Like Madness In The Spring

Speaking of which, new book announcement is up over at that site, go check it out. (https://www.patreon.com/JMilliganAuthor)

Set twenty years after the end of “Bloom,” “Fade” is the second book in The Metro Cycle, and follows Deni (never Denise) Kim-Barnes as she busts her ass working late nights as a singer in an Up Town nightclub to keep a roof over the heads of herself and her genius kid brother, Sun. Little does she know that she’s about to be hauled head-first into a world of assassination, corporate politics, and unnerving revelations about the reasons for it all.

You can get Fade in digital and Print formats at Amazon and Drive Thru Fiction! (Links inline, clicky clicky)

Cover image for eye catch and algorithm? Cover image for eye catch and algorithm!

In countries with universal healthcare, this is a non-issue during a strike. Our access to healthcare isn't tied to working. It's an unconditional right for each and everyone of us.

Y'ALL! IT'S HAPPENING! Ya girl is approaching the big 10k, so I wanted to do something SPECIAL!

THE PRIZE: -THREE people will receive a full character sheet! (This includes a base, an outfit, and 3 expressions!) -It can be any kind of character (humanoid, fantasy, sci fi, furry, robotic, monstrous, etc.) Nothing hateful or cruel will be accepted.

THE RULES: -Likes are awesome, but only Reblogs will be counted. Multiple reblogs will count multiple times! Do NOT spam reblog, however. It is annoying to everyone involved. -You must be following this blog at the time of winner selection! -You MUST have asks or messages open so I can alert you if you win! -No giveaway blogs! I will be checking! - Three winners will be selected via Random.Org on Sunday, August 15th, 2021 at 6pm EST!

Draiman mercenaries preparing the next stage of their assault on the wizard Naghatan Fisk.

This one I feel needs a bit more explanation - the mercenaries are working for a magistrate to take down what they believe is a rogue wizard, one out to actively harm the inhabitants of the nearby town of Lunn.

...and with that, the first draft of the next book is done.

Now I just have to... do about 30 illustration sketches 30 illustrations probably about 20+ spot sketches first pass edit the book then hand the whole mess over to my publisher to layout and final edits... I'm guessing maybe 2 months to go?

1. Get the deck that literally everyone has.

2. Get the deck from the guy in the funny hat that wants to bring everyone back to his place to drop acid and get naked for 'magickal reasons'.

3. Or, you too can grab yourself the accursed deck of omens created by a mad sorcerer in a desperate bid to curse his enemies and possibly be returned to life from beyond the grave by cosmic horrors from beyond our dimension.

We know which one we'd recommend.

The Compleat Windrow-Ravenswood Deck. Go get yours: https://www.drivethrucards.com/product/323726

I can’t make any explanation of why I love this show work, so here’s just a random list.

1. Strong black female lead who is ass-kicking, a team leader, and a mechanic. How often you see that?

2. Beautiful cinematography. Every time I pause to come and go from a room, it looks like a painting, or at least visually interesting.

3. Swings for the fucking fences. Succeeds more often than it fails, but you can never call it unambitious or boring. No idea is too crazy to try.

4. Score is great. Mix of sweet 70′s guitar rifts and throwback synthesizers that sound like Dawn of the Dead.

5. Low budget in the best of ways, every trick in the book wrings every last drop from the budget. Textbook example of when it’s OK to use CGI blood.

6. Has actual zombies. They’re fucking everywhere and actually kill people and pose a real threat.

7. Female leads aren’t sexualized. Both main roles are played by very attractive ladies, and the show doesn’t constantly try to put them in skimpy clothes or give them the Male Gaze treatment.

8. Fun. It’s so much fun. It’s not afraid to be silly, and you can feel the love of the actors and filmmakers coming through.

9. Serious. It has thoughtful social commentary, and the episodes where it digs into things like PTSD or grief/loss are amazing. Most shows seem to take a tell don’t show approach, but I have never seen anything like the PTSD episode.

10. Everyone is giving 100%. There’s shows where you can tell maybe the writer or director doesn’t care, or the actors aren’t into it. My favorite thing is seeing people throw everything they have into something, however crazy.

11. Breakneck pacing. To me almost every episode feels like a full length movie. I keep checking the time code and episode count to see if it’s just the normal 45 minutes. The show moves forward in leaps and bounds and never looks back.

12. Maintains a pretty diverse cast season to season.

The protagonist, meanwhile, is a black woman who must drag this white guy kicking and screaming into doing the right thing every step of the way. 

 17. It plotted out 5 seasons in advance. As a consequence, when you go back to early seasons and re-watch, you are rewarded with new insights. Like a movie. It’s the Babylon 5 of zombie media. 

 18. As I have increasingly suspected, the treatment of trauma survival in this show is, somehow, more true to life than most any other representations of it.

19. This is why it’s great watching a show with someone like my beautiful and intelligent wife. “Full Metal Zombie” in my recollection wasn’t really essential but it turns out I’m so completely wrong in so many ways. 

There’s a surface reading which makes it an episode where the team tried to find a helicopter, and fails. A bunch of resources are wasted, lives are endangered, and no progress is made. So it’s about like every season of Walking Dead. 

Second is the actual story, where sniper prodigy character 10K has some backstory filled in. We learn how he came to be so emotionally distant, which in a nutshell was he had to kill his own father. Now @deliriumcrow is watching this and found this whole other thing, which later episodes (plus knowing the show is plotted out for 5 seasons) confirms is on purpose: 

It starts with the characters discussing whether or not there’s any consciousness left in zombies. 10k describes his father’s death, and hopes somewhere his dad knows his son fulfilled his promise to kill him. Later in the episode another character (“Doc”) is trapped with a zombie and the zombie shows some clear indications of conscious thought, and there’s a complete flashback to the night 10k has to kill his dad. 

At the conclusion of the episode, which made my wife break down in tears, Doc tells 10k that he’s pretty sure 10K’s dad knows what he did. She put it all together. 10K’s dad literally knows what he did, because zombie’s aren’t empty shells, and his dad was consciously aware at the time. 

The episode is tragic and deeply significant for the whole show, but it never hit me before that how much they slipped into it around the goofy plot. 

20. Even at it’s silliest, the show is constantly digging into how we cope with pain and loss. It’s almost supernatural how much better a handle the writers have on these emotions than other shows with more serious foundations.

Most media, I can figure out why something happens in the story, or how come it’s there. I can get the wheels which turned around until that thing comes out. This vague sense of a budget or the constraints of expected narrative drama or limit to the imagination of a producer or writer or director. Whatever. I can look at most things and go “OK, I understand why this exists” whether I like it or not.

Except for some stuff like Riverdale or Buckaroo Banzai or Z Nation and I love it. I love being utterly incapable of understanding how the thing I’m seeing came to be.

We watched Z Nation season 2, episode 14 and it’s the most unnecessary thing. It’s perhaps 10-15 minutes moving the plot forward and just a bunch of shorts where we see all the cast members on the first day of the outbreak. Nothing special, no agenda, just a quiet meditation on Where We Were That Day. Someone sat down and decided “let’s just flesh everyone out a bit. Not a lot, just a bit more.” It’s… great. It’s a whole episode just dedicated to living with the characters, with no other goal than a televised equivalent of a little support group. It’s nothing to do with what the show is about, but everything to do with what the show is about. A pure human thing, somehow impossibly in the middle of a wacky zombie show.

“I’d rather die believing in a lie than live believing in nothing.“

And not to harp on this but the pacing is absolutely staggering. I’m at a loss to understand how the episodes so often find a way to offer lingering character moments along, little fun or melancholy bits of business that aren’t necessary but expand the world and the characters. How they manage to pack the episodes with so many highs and lows and momentum and never feeling either rushed or slow.

So I just recently was lucky enough to acquired an iPad Pro with Apple Pencil. This is the firs major thing that I’ve been able to do with it 100% digital map.

https://www.instagram.com/p/B8SEkmjHQtx/?igshid=1sqx7zszf617r

https://www.instagram.com/p/B3awBhNDin9/?igshid=3lkw1fgs6hoo

As some of you may be aware, I published Whisper Code last week. 

There was some unexpected drama with Amazon, and with the manuscript itself, and I identified a massive plot hole 48 hours before publication. All of this sent me into a tailspin the likes of which I’ve never encountered before. 

It taught me a lot about my own writing process, and my productivity, and how I work under pressure. 

Most of all, taught me that even at the worst of times I am still a great writer! 

Last time I published a book I did a read-along to give you my reactions to the story.

Now that I have the publication date a week behind me it’s time to do the same thing for Whisper Code!

Without Further Ado:

 Starting out - the opening is pretty damn good. I remember writing this first line at the end of a chapter and thinking “Oh damn, that’s the opening to the book.”

Yes, I do hate dates at the beginnings of chapters just as much as I ever did. Necessary evil. Hate it regardless. 

 Oh, foreshadowing within the first three paragraphs. (spoilers for major character death in this book, by the way, and if you all know and trust me to keep to my word about not burying my gays or pulling a sherlock/magicians season 4 then it’s all going to be okay in the end. I promise.)

Nate’s found himself a pack of cigarettes. Here we go again. 

“There was only so long a man could spend reading poetry in privacy before people started asking questions I didn’t want to answer” is such a random line out of context, but I needed you to read it and know that those words are in this book.

Huh. I mention The Ouroboros right out of the blue with no context because I never published the short story about Nate dating a girl that everyone calls the Ouroboros.  Suffice it to say, that’s coming. She exists. She’s only ever mentioned in passing here so don’t worry too much about it. 

Chapter Two involves an important conversation and a *gasp* swear word. 

We meet SAMIRA in chapter three. She is an absolute angel and you will become attached to her. I can promise you that.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that any writer in possession of a Cyberpunk story, must be in want of an explanation for how smartphone communication has changed.