Binge-demic 1

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Here’s my COVID lifestyle: I wake at 9am, then stumble out of bed for coffee and breakfast. With any luck, this involves some sort of sandwich. I’m a big fan of sandwiches.

Then it’s chores and writing. I’m currently revising The Iron Gate, and if I hit my daily goal, I reward myself with a little writing on something else, like bluebooking for a tabletop rpg or brainstorming The Flood Circle which is the next Twenty Palaces novel. Then, a little reading.

After dinner, my wife and I settle in and watch a few shows. My wife hates binge-watching anything. Occasionally, she will watch two episodes of a show on one night, but I only rarely. Too much of one show bores the shit out of her.

At 9:30, she goes to bed at 9:30 and I get my alone time. Which I need. At the end of the day, when I’m alone in my darkened living room, I binge-watch shows. 

And I feel an inexplicable urge to talk about them. So, for a couple of blog posts, I’m going to write about them, starting with the most recent and working backwards.

Person of Interest:

I was talking about the characters on Person of Interest with someone on Twitter, and I was admiring the way the show used exaggeration in building its characters. Reese isn’t just hired muscle, he was once the CIA’s most deadly assassin, an American James Bond (on a TV-crime-thriller budget). Finch isn’t just a computer guy, he’s the reclusive genius who spent his whole adult life living under false identities and who created an artificial intelligence capable of monitoring everyone on Earth.

Reese knows very little about computers. Finch suffers from an unhealed injury he won’t discuss, which leaves him unable to fight or sprint. So it’s not just that each is an expert in their respective roles. They’re also incapable of filling each others’ roles. They compliment each other perfectly. 

It’s the same for the two cops on the show: Fusco is a corrupt homicide detective under the thumb of other corrupt cops, and Carter is the honest, empathetic one. One is being blackmailed into helping Reese. The other wants to arrest him. Both are extremes and opposites, and that naturally creates drama.

The person I was talking to called the characters archetypes, which I don’t think is a good description. To me, calling a character an archetype is an insult. It means they’re a copy of another thing, not an individual in their own right. If these were archetypes, I wouldn’t like the show as much as I do.

In its first season, PoI plays out as a well-made CBS procedural with an unusual and intriguing premise: A surveillance AI called, simply, “The Machine” sends Finch the social security number of a person who will be involved in a murder, either as victim or perpetrator. The team has to work out what’s happening and save a life, possibly several. There’s no season-long subplot, but the seeds of upcoming subplots are planted here and there.

In the second season, the extended story arcs begin, and by the third season, the show becomes positively addicting. The procedural elements are slowly, season by season, eclipsed by the underlying story of The Machine itself, the dangerous bureaucracy around it, and the battle with a rival AI. It’s tremendous fun.

Normally, I’d suggest skipping ahead so you could jump to the fun stuff, but I already tried that myself. As the show was airing, people in my timeline were praising the second season so I tried to jump in at the third. It didn’t work. PoI trades on the relationships between the characters formed over the previous two seasons, and without that background, it’s hard to care. If you’re tempted to watch this, don’t skip ahead.

I know that sounds like weak praise. “It gets good after [X] episodes” is the death song of many a Netflix show. But the early episodes are very good. The later seasons are fantastic. 

I just wrote way more about this show than I intended.

On Netflix until 9/22. If you’ve never seen it, it’ll take a mighty binge to finish it before then. Me, I have the last four episodes set aside for tonight. 

Before that: The Legend of Korra

I originally let this show pass by because I heard good and bad things about it. Fans liked/hated the main character. They hated that Aang, as a grownup, made mistakes and was not the greatest father in the world/or they were comfortable with that level of fallibility. They loved/hated the pseudo-steampunk setting. They loved/hated the way the show expanded the magic and world-building. So I wasn’t in any rush to watch this.

Honestly, I don’t understand what people are complaining about. I thought it was genius, and I’m currently re-watching it with my wife (one episode a day, as I mentioned above).

It’s gorgeous. It’s funny. The fight scenes are inventive, which is no small feat over so many episodes. Korra herself is flawed in the best way, making the show inherently more complicated and interesting than the original (even if it isn’t as charming). I loved it. 

Of course, the ending of the series is famous now. I knew the final scene where Korra and Asami head off to start their lives together as a couple was coming, but I didn’t know what to expect. When I saw it, all I could think was, “That was it?” Considering the attention that ending got, overwhelmingly but not exclusively positive, I thought for sure there’d be a kiss or something. Maybe just the two characters leaning toward each other, fade to black before their lips touch. 

Nope. This is the level of representation that LGBQ fans had to be satisfied with back in 2014. Just six years ago, it was considered brave and groundbreaking. 

I probably should have watched this before I watched She-Ra. 

Coming up next time: Burn Notice and Veronica Mars

Also, One Man is currently the Kindle Monthly Deal. If you read ebooks and think you’d enjoy a high fantasy crime thriller, check it out. 

One Man is the Kindle Monthly Deal, now only $1.99

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Keeping this one short, because there’s not much to say:

One Man is a Kindle Monthly Deal for September. It’s only $1.99.

It’s a dark crime thriller in a dark fantasy setting, and I think it’s the best thing I ever wrote.

The description:

One Cursed City. Two Dead Gods. Ten Thousand Murderers and Thieves. One Orphaned Girl.

As a child, Kyrioc was groomed to be the head of one of the most powerful noble families in Koh-Salash, a city built inside the skeletons of two murdered gods. Kyrioc himself dreamed of becoming head of the High Watch, the highest political position in the land.

Those dreams have turned to dust.

Presumed dead after a disastrous overseas quest, Kyrioc now lives in a downcity slum under a false name, hiding behind the bars of a pawnshop window. Riliska, a nine-year-old pickpocket who sells stolen trinkets to his shop, is the closest thing he has to a friend.

When a criminal gang kills Riliska’s mother and kidnaps the little girl, Kyrioc goes hunting for her.

He doesn’t care about the forbidden magic the gangs are fighting over–the severed ear of a glitterkind, a creature whose flesh contains astonishing healing powers. He doesn’t care about the bloody, escalating gang violence. He doesn’t care about the schemes of power-hungry nobles.

In a raging city on the verge of civil war, Kyrioc only wants to save his friend. He will risk anything for her, even awakening the powers that murdered the gods so long ago.

“One Man is a superbly realised story set in a rich and fascinating world. The horror grips, the fantasy delights and the characters remain vivid and real to the end. I bet there’s more to come, and I will be reading it.” — Justina Robson

 

Cover for One Man

Get your copy here.

And please spread the word, if you can.

Less Twitter. Less of the Twitter Effect.

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Rest in peace, Chadwick Boseman.

It took the passing of movie star Chadwick Boseman at the young age of 43 to make me realize that I needed to cut way back on Twitter.

See, I wanted to write something on this blog about Boseman’s passing, about the work he’d done while he was sick, knowing that his life might be cut short. About the impact he’d had and the joy he’d spread. That I admired the legacy he left behind and feel awful that he’s been cheated of the time he could have spent with the people he loved. 

But I can’t seem to focus on the subject. I can’t even sort out my own feelings about the passing of this famous stranger. Everything’s all jumbled up.

And this isn’t true just with this one subject. It’s true about politics, movies, all sorts of things. I’m more distractible. I’m finding it harder to focus.

The more intense the problem becomes, the more I’ve begun to associate it with Twitter.

Obviously, there are other causes, too. Generalized anxiety about the pandemic. Being stuck at home, looking at these same few rooms. But I think the bulk of the problem comes from what I’m calling the Twitter Effect: a continual flood of information in small doses on widely disparate topics. 

As an example, this is what’s popped up in my Twitter timeline as I write this:

  • Sports team urging people to vote
  • A snide remark at a pundit’s old tweet
  • Trump administration
  • Abolishing Daylight Savings Time
  • Trump’s golf shoes
  • Misinformation from QAnon
  • Joke about Plato
  • Snide election comment
  • Halloween book recommendations
  • #WritingLife
  • State-level (but not my state) police reform
  • Retweeted cross-promotion for a TV show
  • Author promo
  • San Francisco rent laws
  • Superhero commentary
  • Trump joke
  • Mask commentary
  • COVID-19 symptoms/treatment
  • Voting
  • Superman joke
  • Trump tax returns
  • Climate change policy
  • Alexa’s “whisper mode”

I stopped scrolling just now when I came to a cartoon with the caption “My desire to be well-informed is at odds with my desire to stay sane.”

It’s not just that social media can feel so combative and alarmist. That, I can manage. It’s that I’ve spent 13 years training my brain to take in random, scattershot input about all sorts of different things. I need fewer soundbites and more long form thinking. More time reading outside Twitter, in other words.

For a long time, I held on to Twitter because 1) it has replaced blogs as a source for interesting/amusing links, 2) I follow some very fun and funny people and it’s become my main source of laughter during the day, 3) book talk, which is mostly pretty dull but this is what I can get, 4) film and tv talk, which tends to be more analytical and therefore more interesting, 5) and finally, the big one, politics.

Twitter was the place where I kept up with political scandals and wonky procedural shit and climate change and so on. Turning my back on that felt like being a bad citizen. 

And few things are as irresistible as an addiction that feels like virtue.

So I’m cutting back on Twitter in a big way. Years ago, I set up my writing laptop to block it during the day so i could get shit done. This past weekend, I set up my desktop to block Twitter (and Steam, because 2580+ hours of Sentinels of the Multiverse is plenty) from midnight to one in the afternoon. 

That still leaves my wife’s iPad, which I can use to access the service if I want, but that belongs to my wife and it’s not convenient. Part of any plan for breaking bad habits is to make them inconvenient. Plus, I’m not trying to drop Twitter completely, as I did with Facebook. I just want to cut back.

So I’ll be on Twitter less because less. I won’t be completely gone, but I hope to put an end to doomscrolling and political hobbyism.

It’s a relief, honestly. Social media feels both necessary and damaging at the same time. I’ve sort of grown to hate it.

Game of Cages Audiobook available now

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There’s not much to say here, but it absolutely needs to be said.

Today, there’s a new audiobook in the Twenty Palaces series: Game of Cages.

This is the first time the book will have appeared in audio form. Child of Fire was picked up years ago, but not the sequels. So, if you’re an audiobook fan who already has book one, this is your first opportunity to turn the series into a set.

Audiobooks.com
Audible
Amazon

Here’s the art:

Game of Cages Audiobook Cover

Next month, Circle of Enemies.

After that, The Twisted Path and The Iron Gate come out together, whenever I get The Iron Gate finished.

Stay safe. And to everyone who has written reviews, thank you.

Child of Fire Audiobook Available Today. Right Now, In Fact

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Let’s make this short and sweet, so I can go back to revising The Iron Gate:

Today, the audiobook for Child of Fire is available.

Not just on Amazon, but also on Audiobooks.com and iBooks and where ever else you pick up books for your ear drums.

Remember that the prequel, Twenty Palaces, came out last month and that Game of Cages comes out next month. Circle of Enemies is the month after that.

Me, I’m going back to my books.

Twenty Palaces Audio Book Available for Pre-Order

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What it says above: Tantor will be publishing audio books of all the Twenty Palaces novels (and that novella) and the first one will come out June 10th.

Audible has made the book available for pre-order, which you can do right now if you like.

As I write this, that’s the only place where it’s listed, but if you have a favorite audio vendor, I’m sure it’ll be there soon.

And the rest of the series arrives throughout the rest of the summer, one book per month. I’ll send a newsletter later this year, to announce all of them at once rather than spamming your inboxes once a month.

What Does It Look Like When Someone Is Drowning? 2020

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Up here in the northern hemisphere, summer is about to start, so it’s time to repost my annual warning:

How to recognize when someone is drowning.

It’s not what you think. Before you take your kids or loved ones into the water, read this article.

Please.

One Man Audiobook Drops Today

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The audiobook for One Man is out.

Amazon
Audible
Audiobook

There are probably others, too. If your favorite audio vendor isn’t above, it’s probably there.

If you’re an audiobook person, here’s nearly 17 hours of listening.

Snap up your copy today

Quarantine Post 15: Boogaloo and Bowie Slugs

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How about we start off the day with Portuguese jazz?

And, to make this a Sunday worth remembering, David Bowie compared to sea slugs and other underwater invertebrates.

Quarantine Post 14: A Song about a Singer and a Collection of Superheroes as Pin Ups

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Dumb but catchy:

To increase general happiness, I offer this: Artist draws modern movie superheroes in the style of pin-up art. Funny and good.