You can see their motivations, and maybe even imagine doing what they did, if you were in their position.

To a certain point, Killmonger in the Black Panther movie was another good example of a well crafted villain. Until he burned the heart-shaped flowers, one could just about imagine him as the hero. He did some terrible things, but he was fighting for something and his motivations were clear.

Today’s villains in real life are, unfortunately, not so well written. Masked men pulling teachers out of schools and disappearing them in vans. A president standing by, looking bored and annoyed as someone visiting him lays on the floor needing medical attention. A Speaker of the House putting the House of Representatives on paid vacation while the administration denies food funding for the elderly and children. An entire political party using starvation as a bargaining tactic in order to revoke health care subsidies and maybe sneak some anti-abortion legislation in, as a special treat.

I couldn’t put any of these people in my stories and have it be an enjoyable story. It’s cartoonish villainy, and one-note motivation: greed. There’s a bit of racism involved, too, but that’s only for selecting the targets to go through the for-profit incarceration system.

To write a modern day villain, you have to depict them as valuing money more than any human life. I don’t really think the GOP is entirely filled with Nazis, though there are definitely some. To be a Nazi is to believe in a race-based worldview, an ideology that there is one race greater than all the others. When I look at what’s going with the bowing and scraping to oligarchs, I’m seeing a belief system around money, not people.

It’s all about the money. Maybe it has always been that way, but things under Trump are more clear and obvious.

The current Mel Walker story I’m working on takes place in the summer of 2024, well before the election. I have thoughts for a third and final Mel Walker novel, but I really don’t think I want to write it. The Mel Walker stories take place in what is recognizably our world. There is magic and ghosts and people with psychic gifts, but the geography and history and feel of the world is ours.

The Repossessed Ghost takes place in November 2013. The Psychic on the Jury takes place sometime between 2016 and 2019, though it could be any year. It’s a small story very much local to Sacramento. In a sense, I skipped Trump’s first term, and I try to keep the Mel Walker stories apolitical. Reading my blog, I’m quite obviously politically opinionated, and anti-Trump, but Mel Walker isn’t me, and I really do try to make my stories a break from reality.

The same holds for The Psychic Out of Time. It’s not a political screed. I’m not writing Animal Farm, and I have no interest in doing so. I want to entertain and provide escapism.

Truth be told, I want to focus on the good people can do. I want to talk about the transformative power of love. I want to feel and make other people feel hope and triumph after overcoming tragedy. I want to depict heroes overcoming their flaws in order to stand up and do what’s right. I want to paint pictures of justice with my words.

I don’t much like living in Trump’s world, and I don’t have a lot of interest in writing about it. So, I’m not sure there will be another Mel Walker story after The Psychic Out of Time, because it’s supposed to be about The End of the World, and I don’t know how I’m going to be able to capture that when The End of Our World is this cyberpunk dystopia, in which an oligarch can arrange a trillion dollar payout while regular folks struggle to pay rent and put food on the table.

It’s November 3rd, and I promise I’m not going to write a blog post every day in November. That’s not how you finish a novel, though it is a good way to prepare for finishing a novel. Maybe I should write a blog post every day, and then in December, finish my next book around Christmas.

In the mean time, I’m showing up again to do some writing, and this feels like a good way to warm up. It’s also a good excuse for me to talk a little bit about the struggles of my current story, hopefully without giving any spoilers.

Before I talk about The Psychic Out of Time, though… I’ve noticed an uptick in traffic here lately, and according to Jetpack, about half of the new traffic is from China.

Are you or someone you know maintaining a blog, and are you also seeing a lot of traffic from China? I’m guessing it’s a bot or something technical, like maybe someone training an AI. But why blogs? My posts are rife with typos and incorrect words (homonyms are my Kryptonite — I really do need an editor), so if they’re training on me, they’re poisoning their well.

It’s fun to fantasize that I somehow have fans in China, but since none of my work has ever been translated out of English, that seems unlikely.

At this point, it doesn’t seem to matter. It piques my curiosity. Maybe there’s a thread there that will lead to a fun story.

Speaking of stories, allow me to talk broadly about The Psychic Out of Time. No spoilers. Just things that will probably show up in the blurb.

Mel Walker is a psychic that can see the past. With that in mind, The Repossessed Ghost and The Psychic on the Jury are stories involving time displacement, but it’s safe and it kind of makes sense. Mel isn’t going back to the past and making changes. While his feet are firmly planted in the present, he looks at the past and sees things that he wasn’t present for. We can understand this because we do this all the time with cameras.

In The Psychic Out of Time, Mel meets Holly, a psychic that sees the future. Mel looks backward, she looks forward, and when they first meet, they converse across the span of time. In fact, the first time Mel meets Holly is not the first time Holly meets Mel.

I like time travel stories, and I have to write this like one, even though none of the characters actually travel through time. I have to consider causality, free will, and where each character is on their journey through the narrative. It needs to make sense, be easy to follow, and avoid some of the things time travel stories get wrong without being obvious about it.

It’s fun, but it’s hard. I keep hitting these points where I have to stop and really think. The characters can’t travel through time, but through their interactions, information is able to move forwards and backwards, which is just as bad or worse.

I’m trying to write the next Mel Walker story. Not the next Tenet, as much as I loved that movie.

That’s where I’m at, anyway. The work day went okay, but I’m a little bit behind on some stuff, and that sucks. I may need to work late tomorrow. If that’s the case, you probably won’t hear from me until Thursday, as I already have plans for Wednesday evening.

Maybe I’ll sneak some writing/blogging time in earlier in the day. Who knows? Maybe Holly knows, but she hasn’t told me yet.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I have all of my other chores basically finished for the day. For the next hour or so, I’m going to keep working on The Psychic Out of Time. As a warm up, I thought I’d write a quick update.

I’ve really been enjoying Chuck Wendig‘s apple reviews. He started doing them on Twitter a long time ago. They’re funny, informative, and a reasonable introduction to his voice and writing style. Reasonable, because Chuck has a pretty broad range, and these reviews tend to highlight his humor more than his horror.

Melissa and I have been enjoying Cosmic Crisps, but because of Chuck’s reviews, I picked up some other apples yesterday while we were at the store. We have more Cosmic Crisps, some Galas, some Envies, some Asian Pears, and a couple of Opals.

It’s the Opal I’m trying today. Here it is untouched.

When Chuck does his apple reviews, he records himself eating them and gives some brief analysis in a video, posted to Instagram.

When I consume apples, I make it easy on myself. I take the corer/slicer and split my apple in one clean CHUNK. It comes out looking like this:

This would be a good time to note that Chuck is also a photographer, and I’m just snapping these in my kitchen, with my phone.

One of the reasons I picked the Opal is because Chuck recently did a review of one.

How does my Opal compare?

It’s good. The flesh was a little bit softer than I expected when I cut it, but it’s firm enough with each bite that I don’t feel like I’m eating a sponge. I’m finding this apple to be more tart than anything. There is juice, but my mouth feels a little dry after eating a few pieces.

There is a note in mine that I can’t identify. When I try to find the words, I come away with “yellow,” “lemon,” and “flower petals,” though none of those descriptions are quite right. It’s not lemony or sour, though there might be a hint of that underneath the tart. The fruit is obviously yellow, but “yellow” as a flavor descriptor is right, in the same way “purple” is the right word to describe certain flavors of Kool-aid.

It’s a very pleasant apple. I think I like the Cosmic Crisp more, but this is good, and I’m glad we picked up more than one.

On an unrelated note, I made some great progress on the woefully late WXR 2025 keyboard. I’ve got a print for the base that accepts the chip perfectly. I have some tiny screws for affixing the ESP32 to the case, but it fits so snug that it doesn’t really need them. I had to iterate several times on this, but I think I finally have it.

I’m still uncommitted on an official Novel Month thing, but I’m two days in a row showing up to write, and that’s good enough for now. We’ll see what Monday is like when I have to get back to the regular daily grind.

Happy November, everyone!

As I’m writing this, I’m sitting at a Shut Up and Write. It’s the first Saturday of the month, so the group has a mini marathon going on at this community center at the Bel Air off of Arden. It’s kind of a weird venue, but it’s not bad. The only down side is the wifi is absolute garbage, so I need to use my phone as a hot spot.

Let’s talk about Novel Writing Month, and a little bit about the deceased group, NaNoWriMo.

The organization imploded, for good reasons as far as I’m concerned. First there was the event involving child grooming, which the organization didn’t handle very well. Then the org, strapped for cash, sold its soul to an LLM company and violated the spirit of the month. The organization sucked, but the writers that showed up to the events are awesome, and they’re still out there.

I’m sure at some point this month, I’m going to stumble into a Panera, probably in the evening, where I’ll find a bunch of friends huddled over their laptops.

What becomes of all these stories? Are the words wasted? Is it bad in the first place to put all this effort into writing 50,000 words in 30 days?

I can’t speak for everyone, but my November projects turn into novels that I’m willing to stand by and sell. That’s how The Repossessed Ghost came into being. On the back burner, waiting to find an agent, I also have Spin City and Synthetic Dreams. And three or four other projects which aren’t as far along, but that I have every intention of finishing before I’m done.

Not all NaNoWriMo projects go on to find readers. Not all of them are ever even finished. I’m not sure that matters, though. The act of sitting down and putting words on the page is a reward unto itself. It’s good training, good practice, and in a lot of cases, good just to be out in the world participating with others as part of a community.

But why November? Why aren’t those people writing during the rest of the year?

I remember talking with someone about this, and they were of the opinion that NaNoWriMo is bad, actually, because “it burns people out, and encourages people to only write during November.” That was his assessment, which I disagreed with then, and I disagree with now.

It’s true that some people that show up in November only write during that time. Would those people write at all if NaNoWriMo didn’t exist? Now that the organization is dead, will those people still write in November?

I don’t think they will, because I think those people were showing up for the community. I’m not saying that they’re not writers, but I think they aren’t looking to make writing a career the way I am. I think they’re mostly hobbyists, and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Having a little bit of extra external pressure to get words on the page isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That’s what the month has always been for me, and while my first experience with finishing 50k in 30 days led to me burning out for a little while, I don’t blame NaNoWriMo, or even think my experience was common.

That is to say, as I was writing the first draft of The Repossessed Ghost, I wrote the first 25k words from November 1st through November 26th. I wrote the next 25k from the 27th through the 30th, and that is what burned me out. I didn’t write again until January.

Am I participating this year?

I guess? You’re not going to get a strong commitment out of me right now as I have a lot going on, and my emotions have been an absolute roller coaster. I’m going to try and prioritize writing more this month. I’m going to take each day as they arrive. I really, really want to finish The Psychic Out of Time as soon as I can, but I also want to be kind to myself and not feel too disappointed if I get to the end of the month and there’s still more to do.

Today is the 1st. I’m at Shut Up and Write. I’m going to try and get 2k words written today, and we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

What are you up to this month?