Try Part Two

I don’t have a ton this week but I forgot to write last week so I’m gonna try a thing. It has been a heck of a couple weeks, though. For one thing, it’s the start of a new semester and my return to full time work, which has been very tiring, even though it’s exciting and a good thing overall. Then there’s just the wider world, with what seems like a relentless tide of wars, mass shootings, disease and assorted varieties of doom. So much so, that today they set the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight, the most negative assessment ever given of our current state of affairs.

It’s enough to make one feel very bleak, and very powerless. But I’m reminded of the idea of the importance of making an effort. And then today, I had a student come by my office who was literally shaking trying to ask me a pretty run of the mill question – obviously they were having a lot of anxiety. That, I can help with. I can try to be calming and reassuring and give that one person some help in what probably felt like a tough spot in their day.

I can’t do anything about the war in Ukraine. I can’t un-wreck the planet. I can’t stop the demolition of the public health care system where I live. I can try to contribute to solutions to those problems by supporting organizations that are working on them. Obviously there are limits to that because I am, for some reason, not independently wealthy.

I can also try to make my immediate world a little better by doing things like supporting my students, trying to be kind to people when I can, and trying to be patient when challenges arise. I believe that art makes the world better, so I’m going to try very hard to carve out some time and energy to work on some of my long-neglected WIPs. It’s been a challenge but I know I’ll feel better when I’m able to do a bit.

I think that’s really all most of us can do: try to do a few good things that are directly within our own power. It probably doesn’t feel like a lot, but I think it can add up to a lot. So I tell myself on days like today, anyway. That’s what I’ve got for you this week. Thanks for reading.

p.s. I feel like I maybe should have something to say about all the Open Game License folderol, but I honestly don’t understand all the issues connected to it to have an informed point of view on it. So, aside from generalized concern about the ability of people who write and create in the RPG field to continue to make a living, I’ve really got nothing.

Try

The new semester is about to start, and in our first meeting of the term, one of my colleagues was talking about a project to help students with resiliency; basically, helping them learn to hang in there when things get challenging. Another colleague was sceptical that we would be able to help very many in the couple years they’re at the college.

Another friend is having some trouble enjoying Star Wars, because (in part) the way the plot has been laid out, we know that many of the successes that we see on screen are only temporary. The Empire keeps coming back. To me, these two things are connected.

They’re also connected to the King Arthur stories (wait come back), which can be similarly bleak, if you think about it. I mean we know how it ends. Arthur dies. Camelot falls. His knights scatter. We’re left to bemoan what has been lost. Even most of his knights (except Galahad, who is no fun) generally fall short of the ideals Camelot is supposed to be founded on. So does Arthur. Does it all mean anything?

As I’ve argued before, I think it absolutely does. First of all, because it is a noble endeavour to try to live up to something great, even if you don’t quite do it. It’s admirable to try to hit a really hard target, even if you don’t. Trying to be good, trying to be a better person, or to do good in the world, has value. Just about no-one is perfect and never makes a mistake. But if we’re trying to be better than our missteps, that’s still worth something.

It absolutely matters, in the Star Wars stories, that things were better for a while. Heck I’m deeply suspicious, these days, of anything that tells me that the bad guys were vanquished forever and everything was fine thereafter. Because that’s not usually how it works. There always does seem to be that next problem. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter that we fixed the last one, and that we shouldn’t be proud of that. It does, and we should. We made it better. Star Wars, very generally, is about trying to make things better.

It absolutely matters, to me, if we help a few of our students, even if it isn’t most of them. Heck, I think it’s worth doing this project even if we only help one. Because then we helped one. We made it better. All we can do is try our best with the resources we’ve got, and hope that maybe we make it quite a lot better instead of a little better. But even a little better isn’t nothing.

So yes, I still enjoy it when they blow up the Death Star, even though I know the Empire is going to build another one. I still like it when Spidey foils the Kingpin’s evil plot(s), even though there will undoubtedly be another villain along in a minute. And I still love Sir Gawain, King Arthur, and the rest of that hot mess of a knightly court. Because they tried, man. And things were better, even if only for a while.

One of my favourite parts of Andor was the character of Nemik, the idealistic Rebel with his manifesto. The extract from that in the final episode never fails to move me, and the last line of it – “Remember this: Try.” – is a motto I am going to try to adopt as I recover from my surgery and try to get back to a place where I can write. And I think it’s an idea we need in the world. Even if our efforts only make things a little better for a little while. That’s still not nothing.

Thanks for reading.

2022

Apologies for no blog entry last week; due to various holiday related factors, I wasn’t able to write it on the Tuesday and didn’t feel like I had anything significantly fascinating to do it on another day. A week later, and I’m not exactly drowning in ideas this time either. Looking back, for a while I did a sort of year-end retrospective post around now, and obviously the internet is awash in them right now.

I guess I’ve felt less like doing one recently because a) there’s only so many ways to try to spin ‘wow it was a tough year, but by god we carry on’ and b) I don’t have any particular insight or perspective on the world at large that would make it overly compelling. That’s if we consider the world at large, so maybe I shouldn’t for the purposes of this.

In my own selfish little universe, 2022 revolved around two things: I got my book published, and I got my heart fixed. Both of those were undeniably good things, both were significant challenges in different ways, and both leave me with something to think about for 2023.

I was very excited to have a publisher for Easter Pinkerton and the Case of the Heretic Blood, and it never gets old having the physical object that contains the story you made up in your hands. It’s been fun, also, hearing from people who have picked it up and enjoyed what they read. It’s hard to think of a better compliment you could give me than spending some of your time with my imaginary people.

At the same time, though, I haven’t done a great deal with my imaginary people in the past year. I’m still finding it very difficult to write. Basically what I’ve learned about myself is that I really need chunks of time when I can put the rest of the world aside and just think about a place that doesn’t exist. That’s been hard with so many things from the real world so insistently impinging all the time, and I hope that my writing productivity will improve with a few less urgent worries in my mind. One of the good things about accepting that I will always be a hobby writer is that whatever level of production I get to is fine in the big picture, but I do miss the feeling of when the words are flowing and fun things are being created. I hope to get back there at least a bit more in the year ahead.

Getting the surgery I needed on my heart was obviously very good for me. It also involved a lot of stress from the effort to make it happen, and the recovery from it is a lesson in patience. I feel mostly back to myself now, although getting back to my previous level of physical fitness is going to take a while. There’s no reason why I can’t, but I can’t just flip the switch and be back running a half marathon any more than I can press a button and have the next writing project done. No quick fixes.

One of the things I really noticed about my interaction with the healthcare system is how overstretched everyone is and the problems that come from that. This is the result of many years of healthcare not being properly funded. I do not believe it is the inevitable state of a public healthcare system, but rather is the result of choices made by politicians. Right now, I absolutely believe there is a deliberate strategy to pave the way to for-profit healthcare in Ontario by starving the public system of funds.

So there’s challenges like that ahead in 2023, which can make me feel a bit grim when I think about it. On the other hand, much like the freshly-created word document, the year ahead is a space unfilled. So I’m going to do what I can to put some good stuff in there when I can.

Thanks for reading.

Star Wars Part Next

I wasn’t sure what to write about this week, and I’m not ready to do a ‘year in retrospective’ thing, but then I was saved by a few details starting to leak about some new Star Wars stuff that is coming out. In particular the Ahsoka series (which I am excited for) and some rumours (unsure how credible) that it will somehow re-examine or re-explore the ending of Revenge of the Sith. Which makes me a little concerned, because I think the biggest thing that is being done wrong with the Star Wars universe right now is continuing to run back and forth over the same ground, with the same characters.

But, hey, it gave me something to write about, which is just what I think, as someone who is still a pretty enormous Star Wars fan, and someone who thinks rather too much about stories, they should do next instead. Because we’ve had great characters, and great stories, but eventually you find the bottom of every barrel. And I think that’s kind of where we are with what has been, up to now, the central arc of the Star Wars movies and associated stuff.

My feeling is this: I think it is time, and past time, to close the book on the story of the Skywalkers, Palpatine, and their constellation of characters. It’s been told (imperfectly, of course) and gaps have been filled in and I think we’re done with it, or should be. Continuing to mess around with the same characters is definitely a safe option – it’s maybe not hard to sell a viewer, or a reader on more stories about characters they’ve loved already – but I ultimately think there’s so little room to manoeuvre left that the stories won’t be very interesting. Continuing to rework and rexamine the same cast of characters is essentially like bringing out more Hardy Boys novels: consumable, certainly, but also not exactly exciting. Easy to skip. Star Wars can be so much more than that.

The Andor series showed us how, to a point. It was almost entirely new characters, and though our main character was plucked from an existing movie, he almost entirely went to places we hadn’t seen and did things we hadn’t heard about before. It was the best Star Wars we’ve had in a very very long time. The Mandalorian also works well (though not as brave a series as Andor) for the same reason. But I don’t think it should be about finding more gaps to fill in what’s already been told. I think what the people making the decisions on the Disney Death Star need to grapple with now is how to tell more bold, brand new stories in the setting.

Essentially I think the decision comes down to ‘what happens NEXT’. You can’t keep bringing back Palpatine as the big bad over and over, and you can’t keep resurrecting the Empire either. We did that. What’s the next problem? Where does it come from? Who tries to solve it? You can’t use the people who fixed the last one, either. (Sorry, Rey.) It is time for a truly new story.

I don’t think ‘different story’ needs to mean ‘no Jedi’, as I have seen suggested in many a place. The Force and the people who use it are integral to the Star Wars setting, and part of what makes it different from other SF-ish things that are out there. Obviously you can tell great Star Wars stories without going there (viz. Andor) but I don’t think that means that the only great stories that are left to tell are ones that don’t, uh, use the Force.

If we look at one of my other favourite settings, the Arthurian tales are absolutely full of stories of knights going places and doing things, or attempting to do them. There are surely just as many tales to be told of Jedi (and other Force users) trying, often imperfectly, to do amazing deeds and defeat mighty enemies. The Arthurian knights struggle to live up to their code of morals and ethics and those struggles are both instructive and compelling. They also would seem to transfer fairly seamlessly to Jedi, aspirant Jedi, and fail(ed)(ing) Jedi sort of characters.

If it was me, I think about directly stealing from the Arthur mythos. With the Empire gone (really double plus extra gone) we look at trying to establish something better. A new galactic society based on something better, and better than the Republic (which gets more problematic the more we look at it). There will be problems. There will be struggles. Arthur could only make it work briefly before it collapsed again under human fallibility, but the story of the attempt was something else. Dare we imagine a Star Wars character who can do better?

All of which is to say that the setting is rich and vibrant. It is full of possibility for writers, and for those of us who will get to enjoy the stories. What I hope we will see, and soon, are some creators with the courage to start writing us a really new Star Wars story.

Beach Vader

I was going to write another thing this week with some more thoughts that I had about AI producing things like visual art and writing, but there’s tons of much better informed (and likely cleverer) people out there tackling the issue(s), so I’m going to hang back on this one and instead deal with another of the key questions facing us in the current moment: Beach Darth Vader.

For context: every year for a while now, I’ve done the Star Wars Lego advent calendar, which makes for a pretty fun month of building little zippy ships and other assorted Star Wars stuff. Usually they throw in a few “festive” themed things, like a power droid done up like a Christmas present, and sometimes there’s just some goofy things. This year, we got Beach Darth Vader, which I think is best explained with a visual.

Ok, so it’s Darth Vader in a holiday tank top, with swim fins and a ball, and then another build giving him a shovel, a pail, and a sand castle. It’s pretty darn cute, it made me smile when I unpacked it, and it’s definitely a fun little thing, so well done, Lego. It also made me think a bit, though.

Because this is still Darth Vader, of the summary executions, torture of prisoners, evil magic, and service to a fascist empire. Yet basically, we’re also happy to have him as a silly little dude having fun on the beach. (Yes broadly his arc in the original trilogy is that he’s redeemed in the end, but remember he has to sacrifice his own life to earn that) Basically, Darth has become fun.

I’ve been trying to think of other examples of this and I’m not sure there’s a lot. (Feel free to correct me) It sort of happens with comic book villains, in part I think for the same reason Darth Vader can become fun: at least part of the demographic is children, so when you tell stories to a younger audience, you tend to make the bad guys silly rather than truly awful. And basically people like silly. So, like, kids will laugh about the Joker (because he is a clown after all) at the same time as this being a character who killed Jason Todd with a crowbar along with countless other, often gory, killings.

Along those lines, it’s been intriguing to me watching Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy transform from straight up villains of Batman’s rogues gallery to the point where you can buy their figures in sets of ‘superheroes’ along with the classic Justice Leaguers. Part of that, though, has been a deliberate evolution of their stories to take them beyond the role of antagonists and make them more sympathetic characters. (I kind of hope they retconned Harley’s first, and horrifying, origin story.)

But like, Darth is still Darth. He’s just very recognizable, part of a franchise that many people have a great deal of affection for, and have often enjoyed for a big stretch of our lives. You often hear authors say how much affection they have for their villains, and in a way it’s inevitable, when you spend so much time with a character, that you come to like them at least a little bit. And of course it helps that we know they’re not actually real, so however despicable their actions, on some level we know it’s all pretend. We don’t hate the actor for playing the bad guy on stage, and at a certain point maybe we don’t blame ol’ Darth for playing his part in the story we love either.

I think part of this also speaks to the broad appeal of superheroes, supervillains, and Star Wars, which isn’t too far removed from that. You use those basic ingredients to tell a story that a very young child will understand and enjoy about spaceships and laser swords and cute droids that go boop. You can also tell a story creaking old folk like me will like about resistance and sacrifice and difficult moral choices. To me, that’s pretty cool, even if you do get a few things that are at least a little odd when you stop to think them through, like Beach Vader.

I don’t really object to Beach Vader, by the way. I think it’s fun, and god knows we all need that these days. It gave me a little bit of joy the first time I realized exactly what it was, and I firmly believe that we should let people enjoy the things that make them happy. And I think we can easily recognize that it’s ok to do this with Vader, who’s not a real villain or a real problem, and save our truly lasting enmity for the real bad people and real dangers out there.

Fight the Empire.

Automation

As I guess you’ll know if you’ve read much of this blog, I teach history, and I’ve taught a fair number of lessons dealing with automation. It’s difficult to do any kind of survey course without touching on the Industrial Revolution, and therefore getting into the question of mechanical labour replacing human labour.

I usually present it as a kind of two-sided development, because on the one hand the new industrial processes enabled far more of basically any kind of product to be produced for lower costs, so it became possible for people to buy a much greater range of things than would have been the case beforehand. The consumer economy was more or less born.

The other side is that workers who had their labour replaced – for example, a weaver who saw themselves replaced with a power loom – essentially saw a skilled vocation disappear, and for many, their standard of living fell through the floor at the same time as others were becoming wealthy. The gap between rich and poor in the new industrial cities was bigger than it had ever been.

Obviously automation is still something we are wrestling with today; I found a great article a few years ago written by a truck driver, contemplating the advent of a supply chain running on driverless vehicles and automated warehouses, which would probably speed transportation, reduce hazards on the roads, and of course reduce costs. He also estimated that it would or will put about 3 million people out of work in the U.S. The writer of the piece concedes that this is probably inevitable, because the dollars will win.

It’s not an accident that I’m writing about this tonight. Last night I read a thing about how a company owned by Elon Musk (I mean, of course it’s Elon Musk) is working on an AI that can take a given set of prompts and write a fan fiction story based on them. It doesn’t work yet, but as someone who writes stories and who would kind of like it if people bought them, that’s a sobering thing to contemplate on approach. It’s not hard to imagine a company like Disney being delighted with the idea of an AI that can endlessly churn out, say, Star Wars novels, and it’s also not hard to think of the chilling effect that tech will also have on what is already a difficult field to make your bread and cheese in.

And of course writers are perhaps not facing the immediate threat that visual artists are, as art-creating AI becomes less and less of a curiosity and more and more something accessible and useable by ordinary people. Even beyond the question of replacing human labour with computer labour, in this case, are the ethics of these AIs often being trained on the work of human artists who did not consent to their art being used for this purpose and who received no compensation.

So we live in a time when the automation question is arriving for the artistic community, and perhaps because I’m in a bleak mood, I’m pretty sure I know how this is going to go too. I’ve seen people who I otherwise consider friends of the artistic community for whom the lure of ‘cool art cheap’ is going to be more than they can resist, and corporate interests for whom ‘how much does it cost us’ is and always will be the only consideration are already starting to produce art for commercial applications using AI. That was someone’s job a couple years ago.

As I say, I don’t think this is a change that can be prevented. The dollars will win as they always do and humans doing art will become even more of the preserve of the well-to-do in society than it currently is. But right now, in this moment, we can at least express that it’s not what we want as individuals, and that we value the brilliance, ability, and labour of human artists.

Personally I will not give any of my money or other support to any project that uses AI art, unless at absolute minimum they are able to demonstrate that their program uses only the work of artists who all gave explicit consent for their work to be used for the purpose and who were compensated. The burden of proof is on them. And then I’ll think about it.

I don’t want to get overly maudlin about this, but there are many people I love in this world who are artists. Whatever the future is going to be, now is the moment where we can show them that. Please support your local humans, even if the bot can make something pretty.

Thanks for reading.

Andor

As you’ll have noticed if you’ve read the last few entries, I’ve been struggling sometimes to come up with stuff to write about on here. That is not the case this week, because we’ve gotten to the end of the first series of Star Wars: Andor, and I feel like I could talk or write about it all day. I was a little sceptical about this show when it was first announced because I wasn’t exactly dying for more prequel-y stuff, but then: it was fantastic. To me it’s the best Star Wars TV they’ve done, and it isn’t close. It’s the best Star Wars we’ve had in a very very long time, and even outside of that context: it’s just a superb piece of story crafting.

I think it demonstrates that a premise, for a show or a book really only gets you started, or doesn’t. ‘The story of Cassian Andor joining the Rebellion’ could be a pretty pedestrian thing with a lot of the same problems that Kenobi had, where the stakes are wrecked because we know so much of the story to come from other places. But if you do it right, and with care, almost any premise can be spectacular. They put a lot of care into Andor, and it absolutely shows.

The writing is great. The writers almost always have the exact right balance of how much they need to show you so that you can understand what’s happening without needing it to be explained. The performances are amazing. Stellen Skarsgård’s spymaster, Luthen Rael, is one of the most fully realized characters we’ve seen in Star Wars. Genevive O’Reilly’s performance as Mon Mothma is spectacular in its understatement – she has to communicate so many emotions without any lines and from behind the idea that this is a character that maintains their reserve. You can absolutely tell what’s going on inside, though, and it’s something to watch. The whole thing is wonderful.

There’s spy action. There’s a heist. There’s a prison break. There’s politicking. It’s all wonderful.

Another of the things I like about Andor is that this is the first time we’ve really seen the Rebellion look like an insurgency, as opposed to the ‘smaller army vs. bigger army’ way the conflict has typically been portrayed. The scrambling for resources. The need to work with less than ideal associates, because they can help accomplish your goal. The moral compromises. The fragility of the network of resistance that is being constructed. The balance between idealism and pragmatism. It’s all wonderful.

From my non-expert perspective, the tradecraft of the Rebel operatives is all very convincing. The partitioning of information, the procedures of distrustful trust and the performed identities. The little moment where we first see Luthen arrive at his antique shop, put on that identity as the dealer in antiquities, and practice the big empty smile, is perfection. I absolutely believed that these were people whose lives depended on hiding what they were doing. It reminds me very much on John le Carré does Star Wars, which I obviously love. It’s all wonderful.

It also speaks to many issues of obvious relevance to our current moment (I said that was the best part about Kenobi, but this blew it out of the water). Andor touches on overpolicing and an unjust justice system. It touches on the prison-industrial complex. It speaks about authoritarianism and fascism (because the showrunners are very direct that that’s what they’re talking about) in an unapologetic way and, to me anyway, in inspirational fashion. I want a poster of that extract from Nemmik’s manifesto. It’s all wonderful.

Andor also shows the cost of resistance. In the last episode, the uprising on Ferrix is a tremendous emotional event that makes you want to go out and smash a fascist. It’s also a bloodbath, and another little understated moment, of Luthen looking at the brutal violence engulfing the town with a stricken expression, says so much. It was one thing for him to say that people suffering was ‘part of the plan’ and to pull all the threads that led to this. It’s quite another to be there and see the people getting mowed down by blaster fire. Andor doesn’t flinch away from the fact that the fight against oppression is a FIGHT, and that’s wonderful too.

There’s plenty of considered dissections of every episode of series one out there if you look, so I’m not going down that road. Suffice it to say that I loved every single bit of this series. It was one of those things where once it was done, I just thought ‘this is exactly the kind of thing I’d love to write’. I have an idea for the Star Wars story I’d like to tell, if I could pull it off. Maybe I’ll get into that one day.

Thanks for reading.

Leaving the TARDIS

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, you’ll probably have run into somewhere where I talk about my affection for Doctor Who. I got into it pretty young, when the local PBS affiliate would show a whole 4 episode serial every Sunday afternoon. Tom Baker will always be ‘my’ Doctor, and Leela my favourite companion, but every crew of the TARDIS was splendid in its own way. I think I watched just about all the surviving serials of the old series, and Doctor Who is a big part of how I became a fan of SFF.

One of the things I always had trouble understanding, of course, is those moments where one of the companions decides to stop travelling with the Doctor. Because why would you ever want to stop having all these amazing adventures? They’d usually try to make a bit of a thing of it – time to get married or stopping to work with plague victims, and once they engaged with how much of a toll experiencing all the terrifying situations the Doctor and his friends run into when Tegan had to walk away after one too many horrors travelling with Doctor #5. In the new series, they’ve tended to give the companions’ departures a bit more of an exclamation point, to make the decision make sense, but in the back of our minds, watching the show, I bet most of us are thinking: ‘I’d never stop. I’d travel forever.’

That’s certainly how I felt, which leaves me in a weird place with Doctor Who right now, because I’ve had to accept that it just isn’t for me, anymore. It’s a shame because I genuinely liked Jodie Whitaker’s take on the character, the enthusiastic, optimistic Doctor, and I wish they’d done more with the idea of her being a gadget-maker that we saw in her first episode. But if I’m honest, the last few plotlines have just been utter nonsense to me, and when I watch the show it feels like they’re trying to do eleven things at once instead of telling one story well, and it feels like a bad parody of the show I used to love.

I started out pretty excited to watch Doctor #13’s sendoff in ‘Power of the Doctor’, and to see former companions Ace and Tegan back again, but I only got partway through and honestly don’t care to go back and see how it ends. I got spoiled on the return of David Tennant and, well, the less I say about that move probably the better, because I don’t want to crap all over a show I still have a lot of affection for, and judging from what I’ve seen, plenty of people loved ‘Power of the Doctor’ and are excited to see Tennant back.

So I think it’s just not for me anymore, and that’s really ok. As Capaldi’s Doctor put it, ‘Everything ends and it’s always sad. But everything begins again, too. And that’s always happy.’ I read a piece of Taoist philosophy once talking about relationships, and that too often we think of a relationship that comes to an end as having been a failure, but really it’s fine to share part of our journey with a person, and then part, and all it means is that we’re heading in different directions now. The time together was still great. All a bit melodramatic in thinking about a SF TV show, but I do think it’s fine to enjoy something for a while, and then stop enjoying it, and it doesn’t mean we were wrong to enjoy it in the first place – things are just different now.

I’m also reminded of something Steven King wrote about people who ask him if he isn’t worried about his books being ‘ruined’ when they get made into movies that sometimes aren’t very good. He said something like ‘no, the books are fine. They’re right there on the shelf.’ And the Doctor Who stories I love are still fine, and I can still enjoy most of them whenever I want, and there will be some brand new story to be amazed by before very long too.

Still, it feels strange to be stepping out of the TARDIS. Thanks for the ride, Doctors. Splendid chaps, all of them.

—-

It does seem to be a day for leaving things, because I’ve also decided today to pause my use of my Twitter account, due to recent developments on that platform.

I’ll still be on Mastodon at @gianttourtiere@wandering.shop, and I’m trying out Hive under the same handle. And I’m going to keep trying to keep this blog going.

Thanks for reading.

Red X

I think I’ve said before that I don’t do a lot of book reviews because I’m not really well-read enough to be able to say ‘this book is exceptionally good’ and have it mean anything or even ‘wow this is really unusual’ because honestly, maybe it isn’t and I’m just unaware. With that disclaimer, I still want to write a thing about Red X, by David Demchuk.

Further disclaimer – I know David and think of him as a friend. It’s always hard to say how we are truly thought of in the hearts of another, but to my knowledge, he is not plotting my immediate demise. So I guess bear that in mind as you read the following.

It took me a long time to finish Red X. This is not because it’s particularly long (about average, I reckon) nor that it is an opaque and indecipherable tome like James Joyce or something. I did, however, find it genuinely difficult to read. Not to understand (and in fact the important factor may be that it’s very easy to understand) but just difficult in the sense of only being able to spend short amounts of time with it, before it became uncomfortable. I imagine (I haven’t asked David, because I don’t want to generate another exhausted sigh) this is deliberate.

Both Red X and David’s previous book, The Bone Mother, serve in my private little universe as useful reminders. Because I write stories with cults and magic and monsters in them, and from time to time I start to think to myself that maybe I write horror. But it’s then very useful to read a book like Red X and be reminded ‘No Evan you certainly do not’. David Demchuk writes horror.

What is the difference between horror and a story with some supernatural bits thrown in? Some people will argue that horror stories don’t have a happy ending, but I’m not sure I agree. I think you can have horror stories that have some kind of positive or optimistic ending. For me the defining characteristic is that in a horror story, the fantastic elements aren’t fun or cool or exciting – they’re disturbing. They’re unsettling, in some way. That’s what you get with Red X.

Red X is (broadly) about a monster preying on members of the queer community in Toronto. One of the things David does very well is create a bunch of characters who we meet only briefly – just long enough to know a bit about them and their lives – before something happens to them. The part of this that is really good, but also made this difficult to read, for me, is that David gives you enough of each of these people for you to like them, or at least empathize with them, before … things happen. It’s not an easy thing to sit with. I was, on some level, thinking to myself ‘man I just don’t want these things to be happening any more. Let’s go read a Shardlake mystery, ffs.’

However I think that brings us to the other thing David is trying to do with Red X, because of course there really was someone killing members of the queer community in Toronto for years, a serial killer who was actively ignored until the body count simply got too high. Basically, people were losing friends, lovers, colleagues, and they couldn’t get anyone to notice, or care. Red X kind of forces you to feel that, at least a little. Watching all these likeable people disappear. Not wanting it to happen, the way people in Toronto definitely wanted the horror in their own community to stop. But it’s not up to you.

As well as being a good horror story (and I’m trying not to spoil too much in writing this), Red X is also a pretty unflinching look at what it is or was like to be gay in Toronto through the latter part of the 20^th century. David puts a lot of his own life on the table in this, which is both an act of courage and something that insists that you consider the horror of his made-up events alongside the homophobia that continues to plague our society, and realize that these two things are pretty entangled with each other.

There’s also a line, towards the end, that I think I’ll never forget. “I hope you find a better ending than the one that I would write for you.” If you set out to create a sentence that perfectly communicated what David is like, I’m not sure you could do better than that. David, as I have come to know him, is this essentially very kind man who nevertheless has all these dark stories inside him.

We’re lucky that he does, because then we get books like Red X, which are wonderful tales, even though – and maybe because – they’re not easy to sit with.

Thanks for reading.

BACK

Well, hello again.

There’s been a variety of reasons, which we’ll get to. But the first thing I want to share is some news I’m pretty excited about, and I hope you will be too. My third novel, Easter Pinkerton and the Case of the Heretic Blood, has been released by Renaissance Press and is available now. Here is a link to help you get yourself a copy if you would like, and it should be available through a bookstore near you. I’m really proud of it.

Mostly this is because I was finally able to get the surgery that I needed on my heart. It went very well, and I’m recovering well, but it’s going to be a process. I’m back to doing most day to day stuff again, and I’m gradually picking up my activity levels, but I still get tired more quickly than I used to, so I just get less done. I’m working on it.

As excited as I am about the book, though, I haven’t been able to do as much promotion of it as I would have liked and as (I think) it deserves. My friends at Can*Con did an amazing launch event for it at the end of October, and I couldn’t even make it to that.

If you’ve been reading the blog for a while, this is a project I have been talking about for a while, and I’m really thrilled to be putting it the hands of readers at long last. I (I guess obviously) think it’s a fun adventure, a protagonist I’d love for you to meet, and the character I’ve had the most fun writing out of any I’ve ever created.

Dealing with all that has obviously sucked up a fair bit of ‘write a blog’ energy, but I was finding it hard to write anything even before the surgery. Some of that was the stress of knowing I needed my heart fixed, but some of it was also (I think) just that all the other issues in the world right now – some unique to me, some shared by all of us – haven’t left a lot of space in my life in which to be creative.

I’m hoping that’s different now, and I’m going to try to put some of the energy that was directed towards chasing through medical bureaucracy towards writing again, and over time more of the energy that’s been fueling recovery from surgery can go to that as well. I’m hoping that this winter can be one of gradually resuming what used to be my usual activities: writing fiction, teaching history, getting out on the road and running.

I’ve been away from it all for a while. I have some new scars. But, I hope, I’m back.

Thanks for reading, and I’d be delighted if you wanted to spend some time with Easter Pinkerton.