Hi folks! It’s been a minute since I’ve written a blog entry that wasn’t a D&D campaign diary. I realize that’s…honestly not great. But the campaign diaries are easy because I already have to write them every two weeks for my players, so I might as well copy and paste it into WordPress, y’know?

No, I know that’s no excuse.

I want to start writing more on this here ol’ blog, but I have a tendency to go feast and famine with the updates. I either have a ton of ideas and am very motivated to get them out, or I have no ideas and can barely conceive of an idea to fill a tweet, much less a blog post. Still, I’m going to try.

What I’ve Been Writing

I took a break from the book I was working on toward the end of last year, code named The Cracked Men, because of the holidays. And then, the beginning of the year rolled around, and I had a hard time going back to it. And then, I got a harebrained idea and started working on that. Basically, I had been working on some house rules for my D&D game and I thought, “at a certain point, I will have house ruled enough that I might as well write my own game. So then I started writing my own game.

It’s a hodgepodge of concepts and ideas borrowed from a ton of other games — the gradated success range of Dungeon World, the character based leveling of Burning Wheel, the social and group based abilities of Blades in the Dark, and a few concepts plucked from the Marvel Heroes RPG. I made some classes and some basic abilities and I’m happy with what I made, but I’m not looking to actually publish it or try to promote it. God knows there are a ton of great games out there, and I don’t have the hubris to try to assume that my random game idea is worth any attention. But it was fun to work on, and I’d still like to play test it with my friends, but that’s honestly about as far as it’ll probably go.

Once I got through most of that and my brain cooled off — y’all with ADHD know that, “oh, I have an idea, I have to do it NOW” feeling — my head cleared a bit and I started thinking about fiction again. I have two ideas that I’m working on right now concurrently. One is a horror story set in 1940s/1950s Hollywood that I’m calling Creature Feature at the moment. The other is The Cracked Men, but I’m sort of reimagining it a tad. I realized that I was trying to do two things that were sort of opposite goals, so I’m trying to narrow the scope of that book while hopefully still saying the things I wanted to say. Hopefully I start working on that soon.

What I’ve Been Reading

I have been absolutely crap at reading lately. Last year I only managed 25 books — half of my goal — and I desperately want to do better. I’ve finished two books so far this year: Stony the Road by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Karloff: The Life of Boris Karloff by Peter Underwood.

Stony the Road was a book about the history of black folks and their place in the US after Reconstruction up to roughly the Civil Rights movement. I’ve been wanting to learn more about Reconstruction as an era because I live in Arkansas and it’s a hugely important piece of our history that is presently under a wild miseducation campaign. Ever since the South in the 1960s began in earnest began pushing a motion to rewrite the history of the south and the civil war with the Lost Cause of the Confederacy initiative, kids have been raised being taught things that are simply not true. I was taught that Reconstruction was actually a way for the north to continue exploiting the south by having northern carpetbaggers come down and mooch off of southern resources and tyrannically enforce a bunch of rules and laws that the poor southerners had no say in.

That’s, uh, not how it happened.

Anyway, Stony the Road focuses on black communities and how they reinvented themselves in the wake of the abolition of slavery. Many black folks wanted to distance themselves from the stereotype of the uneducated slave in the hopes of being seen more as peers and equals in the white community. It was a fascinating read, albeit not quite what I’d expected going into it.

There were a handful of tidbits that were especially interesting to me. For example: the South essentially waged war on the northerners and black folks that were trying to integrate former slaves into the union and actually completely abolish slavery. There were a ton of armed conflicts that resulted in the expulsion of duly elected officials. It was essentially an armed coup, and yet it is not taught that way down here.

Karloff, meanwhile, was a biography written about Boris Karloff, the actor that played Frankenstein’s monster in the first three Universal Frankenstein movies from the 30s and 40s. I picked it up partially for my own interest and partially as research for Creature Feature. It was a decent biography, and being the first biography about Karloff ever written, it is at least noteworthy for that. However, the author mentions a number of times that he interviewed Karloff several times for the book, but very little of those interviews seems to reflect in the pages. There are a few quotes from him that are nice and help provide some interesting insight into who he was, but mostly after a certain point, it feels a bit like someone is reading out his IMDb page. For what it was, it was fine, but I just wish there’d been a bit more about his internal life and a little less listing off his roles, however well meaning that may have been.

Now that I’ve finished those two, I’m going to dip into some fiction for a bit. I’m feeling a bit wrung dry with facts and could use some fun to recharge the old imagination.

What I’ve Been Watching

We’ve watched quite a few movies recently, and I don’t want to go overly long into any of them, but I wanted to quickly note three of them:

1. Birds of Prey and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn

I absolutely adored this movie. I loved Margot Robbie as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, and although my opinion on that movie has cooled significantly from what was already a pretty low opinion, she was a wonder bright spot. Getting her own movie was absolutely the right call. I am very happy for DC to continue this pivot into being brighter, more colorful, more fun, and a touch edgier than the Marvel movies. I think that’s a perfect way to differentiate themselves without being boringly edgelord “what if Superman were evil??? Batman is a mass murderer” garbage they were doing with the BvS movies. Being the Looney Tunes to Marvel’s Mickey Mouse is a great strategy, and one I’m totally down for seeing.

I believe word was that the film didn’t do as well as the studio hoped, and I’m hoping the studio understands that very well could have been that Suicide Squad was very bad and probably cooled a lot of normal movie goers on seeing what essentially looked like a sequel. Plus, as much as I love them, the Bird of Prey aren’t exactly a name most of the normal folks would recognize, and DC hasn’t built up the good will that Marvel had when they dropped Guardians of the Galaxy. Still, I hope Margot Robbie’s sheer force of will gets us both a Birds of Prey 2 and a Harley Quinn 3 in the future. More of both of those please.

2. The Invisible Man (1933)

I’ve seen The Invisible Man before, but it’s been a hot minute. My brother and I rented all of the Universal Monster movies from our local movie store when we were growing up — well all of them available. I’m not sure it had all of the Invisible Man and Creature sequels, but we definitely watched all of the Frankenstein/Dracula/Wolfman movies up through House of Frankenstein.

Again, partially as research for my book and partially because I love the Universal Monsters, I was especially interested in rewatching this because it was directed by James Whale, who also directed Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein for Universal and is one of the only gay directors that I know about from that time period, especially one doing horror.

The film itself is a lot of fun. It’s fascinating how the movie in a set up and structure level feels like Frankenstein. The mad scientist has suddenly become obsessed with his experiments and has abandoned his girlfriend/fiancee and isolated himself. When the experiment goes wrong, it results in a monster that begins terrorizing the countryside, resulting in a mass panic and a mob chasing the monster to an isolated location where they set fire to his hiding place and ultimately (seem to) kill him.

Mind you, the really interesting thing for me is how the monster in this case isn’t another person, but the scientist himself. His experiments have driven him mad (because something something the key ingredient drove lab rats mad blah blah) and he began terrorizing people because they kept treating him like a freak.

Claude Rains was great as the Invisible Man, the effects were absolutely fucking gob-smacking. What they were able to pull off in 1933 was incredible, and looks better than some of the shit we try to do today. Just, absolutely amazing. The scientist was a bit of a dick, but you can almost kinda understand why he snaps when you consider the way they treated a man who clearly had been through some sort of accident. And it was funny to boot — occasionally very darkly funny, occasionally very intentionally silly. A disembodied pair of pants skipping after a screaming woman while the pants sing, “Here we gathering nuts in May! Nuts in May! Nuts in May!” had me in stitches.

3. The Invisible Man (2020)

Leigh Whannel is proving himself to be an amazing writer and director. I’ve liked and loved basically everything he’s put out. The Saw franchise is very controversial, but I love it — it’s about the mystery folks, not the gore. The Insidious franchise is chockablock full of great spooky funhouse sequences. And I really really liked Upgrade — a smart, funny sci-fi movie that deserved more attention, but got overshadowed by Venom.

I’m always worried when men write stories about women, particularly abuse stories, but Whannel handled the subject with a lot of respect and empathy. I can’t say that he got everything right, or that a woman wouldn’t have handled the story differently, but it never felt exploitative, gross, unnecessarily edgy, or many of the other things I’ve seen from men writing on similar topics.

In this version of the Invisible Man, we instead focus on the fiancee played by Elisabeth Moss, and the titular Invisible Man is relegated to the role of abusive ex-husband, which is what he honestly should have been in the 30s movie. The opening sequence where Moss gathers her supplies and escapes the abusive husband is one of the most tense scenes I’ve witnessed put to film in a while, and it’s handled beautifully.

Turning the concept of the Invisible Man into a haunted house movie is such a perfect spin to take on the subject, and the way that Moss’s character has to deal with gaslighting and being underestimated and dismissed by the men in her life is heartbreaking, terrifying, and captivating. There aren’t any gross rape scenes or any garbage like that, but there are some wonderfully shocking and clever scenes involving the invisibility. And the way that Whannel chooses to address the invisibility felt like a perfect way to modernize the concept without making it silly. It was surprisingly plausible. Very clever, and very well done all around. You gotta check it out if you haven’t.

What I’ve Been Doing

Beyond all of the above, I’ve been volunteering with the Ozark Book Authority whenever I can. They’re changing up a bit of how they handle things this year, focusing on three big key events rather than trying to make monthly big events, and instead turning the monthly events into discussions and seminars on specific topics. I’ll be running one of those in March. And the big three key events are 1) in May, we have a murder mystery on a train; 2) in July, we have a writing conference; 3) Ozark BookCon, which will be at the end of October this year.

In preparation for the murder mystery, we attended a 1920s themed murder mystery party at a local bookstore. It was a ton of fun, and we got to dress up and feel all fancy.

Beyond that, this week has been about cleaning up the apartment, doing laundry, and organizing the office. We moved into this place in August, and I am finally starting to unpack our books and get them put up.

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And that’s all I have for you for now. As I said, I hope to start updating the blog with things other than campaign diaries soon. How have things been for you? Done anything your proud of and want to share? Watched or read anything you want to chat about? Comment below! Or, if you’d prefer, you can drop me an email or hit me up on Twitter. I’d love to hear from y’all.

‘Til next time!