The Summer 2021 Box of Comics

If there's one great thing about ebooks and electric comics is that you can carry potentially your entire library on vacation. 

But that wasn't always the case back in the days before Kindles and iPads. No, back then, you'd have to be judicious with what you wanted to read while on vacation because you'd have to carry everything. In my adulthood, I would spend almost as much time deciding on what books and magazine to bring on a vacation as I did on my entire vacation's wardrobe. I know I'm not alone here. I mean, as much as I enjoyed the 800-page, hard cover history book was I reading, there was no way it found it's way into my backpack for reading on a plane. 

Before adulthood, however, there was another factor that determined what we might bring on a vacation: our parents. I remember my youth in the 70s when we'd go on vacation, my parents would not let me take EVERY comic I owned. Even as an only child, it was just not feasible to bring them all. A friend of mine were talking this week and he mentioned his mom told him he could only bring ten comics on their annual trips. He always prioritized the 100-page giants and the like so he could maximize his reading experience. I did something similar. 

Most of the time, those issues would have a then-current story backed with multiple reprints ranging from the 1940s to the 1960s. In an era where back issues were few and far between, these issues rocked. Well, unless is some crappy story feature Prince Valiant or some Viking nonsense. Didn’t like it then. Still don’t. 

Summer 2021

One of my summer projects is to catalog all my comics. I’m almost done. A nice side effect was seeing all these old issues. Some of them have distinct memories associated with them. Others—many others—do not. In fact, I started culling many issues. “Why the heck did I buy that one?” I asked myself more than once.

Seeing all these issues made me want to read them again. Sure, I could keep all my long boxes in the front room all summer, but I think we know how that would go over with the rest of the family. So I made my own Summer 2021 comic box. I’ll probably go back and pull a few other issues, but mainly, the titles I want to read are in this box.

Those thicks ones are those awesome black-and-white reprints where you get 500 pages of comics in a single volume, the modern equivalent to those old 100-page giants.

I’ve been reading through the Master of Kung Fu collection for a little while, but I’ve sped up knowing the movie is on its way. The others are just hankering I’ve been having: 70s-era Marvel books I never read back in the day.

Marvel also published eight magazine-sized Doc Savage issues, all black-and-white. I have them all, but I’ve only read the first one.

This is one where I remember buying it but have zero memory of it. I like the 70s and 80s when comics artists and writers would just try anything, like apparently making a quarterback into a super hero. Sure.

I have a ton of Superman tiles, second only to Batman. But this Time and Time Again series is something that looks interesting.

Then there are titles like this. Have to read it for the historical value.

I discovered a few X-Files comics which are in the box, but that also led to re-discover this entry where the Dark Knight is abducted. 

This issue of Detective is one of the earliest I ever had. Can’t remember the story, but I will this summer. You can see the frayed edges of a well-loved book.

I’ve got a few novels lined up to read, but I think the Summer of 2021 will be comic heavy.

So, did your parents limit the number of novels and comics for your trips? Did you get to buy some on the road? And what specific comics can you remember reading during the summers?

Year 5 of an Indie Writer: Week 21: The Summer Writing Season

Year of an Indie Writer: Week 23

Sometimes it's the smallest things that can have a big impact.

Fiction Writing Stalled

Over the past month, the new fiction writing has been in a bit of a holding pattern. While I'm still proofing and re-reading the next Calvin Carter novel, BRIDES OF DEATH, there's no new stories flowing from my keyboard. And I've pretty much zeroed in on the culprit.

Blogging. I kind of fell into a blog-per-day schedule by accident. When I finally realized it, however, I wanted to keep the streak going. Why? Because it's a streak. Yes, I was enjoying it, but lots of my writing energy was focused on getting out the next day's blog vs. new fiction. My recent trip to Corpus Christ corresponded to 1 June and I made the decision not to force myself to write something every day. I will develop a schedule--likely Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday--but I want to make it memorable and consistent. If something jumps to mind or there's an anniversary, I'll write more. But my main focus should be writing new stories, not always new blog entries.

Planning the To Be Read Pile for Vacations

A key part of planning for any travel is to decide what I'm going to read on the trip. The family and I went to Corpus Christi, Texas, this past week. We frolicked in the Gulf of Mexico, fished, toured the city, and ate seafood every night. T'was a great week.

Leading up to the vacation, I had meticulously planned out the items I would bring. I brought my Kobo ereader, my iPad for some comics, a small pile of actual comics anchored by the newest Star Wars comics #108 (a continuation of the original Marvel Comics run), the latest issue of Men's Journal, the latest issue of Back Issue focusing on the 30th anniversary of the first Tim Burton/Michael Keaton Batman movie, and a Time Magazine anniversary issue on D-Day.

I was going to be gone for six days.

What did I actually read? Half of Men's Journal (night one), about 75% of the D-Day magazine (every morning), and that was it. Everything else didn't even leave my bag.

Because I bought a few paperbacks: The Scam by Linda Evanovich and Lee Goldberg, First Counsel by Brad Meltzer, two Longarm novels by James Reasoner, and a Shell Scott sampler by Richard Prather. I read four chapters of The Scam and that was it.

Funny how meticulous planning can go off course for the best of reasons: spending time with the family.  Look, I love reading and read something every morning, but after days of touristy things, I was pretty tired.

Oh, and I wrote zero words of new fiction despite bringing the Chromebook. It was truly a reset time.

Happenstance TV Watching

What we did each night was watch some TV. During the regular TV season, the wife and I have a few staple shows we watch together and a few we watch separately. Down in Corpus, we watched together every night while the boy entertained himself with YouTube and other streaming shows.

Now, we subscribe to Netflix and Amazon and the streaming-compatible DVD player in the rented condo likely could have been programmed with our passwords, but each night, we opted to "just see what's on." One night was a DVD my wife bought from Half Price for $2. It was for a show called "Maggie," starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It wasn't great. One night was a 1983 Charles Bronson film "10 to Midnight," a markedly better movie but by no means great. We both chuckled about 80s action movies/police movies, especially considering the abrupt ending. The other nights were unmemorable except for the bulk of Lethal Weapon 2.

As I've written before, as nice as it is to have so much content available at our fingertips on demand, it's kinda neat to just channel surf and land on something.

That One Little Thing

So how does all this non-writing relate to writing? Well, it happened on Thursday morning on our way out of town. I specifically brought some old proof copies of a few of my books to leave in the condo. Instead, I delivered them to one of those free-standing neighborhood library pop-ups. Seeing as how these were proofs copies, all my marks-ups were scattered through the pages. So I penned a note inside each book letting future readers know what these books were, why they were marked up, but hoping they'd enjoy the story.

And I signed them.

That one little thing sparked the proverbial pilot light in my writing soul that had been too long at a low flame. Why? If I hazard a guess, it's because I was ultimately sharing those stories with others. As much as I enjoy spinning these yarns, I really enjoy sharing them. Yeah, I know ALL writers enjoy sharing their stories, but that doesn't make it untrue.

Moreover, the writing portion of the equation is the one thing over which we writers have 100% control, as JA Konrath so brilliantly pointed out this week.

Controllables

I've written here about controlling the controllables. Well, earlier this week, prolific author JA Konrath discussed marketing plans by writers. He has a sobering verdict: most are bad.

However, he offered a ray of light to all writers (or all creatives) in the form of a message he'd send to his younger self:

"One brand, one genre, stop experimenting, stop being a perfectionist, and just write five good books a year in the same series. Make sure they are professionally edited and formatted, have great covers and descriptions, keep length under 75k words, and make sure they have updated, clickable bibliographies in the back matter, pre-order pages for the next release, and newsletter sign-up forms."

Head on over to the main post for his in-depth pathway that led him to this conclusion. It is chock full of details.


That's it for this week. A non-writing week full of barely reading. But that's not bad right?

Quarter Two Twenty Nineteen: A New Writing Cycle Begins

Ninety-two days. Thirteen weeks.

That is the number of days in the second quarter of 2019. Well, it's actually the same number of days in any second quarter of any year, but I digress.

Over the past five or six years, the second quarter of the year has become my favorite quarter. Spring is on the rise and summer beckons. The end of a school year and, well, summer beckons. I haven't been in any sort of school for the past twenty years, but I've always kept a 'school year' calendar in my head.

Second Quarters indicate a shift in the types of music I listen to, movies I watch, and books I read. Gone are the music/books/movies associated with the 'darker' months. Here are the music/books/movies associated with bright, sunny, and hot days. Action/Adventure books. Bigger-than-life movies. Music to drive around town with the windows down. It's a grand time.

New Writing Cycle

As a writer who has a day job, I do not have the opportunity to write for longer than about an hour day day. Some days, ninety minutes. On really good days, it can be two hours.

I compensate by writing along the calendar. New projects start on new months. And today is the start of not only a new month but a new quarterly writing cycle. Think about it: if you write 1,000 words a day for the entire quarter, you'll have 92,000 words of fiction. Imagine what you can do with that.

• Nine 10,000-word novelettes. 
• Eighteen 5,000-word short stories. 
• One long novel. 
• Two short novels. 

What could you do with, say, eighteen different and/or connected short stories? How about two short novels? What about that novel you haven't finished yet?

A bit of poor planning on my part means I'll be spending the first few days of the quarter completing a novelette I started in Quarter One. And then I'll have to complete the sixth Calvin Carter novel.

But I also plan on writing new tales. And what makes this little endeavor fun is that I don't know what I'm going to write. It'll be just as exciting for me to craft the tales as it will be for folks to read them someday in the future.

I think of this as a NaNoWriQua: National Novel Writing Quarter.

What will you accomplish with your 92 days?

Project: Nemesis by Jeremy Robinson

When I asked my fellow science fiction book club friend how he came to select PROJECT: NEMESIS by Jeremy Robinson, he said he was looking for something that captured the 60s cartoon/monster movie vibe. Additionally, he heard a couple of folks saying this book was a genuine effort to do an American kaiju book. Well, that would have been enough for me, too. But a premise is only half of the equation. The book has to deliver.

Two words come to mind: Nailed it!

PROJECT: NEMESIS starts with a military operation in the far north and two soldiers stumble upon the remains of a giant monster. This story is set in a nebulous future/present where Japanese soldiers work with Americans and train together. When a high-ranking general arrives, he promptly asks the younger Japanese soldier to shoot his American partner.


The story cuts to our main hero, John Hudson, Department of Homeland Security-Paranormal Division. He’s in Maine mostly to investigate a series of reports of a Sasquatch sightings. He arrives at a cabin where he’s supposed to sleep only to find a mama bear and cubs have staked out their claim. So, in a novel about a kaiju, you first get a bear attack. And it’s pretty darn exciting. Hudson survives—but not his truck—and he throws back quite a few beers to decompress. Well, the next morning, the local law officer in the person of Sheriff Ashley Collins and, through his hangover, Hudson accompanies Collins to interview the old man who called in the complaints. What they find is unexpected: a seemingly abandoned military base from the Cold War days. But if it’s abandoned, then why is the razor wire new? And why is the wire coated with a substance meant to look like rust? And why is there a man and his hidden partners there pointing a shotgun at them?

PROJECT: NEMESIS definitely earns the name ‘thriller’ because the action rarely lets up. Robinson throws in a lot of sequences that are just flat-out fun. Plus, there’s a kaiju, the Japanese word used to describe giant monsters like Godzilla, Mothra, or King Kong. What makes this story interesting is how the kaiju was created and birthed. It may not be totally unique in the entire oeuvre of monster movies, but I liked it.

The bulk of the book is told from Hudson’s first person, present tense point of view. It gives the story a breathless immediacy.  When the POV switches, it’s all still present tense, including a few scenes featuring the kaiju itself. You actually get a ‘why’ to go with all the destruction. More importantly, you get a twist on a common story trope. Most of the time when an author introduces you to a character via their POV, you make the assumption you’ll be with that character the entire way through the book. Nope. He manages to make you care for a character and then have that character die. It was a shock, as in “Did [that character] just get killed?” Yup. It made the rest of the action higher pitched because you never knew if any of the main characters would get offed.

I listened to the audiobook and this is a perfect case for narrator giving that little extra something that comes across as greater than the whole. Hudson is basically your typical wise-cracking hero, and Jeffrey Kafer is pitch perfect. Robinson’s words and Kafer’s narration sucked me in almost immediately. Heck, I finished this nearly nine-hour book in five days. I started volunteering for household chores. Need the lawn watered? I’ll do it, just let me get my phone. Oh, we need to drive our empty glass bottles to get recycled? I’m your man.

PROJECT: NEMESIS is nothing less than a thrilling summer blockbuster in prose.

The President is Missing by Bill Clinton and James Patterson

Almost from the day it was announced, I knew I wanted to read THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING by Bill Clinton and James Patterson. On the one hand you have one of the all-time best-selling authors who has created his own fiction factory. On the other, you have a former president who served for eight years in the office and could provide vital details as only a man who sat in the Oval Office could. It was a match made in heaven.

But would the book be any good?

It’s an honest question, but let’s be honest: if it’s got Patterson’s name on it, the story will at least be serviceable.

And I’m here to tell you it’s more than serviceable. It’s pretty darn good.

The story opens as President Jonathan Lincoln Duncan, newly widowed, is facing the prospect of a compelled testimony in front of a Congressional committee. Impeachment is in the air because Duncan recently ordered a special forces raid seemingly to save notorious terrorist Suliman Cindoruk, leader of the Sons of Jihad group. The Speaker of the House—a member of the unnamed ‘other party’; Duncan’s party affiliation also remains unnamed making it more bipartisan—who has designs on the presidency smells blood.

But Duncan has an even greater problem. Somehow, Suliman’s cyber hackers have implanted a virus in the computer systems of the Pentagon. Codenamed “Dark Ages,” if released, the resulting damage would be catastrophic. It would literally plunge the US into a modern dark ages. And one of six members of Duncan’s inner circle—including the Vice President—is a traitor because a young girl from the Republic of Georgia is asking to meet with Duncan. Alone. And she utters “Dark Ages” to prove her point.

How could this young woman know that? Who is she? And, after Duncan goes incognito and meets at the baseball stadium, who is this other guy pointing a gun at the President of the United States?

THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING clocks in at over 500 pages, but they read extremely fast. Duncan’s prose is all in first person and the entire novel is written in the present tense, giving it an urgency. Having Duncan narrate his own scenes is great, especially with his asides when he gives details you know came from Bill Clinton’s memories. There are other characters and all those scenes are related in third person. It’s the first time I can remember reading a book like this. Granted, as a writer, I noticed the differences at first, but as the story went on and my reading speed increased, it faded away and I was solely in the action.

By now, Patterson is a master at crafting a story and, while I’ve read few, I could see how one of his stories is made. And I really loved how the tension was racketed up. Sure, there were lots of cliffhanger chapter endings, but this is a summer thriller. It’s supposed to have cliffhangers.

And there was one passage of about five chapters that completely fooled me. I thought one thing was happening and it was something else entirely. Much like watching “The Sixth Sense” a second time when you know the truth, I re-read those chapters just to see how Patterson did it. Brilliant. Also brilliant was the skillful way Patterson kept the truth behind the traitor and other characters, revealing their identity at precisely the right time. This guy can tell stories!

I purchased this book from my local grocery store and I pointed out something to some friends who noticed the book in my basket. I indicated all the other Patterson novels on display—eight?—and then at THE PRESIDENT IS MISSING. Patterson’s name was listed on top of all save the new one. It takes a president’s name to shift Patterson to second billing.

I very much enjoyed this book and would easily recommend it as a good beach read.