Author: John McGuire

Writer of comics and novels. In 2006 his first short story "The God That Failed" was published by Terminus Media in their debut comic Evolution Book 1. Since that time he has had stories published in Terminus Media's Evolution Book 2 and Evolution Special, Kenzer and Company's The Knights of the Dinner Table, and Four J Publishing's The Burner #3. Currently he is eagerly awaiting the digital publishing of his first creator-owned comic The Gilded Age #1 to be published online as well as his first novel The Dark That Follows later this year.
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Don’t Finish It

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Image by Hannibal Height from Pixabay

Years ago I wrote a blog post called “Just Finish It” (which you can read here). It was all about the idea that all those partially written stories and outlines and scripts sitting on my hard drive wasn’t doing me or anyone else any good. Saying that I’m in the process of writing something sounds good, but when you never actually get the damn story to the finish line, there is very little difference between all that and having written zero words. In the end, the mantra of “Just Finish It” was and is a good one. At some point we all need to have pencils down. Because you can write and revise and edit and rewrite and trash and and and… but until you are DONE, you don’t have anything.

I still believe all of it (even if the title of this post seems to indicate otherwise). However, having finished a few projects all these years later (never as many as I would like, though), I have come upon a corallary to this rule.

Sometimes when you are working on the beginning of a story you might have a general idea of what it is about, who the characters are, and where the ultimate destination might be. Then through the writing of the project, you discover other little bits and pieces about what could be added or tweaked to make the story all the stronger. It’s one of my favorite things when I’m writing.

Recently, I’ve had a slightly different experience with one of the shorts I’ve had on my hard drive for a while now. It’s a story that I have a general idea about the beginning and end, but for some reason it always gets a backseat to whatever else I’m working on. So when inspriation does strike, I write up those notes or work on it for a night or two and then it might be a month before I get back to it. This has gone on for a couple of years at this point.

But here’s the thing… had I taken my own advice, I would have created a perfectly good and fine short story. Something I might have been able to submit to a couple of places, and maybe it would eventually find its way into an anthology of my own short stories. All great things… for sure.

However, I would have not been able to let this thing breathe. Let those ideas percolate until they have stretched and become something much larger. Where the original short might have topped out around 20 or 30 pages, this thing wants to be something even more. I’m sitting around 40-50 pages at this point and have so much more which needs to be said.

So maybe the proper advice is to finish it, yes, but only if the story is ready to be finished. Don’t put THE END on the last page unless you are sure there is nothing more to write for those charcters. If you thought it was going to be a short story and it shifts to be able to become a novella… that’s OK. Let it be what it needs to be. When you are able to do that, you’ll not only have better stories, but you’ll have a better insight on what makes a complete tale.

Then you can write THE END and be satisfied.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Still The Best Show You Are Not Watching – The Lazarus Project

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Almost 1 year ago, I wrote a post about this show I’d stumbled upon: The Lazarus Project. It was this weird Groundhog Day meets time travel meets What If about a secret group of people who have the ability to reset the world back 1 year. Which is right in line with my own science fiction novel, The Echo Effect (available on Amazon here). These characters were dealing with Apocolyptic Events for the Earth, using their Reset as a last resort. But when they pulled the trigger you might have to relive the last 12 months of your life with full knowledge of what occurred in the last timeline. Which can be somewhat maddening (for some characters).

After the ups and downs for George in the first season, I wondered how they’d top it. And given some of the terrible things which he had to do in the first season… well, how do you deal with someone who is going to come back to life with the rest of you everytime you reset?

Due to the event of Season One, the world finds itself caught in a true time loop of only 3 weeks. An endless void of time where no matter what you think of your friends and enemies, no one wants to be trapped forever.

But if that would have been all we did through 8 episodes, it wouldn’t have been quite enough. And since it turns out the development of Time Travel (HG Wells style) is what caused this tear in space/time… Time Travel is the only way to solve it.

This change opens up so much more things within the show. Characters who we only got to meet for a very short stint in Season One are suddenly alive again. What happens when you meet your doppleganger? Would you trust the “future” you to have your best interests in mind? Are you willing to go to that dark place again, George, in order to do what must be done?

I don’t want to give any too much more than that but for another 8 episodes I was captivated week in and week out wondering exactly where they were going to go. Surprised at some of the outcomes and nailing the predictions on a couple of others.

***

Now, as I was looking up something on the show, I just saw it was not renewed for a Season Three, which is a bummer. But don’t let that dissuade you from checking the show out. Yes, overally we do end on a cliffhanger, and I will forever want to know what happens next, the Season Two arc was solved by the end. So it is a bit of you get a partial resolution, just not a complete one.

I still think it is a show well worth the watch.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Dragon Con Suggestions

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One of the things we discussed throughout the Dragon Con weekend this year was how it feels (fair or unfair) that Dragon Con makes very small, incremental changes so that you don’t always notice them in the moment. Looking back, though, you can see how certain things have improved or changed. This section is less an airing of grievances and more a hope for a quicker change.

Attendance

Capping the attendance. I actually think having maybe 65,000 people might be a number closer to what would work best, but overall I think where we are is alright enough (75,000). I’m hopeful they will keep it around/near this value for the near future. And unless some other hotels are added in the area, I’m not sure they can support much more.

Loading the Panels

Load the rooms earlier. Please. There were multiple times this year and in previous years where they didn’t start loading the rooms for the next panel until there was 10 minutes left. It didn’t take 20 minutes for the previous panel to clear out. The biggest problem is that you make it so that people miss the beginning of the panel they just stood in line for an hour (or more), which honestly shouldn’t happen.

Badges

Mail us our badges. While the badge pick up process is much smoother these days than it was 10 years ago, I think we’re well past the point of having to fight those lines. When we were driving around looking for a parking spot, I saw the line for Saturday badge pick up was outside of the Sheridan and down the block. I know people have this fear some kind of mass fake badge market will crop up, but I’m not sold on that being the reason to not do it.

College Football

College Football Kickoff Game (or whatever it is called these days) – Since Dragon Con is on Labor Day weekend it is always going to share the weekend with something in downtown Atlanta. I’m not sure anything can be done about that. However, over the last 15+ years the Kickoff Game has also been on Labor Day. That made a ton of sense as you want to highlight the beginning of your season and Atlanta is a mecca for college football.

Now things have changed. We have this weird Week Zero thing where we get a handful of games but for some reason it doesn’t count as opening weekend. So here’s the solution:

Have the Kickoff Game on Weekend Zero!

It would not only help Dragon Con and downtown Atlanta by not having multiple BIG events on top of each other, it would allow the hotels in the area to have back to back BIG weekends… which feels like a win-win to me. Who wouldn’t want to be booked solid for 10+ days. The networks can still build this up as the BIG thing and with the sheer number of teams, Labor Day weekend will still have plenty of potentially good games.

And let’s face it, those fans who are coming to see their team play would come regardless of if it is a 3 day weekend or a regular one.

Note, if this did happen, I would be slightly disappointed to never have the experience of visiting fans from Missouri or Mississippi looking around with the odd look of “what in the world is going on around here” from all the cosplayers.

Also, this is something completely out of Dragon Con’s control. It is more about me putting it out into the universe and hoping!

***

If you haven’t already, you can check out my two previous blogs about my experience at this year’s Dragon Con:

Part 1

Part 2

***

I’m thankful we have Dragon Con in our backyard. And there isn’t a year that goes by I don’t wish I would have found a couple of hundred dollars in order to get an Eternal Pass all those years ago! Looking forward to next year.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Dragon Con 2024 Recap Part 2

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Check out Part 1 here.

Saturday Cont.

Traveller

The only thing I knew about Traveller was that it is a scifi game, and it is old. I remember seeing ads for it in old Dragon Magazines. According to our GM (a wonderful fellow from Melbourne, Australia), it has been around since the mid-70s. This was extremely interesting to think about as the game unfolded. Technologies we take for granted in our daily lives were not considered when they developed the game. So you end up with some weird things like “Pony Express” information exchange. There is no send an email or whatever. Information is hand delivered.

Just an interesting look back at how those developers looked to what the future might look like. And makes me want to go down the rabbit hole to see what other things might have been developed (or not developed).

The game itself was one of the very few I’ve ever played in at a convention where there was nearly no combat (technically we fired on a ship near the end and destroyed it, but that it was it for the entire 4 hours). The GM stressed early on the system was brutal. In addition, we only had 2 fighters with us. Given that I was playing the Scientist role, I knew I wanted to avoid combat at all costs anyway.

Funny enough, in most of these gaming sessions, when you play a scientist type you do so knowing you are going to be rubbish at anything combat related. Your hope is that you get a couple of moments to shine in between fights, but mostly know it’s going to go a certain way. But because we didn’t have those fights and because we needed to have the Scientist investigate a bunch of things – I was the rock star of the group, and probably rolled the dice more times than just about anything else (which I wasn’t expecting – it was a nice change of pace).

Overall it was a cool session and while I’m not sure I’ll likely be able to play it again outside of a convention (since none of my playgroup has any experience with it), I’m glad to have had a little trip into history via the future.

Afterward we grabbed a bite (way too late) and then got home some time after 12:30.

Sunday

Seth Green and Nathan Fillion Panel

It said something about Robot Chicken in the panel title, but there might have been one Robot Chicken question 45 minutes into the panel. Of course, it had to do with a Firefly style episode in the same vein as Star Wars or the Walking Dead. You can imagine this idea went over really well with the crowd.

This was Seth Green’s first Dragon Con, and he seemed to be having a lot of fun. Randomly (though appreciated) someone asked him about his role on Can’t Buy Me Love, which is one of those things I always forget until I’m rewatching the movie. He also told someone on the phone (who was named Meg Griffen apparently) a “heartfelt message” in Chris’s voice. And even had a story about when he was on Buffy making the director uncomfortable because he was only had a sock covering his privates (for those who may not know, he played the werewolf Oz on the show, so when he woke from transforming he was often… without clothing).

The two of them apparently vacation together and were a great pair to have on a panel together.

Resident Alien

Maybe this is the bit which causes Courtney to actually watch the show (to be fair, I think she’s probably watched 10 or so episodes over my shoulder, but is only half paying attention)? I always love when the actors are asked what their “nerd” thing is. Many times you get answers which are ok. Maybe they say Star Wars or Star Trek, and you know they like them, but probably not in the same way many of the people in the crowd do. But then there are those moments when their posture changes and their voice gets a little faster/higher, and you just know “oh, this is their THING”.

Alan Tudyk apparently is really into yard sticks (yes the measuring kind) (no it wasn’t a joke). Alice Wetterlund loves Star Trek. Sara Tomko talked about meeting her first fan who cosplayed as her. And Meredith Garretson mentioned a book series (which I sadly didn’t catch the author), but she came back to it a couple of times.

See they are just like us! 🙂

Agents of Shield

Probably the cutest moment from the convention was when Brett Dalton’s daughter (maybe 10ish) asked him a question after standing in line. He made sure we all gave her applause enough to “embarrass her”, which we did. Having him and Cobie Smulders on the panel created an interesting balance as he was on the show for however many seasons while she was on there a handful of times but has all the MCU movies under her belt. Which meant their experiences were wildly different and created some interesting conversations.

You could tell that both of them really enjoyed working on the show/movies, and are always down for even more if the time allowed.

 

LitRPG Writers Panel

Weirdly, the only panel I almost didn’t make it in was this one. There was one seat left (which left Courtney outside the room, but this wasn’t really her thing anyway). I’m interested in LitRPG, this whole genre which is probably only a decade or so old. I have a short story which is morphing into something more that I feel like fits right into that heading. So I figured I’d sit in and see what some of today’s writers had to say.

Overall, I learned a few things. It definitely feels like they all (though to differing degrees) put a fair amount of thought into the game system the characters are playing. It also seems like the indy publishing plan of writing in series, releasing a lot of books overall (though many tried to stick to trilogies), and maybe even the use of spreadsheets to keep track of everything. Dakota Krout also reinforced that idea what we see in the finished product started years before. And the core of the game may have started even before that.

I need to check out a few of the novels to get a better feel (I’ve only read two, maybe three LitRPG books at this point). but it feels like a very interesting path to have available.

***

Once that was done, we grabbed food, and then did the slow drive home with a little of the post-con blues to keep us company. Overall, another great time, and I’m kind of thinking we may try to dip our toes into the hotel craziness if our luck can hold. The 40 minute drive downtown and back home wasn’t bad, but there were a couple of things we likely would have done if we were staying downtown.

Hope everyone else had a great time. See you next year!

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Dragon Con 2024 Recap Part 1

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One of the biggest questions I had this year, and honestly every year, was how would Dragon Con 2024 actually feel? Would it be overly crowded? Would we end up waiting in long lines for panels and miss out?

The only way to find out is to go, right?

Friday

In the week leading up to Dragon Con we go through the App and I star literally anything and everything I might have some interest in. Which means 4 or 5 panels might show up in my schedule for a time slot. I do this for a number of reasons.

To coordinate my panel interests with any that Courtney might have earmarked.

To not forget about anything that might get lost in the amazing number of panels Dragon Con puts on.

To have back-up panels available when you realize the line for the one you want is wrapped around the hotel.

To have a back-up panel when you are in the Hilton and the next one you scheduled is in the Westin and it is Sunday and your feet hurt.

Nathan Fillion Panel

This was the one Courtney and I both had marked as the number one panel to see. Aside from how good he is on panels, I don’t think we’d ever seen him solo one. We also knew the line was going to be long. As soon as we reached the backside of the Hyatt, we found the end of the line and crossed our fingers. About 10 minutes before the panel began, the line started moving. By the time we got into the room (about 3 rows from the back), Nathan had already begun talking (annoying).

Once we were seated, he treated us to stories about his career. How he got the speaking roll as Headpool in Deadpool/Wolverine (apparently the key is Ryan Reynolds helping you out and then thinking you did him a favor). How he has a trick knee, so any running you see in the Rookie is not always him. How he would do a Firefly: Captain Malcom show in the Picard style now 20 years later.

The hour went by far too quickly. I could listen to him talk for days.

Smallville Panel

Given the quick turn around (30 minutes after our first panel in the same room), we took a bathroom break and grabbed a snack. Luckily the line wasn’t very long, so we were able to load in and were fairly close to the front. Kristen Kreuk and Eric Johnson were on hand to talk about Smallville among other things. Starting a trend which would be a common occurrance through many of the weekend’s panels, I believe this was each of their first Dragon Cons. They talked about how cool it was to see the cosplay and seemed to be having a good time. We determined Kristen must be a vampire of some sort since she looks exactly the same as she did 20 years ago. Eric told a great story about his time on Vikings when he kept blowing a scene because his sword kept getting stuck in his scabbard.

 

Saturday

Before I get into Saturday proper, we had a bit of an adventure getting there. Egg again came over to the house to carpool, and we left around 10 AM. My thinking was that since our games don’t start until 1, that will give us time to grab lunch beforehand. While I knew the Parade was going on, I hoped we’d pick a route not to get caught in it.

What I didn’t consider was that the College Football Kickoff game between Clemson and Georgia was at noon (WHY?). This meant the interstate snarled. Once we got off on our exit, it was no better. Then to top it off, the parking deck I chose first didn’t have any empty spaces. Of course, they were letting us in, but after going through 7 or 8 levels we didn’t find anything. We finally had to park much further away than I would have liked. All in all it took us over an hour once we got off the exit before we had parked and exited the vehicle.

 

Gaming

This was our second year of doing our best to avoid the crazy Saturday crowds and instead just hang out in the Gaming building (Mart 3). There is food to be had there (Chick fil a and Jersey Mikes) and the area where we game has plenty of space so for the most part you are not ontop of each other which is sometimes a problem at Gen Con.

Deadlands (Savage Worlds)

After many, many, many attempts to play the current Deadlands system including that one time at Gen Con when we thought we’d gotten it right and instead it was for the 1st edition version of the game (which felt very complex). I’m a big fan of westerns and weird westerns, and this came at a time when I am knee deep in playing through Red Dead Redemption 2… so I was ready to be a cowboy of some type. With the five players at our table, I felt like we had some good interaction with one another, and the premade characters (from the Kickstarter box set) had some interesting flaws on them that helped inform some interesting roleplaying directions for players.

I chose the Witch to see how the magic system worked. And it didn’t disappoint. While I had some “charm” style spells, I didn’t have a ton of opportunity to use those. The Blaze ability (think Fireball) helped turn the tide (or made it so we didn’t get our asses kicked) when dealing with some Federal officers chasing after the same item we were hired to go collect.

With Savage Worlds I learned I have a red six side (likely stolen from a Risk game many years ago) who loves to “explode” on me (in Savage Worlds when you roll the maximum on a die, you get to reroll it and add the new roll to the previous one). This allow my character to do a ton of damage in one of the shots. And since in Savage Worlds you are supposed to be Big Damn Heroes, it goes a long way to helping you get that feeling.

We ended up destroying the abomination keeping the item in question, and then Lee managed (with his dying breath) to outduel the enemy Gunslinger by drawing the Joker card (which basically let him go first). It was a really cool moment we had joked about earlier in the session (as in – it’s likely not going to happen), and then to have it show up in the biggest moment was awesome.

A great game and one I’d love to play a campaign in.

***

Tune in next week for Part 2 where we see Nathan Fillion again, play cowboys, and nearly miss a panel.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Dragon Con Through The Years

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Late summer in Atlanta means some level of reprieve from the blistering summer heat (not that it is really gone until October some years). Baseball is beginning its downslope to the playoffs. Football is just under way. And 90,000 of your best friends descend to participate in Dragon Con!

I’ve been going semi-regularly for over 30 years now. From when it was more comic convention to now when 90,000 best friends MIGHT be a little too many on Saturday. As I get ready to make my way downtown again, I wanted to look back over the various recaps I’d done and collect them all in one place. So in that tradition, here’s the full lists of reviews I’ve done since 2014 (minus 2020 for obvious reasons):

Dragon Con Memories – A walk through the years before 2014 as I talk about my relationship with the convention

Dragon Con 2014

Dragon Con 2016 – The Bad

Dragon Con 2016 – The Good

Dragon Con 2017 Recap

Dragon Con 2018 – Wish You Were There – I missed this Convention due to family commitments, but it has a few Dragon Con Hacks which I should honestly expand on in a blog at some point.

Dragon Con – Everything Pop Culture – A lead up to 2019 where I put my Old Man Yells at a Cloud pants on (a little bit).

Dragon Con 2019 – Review Part 1 – Where I find out I’m allergic to Aleeve!

Dragon Con 2019 – Review Part 2

Dragon Con 2021 – Review

Dragon Con 2021 – Review Part 2

Dragon Con 2022 Recap

Dragon Con 2023 Recap – Part 1

Dragon Con 2023 Recap – Part 2

***

If you’re heading down for the weekend, hopefully I’ll see you!

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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The Worst Game I Ever Played

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I was doing my blog for the week of Gen Con where I give an easy compiling of the links from all the years I’ve gone (and you can find that “index” here), and rereading some of those old posts got me into a great mood for the upcoming week of gaming. However, it reminded me that somehow, someway I have never really talked about the worst experience in gaming I’ve had at Gen Con. And I feel like enough time has passed that it’s long since over due.

At Gen Con 2019, Egg, Lee, and myself played in a later night session of a game called Amber. Now before I get too into what worked and (mostly) what didn’t work, I realize that just because I didn’t have a great time during the game didn’t mean that the other 30+ players weren’t having the times of their lives. And that’s obviously OK, too. But…

First, this is what I said about the game at the time:

I kid Egg about diceless games, saying that they are Communist. Mostly I prefer games with dice… then again, I don’t have the horrible luck he does (seriously, it is odds defying). Amber is one of those diceless games that’s been around for decades, but none of us had ever played. Based on a series of novels I learned a few things about the game.

First, the people who are into Amber, are REALLY into Amber. Think of your favorite series of books (probably Game of Thrones or Dark Tower for me) and then multiply that love you feel for them by a hundred… and you’d still be short. They know everything about the world… everything…

Which can make it a little bit to penetrate such a thick history. The story seemed to trump everything throughout this session, which I’m not sure if that is how most Amber games go, or just more of a GM preference. I must admit that this one didn’t work for me. In addition, it ran over by 2 1/2 hours, so we didn’t get done until 2:30 in the morning, which threw off our schedules a bit for the remainder of the weekend (that lack of sleep starts here).

***

The first and immediate thing is the diceless thing. I’m probably never going to be onboard with a diceless roleplaying system. I feel like one of the things I like about the games I play is the uncertainty factor. The idea that there is a little bit of fate being pulled and pushed in various directions for me or my fellow players to react to. The joy at succeeding on a roll that could tilt the entire session/campaign in one direction or another. The agony at failing your die roll and suddenly having to scramble to find some way out of the predicament you find yourself in as a result of the disasterous roll… those are the moments I love.

At the same time I can also admit that much of the dice rolling during the course of a game may not really matter. If you have a perception roll for everyone in the party, more than likely you only need one person to have a success for all the players to effectively get the same knowledge… leading us to the question of why bother with the rolls in the first place? And we all have had the fun and excitement of a combat that runs on for far too long due to both the heroes and the villains not quite rolling well enough to sway the battle to one side or the other.

However, within this particular session, the idea of not using dice meant that everything was more or less determined by the GM only. Roleplayers talk about adventures in the terms of railroading the players or open sandboxes which allow those same players to pick and choose what they want to do. The idea being that the GM and the players should look to build a story together and not just exist at the whims of the GM.

He had more agency as a ghost than we did as players.

The problems with the session were as follows:

The Characters we were given/came up with had very little agency within the story. And this wasn’t a case where we (personally) we not getting agency, I don’t believe anyone really was. At one point, the three of us came up with some simple way to tie our characters together only to be told that we should be at odds. OK, no big deal. So we changed that and then immediately the story changed so we were tied together.

The GM was writing his own fan fiction. That night, long-since seared into my brain, felt completely like the GM had written us a fan fiction within the world of Amber and somehow we were all unwittingly playing a captive audience under the guise of roleplaying. To the point where after we had already exceeded our time slot, he proceeded to read page after page from his notebook detailing how the adventure’s story was to end. If there was any doubt that our character’s actions had any affect on the story he constructed, I’d been hard pressed to figure it out.

Too many players. I think there were at least twenty players for this game and one GM. Many of the things that we and other characters we doing by interacting (roleplaying) was completely lost because there was no need to check in with us if another player had somehow grabbed the spotlight.

One player tried to grab the spotlight. In college you have grad students who act as assistants to the Professor. They can help teach the class when the Prof is unavailable. They can grade assignments, etc. In this session, what that meant was helping to control the narrative to make sure whatever character you were playing had the most impact upon things. Oh, the guy did it in a very shrewd way by talking with players at the beginning and then being the point man for the GM. However, it got to a weird point where his voice was simply the loudest one in the room (and we were playing in Lucas Oil Stadium, so that’s saying something).

The session went over by 2+ hours. Listen, we’re all there to play games. Sleep is for the weak. Chicks dig narratively driven scars from tortured characters. But it is one thing to go over by 30 minutes, maybe an hour, and another to just disregard everything when it comes to time so that you can tell whatever story you wanted to tell.

Could we have left early? Oh yes, we could have left at the alloted end time of midnight. But I don’t leave games early. And I especially wanted to see if it would somehow turn around or remain the train wreck it appeared to be.

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

***

The joke is that we actually are still playing Amber. The Shadow still grips us, and nothing we have done since is real. The three of us are forever stuck in an unending Hell where we can only watch as the story proceeds around us, never interating with anything… ghosts to a world who had long forgotten we were even there.

And much like any cautionary tale, I will not bother with trying to play another session in the hopes it was just a bad experience. I could not do that to myself. Living through it once had been more than enough.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

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Gen Con 2024 Recap – Part Two

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Flashback to Thursday (Day 1)

If you missed Part one, you can find it here.

In writing this blog, I realized I left out one of the things we did on Thursday, and that was to attend the Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman Dragonlance 40th Anniversary Panel. I ended up getting there about 1/2 way through it (which meant I needed to pick up my copy of the book at the booth rather than at the panel, but luckily that process was smooth enough), but I was still able to listen to them talk about about the journey to this point… though, every time they said 40 years I felt a little bit older. Chronicles were some of the very first novels I read once I discovered the joy in reading. In many ways Dragonlance was more of a gateway to roleplaying than anything else I’d done, enabling me to see exactly what it meant and how these numbers and names on a few sheets of paper could be transformed into living/breathing characters. A process I still try to employ in my writings.

We all went into the panel thinking this was the last ride for the duo of authors within this world, so imagine our surprise when later that day it was revealed they’d be writing in Dragonlance once more, this time going way back in time to Huma.

I haven’t started in on the new trilogy yet, but now that this 3rd book is in my hands it is next on the reading list!

 

 

Friday (Day 2 cont.)

Old Gods of Appalachia

We pick up with my favorite session of the weekend. Horror games are not something I get a lot of opportunity to play overall. In my experience they seem to lend themselves more to shorter campaigns (stories), or perhaps it is just I’ve only been a part of a handful that have lasted longer than a few sessions. Whenever these sessions open up, I’m excited to see what opportunities they might provide.

The other thing I’ve definitely noticed about any horror or horror adjacent game is you have to have buy in from the players. And by that I mean you need to all be on the same page as to whether you are going to take it seriously or if you are going to effectively do a version of Scary Movie (or insert your Horror B-movie of your choice). We were lucky on Friday night (plus the best horror games are done at night, right?) where we had an excellent GM. His ability to set a scene and weave the right amount of tension throughout the session really made for an excellent experience. And all six of the players were pretty much bought in on the story. While there were definitely a few moments of laughter, it did exactly what you wanted it to do, give you a tiny pause from the impending doom that certainly awaited you.

We played the adventure “Best Leave Them Ghosts Alone” and without giving any spoilers, I felt like it had room within it for everyone to have a moment to shine. The story had some combat but also allowed for the roleplaying moments I really appreciate during these gaming weekends. After the game we spoke with the GM for a maybe twenty minutes and looked at the various products Monte Cooke had to offer. I thought about buying the book, then thought I shouldn’t, then we left the room… only for me to get about 10 feet and say f- it, and go back and buy it. I’m looking forward to reading through it and maybe get one of those short campaigns going at some point.

 

Saturday (Day 3)

13th Age

I was listening to the podcast Reading D&D Aloud when I heard Rob Heinsoo, co-designer on the 13th Age RPG. They had just finished up their Kickstarter for the 2nd edition, and in discussing the system he mentioned something called a Escalation Die, where every round it increased by 1 and added to your To Hit rolls in an effort to both end combat a little quicker and increase the ability of the heroes to potentially win the fight. I’d never heard of such a thing, and it made me wonder about the system in general.

Saturday, as originally planned, had a lot of free time with Daggerheart being the only game we’d secured to start. When I mentioned this to Egg, he said he might be able to get us a game of 13th Age through some of his media side contacts. Sure enough, we secured a two hour session… with Rob Heinsoo!

Normally with two hour sessions you get pregenrated characters, but Rob wanted us to see a bit of the character creation, so while the abilities and powers had been listed out on the character sheet – the “cool stuff” was coming up with our “One Unique Thing”. Basically, 13th Age has you come up with something extremely special about your character, and in theory, it could be anything you’d like. Anything is a large box to figure out, so Rob gave a couple of examples (which I wish I could remember them all), but the one that told me you could dream big was:

I am a former god who has fallen from the patheon.

I mean, you can’t get much bigger than being a god.

So we went at coming up with our Unique thing. Egg had his bard whose instruments were from skinned trolls (so the playing kept them from fully regenerating). Lee had a Draconian whose claws were his weapons. And I was playing an Elf Ranger…

As an aside, I’ve thought about Elves in our roleplaying games. Here are beings who are effectively immortal. And I always wonder how they could possibly live so many lifetimes without going mad from the pain and loss of loved ones. From the sheer amount of memories weighing them down. In my mind, I’ve thought it might be cool if every 100 years or so you must return to your homeland and have a Renewal Ritual performed that would excise some of those memories from you. It might not be a complete mind wipe, but by reducing some of your experiences, it would let your mind reorder itself.

In that vein, I said my Elf had forgone such a Renewal and now suffered from swiss cheese brain. All those memories are in there, but they come and go as they pleas making it so there would definitely be a lot to roleplay if this was an ongoing campaign.

Rob listened to each of our Uniques and you could see his mind racing to find threads to potentially use as well. Even though this was a 2 hour session, I felt like he’d have come up with a full campaign based on some of those ideas.

The actual play was a brief encounter where we fought some wannabe dwarves and got to experience 13th Age a bit. Given the lineage to D&D we had a leg up on much of the terminology, but it was still interesting to see how things like the Escalation Die worked. I liked that even if you missed in an attack, you still did some damage (3 for my character). Having damage be more based on your level and not on whether you had a Longsword or Short Sword worked well – one less thing to track, I think.

Rob Heinsoo has such an exuberance for the material (and for roleplaying in general) you couldn’t help but be sucked in by him. I’m a bit envious of any of those who get to have him as their GM for that reason. I’d like to thank him for taking the time to do the session with us, and show us a little bit about the game itself. They are still finishing up the 2nd edition (but you can still pledge here), but I’m super interested in seeing how it turns out.

Deadpool Roleplays the Marvel Universe

I still remember the good old days where if you played Marvel then there was a huge chart that needed referencing. This session had no huge chart… so I guess we need to figure out how to play this game?

Another 2 hour session, but there were a couple of roleplaying style opportunities within but mostly focused on the combat systems. Which appeared to work… fine. I did like that you roll 3 6-sided dice with two white and one red. The Red one has a MARVEL logo as the 1, but if you roll that it acts as a 6 and a Fantastic (critical) on which many of your powers and abilities do something extra with. I played Winter Soldier, so mostly it was a damage enhancer. Damage also keyed off whatever number was on the red dice.

There were really 2 “bad” things for this scenario:

The first was the example characters were Miles Morales, Daredevil, Luke Cage, Winter Soldier, Annabelle Riggs… who? Egg had her as his character and asked me (the comic guy) if I knew anything about her. We later figure out she has about 25 total appearances before this, and I have read a total of ZERO.

Look, in the main game if you want to stat out the lesser known characters – great, go to it. But at a convention, we should really focus on name recognition first.

The second “bad” was the character of Dagger (which Lee had). Her powers affect an ability stat called FOCUS, which is what you draw on to use your super powers. However, in this scenario we are going up against Gun Thugs and Taskmaster, who are melee types… which meant her powers weren’t going to do very much at all. Again, in a longer session/campaign, someone who can make it so the villain can’t use their powers because it has been depleted makes a ton of sense, but in this environment it was more of a feel bad.

Overall I thought the system worked well enough and would actually love to go through character creation just to see how that worked.

Daggerheart

Which brings us to the last game of the night and the trip. This is the Critical Role system which is still in a Beta (if I understood correctly) so this version may be vastly different when it is released in 2025.

I mentioned that sometimes the players and the GM mess really well at a convention and the game takes on a really good flare of its own. For me, this was another example of it. I think this was fostered as well by the fact that while we had the combat moments, we probably had a bunch of moments which allowed us all to focus on roleplaying. In fact, I made a decision that had I known how long the scene was going to last, I might have not done it.

My character was a Cat person, ranger type (a lot of that going around on Saturday for me apparently). Another of the party was a more grizzled veteran. After our first battle, someone asked him for pointers for the dinner we were going to have and he gave a couple of nice answers… so I said – “Remember the scene in Jaws where the kid mimics his dad while they are at the dinner table… that’s going to be me at this meal”. However, I’m not used to playing in person, being an online player these days, but then it occurred to me – I could just act it out.

So I did. The other side of the table noticed it immediately (the person I was copying sat to my left), but soon enough he not only realized what I was doing, he started f-ing with me. Dangling his arms, crossing them in weird ways, and placing them on the table in random ways. I was having fun, Egg snapped a picture of us at one point, and it was a good bit that really didn’t distract (too much) from the other players moments as well.

And the scene lasted for over an hour.

That’s a long time to keep up the bit. When we finally reached a scene change, I offered an apology to the guy “I hope I wasn’t annoying you.”

“Not at all. I appreciate your commitment to the bit.”

“Yeah, if I had realized I’d need to keep doing it for that long, I might have made a different choice!”

As to the system, there were things I liked and other things I’m not entirely sure of. Instead of a D20, you rolled 2d12s for skill and combat checks with one being a HOPE dice and the other being a FEAR dice. If you succeeded and the HOPE dice was higher, you accomplished your goal and got a HOPE point to spend on one of your abilities. It seems like another thing to track (and it is) but it also feels like something you’ll actually use a fair amount as opposed to Inspiration (which I never remember). Other things had to do with the damage/armor system which I think could be streamlined a little more. Egg’s character died toward the end of our adventure and it seemed like the rules did him no favors there.

Overall, I really liked the session. I liked aspects of the system. And the GM and players were great to play with. A win!

 

Sunday (Day 4)

Always a somber day no matter what convention you’re at. Some Sundays are a sort of sprint through the Dealer’s Hall in order to see the 4 or 5 rows that we’d somehow not managed to get over to during the weekend. This time was not one of those. Since most of our games started around 2PM, we actually had a good amount of time to make our way through the maze and see everything we wanted to see (a couple of times). After a final pass and couple of goodbyes, we made our way back south to Atlanta where I managed to walk in my front door at about midnight (much, much shorter drive on the way back).

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Gen Con 2024 Recap – Part One

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Wednesday (Day O)

Normally we take a very leasurely pace going from Atlanta to Indianapolis, making stops for food, gas, and then normally for stop at a couple of toy/comic style stores. It turns a calculated 8 hour drive into around a 11 or 12 hour drive, but we’re so excited for the coming weekend it is well worth it. However, for some reason the drive took nearly 16 hours. We left Atlanta at 6:30 and arrived in Indianapolis around 10 or 10:30. We may have hit a time warp somewhere in there, I’m not entirely sure.

The other thing that I should note is we weren’t as lucky in our hotel placement as last year (where we were across the street from the convention center). Not that the Sheraton wasn’t nice or anything, but after a day of walking around and playing games, you kind of want to be able to get to your room sooner rather than later. The Sheraton must have moved by one block ever night as it always seemed one block further away than I remembered.

Thursday (Day 1)

Wizards of the Coast are in the process of preparing for the big release of One D&D (D&D 2024) in about a month’s time. While I think it might be nice to have the release at the 50th year of D&D celebration at Gen Con, the logistics didn’t work out. Instead they had 3000 copies (750 each day of the con), but instead of doing the same as the Lorcana release last year which created all sorts of problems, those interested had to be online at 7:00 AM and try to obtain a ticket there.

Lee, Egg, and I all discussed this. We’d love to have a shot at the Players Guide, but we also know that waking up that early is THE SUCK. I basically said that if I happen to wake up to pee and it is 6:50, then I’ll give it a try.

I woke up at 6:45… and hit the submit button as the clock turned to 7:00. The I watched the working circle on the phone spin and spin. Egg was wait listed at 900, Lee was higher I think… but mine said 275. Then it said 200. 150.

Was it actually going to happen?

Of course not. That’s not how my luck works. The odds were stacked against us anyway.

The rest of the con I woke up at 7:02 and 7:30, and 9:00… so I only tried the once.

1879

If it is somewhat Steampunk, you have my interest. Somewhere along the way of signing up for events months ago, I mentioned this one to Egg and he secured us a 4 hour block. It turns out the GM actually writes for the game (I did not write his name down, otherwise I would give him a shout out) which was really awesome for us since we had never played it. Many times the games may have a GM who knows the system only a little bit. That was not the case here.

1879 is a game where you have 3 factions struggling against each other on a distant planet in another solar system. Thousands of years ago a portal opened on Earth and the Babylonians went through and set up their own society while encountering and defeating the local lizard man population. Then the portal closed until the 1800s when it opened in Victorian Era Britain. Britain then did what they did during those times, which is colonize this new location.

The game can kind of take on a couple of different options depending on which civilization you want the characters to be from. The GM told us the previous year the players had played Lizard-folk. This time we were the Babyloanians dealing with the British.

The game was fun, though the system kind of felt like it was doing a little bit of everything. It had D&D style attributes, but then there were different dice used in your attack rolls (say d8+d6). It was fine but likely not a system we’d want to play regularly in our home game.

Cyberpunk Edgerunner

If Steampunk is my thing, Egg has a similar affinity for the Cyberpunk genre. The GM summed up the game in a very succenct way: You just have to give the characters enough money to pay 1 month’s rent and you will always have something for them to do. In the rebellion against the establishment, it is truly the rent which holds the biggest sway over our lives. The adventure itself was well done.  Some big corporate project manager decided our tenant building would be cheaper to buy and put up a new cell tower.

This would not stand!

Highlights of the session was Egg’s rocker getting a Nat. 20 when winging an empty bear bottle at the suit’s car and landing perfecting through the sunroof. Our group deciding to take the battle to the Project Manager’s house by posing as garbage men. Us finding him in a compromising position early in the morning. Me raiding his fridge for all sorts of expensive food and alcohol. And finally extracting the appropriate amount of revenge before slinking back to our side of town.

The only bad thing was we probably stole too much money from the PM, as I had enough to pay my rent for at least 2 months!

 

Friday (Day 2)

Shadowdark

We don’t play a ton of OSR style games in the home group. Our default ends up being 5e for the most part with the occassional White Wolf style games coming in second. But we were all interested in seeing the game that would end up sweeping up at the Ennies later that evening.

Given its lineage, it was easy enough to slip into as being D&D players we have a common language. We were playing pre-generated characters which helped us jump right into the game itself. Tasked with destroying an enemy fortress’s heavy balista, we encountered a world that had to make immedaite adjustments to the lack of darkvision for dwarves and elves with firefly style beetles trapped in overhead lights. A clever solution to a problem which doesn’t really exist in regular D7D settings.

In addition, setting up the turn order at the start of the game and just rotating through that kept the combat and non-combat moves flowing easily. At no point did you feel like you didn’t have some level of impact on the game. However, there was one tense moment where the Real-Time aspect of Shadowdark nearly snuck up on us. We had to set explosives to blow up the weapons and those would go off in 10 minutes. Literally 10 minutes of real time would have them explode. Which meant that we needed to get through another full turn to ensure Lee’s character was actually able to make it out. We were so engrossed in playing, there were about 3 minutes on the timer when I realized it and noted we might not want to monologue anymore and get to Lee’s turn!

Egg ended up buying a copy of the game, so I’m interested in seeing how the book presents the game and how any of those things might be used in any of our games (D&D or not).

Transformers

Transformers is my childhood toy. While the Star Wars movies captured my imagination, I had far more Transformer toys than I ever had for Star Wars. Issue 4 of the Marvel series was the first comic book I remember buying, even before I even really knew comic books were a thing that existed. I experienced the pain that every young chiuld hopes to avoid when their grandparents, who don’t even understand these cars who change into robots thing might be, buys you an assortment of Go-Bots for Christmas… scarring you well into your 40s.

As to the game, this was a two hour introduction session. Which most of the time I think those aren’t going to really allow you enough time to do more than an encounter or two. It doesn let you get a glimpse at the system, which is kind of the whole point in a lot of these cases. We did get to see some of the system which also uses addition dice (including a D2 – so flip a coin). One of the things I’m not sure I like is if you don’t have a proficiency in a skill, then you are rolling at disadvantage immediately. It is a bit of a “feel bad” for me. Heck, I already don’t have any skills in a particular thing and now I get an additional penalty as well.

While the system didn’t wow me, we did have a moment that was a bit odd. As we went around saying our names, one of the players said “TireIron”. I’m jotting down the character names and didn’t think anything of it since I could very well see a Transformer having that name. However, his buddy sitting beside him was like “that’s not your name… your name is on the first line of the character sheet”. It struck me as odd at the time, but the more and more I think about it, I’ve been struggling to make sense of it. Since we were in Kindergarden, we’ve been taught to put our name at the top of the page. It’s my default at this point. So… if TireIron wasn’t written at the tip-top of the page, why would you grab a word from some other random area of the character sheet?

Who knows?

***

Check back in for part 2 next week where there will be Cats, Giants, Frogs, Deadpools, and very, very Old Gods.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Once More, Into the Breach!

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Another year, and another chance to go up to Indianapolis and play games with 1.5 million of our friends (ok, maybe it’s more like 70,000 at this point) at Gen Con. It will be a bookended by two longish drives and the middle will likely be filled with a random assortment of games we may or may not have any idea what system they are using prior to sitting down. In between those sessions we’ll travel, slowly, through the Dealer’s Hall (which realistically takes about a day to go through due to the sheer size), and then we’ll have many, many evenings where we try to kill Egg Embry by making him laugh so hard that he loses his breath completely.

Next week, I’ll likely have part one of my review, which I’m so thankful I started doing from that very first year we went (2017) as there are definitely little moments and games that I might have forgotten without my brief histories to jar the memory back to the surface. So in that tradition, here’s the full lists of reviews since I started going (minus 2020 and 2021 for world ending reasons):

Gen Con 2017 Reviews – Part 1 and 2

The Best Game I Played at Gen Con – Tales from the Loop

Gen Con 2018 Reviews – Part 1 and 2

Gen Con 2019 Reviews – Part 1 and 2

Gen Con 2022 Reviews – Part 1 and 2

Gen Con 2023 Reviews – Part 1 and 2

***

And for anyone else traveling up, down, or over to Gen Con… safe travels!

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

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How I Spent My Summer Vacation

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The sun is slowly setting, forcing the snow-covered mountain into darkness. The rider hasn’t adequately prepared for the harsh conditions but does his best to pull his meager coat around him tight enough to block out a little wind. His horse underneath him lacks even a winter blanket and is already protesting against continuing through the foot of snow. It didn’t much matter though, the true quarry was supposed to be found in this area. It was like something out of legend, a brilliantly white Arabian horse out in the wild. The idea of it actually existing was lunacy, but he had it on good authority that it not only existed but was found grazing in the area. So he would stay, set up camp if he must, and wait for the damnable beast to appear.

Either that or die of frostbite.

***

We ventured to the beach this week. I’m lucky enough that my family seems to like hanging out with each other, and so we normally head to South Carolina or North Carolina to soak in some sun, sand, and hang out with each other just long enough without getting sick of one another.

This year, my 16-year-old nephew decided that he would bring his Xbox and I had the privilege of observing him play through portions of Red Dead Redemption 2. I’ve watched someone run horses off of cliffs, into trees, allow them to die of exposure, die to a cougar attack, and slide off the side of a mountain. I’ve watched him shoot a trio of strangers for mouthing off to him. And while I didn’t see the slaughter of many innocents in Blackwater, the results continued to follow him for days and weeks after.

Do you take the time and earn a proper living? No, the way of the gun dictates violence in so many things.

Image by Elisa from Pixabay

***

Weirdly, when I play most games, normally, I try to do the right thing when possible. I would never think of going full crazy within the structure provided as I don’t need to ruin what goals I’m trying to accomplish with such morally corrupt actions.

And yet…

And yet… there is something both liberating and disturbing about watching what can only be described as a comedy of errors resulting in a bloodbath. Sometimes it feels like I’m watching a B-level film where the protagonist (antagonist) isn’t entirely sure why he is doing what he’s doing. He’ll rob a man for a couple of dollars but then save another who has managed to get his leg caught in a bear trap.

But… I can’t stop thinking about the horses. All those horse limbs broken. All those horse souls freed from their digital bodies. Their only crime that they were ridden by a psychopath.

***

I’m not normally one to watch a ton of games online. Mostly because I’d rather spend that same time playing the games I have. But I must admit, watching someone else use chaos in one of these games. The randomness of so much of it.

I also have a copy of RDR2 sitting at the house, which means I’ll need to bust it out and decide whether chaos or order is the way to go.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

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The Perfect Idea

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Image by myshoun from Pixabay

I’m written in the past about how I’m a pack rat both in the physical world and in the digital one. The greatest thing about having a digital repository of all my ideas is that I can normally look to them for inspiration on the current things I’m working on. Or a nugget of an idea can linger out there for long enough that it actually becomes something worth pursuing in earnest.

This brings me to my comic projects. Over the years I feel like I’ve collected more ideas for things that never became anything. So why don’t these projects ever become real things?

Where is this story going?

Sometimes that happens because the initial idea of the comic is cool, but I don’t know where to go with it. I might have the barest of bones of an idea. Maybe I know the elevator pitch but then have absolutely no idea how to craft a story around it.

Project Partners

It is something you’re going to do with a partner, and they have other priorities. This one has happened more times than I can count. Whether it is another writer or it is an artist who I’m trying to find a project for… it just never seems to work out. The timing is off.

Divided Attention

The next shiny object gets me. I once heard a writer say that the most exciting idea is always the one you aren’t currently working on. As a writer, I have a ton of possible stories to write about. Which means when I’m in the process of crafting a script, suddenly I have three other ideas who all want their time to shine.

The story is too big.

One of the things that is a ton of fun is world building. Outlining the epic storyline that is going to leave potential readers going “wow”. You can’t do it justice with only 4… 6… 10 issues… no, we need a 60 issue opus where we really explore the world and the characters and and and…

Money

For many years, especially before Kickstarter and Crowdfunding became an avenue to help mitigate the costs, money was the singular reason why I didn’t do a comic book. When you have to pay the artists and the colorists and the letterers and someone to format things… that digital page you spent hours writing and editing actually shows up as a tangible cost to it.

Paralyzation

Whatever project I choose is going to be the next year, two years, three years of my life potentially. If I get to the point where I’m doing more than 2 Kickstarters a year, then that can shrink the timeline, but otherwise it is going to be “the thing” for me for a little while. How in the world do you chose which idea to go with?

***

We’re in the process of getting In Our Dreams Awake #2 off to the printers and finalizing both Issue #3 and #4. My hope is to have an Issue #3 Kickstarter in the Fall and then Issue #4 in the Spring of 2025, which means I need to get the next thing off the ground… like now. Yesterday would be even better.

At this point I have 3 potential (well, actually 4) projects to consider bringing to life.

Project 1 – A continuation of The Gilded Age. Effectively issues 5-8 would be a complete story featuring some of the characters from the first set of issues. In addition, I have two other ideas for Gilded Age comics in my head. One would be a one-shot, and the other would be an oversized issue (if I could ever crack the story, I think it could be amazing). The positives for this one are big as it was the very first comic I Kickstarted, which means I have some amount of backers who would be interested. The bad is it has been like 6 years since the trade was done, so it isn’t the most fresh idea.

Project 2 – A post-apocalyptic edge of space story that I developed with a co-writer. This is one that could make a ton of sense to do because I could share the writing duties. Plus the co-writer has a decent prescence on social media, so that could be a huge help in making sure we hit any funding goals we set. The negative is that the cost would likely be 100% on me (which isn’t a deal breaker at all).

Project 3 – I have an idea for something more all-ages that I’ve been mulling over for years. However, until recently I’ve not had enough of a story to actually get anything down in the computer other than the big idea. But now I’ve been developing the outlines and script for issue 1. The downside here is that it is a brand new project, so the only thing I have to trade on is my name and my past work.

Project 4 – One of those lingering ideas popped into my head about a month ago, and I mentioned it to Egg Embry. And before I knew it, I had an outline for 4 issues and helf a script for the last issue in the series. This is definitely more long term as to whether it happens, but it wouldn’t have been on my radar at all 2 months ago.

***

So I’m sitting here, at a crossroads, trying to figure out the next move. Which story needs to be told next? I’m still not quite sure, but you’ll be the first to know when I figure it out.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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The Unread Pile – Moon Knight

  By ,

I first encountered Moon Knight during the very earliest days of my comic collecting. At the time one of my favorite comics was West Coast Avengers, and while I read both the regular Avengers title, something about the West Coast lineup spoke to me. About 3 or 4 issues into my collecting, Moon Knight made an appearance in the comic and shortly thereafter joined the team.

Weirdly, I didn’t immediately think of him as a Batman rip-off, even if in some instances that’s what writers lean into. Instead I saw someone who wasn’t entirely in control of his own senses. Someone who spoke directly to his patron god: Khonshu. And someone who didn’t shy away from the difficult choices.

Ever since, I’ve collected pretty much any Moon Knight series and they run the gambit of good, bad, and everything between. At least that was the case before I reached the latest run.

***

Moon Knight (Volume 9 – 2021)

Writer – Jed Mackay

Penciller – Alessandro Cappuccio

***

This run of Moon Knight feels like it was written by someone who has read every issue of comics which Moon Knight appeared. It feels like the creators even read those same West Coast Avengers issues which left such a strong mark on my own interests and comic collection. It honors those things which have come before, but then moves things forward in a very organic way.

Moon Knight is a Priest of Khonshu, which means the night is his to patrol. Those who move about at night are under his protection. So what happens when the things which go bump in the night (Vampires) begin to make a move on New York City? What happens to those people who are merely innocents, that now have found themselves transformed?

Marc Spector is not the first man to take them mantle of Moon Knight. When one has died their last death, another one is chosen by the Moon God. And yet, while Marc is the Fist of Khonshu, a god may have two Fists. If this run only introduced Hunter’s Moon into the lore, that would have made this run worth it. Someone who understands the connection with the gods, who doesn’t understand all of Marc’s tactics, but calls him brother all the same.

He has multiple personalities… and the comic embraces this idea. For much of the 90s comic Marc Spector: Moon Knight, the idea that there were other voices in his head was downplayed. Not here… and it is an asset for the character and his story.

Tigra shows up. And is given a large role in the overall storyline. It always bothered me that after they went their seperate ways in West Coast Avengers, I don’t know that they really crossed paths again (at least in any substantial way). And I have to think it is that whole – he’s supposed to be grim and gritty and Tigra is a Superhero. Here, in this run, those things can coexist.

He fights a haunted house… and then uses it as his base of operations. I’ve read somewhere that when a new writer comes onto a title, they should always leave the toy chest fuller than when they arrived. This is it in spades.

Zodiac – Moon Knight has had plenty of villains over the years. The Midnight Man. Black Specter. Randall Spector. Werewolf by Night. Bushman. And aside from the Bushman, I don’t think he’s really had that archnemesis until now. Zodiac is everything Moon Knight needs when it comes to a villain. Someone who can challenge him to become even more brutal. Someone who is thinking steps ahead of him. I never read the miniseries which first introduced Zodiac, but this comic feels like a perfect fit.

8 Ball – Nothing like taking a Z-List character and turning him into a sympathetic character. Who would have ever thought?

The echoes of the past… older villains, characters who might not have been used in decades pop up throughout the run. It never feels forced. More than anything, it makes this little corner of the Marvel Universe feel that much more alive. The connections between everything only help this process.

From the very first issue until the last in this run, it hit every beat, hit every high mark, and immediately took its place at the top of my Moon Knight reads.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Repost – Push Through The Noise

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Head beating itself against the desk.

The words fail to make the leap from fingers to screen.

Blank screen mocks you with it’s flashing cursor.

Still, there is nothing, absolutely nothing to be done about it.

Another glance at the clock shows me only that time continues to tick by, faster and slower at the same time.

I’m tired.

I don’t want to do this tonight.

Why didn’t I start earlier?

I have to go to work tomorrow.

Gotta get something done.

Just need one idea…

Something…

Anything…

Damnit!

Opens one of the notebooks filled with various bits and pieces of ideas or characters or settings or…

None of those will work.

I’m wasting all this time.

Maybe try reading what I’ve already written?

Why is this so hard?

Other people make this look so easy. Ideas flow out and magically appear. None of them have this problem.

So why do I have the problem?

You’ve been here before and managed to find a way around the problem.

Work the problem.

Is it a character issue?

A subject issue.

Ok. So what needs to happen before the words start working for me instead of against me?

Don’t touch that mouse!

No reason to even bother clicking away.

Another ten minutes destroyed by inaction.

***

This is my brain on writer’s block. I know some people will tell you it doesn’t exist. I’ve heard people talk about it like it is a completely foreign concept to them. There are those who really think they’ve got the whole thing figured out.

I don’t buy it. Not one bit.

There have to be those times when other people, other writers just don’t know what it is they are going to write. And not in the good way, where you are on a journey of discovery within your work. No, I’m talking about that blank page, when it locks onto your soul letting you know that you have nothing else you could possibly bring to the table. That if you’re tired, then just do it tomorrow. No one needs to know that you’re having issues. No one needs to know that the words won’t come.

I mean it’s not like you forget how to write, but there has to be something which could streamline the process a little bit. Some magically easy button I can push to just get the initial push.

Something to help me remember how to do it.

***

Another ten minutes lost.

Bedtime was an hour ago.

And still, this stupid monitor glows with a white smile.

Just have to write something, no matter how small. No matter if there are tons of actual good ideas. Something needs to appear on paper.

No more excuses.

Push through the noise.

 

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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The Unread Pile – A Cautionary Tale

  By

 

Like this, but with comics

It’s gotten a bit out of hand, and I’m not sure how it made it this way.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. I have a decent idea of how it started. I’m not talking about where the comic collection started. I know that very well (and have written about it within my Comic Book Challenge series long ago). I was missing a couple of issues here or there of one of my current pull box reads. Maybe it was an issue of The Flash, maybe it was Avengers, or it could have been Knights of the Dinner Table. But there was a random hole in the comic collection. Which meant I couldn’t push on and skip that issue, no, I had to track it down. But that’s the thing, in this evironment of today’s comics, finding a comic store which not only has some back issues, but very recent back issues (I’m talking about the ones that may have just moved from the front facing shelves to the back issue bins) are much more of a problem.

Regardless, until I found that Flash issue, I couldn’t read the pile I had. Or that Avengers pile. Or that other random pile.

The bulk of my comic books live upstairs in a pair of closets. At last count I had over 11,000 comic books within around 27 long boxes and an assortment of short boxes. The problem with that area is that once they make it to the closet, they kind of disappear. It just becomes very difficult given the space to really do much with them. I have a basic system where I’ve put notes on the boxes listing out what is in each, but sometimes those get loose as well.

Organized… or something

No matter what, if I put any of those series I haven’t read through yet, I will never see them again. They will be lost to the closet!

Instead, I would keep the latest stuff downstairs beside the bed. That way they would easily be there to read through, and then as I made my way through them, they could go upstairs. Except…

Soon enough, it became some kind of monster. I had 5 short boxes that needed to be organized. Needed to be looked through. Because, I had finds from last year’s Dragon Con. I had finds from this year’s Heroes Con. Heck, I had some random issues from Free Comic Book Day which needed to be accounted for.

This last weekend, I went through those 5 short boxes (and quickly realized it needed to be 6 short boxes with all the loose extra stuff sitting on my desk). There were three main piles to start (Marvel, DC, Indy) and then I began to further sort them. But there is something else which happens when you start organizing your comic books. No matter how much you want to deny that it’s going to happen, you end up opening up one of the comics and giving it a read. And then, since the next issue is literally right there… might as well read it. And then I looked up and realized I’d caught up on one of the series in its entirely. I was now back to eagerly awaiting the next issue to drop!

All this made me really think about the original plan, and the fact that I love reading comics. Therefore, I’m going to go through the (6) short boxes and work my way through the last few years of comics that somehow ended up in The Unread Pile. And then I’ll likely write about those series so that everyone else can relive things they read 2, 3, or even 50 years ago (some of the recent purchases go back to the late 70s).

It’ll be a win/win. Content for the blog. Actually reading comics I’ve bought. And my wife will be happier without the short boxes downstairs in the quantities they currently are.

OK, win/win/win.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Movie Review – The Honeymoon Phase

  By ,

My wife makes fun of me, but one of my favorite things is to scroll through VUDU (now Fandango At Home) looking through the weekly deals. I’m not trying to spend tons of money and most of the time I don’t bother with much of anything. However, sometimes they’ll do a Horror movie spotlight and suddenly there are a bunch of new to me movies to investigate. So one night after finding a couple of interesting trailers, I went on the deeper dive on the computer and realized that a few of them were made by the same company (Dark Sky Films). Hmm… well maybe I should give one of them a shot.

***

What makes married couples fall out of the so-called Honeymoon Phase? That’s the set-up for the experiment are going in for. They do it for one month and are paid $50,000. So even though there is a little trepidation, they agree, and wake up together in a house in the middle of nowhere. There anything they want appears to be provided (food, alcohol, etc.). And things proceed fairly normal for the first week or so.

***

What makes us trust someone? What makes us know that the person we love has only our best interests at heart? What would it take for that trust to become broken?

The movie is at its best when those are the questions we are asking as we watch the film. We follow Eve as she begins to have doubts about her husband. One of those things where things are just a little off through how he acts. It’s nothing big enough to be more than a nagging feeling, but… he doesn’t kiss her the way he normally does.

The movie really leans into this idea of whether or not Eve is having some kind of mental break (brought on due to taking LSD brownies 10 days into the experiment) or if she’s right and something is really wrong.

***

Here’s the thing, that works really well when the movie focuses on that. And there are a bunch of things where as the viewer you kind of wonder which way they are eventually going to lean into, because either option (she’s crazy or he’s wrong) can work within the story… until (and spoilers to follow)…

She gets pregnant and suddenly is like 6 months pregnant. And only 20 days have passed.

She freaks out (understandibily so) and yet, her husband (Tom) embraces this all as a good thing.

I’m sorry, what? Something super strange is going on and Tom wants to treat this like it is just a normal thing (and the observers of the experiment don’t make any mention of it).

It’s a strange choice, because at that point you know Tom is wrong 100%. She knows it 100%. And I think the movie suffers for this. And the sad thing is they didn’t need to do the weird pregancy angle the way they did. It could have been a “normal” pregnancy where suddenly she’s wondering if this baby inside her is Wrong Tom or her husband’s from before the experiment. Suddenly she has even more doubts about her own sanity. What if the baby is Her Tom’s kid? What if she really is going crazy?

***

As the movie moves to its conclusion, we get some answers as to why this experiment exists, who Wrong Tom actually is, and Eve gets to do a decent Final Girl impression.

Overall, I liked the performances. I liked the premise, and I dug the questioning of Eve throughout the early portions of the experiment, but some of the stranger decisions are a little confusing (as to why that choice was made) which made it feel more like a “let’s do this weird thing” as opposed to maybe telling a slightly smaller story about two people in love.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Repost – They Can’t All Be Bad, Can They?

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Sometimes this blog of mine needs to become something of a confession. I feel like I live a life in the shadows where only the late night glow of the computer can sustain me. During the day I am one person, making decisions in my job, in my life, in my very conversations, and then there is the person that only a few people know.

He’s the one I want to talk about right now.

You see, this person has a problem. Actually that’s not entirely accurate. If you asked him he might not even acknowledge the problem as he sits there on the couch watching TV. We live at a time where almost every classic you’d ever wish to watch is available within seconds through some streaming service or by actually renting the item in question. Instant access.

And yet there he is, this version of me who I don’t want to claim, he’s watching the worst movies… over and over and over again.

It has to be a sickness. There is no reason that every time he sees movie X on the TV that he should watch it again. The only thing I can figure out is that he’s comforted by them in a way that others would not… could not ever understand. So in an effort to out this problem to the world, these are my favorite “Bad” movies. These are movies that without fail I find myself watching at 11 PM (who am I kidding, pretty much whenever they actually come on). And I understand that they aren’t good movies… I really do. I just can’t stop myself.

Note that this list does not include things that I actually feel are genius in some way – Office Space, Happy Gilmore, Tommy Boy, etc. nor does this list include romantic comedies that I would say are good – While You Were Sleeping. And it definitely does not include Side Out (the GREATEST VOLLEYBALL MOVIE OF ALL TIME – it is never on tv… ever).

No, these are just the worst of the worst… or maybe just the best of the best.

red-dawn-movie-poster-1984-1020191147

Red Dawn – This is the original. I have not seen the remake, and I’m pretty sure it would only degrade the original in my head, so what would be the point.

Why do I love this movie? Well for starters it has C Thomas Howell in it, so it has that going for it. Seriously I think that this was one of those movies that capitalized on that inate fear of many in the 80s… this could actually happen. But the real reason is probably that it was teenagers who were fighting off the Cuban/Soviets. That sense of trying to think, even for a moment, that if the shit went down, maybe you could make a little bit of a difference. That appealed to the 12-18 year old me (and still appeals to the 38 year old me).

And who didn’t want to shout WOLVERINES? Put your hand down, you’re lying. We all wanted to do that.

Point Break

 

Point Break – I think this movie is amazing, if only for the most stilted line in movie history:

“You crossed the line. People trusted you and they died. You gotta go down.”

Considering everything that’s occurred between them, Keanu couldn’t muster a little more effort in delivering that line (or maybe they could have gone with another line).

But really, I love every moment of this movie. From the idea that the Ex-Presidents are surfers, to the fact that the FBI is paying Johnny Utah to go undercover, to the very real possibility that having a top notch college quarterback be “undercover” in anything would be a terrible idea (at least it seems like a terrible idea).

The-Replacements.2

The Replacements – Hey, Keanu makes the list twice. I love sports movies. Hoosiers is one of my all-time favorite movies, The Natural is amazing, and Bull Durham makes me wonder exactly how it is on those minor league teams. I love the idea that the majority of the time the guys we are watching are going to succeed and yet I still am engrossed in the movie.

And then you take these misfits, these cast-offs, and watch them come together under a washed up QB and a coach that was out of the league. I mean, these are the storylines they focus on every week on ESPN and here it is in a film. Make those over-paid divas the bad guys and let’s mix it up with those guys who are just happy to be there on the field.

Those are the guys I want to watch.

A-Knights-Tale-2001-movie-poster

A Knight’s Tale – I have no defense for this one. It is blasphemus to have Rock and Roll music as the soundtrack to a medieval adventure – though the dancing to Bowie’s Golden Years is good. It is terrible to have Geoffrey Chaucer in this film and make it seem like he wrote some of his stories based on Sir Ulrich Von Lichenstein’s adventures – though I like how they make him a gambling addict. There is so much bad that if I just talked to you about the movie in person, you’d wonder if I was preparing a Mystery Science Theater style mocking of it.

I still watch this one EVERY TIME it is on. I like the stuff with the Black Prince throughout the movie and then when Will is knighted. I like that this guy is trying to figure out what being a knight is all about, when he just needs to be himself.

I know, I know… very sappy. I can’t help it.

Bedazzled

Beddazled – This is the Brendan Fraser one, not the original one, which I feel like is much more sinister in its approach. I had forgotten about this movie until this past weekend when it came on and suddenly found myself watching it. This is one that actually has inspired me in my very first attempt at trying to write a novel. Now, not much more than the basic outline of a few chapters took place, but I love the idea of portraying the Devil as someone who is not just the boogeyman in our minds, but as someone who could actually have depth and caring.

But I also think that the Devil would try to screw over someone making wishes to the best of their ability. You’d need to be a top of the line lawyer in order to actually be able to make a wish and not have it backfire on you. And I’m guessing that the person/being who has been around since the beginning of time might still have more experience.

roadhouse-poster-mt

Roadhouse – “Pain don’t hurt”

“I want you to be nice until it’s time not to be nice.”

“A polar bear fell on me.”

Patrick Swayze at his most Zen-like (well maybe 2nd most to Point Break). Let’s go through the checklist? Bouncer who is legendary? Check. Falls in love with the local doctor who patches him up? Check. Evil rich guy who controls the town? Check. To the death fight on the shore of some creek/river with the number 1 henchman? Check. Everyone getting a one-liner? Check.

If that’s not enough for you, then I don’t know what you want.

So that’s my demons. My skeletons in the closet. Exposed for all to see. I don’t claim that I will stop myself from watching them the next time they are on. I don’t claim that I won’t love them just as much. I mean, why deny ourselves the things we love…

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Tales from the Cubicle – Part 9

  By

Salsa Shark

I don’t like onions. Hate them, in fact. However, the rest of the world doesn’t understand this, so there are many, many, many opportunities to eat them if you’d like at various resturants. Salsa being a big one. In the Atlanta area, you can’t throw a stick without hitting a Mexican resturant, which means I’m going to have a big bowl of chips sitting in front of me. Now, while others use those chips to scoop up as much of the salsa as they possibly can, I take a slightly different tactic.

I dip the chip in, allowing it to get a little damp, and then make sure to effectively wipe any of the bad stuff on the side of the bowl.

I’ve done this for as long as I can remember. Which also means when I first started working, I would do the same thing in front of my co-workers.

Now, I’m sure people thought this was odd, but they also realized they had more of the “good” stuff for themselves. Or at least that’s what I thought.

Flash forward nearly twenty years at the company Christmas party. One of our remote employees was walking around, introducing her husband to people when suddenly he immediately recognizes me. It takes me half a second and I recognize him from that first job, having worked with him for maybe a year or so. Truly, it is a small world.

And then he says to his wife, “John always dipped his chips in the salsa just barely enough to get some juice on them and that was it.” Twenty years later and he still remembered the random way I eat chips. Talk about making an impression on someone.

***

You Knew What You Were Getting Into

As an engineer, there are long periods of work where you need to get really focused and avoid any distractions you can. There are tasks which can be very repetetive, so over the years I started bringing headphones to work to listen to music and later podcasts. I was certainly not the first at this particular company to do it. I personally found that the focus allowed me to be much faster and efficient with those tasks. A win-win.

However, flash back to a moment where during one of our staffing meetings it was brought up that the budgets on some of the projects were getting stretched thin. An one of the bosses made a point about how headphones and listening to music was likely at the cause of this issue. That because we (and I mean multiple people) were doing it, we were completing tasks slower than we would have if we weren’t covering our ears up.

Not what I was doing at the office.

Now, I’m normally not a person who seeks out confrontation, but this infuriated me. So I asked whether it was possible that the projects were running low on money because they hadn’t originally had enough money in the contract. His response was, “There are tasks that you have to do which are not always fun. But they have to be done without distractions. And hey, you chose your profession… you knew what you were getting into.”

Which, to this day, I still don’t understand what the hell that meant.

We still continued to have our headphones. Maybe the other project managers explained to him how dumb his thinking was (or at least how poor his people managing skills appeared to be).

***

You Don’t Have To Turn On The Red Light

Back in the days of being a younger engineer and living the true cubicle life, your immediate neighbors were the ones you were likely to have the most conversations with. My three closest neighbors would sometimes just have random chats about life, music, whatever you could think of… while sitting at our desks and doing our work. The cubicle walls doing little to damper our talks.

And it is during these times when you really get to the root of things. About how much you don’t know about someone or how much they may not know.

So it was that we all began talking about music. Lloyd was more into hip-hop and was attempting to educate me on those artists. Somehow we got to Puff Daddy, and I said “well, I’m a little indifferent to him after he took the Police song.”

Lloyd was silent for a beat, and then said “Who are the Police?”

After which I was silent for more than a beat. “Every breath you take… that’s the Police. Roxanne? Message in a Bottle? King of Pain? Everything She Does Is Magic?”

“Nope. Nope. Nope. I don’t think I know them.”

My world cracked completely open.

My other neighbor at least tried to save me. “Lloyd, don’t be stupid. You know who the Police are. You’ve heard of Sting.”

And at that point, it clicked into place for him. “Oh, yeah…”

As the years have gone by, I understand more that everyone has their own tastes and blind spots. But in that moment, I couldn’t have imagined not even having heard of the Police.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

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Movie Review – Furiosa

  By ,

A lot of time when a sequel or prequel comes out, I try to go back and watch the previous movies. Sometimes I don’t get that opportunity. However, with Furiosa I wanted my wife to go see it as well (she’s a fan of girls kicking ass), which meant she needed to watch Mad Max Fury Road first. So we both went into the movie this evening with Fury Road only a couple of days old.

First… I really dug the movie (Courtney liked it a lot as well).

Chris Hemsworth is a worthy addition to the villains of this world. You could tell that he was having a ton of fun just playing nearly every moment as big as possible. Anya Taylor-Joy has very large shoes to fill in the titular character’s role, and she does a great job in making the character hers.

As to the story… while it is one overarching story of Furiosa’s life, Miller does an interesting thing where he breaks up these tales into segments, with each having their own title. I thought that was a cool way to tell these little tales that still allow for the time jumps we need for Furiosa to grow up, but I also realized that these Mad Max stories could happen in almost any order (prior to this movie), and as such they are little stories you might tell about the heroes and villains in mythology. Each of the chapters in this movie are exactly that, chapters of a larger tapestry within this world.

With the box office results so far, it would be fair to say that it hasn’t performed as the studios would have liked it to perform. And while I don’t have the answers to all the questions pertaining to why people aren’t going to the movies like they used to (although I do have plenty of theories that range from the cost of movies to make down to the cost of seeing a movie and a bunch of other things in between), I do have a couple of thoughts about why this particular movie might have stumbled out of the gate.

Both Fury Road and Furiosa ask something of its audience that I’m unsure how it works across the broader spectrum. They ask you to buy into a post apocolyptic world that is gonzo. The characters are over the top, larger than life, in a world where the lives of the extra characters are beyond meaningless. And by that, I mean those people are sacrificial lambs in the entire sense of the word. I’ve heard that the best science fiction asks you to believe one thing, but then grounds the rest within the rules you would expect. Mad Max says this is a dead world run by insane men… and oh, yeah, there’s going to be over the top, in your face action to the point you are going to question how anyone would live for an hour in this world.

But that’s the charm of these movies as well. I think it is why Fury Road did as well as it did. It got the good word of mouth to help slowly build to a success. Whether Furiosa does the same, it’s hard to say, but given Hollywood’s penchant for taking these “duds” and immediately trying to go to streaming, we may never know the real answer.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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The One Where I Don’t Get Sea Sick On My Very First Cruise

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Image by Gianluca from Pixabay

When I was about 14 years old my family went to Destin, Florida for a week. Well, technically we did that pretty much every year. When we first started going there in the early 90s there were only a handful of places to stay, even fewer things to do (you generally had to go across the bridge to Fort Walton), and that was probably for the best for my parents and their three kids. However, during this particular year, my grandmother had come to stay with us as well.

Now Nanny loved to fish. I honestly think had she lived on the coast she would have done it from sun up to sun down. So we were definitely going to do some fishing activity while we were down there, and so my parents decided to book us all on a 4 hour deep sea fishing excursion.

Side note – I get motion sick in cars. It’s not nausea though. Instead, I get bad headaches. Weirdly, I don’t get them if I’m driving, and I don’t get them if I’m in the passenger seat. Otherwise, life becomes a bit of pain. Which made family trips all sorts of fun as I couldn’t read to pass the time. At best I could listen to music with headphones on or just try to zone out.

I load up on the boat. This thing likely could hold maybe 30 people. Everyone would have a spot on the rail where they could fish until their hearts desire was full. And there I was, right beside Nanny, ready for the boat to get to the fishing spot and catch all sorts of things.

Image by gwiseman from Pixabay

The trip out there was probably 15 minutes and wasn’t too bad. Though, I felt the very beginnings of a headache, that would likely go away once the boat stopped.

Once the boat stopped moving.

On a moving ocean…

Oh, crap, the boat is never going to stop rocking, is it?

What occurred next I can only (luckily) remember through a haze of blinding pain as I spent the next 4ish hours in the middle of the boat on a cot, writhing and moaning. Because, the only thing that might make things worse would be if there was a storm out at sea. You know, where the boat gets tossed around a little bit (nothing scary, but more than I could possibly deal with).

When we finally reached land, I may have kissed the ground. And every year after, my parents would make the joke about booking another deep sea fishing excursion.

***

Image by Took A Snap from Pixabay

Now, I told you that story, so that I could tell you this story…

My wife and I were married back in 2002, and for our Honeymoon we were gifted a Mediterrean Cruise. We’d fly into Barcelona the morning of departure, and then it would be a week visiting various ports throughout France, Italy, and Malta. I was really looking forward to the opportunity, but my previous “boat” experience weighed on my mind. So I went and got the motion sick patch from a doctor. If you are unfamiliar, you stick it right behind your ear, and it is supposed to help with motion sickness. In addition, my dad mention a bracelet that he’d worn on a cruise which was based on pressure points along your wrist which apparently helped with the symptoms. Finally, I had old faithful, Dramamine to get me through any of the worst of it.

The flight to Barcelona was overnight, and since it was far and away the longest flight I’d ever been on, I made sure to take my Dramamine when I got on the place so that I could sleep. But, sleep on a plane is a sporatic thing for me, so I’m not sure how much rest I actually got.

Once we landed in Spain, it was early morning, and we hurried to the port in order to begin boarding. Somewhere along the way I slipped on the bracelet and put my patch on.

Getting onto the boat, the previous day’s trip, jet lag, and perhaps something else had completely wiped me out. I could barely function when we had to go to the muster stations, and by 3 or 4 when we were allowed to go back to our rooms, I pleaded with my new bride to let me sleep.

“Just give me today, and I’ll be good the rest of the week. I don’t know why I’m so tired, but I can’t…”

Luckily, she saw the poor, pitiful state I found myself in, and took pity… even though it meant missing some of the first evening activities (the big one being the first dinner). I think I finally woke up around 9ish, and when we started trying to figure out why I was so wiped and she wasn’t… we realized:

Dramamine

The Patch

The Bracelet

I’d over drugged myself!

I took the bracelet off. I didn’t take anymore Dramamine. I only used the patch. And the good news was that not only did I not need to sleep the trip away, I didn’t get sea sick!

***

I’m not sure if there is a less subtle message in all of this. Mostly, I felt like a dumbass, but I was so worried that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the trip… I nearly messed up the trip in a different way. Which feels like a very “me” thing to do.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Soundgarden

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I didn’t know what to do with Soundgarden at first. Of the Big 4 Grunge Bands from Seattle I was squarely in the Pearl Jam, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains side of things. It’s not that I disliked Soundgarden by any means, but something held me back from truly embracing them as one of “My Bands”.

Weirdly it might have been Chris Cornell’s voice which gave me the most pause. It’s an extremely strange thing to admit considering he might have one of the best pure Rock voices from anyone of his era (or any era really). But there it was. While my other friends raved about Badmotorfinger, I went on listening to other things.

But apparently Chris Cornell and Soundgraden weren’t going to let me off the hook so easily. He first got me with the Singles Movie Soundtrack. Seasons, his solo contribution made me refocus a bit more on his vocal talent. And it hammered me as one of the real standout tracks from the album. Just this little beauty of a piece…

Next it was the Temple of the Dog record… through my love of Pearl Jam, he’d found another way to worm into my head with Hunger Strike. After I listened to the full piece, it was inevitable. Somewhere in there I added Badmotorfinger into the rotation in my car. It was this perfect level of heavy and rock, and whatever idiocy I’d had with Cornell’s voice was long since forgotten.

And then Superunknown came out… I heard Fell on Black Days, and it was completely over from there. How we managed to snag tickets to see them at the Fox Theater in Atlanta, I’ll never know for sure, but I am grateful for it. This band should have been selling out the arenas at that point. Yet, there we were in a pretty cozy venue where we could absorb ever ounce of energy from the band.

Down on the Upside… I’m going to say something odd, but I may actually like that album better than the others. I’m not saying it is a better record than Superunknown (or Badmotorfinger), but I find myself coming back to it again and again over the years. It may be that Black Hole Sun was overplayed on the radio where it went from this amazing track to something I didn’t really need to hear again. Down on the Upside never got the love of their previous albums, so maybe that was what I was embracing as well. With any band, I think we all want to be able to find the thing that we like that no one else does (or we like it more than they do). Regardless, in some ways I feel like this is the version of Soundgarden I always needed them to be. No matter what, I can pop that one in and never seem to get tired of it.

Then they broke up… just as it felt I had fully embraced them. Trying to cast my mind back to that time to remember how I felt about that… I think I was more annoyed than anything else. At the same time, I understood I’d only broken the surface with them, so even if there was nothing new to come, I still had older stuff to listen and learn. And when Matt Cameron joined Pearl Jam, that seemed like, well, if they were finally going to stop being the modern day Spinal Tap when it came to drummers, then at least some good came from it.

But again, Cornell wasn’t through with me. He decided merging with members of Rage Against the Machine to form Audioslave might just get my attention. The part of me who held out hope for a Soundgarden reunion was sated by this new band…

And then they broke up.

And got back together.

And broke up.

Maybe it didn’t happen quite that way, but it felt that way. Audioslave feels like a band that I really liked, but somehow managed to never actually get to see in person.

Then Cornell went on to do solo stuff, and I’d check in on him periodically. His version of One is so crazy that I’m not sure how you can sing the lyrics to Metallica’s version while playing the guitar for U2’s version. That’s a huge step up from patting your head and rubbing your belly at the same time.

Either way, that should have been it. Instead, Soundgarden miraclously reformed, put out a new record, and toured.

It was weird again. I think it caught me completely off-guard. Mentally I was in a good place with Soundgarden’s legacy, but maybe that was because I had come to them a little later than everyone else. For some reason I didn’t immediately go out and get King Animal. I’m not sure why exactly. Maybe I was worried about them trying to ape their own sound. Maybe I was thinking I was good with where they left off. It seems like long breaks from reforming bands don’t always go the way you might like.

And then they announced a tour and the Atlanta date was going to be at the Fox Theater again.  I wrote a little about the experience here.

Little did I know that only a few weeks later, Chris Cornell would be dead.

***

The first time I dealt with a band I liked having an unexpected death, it was Nirvana. Later on Alice In Chains and Stone Temple Pilots and Linkin Park were added to that (sadly) growing list. Sometimes the reaction was pure surprise. Other’s were less surprise and more a general sadness for what seemed like was inevitable due to their issues with drug abuse. I don’t mean to say it in such a matter of fact way… it is all very sad, but I never know how to react to those moments.

With Chris Cornell, more than anything, I think about what the world lost. The art that he was still making. Whether it was with a band or on his own. The power of his voice in both music and in life. He was a part of the soundtrack of my own life. Milestones which pile up over the years as I listened to his words over hundreds and thousands of listens. It’s the amazing power of music that is able to move us in ways we might never thought possible. Chris Cornell did that with everything I heard. And seven years after his death, I still wonder about a world with him still in it.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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Two Days Left for the In Our Dreams Awake Issue 2 Kickstarter!

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Two Days Left for the In Our Dreams Awake Issue 2 Kickstarter!

Click here to back the comic!

***

Throughout this Kickstarter campaign I’ve written a few posts on In Our Dreams Awake, so this post will put them into a more comprehensive guide so that you don’t have to go stumbling through the Tessera archives in order to locate things.

 

Repost – Behind the Comic: In Our Dreams Awake

This post actually comes from the first issue’s Kickstarter, but it tells the origin story for the comic. Going back nearly two decades, the comic went from something we hoped would be our way into the comic industry to something collecting dust on a computer hard drive to finally a series.

Behind the Comic: – Anatomy of a Panel – In Our Dreams Awake #2

An idea which actually came from Egg Embry when I was struggling on how to post about The Gilded Age. This post takes you through the development of a panel from issue 2 of In Our Dreams Awake. Going from the concept, to an excerpt from the script, to the art itself (and the panel itself is the image from the banner at the top of this post).

Odd Synchronicity?

A little more of a stream of conciousness style post that focuses on little moments which lead to the comic coming to life.

What If?

A post about the core concept of In Our Dreams Awake… trying to find happiness in the life you have rather than always yearning for the path not taken.

The Reason Why – In Our Dreams Awake

Finally, the true reason I dragged In Our Dreams Awake back from the land of the dead.

Kickstart the Comic – In Our Dreams Awake #2: A Cyberpunk/Fantasy Adventure

I started doing a highlight post on Kickstarter some years ago on the blog, so it was only fitting to do one for my own comic (totally unbiased too… honest).

***

A quick reminder that In Our Dreams Awake #2 is available on Kickstarter for only two more days. Go and check it out here.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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John McGuire is at Galactic Quest (Buford, GA) for Free Comic Book Day May 4, 2024

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The Kickstarter for In Our Dreams Awake #2 is still going! Find it here!

***

This coming weekend (Saturday), I will be at the Galactic Quest Comic Store in Buford, Georgia from 10 till 6(ish). It’s Free Comic Book Day, so there are all sorts of goodies whether you are a young fan or old fan (or anywhere in between). Check out the website for information on exactly what comics are being offered this year. Plus, there are bound to be superheroes showing up here and there in all their costumed glory.

So come and stop by and we can chat. I will have copies of In Our Dreams Awake, the Gilded Age trade and The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, and The Echo Effect novels.

Hope to see you there.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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The Reason Why – In Our Dreams Awake

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Over the last couple of years, I decided to start writing about the published things I’ve managed to do – comic, short story, and novels. But I wanted to talk about the reason why they exist. Sometimes that’s talking about how the comic came about. Sometimes that’s a breakdown of where I was when it was conceived. Sometimes it’s a look inside my brain.

It occurs to me I never wrote a post for In Our Dreams Awake. Even if I have talked about the origins and it’s history.

The Reason Why In Our Dreams Awake exists is because I feel like I let people down when it didn’t exist.

***

Back when we were first emailing about this story, Egg was doing his best to try and make it in the world of comic books. He traveled around the southeast to various conventions setting up at an artist table with his then girlfriend. He would craft stories, make connections, and was putting in the legwork.

In the meantime, I was traveling down a different path with the folks over at Terminus Media, trying to get the anthologies finished. Trying to figure out how to create a comic book in the first place. And then later trying to figure out how to do more than the odd 8-10 page short.

Both of us were hoping for that little kick from a project or a connection or something which maybe would make it so this crazy idea of making comics might not be as crazy as you think.

In Our Dreams Awake should have been that thing. It should have been the catalyst for something bigger and better.

***

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

There’s this concept called Sunk Cost. Basically it means that a cost has already occurred and cannot be recovered. To me it means that you can’t let your future be determined by mistakes you’ve made in the past. You cannot remain beholden to something because it MIGHT work out for you. Instead, you need to forge ahead almost as if that original mistake didn’t happen.

When the original artist on Egg’s Cyberpunk story fell off the face of the earth, I should have scrounged up some funds and pushed the project ahead with a new artist.

But I didn’t do that.

I convinced myself that we had come too far to go backwards and start 24 pages completely over. I held onto some misguided hope that the time and effort invested in those pages were worth holding the whole project up.

The pages sat there on a computer for over a decade. All that hard work lain fallow.

Even when I finally circled back to the project and decided it NEEDED to get finished and put out into the world, I still couldn’t let go of that Sunk Cost. I still waited to hear back from the missing artist, engaging with him to try and see if we could salvage those pages. And when he ghosted me again, I waited… holding out hope for… what?

***

In Our Dreams Awake is a story about a man who isn’t sure which life he deserves. It’s the story about a man who is constantly wanting something more, something different than his current life can provide him.

But at it’s core it is about DREAMING BIG.

Egg and I wanted to make a comic book. We wanted to have readers and be able to tell this weird story. We wanted to be able to sell a few copies here and there, maybe break even on things when it was all said and done.

DREAMING BIG.

***

So maybe the biggest thing is the things I’ve learned along the way. Every mistake, every misstep got me a little closer to having printed copies of issue 1 in people’s hands. The mistakes that occurred between issue 1’s Kickstarter and issue 2’s current Kickstarter. And probably the mistakes that are likely to happen in the future.

Because doing this isn’t easy. The imposter syndrome is constantly hanging around in the back of my mind. Telling me that all the hard work isn’t worth it. You’ve invested so much, why keep going? It would be simplier if you just called it quits.

Maybe you shouldn’t DREAM SO BIG.

***

But that’s The Reason Why, isn’t it? If I don’t push this through, then the little voice of doubt will have been right. And I owe it to everyone who worked on this comic, whether it was 15+ years ago or it was earlier this year, to find a way to get it out into the world. Because if you can’t DREAM BIG about something so wonderful as comic books, then what can you DREAM BIG about?

***

A quick reminder that In Our Dreams Awake #2 is available on Kickstarter. Go and check it out here.

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

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What If?

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The Kickstarter for In Our Dreams Awake #2 is still going! Find it here!

***

I’ve talked before about how the process of In Our Dreams Awake came about all those years ago. But just like every idea, it’s meaning and purpose have changed over the years. The way the project started, and what it has become are ever changing in ways I don’t know that I completely understand.

But it all stems from this central idea I have about the What If Game.

What is the What If Game? It’s the thing that every (or nearly every) human on the planet plays at various points in their lives. It is the time we take to daydream about decisions we’ve made in the past and how they’ve affected our current state of being.

It can be very big decisions:

What college will I go to (or do I even go to college)?

Should I ask this person out?

Should I maintain this friendship?

Should I take this job or another job?

And sometimes it can be very small decisions which could add up to something bigger.

Should I go talk to the professor about my grades?

Should I spend more time working on this project?

***

Image by John Hain from Pixabay

The thing is, this is a good exercise for a person to go through. We should constantly evaluate what we have done, and look into not only the results of those decisions, but anything which might have led us to the moment. In the same way you might analyze your victories and defeats to see what you can do better the next time… the very same thing for the various life decisions we must all make.

However, it is one thing to use this in a way to better yourself. To propel you forward in your life. Like everything, it can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you use the self-reflection.

I have a friend who for many years focused a bit too much on the What If Game. They were so busy looking backwards at the things they didn’t have that they didn’t see all the gifts and opportunities right in front of them. Fundamentally their world view became a bit skewed because the path not taken was the path they thought they should be down.

***

In many ways, In Our Dreams Awake, is that idea taken to the next level. It is about a burning for something extra in our lives. Jason Byron lives his two very different lives, but he isn’t happy in either one. In the Fantasy world, he is willing to risk everything he has for an artifact of an outlawed era. And for what purpose? Because he wants to have a life different than the one he currently enjoys. In the Future world, he loves his life so much that he is trying to doublecross everyone and escape off world.

Because he is simply not happy with where he is.

He looks to the past or he looks to the future, but neither sate his appetite for much of anything. For Jason, both of these paths may lead to destruction.

***

In Our Dreams Awake is a reminder, of sorts, to myself that I should take time to be in the present. To experience things as they are and not constanly look back or forward. Time already flies by. If I’m not enjoying the present… what’s the point of any of it?

***

A quick reminder to go and check out the comic book, In Our Dreams Awake #2 on Kickstarter!

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

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Kickstart the Comic – I Took A Hammer to Hell #3

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Just a friendly reminder that I have a Kickstarter going right now for In Our Dreams Awake #2. Back it now!

***

Sometimes there is a plotline/story idea that catches me just right. I’ll be minding my own business (definitely not planning on buying more comic books), and then they jump me out of nowhere. I And then I’m left only trying to figure out how quickly I can get the issue in my hands (or virtual hands as the case may be).

You had me at Deal with the Devil story.

***

Cover by Mulele Jarvis

I TOOK A HAMMER TO HELL #3 (#1 & #2 Available too)

Writer – Matt Garvey

Artist – Mulele Jarvis

Colorist – Fabi Marques

Alternate Cover – J Francis Totti

The Kickstarter campaign ends on Friday, May 3, 2024

 

***

The Pitch:

With nothing more than a MASSIVE hammer duck taped to his hand, Jake is going to kill the devil! 

 

The Story:

Jake made deal with the devil for his eternal soul (original I know, but wait till you read it, this is VERY different) but instead of waiting till his time is up or trying to wiggle out of the agreement, he goes to Hell WILLINGLY! 

Why on Earth would someone do this?!… Well,  he has only one goal in mind. 

With nothing more than a MASSIVE hammer duck taped to his hand, Jake is going to kill the devil! 

This comic has action, it has gore…but it also has a story that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

So, F#@K REDEMPTION…EMBRACE VENGENCE!

You won’t be disappointed!

 

John’s Thoughts:

So many Deal with the Devil stories are about the person trying to find a loophole to the predicament they have put themselves in. You see, it is very simple: you do the crime and then your soul does the time. And don’t get me wrong, I love those types of stories. Heck, I have a book sitting on my shelf that pretty much focuses on just that.

I Took A Hammer To Hell makes an immediate detour, though. It takes that core premise and says “what if the guy made his choice and was willing to go to Hell when the time came”. And then tried to go kill the Devil.

At it’s core, that is an interesting idea. If you had 40 years to plan your assault on Hell, what would you do? Would you train like Neo in the Matrix? Downloading every bit of fighting skills you could. Would you study with all the religious figures you could find, hoping to find some weakness for the Devil?

Or maybe you’d just strap a hammer to your hand and say f$%# it.

A sampling of the Ultimate Digital Collection

The Rewards:

Matt Garvey does his best to keep his Reward costs low, so you can pick up the lastest digital issue for £2 ($3) or even a signed copy of issue 3 for £2 ($6). If you are just hearing about the comic and want to play catch up the digital will run £5 ($7) and phyrical versions of 1-3 are £12 ($16).

The best bang for your buck though is his Ultimate Digital Package (25 comics) which will get you caught up on I Took A Hammer To Hell and then continue to feed comics directly in your brain from many of Matt Garvey’s history for only £10 ($13).

(I actually did that level on his last Kickstarter: Gangsters Versus Nazis and am working my way through all the comic goodness.)

The Verdict:

I’ve already supported the two previous Kickstarters for Issue 1 and Issue 2, so I was ready to go when Issue 3’s campaign went live. If you can handle a story about Vengeance against the Devil (and who wouldn’t want to see that), you should back this comic so that they make 50 more issues!

Make sure you check out I Took A Hammer To Hell #3!

Covers by Mulele Jarvis

 

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

 

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Kickstart the Comic – In Our Dreams Awake #2: A Cyberpunk/Fantasy Adventure

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I’ve been writing about it for the better part of the last month, but we are finally LIVE on Kickstarter.

For those who may be unfamilar to Kickstarter, it is a platform that allows creators to take their work (in this case a comic book) and effectively get people to Back the project by saying they want to buy the product. We do this through a number of different reward levels… some of which will just be the new issue of In Our Dreams Awake #2, others will include both issues, digital options, as well as a chance to get signed novels or signed comics from Egg Embry and my back catalogue.

I hope you will join us for the campaign!

Click here to check it out!

Cover by Moonee Art

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In Our Dreams Awake #2: A Cyberpunk/Fantasy Adventure

John McGuire – Writer/Creator

Egg Embry – Writer/Creator

Edgar Salazar – Artist

Rolands Kalninš – Artist, Colorist, Letterer

Genaro Olavarrieta – Inker

Javier Laparra – Inker

Alexander Lugo – Letterer

Moonee Art – Cover Artist

The Kickstarter campaign ends on Friday, May 10, 2024.

***

The Pitch:

Jason Byron dreams of two lives. In one fantasy, magi reactionaries won, technology is banned, and Jason is a portrait painter hiding a contraband telescope. In the other world, he leads a cyberpunk gang amid a future of flooded cities and gilled aliens. When he closes his eyes in one world, he awakes in the next.

In Our Dreams Awake is the story of what happens when both dream worlds spin out of control. What happens when Jason no longer knows which world is the dream and which one is reality?

 

The Story:

IN THE FANTASY DREAM, a mage arrives at Jason Byron’s cottage with orders: Paint and document a downed flying machine before the Magi destroy the heretical technology. But, will the authorities let Jason live with this forbidden knowledge?

IN THE CYBERPUNK FUTURE DREAM, there’s a turf war in Drowned London, and Jason Byron must parley with the rival gang leaders. Can Jason make peace with the ‘A People, those mouthy cat aliens, and other gangs? Will this escalate and go to guns?

Who can say what dreams may come? Each Jason Byron works for an unseen love. Their guiding light is making their worlds better for those who hold their hearts. But can these dreampunks make their dreams come true?

Cyberpunk Variant – Art by Rolands Kalninš

John’s Thoughts:

In Our Dreams Awake began with an idea of having a man dream two different lives. Egg and I then took that to the comic book pages by having two seperate artists work on the two different dreams… the two different versions of one story that we were telling.

Issue 1 started things off with us learning a bit about Jason in both his Dreams. A painter who dreams of the unknown, doing his best to keep his contraband technology a secret. A Gang Boss who dreams of a way off a drowned world, doing his best to keep his forbidden love a secret.

Issue 2 escalates that to the next level. Secrets begin to unwind and the consequences will change both his worlds completely.

 

 

The Rewards:

The Kickstarter is for the second issue in what will be a four-issue series. Issue 2 is completely done and issues 3 and 4 are nearly complete.

We have the ptions of either the pdf ($5) or print version ($10) to send to you. We also have two different variant covers, one by Rolands Kalninš and the other by Egg Embry ($15). If you missed the first issue, never fear, we have options for both issue 1 & 2 ($8 for digital and $20 for print copies).

On the higher end, we have an opportunity to get drawn into the Cyberpunk world as a potential member of Jason’s Gang ($250). On the last Kickstarter, we had two people choose this option, so you’ll get to see them in this issue!

Finally, we have a number of add-ons ranging from Signed Copies of The Gilded Age Graphic nivel, to the Dreamr by the Apocolypse RPG Zine ($10-$20 each).

 

The Verdict:

In my completely and totally unbiased opinion, why are you still here reading this? Go and back this amazing project!

Back this if you like Dreams, Painters, Cats, Blowing Stuff Up, Aliens, a drowned London, magic, spaceships, and probably a dozen other cool things I’m forgetting about (oooh, crab people!).

Cyberpunk Variant – Art by Egg Embry

***

I’d like to thank you for taking the time to check out our project. A lot of passion went into telling this story, and we hope you will join us on the ride!

Check out the campaign here!

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

Repost: Behind the Comic: – Anatomy of a Panel – In Our Dreams Awake #1

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Reminder that the Sign up page for In Our Dreams Awake Issue #2 Kickstarter is still available. Be sure to sign up so you get notified when the project goes live!

I thought it might be a nice look back at the Anatomy of a Panel that I did for issue #1 (which will also be available during the upcoming Kickstarter).

***

Taken as a whole, a comic book represents the input of multiple people, multiple perspectives, and multiple skill sets before the final product is created. I’ve said many times in the past that one of the reasons I love the format is exactly for that reason. You get to feed off of the creatives who you work with. And what begins as one thing can become something completely different in execution (and making the overall comic that much better).

 

In Our Dreams Awake #1 – Page 7, Panels 7 & 8

The Team

Pencils – Edgar Salazar

Inks – Genaro Olavarrieta

Letters – Egg Embry

Writer – John McGuire

 

Concept

This pair of panels represent the end of a larger conversation within the issue. So much of this world that Jason Byron lives (dreams?) in is dictated by the mages who control everything. They ensure the chaos technology threatens to bring to the people can never exist again. They are Order.

And to go against that would mean going against everything they stand for… and that way lies madness.

So what do we see? We see that Edgar made a choice to not allow for any other colors within these two panels, but instead presented them as a pair of black and white moments. Two men, representing opposite beliefs about their world, are separated by the small table.

 

The Script

Page 7 Panel 7

Annoyed by Peter’s accusation, Jason pushes himself away from the table as if to get up.

Jason – I know all of this, Peter.

Peter – So ask me your question again.

 

Page 7 Panel 8

Same shot as Panel 7 (Jason is still sitting). Jason pauses. No words are needed.

 

Breakdown

As you can see from the script, I actually made a slight mistake between the two panels. In Panel 7, Jason is frustrated/annoyed and pushes himself away from the table. Edgar followed that showing him standing up. His body language is very tense. However, when we come to Panel 8, I note that “Jason is still sitting”…

No, John, he is not.

But Edgar went with it, and I think it actually works in this visual context because of the artist’s choice to make these mirror images of each other (in regards to the black and white). Where Jason was angry in the previous moment, he has sat back down. But instead of either of them furthering the conversation, the darkness envelops them instead pointing two the very ideas that they stand for can not exist alongside one another.

It even mocks the prompt from Peter in Panel 7: “So ask me your question again.” Panel 8 answers that prompt with silence. There is no need to push the issue any longer.

There are no shades of gray here in this place.

***

But perhaps there is another world for Jason to find peace? One he can visit while he dreams?

***

We are less than a week out from the launch of In Our Dreams Awake #2 on Kickstarter. Make sure to sign up to the Prelaunch Page here:

 

 

 

***

Repost – Behind the Artist – Interview with Rolands Kalnins

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Reminder that the Sign up page for In Our Dreams Awake Issue #2 Kickstarter is still available. Be sure to sign up so you get notified when the project goes live!

***

As we prepare for the In Our Dreams Awake Issue #2 Kickstarter, I wanted to spotlight some of the people who helped bring these crazy ideas to life. This brings us to the artist and colorist on the Cyberpunk portion of the comic book: Rolands Kalniņš.

 

***

How long have you been creating/working in comics?

I’ve been working in the comics industry since I was 16 years old. And full-time since I was 20.

I’m 26 now.

 

What made you want to work on comics?

As a kid growing up in a post-Soviet country we got our entertainment(films, books, comics) much later than the rest of Europe. So I was lucky to grow up watching original TMNT, Star Wars, Spider-man and the X-men animated series, Power Rangers, Adam West Batman, Tim Burton’s Batman, Pokemon, Digimon…

These shows and films made me love these characters, and later on, I found out that many of them were based on comic books. Unfortunately, the only comics we could buy in Latvia were based on Disney and Hanna-Barbera characters aimed towards very young kids.

So I spent a lot of time drawing and creating my own comics. And when I was living in the UK at the age of 15, I had the chance to buy a lot of Marvel comics. And that moment when I first held a comic book in my hands was simply magical.

And that truly made me take the path to become an artist in the comic industry.

Who inspires you? Or do you have a favorite artist or creator?

Personally, I have so many favourites/inspirations. Tho the most influential artists on me were/are: Dave Rapoza, Sean Gordon Murphy, Nick Dragotta, Junji Ito, and many others…

Variant Cyberpunk Cover by Rolands Kalniņš

How do you manage your daily/family life with your creative work? Is this your 9 to 5 or is this your 10 to 2?

My daily routine used to be different. But for the last few years, I’m also a full-time Tattoo Artist at 2 private studios that I own. So my day-to-day is divided.

Most days I work from 8:30-11:00 on comics and tattoo designs. From 12:00-16:00, I work at my tattoo studio. 17:00-19:00 session at the gym (usually 4-5 times a week), and 19:00-24:00 more work on comics/family time.

 

How would you describe your creative process when it comes to making comics?

My process is quite simple. I read the script, gather references and inspirational images, and then I draw the pages, usually coloring them right after.

 

Making comics often requires collaboration with others. How do you foster relationships and approach the collaboration process?

Creative relationships for me are really different with each writer and or company. On some projects, I get complete creative freedom and just create the artwork.

On others, the process is more involved and created on a step-by-step basis. With a lot more back and forth. Visuals changing as the story evolves.

And these things are different on each project depending on my involvement as well. Am I just the artist, or am I the colorist?

In some cases, I design the whole book, spine and all.

For me, the most important thing is to do the best work I can for the client.

Jason Byron makes his way through the flooded streets. By Rolands Kalniņš

What are your biggest obstacles when it comes to making art? How do you overcome them?

Hmm, for hurdles in creating work…

The hardest thing for me is creating art in bulk for my personal projects. Client work comes much more easily for me because it has certain direction-script, or just a description of a piece.

 

How has your experience been with the indie comics community?

I love working on indie comics.

Of course, a dream of mine is to do a Batman book, but for the most part I’m most comfortable doing creative horror books in the indie scene.

The thing I like the most is the “out there” ideas and that there’s no limit to the craziness of the stories I could visualize…

 

What advice can you give for people who want to start making comics?

Best advice is to learn the basics first.

And that doesn’t mean human figure, faces, etc… It means drawing straight lines, perfect circles, cubes… and only then applying those skills to draw objects, and characters.

And of course, drawing non-stop, but doing illustrations, pages, and panels, not just studies for study’s sake.

Applying knowledge and learning on the go is key. Many things I learned over the years I learned on the job doing the actual work.

And of course, finishing things. Many up-and-comers tend to sketch a lot and never do finished work, which grows into a boatload of bad habits.

 

Are there themes and/or subjects/genres you find yourself drawn to again and again in your work?

My favourite genres to create for are usually pulp-fiction, neo-noir, cyberpunk, and horror type of work.

But I love doing most genres.

But dark fiction and psychological mind-bending work suits my style best in my opinion.

Jason Byron and Fem’A Lin kiss. By Rolands Kalniņš

If you could go back in time ten years, what advice might you have for your younger self? Something you wish you knew?

Hmm, I would probably say to myself to never stop drawing and don’t give up. Things will go your way eventually…

And don’t let anyone talk you out of anything career-related.

 

Do you have any upcoming projects? Anything you’d like to promote? Anything else that you’d like people to know about you (Hobbies? Passions? Favorite TV Show)?

I have many upcoming books and personal projects, but I can’t really talk about any of them due to NDA’s. Only thing I can say is that “The Pandora Window” a book I’m co-creating with Ray Chambers is finally announced and being drawn as we speak. And many other projects with Adam Barnhardt of Sh*tshow fame. Hopefully, soon they’ll be announced.

For hobbies, I tend to have many, but the most important ones are Powerlifting and reading. For me, it’s a way to clear my head. And of course, a healthy mind and body are key with this type of profession.

I personally believe you’ll go crazy quite fast if the only thing you do 24/7 is draw. It can become more of a detriment than a strategy to become successful.

 

Where’s the best place to find out more about you and your works?

I’m most active on my website(portfolio), Instagram, Twitter and Reddit.

https://rolandskalnins.carbonmade.com/

https://www.instagram.com/marvelzukas/

https://twitter.com/marvelzukas

https://www.reddit.com/user/Marvelzukas/

Jason Byron’s intense stare. By Rolands Kalniņš

Do you have a Bio that I can post at the bottom of the article?

My name is Rolands Kalniņš

I’m an illustrator, concept artist/designer, colorist from Latvia.

I’ve worked on many projects for different publishers and kickstarters.

Scout comics: Red Winter.

Fracture Press: Tales of Fractured Mind, Tales of Fractured Worlds, Soul of The Sea, The Burning Memory

Tpub: Transdimensional.

Source Point Press: Sirius

Frank Martin’s Pipe Creepers

Scapegoat Press Inc: Pcycho Path, Aeonian.

Roy Burdine’s Reapers.

VMComics: Hotel Hell

Musicians: Varien, Hellhills, Manic, Toracha, Cream of Cthulhu, and many more.

***

I want to thank Rolands Kalniņš for taking the time to answer my questions. And I really appreciate his contributions in bringing In Our Dreams Awake to life. Remember to go to the Sign up page for In Our Dreams Awake Issue #2 Kickstarter. Be sure to sign up so you get notified when the project goes live!

 

 

 

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com

 

 

Odd Synchronicity?

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Reminder that the Sign up page for In Our Dreams Awake Issue #2 Kickstarter is still available. Be sure to sign up so you get notified when the project goes live!

There are little things in our everyday world which sometimes lay out a message you might be on the right path. Small reminders, universal beats as it were to help subtlely (and not-so-subtlely) guide you. Then again, it could be more that these are the very things which seeped into your subconcious to begin with to create the path in the first place.

As we close in on the launch date for In Our Dreams Awake Issue 2, I began looking through the old emails, trying to find little bits and pieces that I had forgotten in the meantime. The back and forth in the very early days between Egg and myself as we worked the story, bouncing ideas off each other, trying only to improve upon the blocks of the story each time. Discovering things about the characters and what their goals may or may not be.

***

Things in the original breakdown:

The very first outline was 9 issues of story. Talk about being overly ambitious on what we might be able to do all those years ago… not that long out of college. 9 issues… good lord.

Jason Byron was originally an important man… perhaps a Duke of some sort.

In the sci-fi story there was a moment where he was going to have something similar to an Office Space style futuristic job. There was no Cyberpunk gangs. No angry cats (see issue 2).

Jason has more of a comprehension of what is going on between the worlds earlier on in the process. As seen in issue 1, these two worlds are tied together by him, but as things begin to spiral a bit, those world can start to bleed over.

There was an assassination attempt on Fantasy Jason. Totally didn’t remember that one at all.

As opposed to splitting issues between the two worlds, it would be full issues spent in one or the other. So a lot less flip book.

***

So what are the guideposts that helped us along?

Henry David Thoreau’s core quote. Egg discovered it somewhere and suddenly we had a proper title for the story.

I received a series of post-it notes from my parents as a gift and one of them was the Poe quote which again felt like they had read our emails.

Even stranger than that was a random listen to a Van Halen song which felt like it too was written about Jason Byron two decades before he ever took shape:

Love Walks In – Van Halen

Contact is all it takes
To change your life to lose your place in time
Contact! Asleep or awake
Coming around you may wake up to find
Questions deep within your eyes,
Things you’ve never realized

CHORUS:
So when you sense a change
Nothing feels the same
All your dreams are strange, love comes walkin’ in
Some kind of alien
Wait for the opening
Then simply pulls a string

Another world, some other time
You lay your sanity on the line
Familiar faces familiar sights
Reach back remember with all your might
Ohh there she stands in a silken gown
Silver lights shining down

CHORUS

Love comes walkin’ in

Sleep and dream is all I crave
I travel far across the Milky Way
To my master I become a slave
Til we meet again some other day
Where silence speaks as loud as war
And the earth returns to what it was before

CHORUS

Love comes walkin’ in

***

At the end of the day, the story is one we felt compelled to tell. In our email exchange 20 years ago, Egg asks a key question about the story “Is this a story of hope or failure?”

And I like my response, because even through all the tweaks and changes to the very first kernel of an idea, I think we’ve kept to this guiding light:

“The story, at its core, is probably a little of both (failure and hope). Hope that our lives can be brighter than they are but also failure in the risk of not living in reality. Plus, there’s the issue of what reality is truly. Is it what we perceive, or is it what others perceive?”

***

We are less than a month out from the launch of In Our Dreams Awake #2 on Kickstarter. Make sure to sign up to the Prelaunch Page here:

 

 

 

***

John McGuire is the writer of the sci-fi novel: The Echo Effect.

He is also the creator/author of the steampunk comic The Gilded Age. If you would like to purchase a copy, go here!

Click here to join John’s mailing list and receive preview chapters of upcoming novels, behind the scenes looks at new comics, and free short stories.

His other prose appears in The Dark That Follows, Hollow Empire, Tales from Vigilante City, Beyond the Gate, and Machina Obscurum – A Collection of Small Shadows.

He can also be found at www.johnrmcguire.com