Tag: John McGuire

Repost – What if… Last Action Hero was a Good movie?

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I wanted to look at a movie that could have been something more, but was tied to an aging actor and an annoying kid and only wanted to be tongue in cheek about the whole “Cop” movie thing.

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So What If…. Last Action Hero was a GOOD movie?

I know what you’re thinking: “John, there is no way to salvage anything within that movie!”

And you know what, random person talking to their computer screen, you’re probably more right than you are wrong… but let’s give this thing a try anyway.

Note, the one thing I am not touching is the soundtrack. Say what you will about the movie, Alice in Chains (2 songs!), Anthrax, AC/DC, Megadeth, Def Leppard, Aerosmith, Cypress Hill, Tesla, Fishbone… it is one of those albums that I still listen to from time to time.

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For those of you who don’t remember, the movie was supposed to be a parody of the 80s action movies (anything with Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Russell, Gibson, etc). A kid manages to get a magical movie ticket that puts him directly into the movie he’s watching. Eventually he brings Arnold back into the real world where suddenly Arnold realizes that the rules here are not the same as they were. And worse yet, his arch-enemy has somehow made his way into the real world as well!

That’s actually not a horrible idea on the surface. That core concept of what is real and what is fantasy. And that’s what my version would focus on as much as anything else. Those little moments that appeared in the movie, but were glossed over due to the need for another catchphrase or yelling boss or even cartoon cat.

My version would still begin with Danny watching the movie, getting the magical ticket, and then getting sucked in. But our hero, Jack Slater, wouldn’t be a goofy parody spouting one-liners left and right; no, this would be someone who had seen the worst in people and still managed to keep going (think Se7en for an idea of the feel I’d be going for). He’s a person who is barely holding on to his sanity and is constantly wondering why all these terrible things always seem to happen to him.

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So when Danny reveals that he’s a character in a movie series our hero lashes out. The idea that someone has been dictating the horrors of his world, tearing his marriage apart, killing his son, keeping him estranged from his daughter… that would be too much for him. And even though Danny would try to plead with him to follow through on his latest mission, Slater ignores the kid and then goes on a spree of his own. If the world is always going to be terrible, then why bother with it, why bother with saving anyone… let it all burn… and he uses half of the ticket to go into the real world (Danny rushing in after him)…

While the second piece of the ticket manages to fall into his enemy’s hands, Benedict. This is a man that has stood by and watched Slater destroy his boss’s empire, and only by luck was Benedict able to escape. Once he finds out about the ticket he sees it for what it is – a way to go to other worlds than these – to recruit like-minded people to his cause, giving them the freedom in the real world that has been severely lacking for any of them.

In the original Benedict has a monologue where he talks about the real world being a place where the bad guys can actually win. He talks about going to get the villains and bring them out. But we never get to see that moment in the original. And I believe that is a huge missed opportunity. So in my version we not only see some of it, but these villains coming out are not treated as just randoms… no, Benedict would have begun to research who might be able to help him.  And freed them. And the Ripper would be one of them.

Now the real world is suddenly going to Hell and somehow Danny still believes in the HERO that Slater was. He convinces him by telling him that while it is terrible that all those horrific things have happened, he always knew that Slater would still try and do the right thing. That he could still be the man Danny always knew him to be.

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And that would set up an ending where Slater not only has to deal with Benedict, but with the random assortment of baddies that are out in this world. It gives Danny a chance to assist in figuring out those characters who Benedict might have contacted in the first place (what the people are like, what their weaknesses might be, etc.).

We end with Slater and Benedict squaring off, Slater run through the ringer, but somehow finding enough strength to finish his enemy off. A beaten and bruised Slater limps back to the theater with Danny helping him, ready to go back to his movie life again… Danny fires up the movie, but instead of Slater IV, it is something nicer – perhaps a romantic comedy. A just reward for the life that Slater has led.

***

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

Book Report – The Plot

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As a writer you are constantly searching for the next plot, the next story, the next character… the next work you are going to be pouring your soul into. I have a bunch of old and in-progress files on the computer with short story ideas. Sometimes there is a little meat on those bones… stories I come back to from time to time and work on. In some cases they are still in that folder because I haven’t quite figured it out. Maybe I have the beats but not the ending. Maybe I have the ending but no idea of how to get there. Maybe it is little more than a concept or tagline. Something just waiting for inspiration to strike so that it can become a real story.

Whether you are able to write a book in a few months (weeks?) or it takes decades (still waiting on a couple of series…), you feel like there has to be something out there which has never been seen. Something which will put you on the map and finally get you to the best seller list (or maybe just your local library… whatever your goals might be). It’s the Great White Whale. And that singular idea is enough to keep many constantly rattling away on their keyboards into the deepest parts of the night.

Which brings us to The Plot (by Jean Hanff Korelitz).

***

Image by Jill Wellington from Pixabay

Jacob Bonner is a writer who has lost his way. He’s someone who had their first novel come out to a little bit of fanfare. Nothing huge, but enough that he thought he was someone. Then his second book doesn’t do anything. And now, only a handful of years later he has fallen into a measure of obscurity. He now teaches other writers at colleges, doing the bare minimum to help them pursue the dream that he is sure he deserves.

Until one of his students comes in with an idea for a book that he hasn’t heard before. This is the ONE. Something that will make his student famous. Something that will ensure everyone will be talking about it.

For Jacob, it helps sink him into further depression.

Time continues on and he looks up that writer… only to discover he died without ever actually publishing a novel. So Jacob takes the PLOT and writes the book. And it is everything he wanted. The fame, the money, the book tours… and so much more. Things are going great until he gets an email which says “You are a thief.”

***

What’s interesting about the novel is the author employs a technique I haven’t actually see in a novel since I read Misery by Stephen King: we get to read excerpts from the stolen book throughout our journey with Jacob. It’s a bit jarring at first, I must admit that I wasn’t sure why we were getting to see what the book was going to be about because in my mind whatever THE PLOT actually was would either end up in a couple of directions:

We never actually get to see what it really was because nothing Korelitz presents as the actual Plot wouldn’t live up to the ethereal idea in the readers head.

Or we get to see what it is and are disappointed by whatever it is because we’ve built it up as something which doesn’t exist.

So to include the pages from the novel within the novel felt a little like filler at first. A distraction from the overall plotline we are following: who sent the email? That’s what I wanted to know and every chapter that we spent on the other novel broke up our journey.

Being a writer, I should have had more faith in the web Korelitz was creating throughout the narrative. Slowly, we begin to see how what Jacob has written helps inform us reading The Plot of what might be going on between the lines of both pieces. It ends up working out pretty well, though there is a part of me that wonders if a couple of the sections could have been trimmed and then spread out a little bit more.

***

The funny thing is that Jacob is searching throughout for something that will propel him into the life he always wanted, but I could see his story as being told on the big screen. Movie life imitating printed life?

Is that even a thing?

***

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

Free Short Story by John McGuire – And I Feel Fine

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* * *

And I Feel Fine

 John McGuire

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 11, 2019.

 

Huh… I guess the Mayans were right after all.

That was my first thought when the end times came. You might have expected screams or crying or begging… basically any of the five stages of grief. But no, that’s not how I work. I’m too worried about ancient prophecies coming true rather than the immediate need to extract myself from the situation.

Typical.

Oh, sorry. I should probably be a little more official in how I do this. I mean, I activated this recorder for a reason right? My grandmother always said that when you cut corners you only hurt yourself. Or was it when you skip steps you bounce… no, that’s not it either. Damn, can’t remember. I guess it doesn’t much matter.

Still, always better to be official.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 12, 2019.

 

Seven years after the big one. Though, you might say that’s a bit of a misnomer. Really, I should say seven years after the first one. That would be much more accurate.

So why am I so calm?

It’s a question I ask myself all the time, honestly. I should be a screaming mess, running around, panicking… or whatever it is a person is supposed to be doing. This, if you think about it, is the strangest thing you could possibly even think. I’m saying I should act normal… when the world hasn’t acted normal in quite some time.

Either way, once you lived through a dozen or so cataclysmic events in your lifetime, what’s the difference? Wait, what am I saying? You probably know exactly what I’m talking about.

I guess.

I mean, I’m not yawning about it, but if it is my time… well, what the hell am I supposed to do about it?

I remember that first morning after it happened. Heaps of clothes on the ground, cell phones lying on top of the piles, drinks and food once being enjoyed now serving only the scavengers and ants. News spread fast, and all over the world it was the same scenario. People had just up and disappeared.

Nothing brings out some religious nuts like a good mystery so we heard lots of claims about how God had finally had enough with us screwing up the Earth. That he had taken his faithful up to Heaven and abandoned the sinners.

Maybe that was what happened. The rest of us poor schmucks biding our time until the absolute end.

I always thought it strange that things got back to normal so quickly after that. Don’t get me wrong, there were still tons of things we had to deal with. Family members lost and gone and all of that. But it was a shared grief. Everyone knew at least one person who disappeared…

It bound us together.

And when you think about it, percentage wise, there weren’t a lot of people taken. Then you had that scientist make the claim that it was spontaneous combustion. Had all sorts of charts and graphs to back up his theories. Like anything else, you can get scientists to say anything if you pay them enough. And I gotta believe the governments of the world didn’t need some kind of religious fervor let loose… hence the combustion theory. I didn’t buy it, but it seemed to calm a lot of people down.

People just want to believe.

I was never a big one on the Bible, but I have wondered, how many people survived the flood? I remember that he brought two of every animal, but he also brought his family.

Is that right?

Well, it couldn’t have been all that many. We may be getting down to that number here shortly. Assuming we haven’t already reached it.

To be honest, I’m not even sure who this message is for. For all I know the amount of humans left in the world could be down to a few dozen. And I think that I read somewhere that you’d need a minimum number of potential breeders to be able to restart the human race. Something about genetics and inbreeding.

What really sucks… ok, what really sucks more is that you know it is coming, but there is nothing you can possibly do to stop it.

And folks thought Global Warming was bad. Oh no, we’ll be dead in hundreds of years.

I’d kill for Global Warming. I could do it in my sleep.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 13, 2019.

 

It was a zombie uprising last year, and I have to say, putting down Johnny in front of his mother may have been one of the least happy days I’ve ever had. Man, did that woman have a set of pipes on her. My ears still ring sometimes when I’m getting ready to go to sleep. For most people they get the ear ringing from loud music, me, I get it from the unholy screams of a woman whose son you just killed.

For a second time.

Whoever is out there listening to me blather on about all sorts of horrible things… I just want to say that I don’t mean to be so callous. I really don’t. Mostly I blame others and that seems to get me through the days.

Dreams of alcohol get me through the nights.

The thing they don’t teach you in school is how to be all right with it all. We study history, but what is history? Just a series of horrible events, and then we answer questions about dates. But, we never learn what it really means. Those people who died in the Black Plague, we know the numbers, but what about the survivors? When they thought the world was ending, did a bunch just take a knife to their throats and end it all? Those that didn’t, how did they find the internal stamina to keep going on?

This is the stuff that keeps me awake at night.

I need a drink.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 14, 2019.

 

The worst part is the waiting.

Or maybe the worst part is the loneliness?

I mean you really can’t trust anyone these days. I get a knock on the door, hoping it is the pizza delivery order I put in a decade ago. Maybe the guy just got lost? But no, it’s some random scavengers.

Oh, they tell you they’re nice, but sure enough, it is just more of the same crap. They’re trying to take your stuff, or they want to infect you, or whatever.

Hey! It’s not as if it’s my fault Dad was a nutbag who not only stocked his shelter, but had a shelter to begin with. What did you expect? They had to have bomb drills when he was in elementary school. Duck and cover or some such shit. Like any of that would save you from the mushroom cloud shape filling up the horizon. But it was something for them to do, and I have to think doing something is better than doing nothing. My grandfather raised him with plenty of stories about the Soviets, which would be enough to make any kid a little nuts.

So he went out of his way to ensure that this place, this bunker, was full of everything you would need to survive whatever came. Food stores, a way to replenish the water supply through extra deep wells, exercise equipment, all sorts of entertainment, and just about anything else you could think of. He didn’t know if he would need to be down there for a year or ten, so he prepared.

I want you to know something; I did my best to save everyone I could. I invited the good ones in, and I invited the bad ones in.

No matter what, I learned that people end up as bad ones most of the time.

Except for Ian.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 15, 2019.

 

You know I am making up these dates, right? I have no way of knowing what the real date is. This camera says May 15, 2019 on the little display, but how do I know it hasn’t been reset or rebooted? There aren’t any new patches to update the damn thing, that’s for sure.

They say that in a nuclear Armageddon the only survivors would be cockroaches. I think that statement is wrong and sells us short. The real answer is always cockroaches and humans will find a way to survive. Though I suppose, at this point, humans are effectively cockroaches.

So maybe the original statement works.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 18, 2019.

 

I buried Ian six days ago.

One week. That’s how long it has been. One week. I don’t know how to go on.

My constant, my love. My…

I’m sorry, I can’t… not today.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 19, 2019.

 

This must be cabin fever kicking in. Heh. I’m actually surprised that it took this long.

Ok.

Let’s try this again.

Deep breath.

I buried Ian eight days ago.

I don’t know what I’m doing here anymore.

This was not how it was supposed to be. My family had the shelter since back during the Cold War when everyone either had a bomb shelter or hoped those old videos about crouching under a desk were going to be enough.

They should have called those old things ‘Better get ready to kiss your ass goodbye!’

It was a lark, a goof. We used it as a teenaged clubhouse.

Back when I was nine one of the houses in the neighborhood went on sale and somehow, one of the teenagers managed to get in the locked house. And then he told a friend, who told their brother, who told me, and soon enough we had a fully functioning house to hang out in. It was the perfect place to just get away from everyone else.

You know, just how every little kid needs their own house to really reflect on the rigors of elementary school.

Anyway.

It made us think we were older than we really were. And yeah, the older guys hated that us youngsters where always there, but they couldn’t kick us out because then we would have told on them and poof the whole thing would have been gone.

Mutually assured destruction.

Of course, no matter what there is always some dumbass in the neighborhood. Some kid or pair of kids who think they know better or think they are cooler than they really are. Yeah, we had those kids in our neighborhood. We had those two idiots. You want to know what they did?

They were playing in the house without anyone there. No supervision whatsoever. These two first graders who decided they were above it all.

Yeah, mistake number one. Not like they murdered someone. Very forgivable.

But then the dumbasses made sure that whatever it was they were doing in the house occurred in full view of the front kitchen window. Suddenly every person out for a walk in the neighborhood could look in as they passed the For Sale house and see one the neighborhood kids in the window.

You can guess how that turned out. Locks were changed, windows sealed up, and the clubhouse became a distant memory.

But it was a fun two months.

That’s what the bomb shelter was supposed to be. I mean, sure we were teenagers and no one knew we were going to be down there… uhm… mixing it up.

We’ll I don’t want to get graphic about it. A lady never talks.

So yeah, that’s why we’re down here when the shit went down the first time. When things went sideways…

All five of us.

Wait. Stop.

It just occurred to me, every one of those horror movies begin with the five teenagers and then one by one they end up dying or getting killed or…

Having to kill one of their own.

Yeah, life can be funny. But mostly it has a really sick sense of humor.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 20, 2019.

 

Jimmy and his mom arrived in those early days. This was after the people disappeared, of course. This was just the next thing.

We were too scared to venture out. Too scared about what the broadcasters were saying. Then one by one, they disappeared from our screens. But we had the internet to tell us about the chaos. And it told us more than we wanted to know. It told us about the fallout in Russia, that New York had sunk into the ocean, the fact that one of the missiles diverted to the North Pole… the heat from the bomb caused glaciers to melt. The ocean rose…

We’d sent out emails, to family, to friends, trying to let them know we were somewhere safe. I wanted to go get my dad, but he told me not to bother. Both he and Mom worked downtown, and the city had taken the worst of it. Still, he thought there were a couple of places where they’d be safe enough. Maybe even make it to us if things got any better.

So I stayed put.

But Jimmy and his mother came because of the emails. And it was good. Ian and him had lived across the street from each other since they were five, but I think his mom never liked Ian. And when you start to get that cabin fever after a couple of months. When the fear kicks in and every moment of every day is full of worry.

Well, that’s when those little whispers begin to get the best of you.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 21, 2019.

 

It was Jimmy’s mom who let the new guy in. He’d begun pounding on the door and would not stop. She screamed at him to go away, and when he didn’t move she opened the hatch and let the bastard in.

Yeah, it only takes one idiot to ruin it for everyone else.

He wasn’t right in the head. The radiation or the solar winds or whatever it was that week swept across the nation and gotten its hooks into him. He’d turned like most people do when they have nothing left to live for. He’d become a creature even if he wasn’t actually infected with anything. Whatever it was, it was enough.

Somehow, Jimmy stepped in the way, got bit. Infected. The disease transmitted itself to him.

If it is any conciliation, and I’m not one hundred percent sure there is, he did it to save his mom.

Ian put them both down. Because even if Jimmy tried to save his mom, she still got the sickness too.

We burned the bodies in the incinerator, and then hoped that we weren’t infected too.

 

End log.

 

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 22, 2019.

 

Someone decided we needed to go out. I’m not naming names, but it was Rick.

Have I mentioned Rick up to this point? Sorry. Rick was the fifth member of our little group. The odd man out. The one who secretly hoped he could use the friend zone as his way in with Kelly or me if we broke up with Daniel or Ian.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved Rick. Just not in that way. He used to spend the night at my house. Heck, he spent more time at my house than he did at his own most days. Not that I blame him. His parents were real pieces of work. His dad was constantly on his case about college and his grades. Never mind he had the highest grades in the school twice over. I remember asking him how far ahead of the second place person he was, and he told me that he could have skipped his last semester of senior year, gotten zeroes in every class and still been our school’s valedictorian.

So, pretty smart.

But it can be a bit lonely in this place, as I am beginning to find out. And now I feel bad for Rick. At least we had someone to cuddle with at night. Someone who we loved was right there with us. That personal connection is a huge thing when you are not sure what tomorrow is going to end up bringing to you.

Cabin fever though, it’s a real thing. I was beginning to wonder if it was the last stage of the Earth trying to kill us.

Rick wanted to go out. To see if he could find any survivors. To see if anything of the old world still remained. Maybe it was the cabin fever. Maybe it was that he needed to know what happened outside our four walls. Mostly I think that he needed to either find someone for himself or die trying.

I begged him to stay put. We all told him that there was nothing left for any of us. That the world out there was the past and we just needed to deal. But he wasn’t listening anymore. He waited until we were asleep and left.

I…

God…

Sorry, I don’t mean to break down on you like this. I’m supposed to be giving an account, but I never realized how much I would miss him. It’s been three years since he walked out the door. I really do hope he found someone else out there. That he is with the love of his life doing all sorts of naughty things that you are supposed to do when the world ends.

That’s what I hope for him.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 23, 2019.

 

Kelly and Daniel. I wanted to say a little bit about them, but I’m not entirely sure how to frame it. They were Ian and my friends.

Well our couple friends.

You know the kind that you can do everything together and not get bored. But you never are on your own with one of them. Ian called it playing two on two defense. That’s the only way it could work. Otherwise, it becomes one of them bitching about the other, and you’re stuck in the middle.

I mean, how many times can you tell me about some horrible slight Daniel has done to you and me telling you to break up with him and you not doing it has to happen before I stop hanging out with you altogether?

We had reached that point before the world went to shit. And after two years’ worth of it, the whole time Kelly wanted out of the relationship. I mean, you’re stuck with this guy you now hate. You could see it with the two of them after about six months. They no longer cuddled at night. Soon he was sleeping on one side of the bunker and her on the other.

I thought that might be the opening for Rick to make his move out of the friend zone, but it wasn’t. Thought Daniel might have killed him if he had tried, so I didn’t push it.

But when it was just the four of us… it got to be too much.

I wish I knew when it really turned. What was the last step that pushed them over the edge? Was it this idea of their not being anyone else out there for them? Was it Ian and me, still happy, not sharing in their misery?

I wish I knew. I might have been able to stop what had happened.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 28, 2019.

 

I awoke to Kelly standing over Daniel with the knife in her hand. He was gurgling on his own blood, and she had the spray all over the front of her shirt. Her eyes were glazed over, like someone who couldn’t see anything anymore.

And that smile…

Her smile.

I sometimes see it when I dream.

Ian did his best to approach her. He talked to her in that calming voice he has. A voice that would say everything was going to be all right if only she would give him the knife.

For a second, maybe not even that long, I saw something in her eyes. The glaze melted away, and she saw the knife, and she saw Daniel, and the smile didn’t leave her face.

Madness.

I don’t blame Ian for what he did. She went at me with the knife, and he stopped her. He stopped her the only way he knew how.

When it was finished, we clutched each other, just the two of us in this place.

I don’t know what terrified me more… Kelly’s actions or Ian and I being there by ourselves.

 

End log.

 

 

Begin log. Sarah Knotts. May 29, 2019.

 

I’m at the end of things now.

The food has nearly run out. It was a good run. I can’t complain about that. Ian really did me right on that accord. Almost makes me…

No, I told myself that I would be strong about this. I’ve collected every spare bit of whatever I have around here. I don’t know if I’ll need it. Maybe the problem with being a pack rat is that even now, of all times, I can’t let the old shit go. My bags are packed. I’m ready to step outside, for whatever that is worth. I may not last five minutes out there. There’s actually no way to know what a person might encounter out there. It literally could be anything.

Anything.

That’s a difficult thing to prepare for. What was it last year? It all runs together these days. Plague I think. Some unknown horror left behind by the CDC or some terrorist organization?

It makes a girl wonder if maybe the Earth is trying to tell us something. Dad had an old stereo, which actually could play albums. Yes, even long after the days of cds and then mp3s he loved that thing. More than that, he’d go out and get these great comedy records.

Pryor, Murphy, and Carlin.

George Carlin had a whole routine about maybe the Earth invented AIDS in order to wipe the humans out. Now, I’m pretty sure he was joking with that one, being a comedian and all. Then again, when you have one extinction level event and you survive… maybe he was onto something. Maybe, just maybe, the world is tired of us and now wants to weed out the undeserving.

So what do you call it when you’ve survived five of them?

The air may be on fire out there. There could be an asteroid streaking towards us right now, and I wouldn’t know. I’d be stuck in this fucking box, staring at the empty shelves, dingy furniture mocking me from the corner, the entire world would incinerate, and you know what…

I’d probably survive that as well.

Only the strongest survive? I got news for you; I’m not all that strong.

Or maybe I don’t care about surviving anymore.

 

End log.

 

***

I Feel Fine appears in the Machina Obscurum Anthology and can be found 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

Video Blogs That I Spend Too Much Time Watching

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Every night after my wife goes to bed, I should be at the computer writing. If I had the level of discipline I truly needed, it would be a no brainer. I’d become tied to the keyboard for somewhere between 1-2 hours every night. I’d have so much written after a few weeks, it would be staggering. But sadly, there are days when I can’t get my brain into the correct headspace to do any of that. And it isn’t a writer’s block type of thing. It is more of the: life is kicking my ass/I’m tired/can I just veg out for a little while.

I’ll be good and write tomorrow night.

I promise.

In the meantime, these are the Video Blogs/Series (whatever you want to call them) that end up taking too much of my attention these days:

Pitch Meeting

If there was a Mount Rushmoor of Youtube videos, this series would have to be the very first on the mountain for me. The basic premise is of a writer “pitching” his next movie to a producer. Through the magic of green screens, Ryan George plays both parts as he goes through the various plot points and characters of a movie and makes you question (truly) if any movie actually thought about exactly what kind of story they were telling. Too many times I find myself going “Oh, yeah, I guess that didn’t make ANY sense.” After a few episodes you might even start saying things like:

“Super easy, barely an inconvience.”

“Tight”

“Wow wow wow wow.”

One of the classics is the one he did for Back to the Future, check it out here me.

 

Julie Nolke

I discovered her during the Pandemic through her video “Explaining the Pandemic to my Past Self” where a future version of Julie goes back in time to talk to her slightly younger self about what’s about to happen to her (and the whole world). And then because that one was a hit, she has done a bunch more. However, her channel is also various comedy skits including her getting advice from a drunk fairy godmother, dealing with a roomate who is randomly upset about various things, and so on. Think if you were watching Saturday Night Live except all the skits were by one woman (and the vast majority are very, very good).

Viva La Dirt League

When a group of New Zealanders (is that the word?) get together and make a bunch of various series that point out the oddities within online roleplaying games, first person shooters, and even horror games. I came upon it through their Epic NPC Man, which focused on one of the NPCs from a video game and the various PCs who play the game. They tackle a ton of things that have become cliches over the years such as why do the women in games always have skimpy armor that only seem to cover their naughty bits and nothing else? I typically laugh mutliple times through their videos.

(I feel like this is the worst summary of something I’ve ever written. I really think it is excellent.)

 

Ashley Sleeth

Every night my wife and I try to watch at least one poker video. It’s our way of “studying” in an attempt to get incrimentally better at the crazy game we supposedly play for “fun” (though sometimes the line between fun and frustrating is very blurry). Ashley has only been doing her video blog for a little over a year so it feels good to join her on her journey to become a better player. This is one of those that if you aren’t a poker player, I’m not sure you would get as much out of it, but Ashely clearly puts a ton of time and effort into her videos and game which makes it a great blog to 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

Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday!

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Normally I would be preparing my own comics and novels for Saturday at one of our local comic stores, but I will be in Raleigh, NC with family this year. That isn’t to say that you still shouldn’t visit your local comic store to get some free (and hey, maybe purchase some other ones) comics. What’s cool about Free Comic Book Day is that the offerings are so varied, you always have something to potentially check out. Whether it is a Marvel or DC superhero book or A Nightmare Before Christmas comic or a Smurfs anniversary comic or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic or…

Typically, I grab a handful of things for myself and then try to get a couple of comics for the nephews and neice. Whether you are 5 or 95, there is likely going to be a couple of things which might appeal to you.

For a complete list of the Free Comics, visit the Free Comic Boo Day website.

For a list of comic stores near you, visit the Comic Shop Locator.

For a free copy of one of my comic books, issue #1 of The Gilded Age, you can join my mailing list 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 – I Should Have Paid More Attention to C. Thomas Howell

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I feel like somewhere in the midst of what you’ll read below is a horror movie waiting to find its way to the screen. Having lived it, I may be too close to the source material.

Either that or shown as a thing you should NEVER EVER DO.

***

The year was either 1997 or 1998. Now a Junior in college, I had driven up to the Georgia Tech Student Center to pick up my mail and was on my way back to my car (and then my dorm room) when I heard a woman’s voice call out to me from the dark Atlanta summer night.

“Excuse me, sir? I was wondering if I could ask a favor of you?”

I turned around and saw an older woman, maybe late forties, but most likely in her early fifties. Regardless of her actual age, she was someone who had that look where life had never really cut her a true break. Through cigarettes and alcohol she might be able to numb the pain of existence, but she was destined to be one who, from cradle to grave, would work until her fingers became little more than nubs. Stick thin, her leathery flesh hung off her bones.

I felt sad for her immediately.

“Can I help you with something?”

She moved a little closer to me and nodded, fully emerging into the parking lot’s light. “I hope so. You see, I’m supposed to go and get my younger son from the baby sitter. And my older son was supposed to give me a ride, but he’s not in his dorm room. I can’t seem to get a hold of him.” She glanced down at the watch on her wrist. “And the sitter is done at nine and it’s already eight-thirty.”

I didn’t immediately respond, even though I could tell where this was going. When you live in downtown Atlanta, you get used to people coming up and asking you for spare change or various other favors. In my first year living downtown, I probably (read: definitely) ended up giving too much money to the random homeless who crossed my path. But that bit of humanity had been stamped out by the bank account of a college student living a few years on his own.

I braced myself for the question.

“She’s only a couple of miles down the road. If you could give me a lift,  I’d be forever grateful.”

Now my mind and mouth normally do things in agreement. Mostly the mouth waits until the brain has finished its various calculations or what-have-you and then when it gets the proper instructions it spits out the correct sequence of words.

Not this time.

“Uh, yea, I guess I could do that.”

Immediately my brain rebelled. Why had I said that? I don’t want to give her a ride. What the hell am I thinking?

Her face lit up, and I was suddenly glad that I had said yes. This would be my good deed for the year. Heck, for the century possibly.

“I’m right over here.”

As I moved over towards my 1990 red Pontiac Sunbird, I didn’t notice her wave to another person. Another beaten down by life person, but male. Same tanned leathery skin… in his late forties, early fifties as well. He wasn’t rail thin like his wife, but there was only the slightest beginning of a beer belly hiding under his shirt.

“This young man is  going to take us to the sitter’s.”

Now this is the point I should have said something like “no” or even “hey I’ve got something else I need to get to that I just remembered”, because now the numbers were not in my favor. With just her in the car she’d be in the passenger seat beside me. I’m 6’5″ 275 lbs and all of 21-22 years old. I could take on the world with the side benefit that being that size, no one typically bothered me in the first place.

Yet, with him along for the ride that meant someone would be in the back seat.

Behind me.

Where I couldn’t see what he was doing. Not a good idea.

I think my brain was on strike that night because it only barely fazed me. My southern hospitality was going to get me killed. And there is even a saying for a situation like this. Don’t pick up hitchhikers. I mean that is the number one thing right up there with “Don’t take candy from strangers.”

What is wrong with me? My parents taught me better than this!

Sure enough she moved into the front passenger seat, and he sat in the back, straddling the middle so that I could see him in the rear view. But not really see what he was doing back there. I turned out onto North Avenue going West. My eyes darted from her to my rear view mirror to see him and then back to her. I barely remember the road, driving on instinct.

urban-legend-killer-backseat

“So, where is it I’m taking you?”

The woman answered quickly. “It’s only a couple of miles up the road.”

“Actually, we don’t need to go to the sitter’s. She’s taking the baby back to the house.” The smoker voice from the back jarred  me to the core. What the hell? Now I’m taking them home?

“Oh, then just continue on North.”

Again, I should have found a way to get them out of the car. But I was stuck taking them home. Somewhere my screams wouldn’t be heard by anyone.

I’ve been in three fights in my entire life. Two of them were won pretty quickly. The other was a losing battle, one of the few times where the other kid had been a little older and a little stronger. Mostly I observed what my grandfather had always told me: I better not ever start a fight, but I damn well better finish one that someone else started.

Those thoughts drifted into my mind while I tried to determine my best course of action. If they had a knife or something similar I might be able to put a hurt on one or both of them… if she had the blade. If he had the weapon, then I was going to need something of my own. But what else was there? A passing car’s lights illuminated the interior of the car and my eyes flashed to the keys dangling from the ignition. Rough edges of a weapon. It wasn’t much, but it might be better than naked fists.

Still I tried to think things through. I figured as long as I don’t do anything to set them off, or show that I know I am in trouble, it has to be in their best interest to wait until I get them to wherever their true destination was. Otherwise they might risk the chance that I drive the car off the road and try something now.

They made idle chat with me. A decade later, I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. I’m pretty sure that the most that escaped my lips was Yes, No, or I don’t know. I was too busy putting that math side of my brain to work trying to analyze the angles of this situation I’d gotten myself into. Plus it was hard to hear what either of them were saying due to my heart echoing throughout my body.

We drove and drove and drove, more and more minutes piling up on the odometer. Now I’ve taken North Avenue east many times on my journeys to hang out with friends, but I had never gone this far west on the road. Everything had long since become unfamiliar and I kept waiting for them to say something, to have me turn off, but more time passed and nothing. I had no idea how far we needed to go before I got them “home”, but I kept on, sure that terrible things awaited me.

Finally at some point we turned off North and then worked our way onto some of the more back roads.

For those unfamiliar with the layout of Atlanta, if you are in downtown and you drive more than about 20 minutes in any direction you will run into an interstate. Worst case you’ll hit the perimeter I-285. This is a road that loops around the city, encircling it.

Base Map 285

Yet, we had driven far enough and still I didn’t see a sign for the highway, nothing. Somehow I was in the backwoods of Georgia while still being in the city. It was as if they had managed to take me to a part of town where street lights were only a suggestion and not required. Long stretches went by with only my Sunbird’s headlights to show that the world outside the car even still existed. And I was driving these two random people up these roads I didn’t know existed.  And these roads were the type where I don’t even know how there was nothing on them. Very few houses. No restaurants or gas stations. It was like I’d crossed over into the Twilight Zone. Nothing made sense in my head. My heart pounded in my chest, threatening to explode.

dark road

What was I supposed to do? Call their bluff? Point out, ever so nicely, that I had only agreed to take one of them “a couple of miles” to their younger son?

I spotted a small cluster of lights in the distance. As we got closer I could see it was a convenience store, and then the night took a turn.

“Do you think we could stop up here? I need to get some cigarettes.” The way the man said the words and the paranoia in my brain combined to make me wonder whether it was a question or an order. So I pulled over.

“Would you like anything? A drink or something?”

Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do, let you get me a drink and somehow put a drug into it and then I’m missing a kidney or I’m dead or something.

I locked eyes with him in the rear view mirror. “No, thank you.”

The man exited the car, and I held my breath that the woman would follow. I slid my hand very casually so that it was resting on the gear shift.

They both get out of the car and I’m gunning it.

She didn’t budge. “Hey honey, get me a pack of smokes too while you’re in there.”

They were just playing with me now. I know it.

He returned a few minutes later and I wondered if the old guy had gone in and robbed the store (sometimes I still wonder this). They might already be ready to kill and eat me, but there was no telling how far they might go.

Hmm.

We journeyed for a bit longer. Again, I would say the exact amount, but I lost track. I think I’d been gone from Georgia Tech about 40 minutes by this point.

They both pointed out a side road to turn down… it was dirt. “Ours is the one on the end.”

Of course it is. Where else would you live but off a dirt road within the Atlanta city limits.

I stared out into the darkness, but couldn’t really find the beginnings of a structure to know where I might be going or for how far. My car’s shocks protested the pot holes and each bump caused my two passengers to shift in their seats. We began to climb a fairly steep hill, and when we finally came over the crest I caught site of their double-wide home.

This thing might have been nice looking once upon a time, but now, through either the elements, or lack of caring about what the shit-hole looked like, it could only remind me of something that should be condemned. Various bits of junk littered the yard and every redneck stereotype crept into my thoughts.

“Home.” My voice may have cracked with the hope that this was the end of our voyage. My own fight or flight on high alert.

The old man shifted in the backseat. “I just feel awful about making you drive all this way. I have some money in the house. If you could wait a minute I’ll run in and grab it for you.”

I shook my head. “That’s OK. I’m just glad I could get the two of you home.”

Liar! Just get the hell out of the car and let me go!

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Have a good night.”

They seemed to pause at that. And to this day I’m not sure about what they were thinking. Maybe this whole thing was just them trying to get home without needing to take the bus. Maybe they really had a son at Tech who they’d come to see. Maybe they had a younger son who they needed to get to, but then the sitter decided to bring him home instead of waiting for them to arrive.

Or maybe they had been planning on killing me the whole damn time.

Until I told them to have a good night. And that was the point they had a change of heart.

The two of them got out of the car, but before the wife could shut the door the man held it open and stuck his head back into the car.

Just gun it!

“You know how to get back?”

I nodded in the darkness even if he couldn’t see my action. “I’ll figure it out.”

“Alright. Take care.”

And with that he shut the door and I turned my car around and headed back to the paved streets. It was only then that I saw a sign for I-285. I may have taken it to just get my bearings (I honestly don’t remember). My body began shaking, the adrenaline pumping through my system for the better portion of an hour finally began to wear off. In a daze, I somehow managed to guide my car back to more familiar streets and then back to the dorm.

Somehow still alive.

I may not have slept well that night… or the next few.

So there you have it, The Stupidest thing I have ever done. My last good deed, ever.

The Reason Why – Anonymous

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Last year I wrote a series of blogs talking about my various projects both in novel and comic formats. The idea was to give a little insight into… well, into the “Why” of it all. A little background on what compelled me to write that particular story. They were really posts that should have been written a long time ago, but for some reason the idea to put it all down hadn’t occurred to me. Looking back at them now, I realize that I’ve missed a couple of shorts.

***

I never like the movies or shows where the Big Bad Guy kills off his lieutenant for no reason (Batman 89 being the one time that I do like it, if I’m being honest, there isn’t much better than “Bob… gun.”). But you think about these massive plots super villains have to come up with all to get one over on the hero. They must delve deep into the recesses of their minds in order to figure out the exact way to ensure the hero falls into their trap. To do that requires a bunch of henchmen to help out. These are the forgotten men and women. Perhaps they are as damaged as the villain and see them as a guiding light for their own darkness. Maybe they follow because they see that there is opportunity for a lot of money or power (or both) and like any good business, you want to get in on the ground floor. Or maybe, they are just lost and need someone to give them direction.

I might have subconciously been pulling for these guys.

No matter why they are there, they get to be treated like crap most of the time. They are going to be the ones who are thrown in front of the hero. The ones to randomly find a bullet from the police. The ones who get left behind when the getaway vehicle only has room for 4 people… sorry.

Or, from time to time, you get to be killed by your own boss for… reasons.

It’s a thankless job, and I’m not really sure why anyone would do it at all. For some reason that part of the setup stuck with me: why would they keep doing it? And that’s when I realized that this anthology needed to have a story from the lowly’s perspective. This idea where maybe someone had wised up a little bit. Realized that the way things were going, they were just as likely to end up in a box six feet underground as anywhere else.

Maybe, just maybe it might be time to explore your retirement plan?

***

“Anonymous” by John McGuire

“In Vigilante City, there are opportunities to be found whether you are on the right side of the law or the wrong side. However, the glitz and glamour of being the villain captured on the evening news isn’t all it is cracked up to be. And for one anonymous henchman, he has a plan to get his last score.”

***

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 – Southern Culture on the Skids

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Or What it means to me to be from the South (specifically Georgia)

1 – It means being made fun of both far and wide.

How many times does a comedian or a late night talk show or radio DJ or whomever use “The South” as a punchline to some joke? When the stereotype of where you were born is almost never positive… it makes for an interesting experience.

2 – It means making fun of Yankees, no matter if they are from New York or the Midwest or just “north” of wherever we currently are standing.

Because of #1’s abuse, we have to try and poke fun back. It is a moral imperative.

3 – It means that so many times your sports teams end up underachieving. And it doesn’t matter if we are talking about the Braves or the Falcons or the Bulldogs or Yellow Jackets or Hawks or…

Yes, it is depressing to see those other teams win on our fields. Please stop bringing it up.

4 – It also means that no matter how many people show up for any given game (regardless of the sport) someone will make an issue of it by saying that we don’t support our teams.

Hey, stop trying to spend my money for me!

5 – It means that you definitely shouldn’t get into hockey, because they will just take your toys away from you and move them to somewhere in Canada (The North-North).

Atlanta is kinda like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football with this one.

6 – It means that winter is normally only bad for a couple of weeks… even if we do freak out at the first snowflake.

snow

Though I contend that we get ICE more than snow and show me anyone who can really drive on ICE.

7 – Though our Fall weather is the envy of everyone (or it should be) by not only ushering in football season, but just being the nicest days ever (seriously, ever).

Really, the weather is amazing from September to late November.

8 – It means that most of the people you end up meeting seem to be from somewhere else. Which is odd to me that since it stinks to be from the South that so many people would leave their homes and relocate here.

Could it be that it is secretly awesome here after all?

9 – It currently means that we might be the most prepared for the potential Zombie Apocalypse with the Walking Dead being filmed here.

Or at least we know what Atlanta will look like when it happens.

10 – It means that traffic will be awful (in Atlanta), but because people are from various other places originally, they will gripe all the more about it (we know, we know). And it really means scratching your head when New Yorkers tell you that you drive crazy (after you’ve ridden in a NYC taxi cab!).

atl-traffic

Seriously, just use your turn signal, and we’d all be so much better off (this is for everyone that loves to cut me off regardless of where you originally come from).

11 – It means that other people question why we don’t take the train more places without realizing that our subway only goes from north to south and east to west and doesn’t always have a stop at the place you actually want to go (Turner Field anyone?).

We just like our cars… a lot.

12 – It means having really good food… that will probably end up killing you (fried chicken, mashed potatoes, country-fried steak, biscuits, sweet tea).

 

southern-food-1

Excuse me while I go have a heart attack from this gravy.

13 – It means that we call it having a Coke no matter what you are actually drinking.

Not soda or pop, you whacky Northerners!

14 – Finally, it means trying to convince your wife, who’s lived here for all but 3 years of her life, that she is actually Southern at this point.

And failing… 🙂

***

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

Food Advice for April 1st

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Image by Alexa from Pixabay

It’s come around again for me. No matter how hard I try to make the date change, it lurks in the shadows, waiting for me to not pay enough attention. It knows that as soon as I let my guard drop, that will be the true end of me. So I must remain diligent or else fall prey to the terribleness of April Fools’ Day.

You know, the day where every site likes to try and run some article to convince you of that horrible thing you’d hoped would never come true has, in fact, now come true. Or maybe you’d just like to read a little about an upcoming movie or comic… yet, can you be sure of any information you receive on that day?

Nay, I say!

Instead, I’d like to honor my least favorite day of the year by talking about the thing that feels like April Fools Day every day of the year.

***

Garlic Mashed Potatoes are not fancy.

I don’t know where you get off thinking that adding a little bit of garlic suddenly makes them a dish to feed to kings and dignitaries. I don’t care what the cooking shows have told you. They aren’t improved by such additions. Instead, the garlic actually takes away from the perfection of the dish.

The beauty is in the simpleness of the dish. Heck, the simpleness of the food itself.

It’s Potatoes that are mashed, with butter and milk and maybe salt. That’s pretty much it.

It’s a basic dish. Potatoes are basic.

Image by Couleur from Pixabay

And that’s OK.

This was never supposed to be a dish served at the five star resturants. You know, those places where the amount of food on the dish is quarter sized? Where the food is so fancy, you don’t know which fork to use to eat?

Mashed Potatoes are supposed to be served as a way to try and take up every spare inch of your plate. It should be a question of what might fall to the floor, that’s the amount of mashed you need. It is comfort food. It is pure goodness.

Stop trying to make it something it isn’t.

Please.

***

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

John McGuire will be at FLUKE in Athens, GA this weekend

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I’ll be making my first convention appearance of the year at FLUKE at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia this Saturday from 10-5. FLUKE is a one-day convention focusing on independent comics and creators.

So come and stop by and we can chat. I will have copies of the Gilded Age trade and copies of the recently funded through Kickstarter In Our Dreams Awake #1 as well as copies of 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

Movie Review – Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania

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After spending the last two blog posts talking about Marvel’s Phase 4 movies, I finally managed to get out and see the first movie to kick off Phase 5: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. While the Phase 4 movies and shows gave us glimpses of where (when?) we might be heading… it is here that the big storyline for the MCU really kicks into gear.

It’s an interesting choice to use an Ant-Man movie for this purpose as the first and second movies were really elaborate “caper” movies. They played things more for the laughs. And yes, while Marvel movies love their comedy bits, I feel like the Ant-Man movies lean into the full comedy with a touch of science fiction. So if you were to tell me which Marvel character would be best suited to provide us with Kang the Conqueror, I would have probably leaned more toward a Thor movie or Guardians of the Galaxy or even The Eternals (if you had to). In the comics, Kang is traditionally a full Avengers team opponent, so no matter who had first contact with him, it should potentially leave us with the idea of “We’re going to need the whole Avengers team to deal with this.”

Ant-Man 3 then has to really pivot from those first two movies. The sidekick friends are missing from the film to instead focus on the surrogate Pym/Lang family which has developed in the time since End Game. Really, there is no opportunity to spend much time with anyone else, as we quickly find our heroes all trapped in the Quantum Realm doing their best to navigate this alien world and find their way back to each other.

All the while, the threat of Kang the Conqueror hangs over them (and the world).

This is very much a superhero movie with BIG STAKES.

Michelle Pfiefer’s Janet Pym is effectively a co-lead within the movie. She is the only one of the five who has any real idea of what might be in store within this world, and therefore literally takes the lead trying to reunite the family and find a way home. Which works well for the most part… however, her character does the trope of not telling her family about Kang and the danger he represents for nearly half the movie. This isn’t a case of a story where maybe the character with “knowledge” doesn’t know whether she can trust the people she is with… no, she’s with her husband and daughter. But instead of taking ten minutes to let them in on the big problem they have, she instead dodges the question.

Paul Rudd’s Ant-Man also gets to play the big hero in this movie. It’s another place where you can really see where this character has started back in Ant-Man 1, and where he’s ended up. He’s someone who is content to not play hero. He’s someone who lost 5 years with his daughter. Someone who also was directly responsible for saving everyone who were Blipped. He’s an Avenger. And while they play that bit for laughs, with that designation, he’s someone who has to help others (or, at least he should).

I really liked the various alien creatures ont he world. Many of them had very cool and unique looks to them that I almost wondered what a Quantum Realm tv show should look like. There was an oddity to some (much) of it and while many of those characters offered some humor, for the most part I thought it worked.

However, what didn’t work for me was MODOK. Without getting to in the weeds (and spoilery), MODOK is a character that comes off as a complete joke. Everything is played for laughs, which makes little to no sense considering he is a Mechanized Organism Designed Only for Killing. Leading up to his appearance he is called the Hunter. Someone who is not only dangerous, but is basically death for those who encounter him.

Yet, that is never shown. Instead it is one character making fun of him after the next. There is a never a moment I really feel like he should be taken seriously. And while I’m not a big fan of the character in the comics, there might have been a way to do him justice… this wasn’t it.

***

So does this work as the launch of Phase 5? Does this movie start the ball rolling for the Kang saga?

Yes. I think that Kang is shown as a very credible threat. Someone who is not only powerful, but he’s powerful on a scale completely different from Thanos. Where Thanos sought to change the fundamental nature of the universe, Kang is someone who snuffs out timelines. He arrives and he conquers. Because that is who he is. It isn’t for some misguided attempt at a noble reason. It is because he can.

And that is someone who the Avengers (and Fantastic Four and maybe the X-Men) will need to be brought back together to stop.

***

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

Marvel Phase 4 – Just What is Going On Part 2

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Twitter/DragonKid21

Part 1 can be found here.

I wasn’t thinking about doing a part two to my post last week on the Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase 4. In fact, I pretty much had said my piece about it. But something hit me as odd the other day, so I figured I would dive into it a little bit more.

So up until Phase 4, all our storytelling was done on the big screen. Well, that’s not entirely correct. We had the Netflix shows which clearly were in the same world (they even mention the Incident or something like that when refering to the events of the Avengers movie). And then there was Agents of SHIELD which took a movie character, Agent Colston, and built a story around him and his team at SHIELD. That one didn’t really influence much (if anything) in the movies, but it did have to react to the big moments in some of the films (with one of the biggest reflecting HYDRA’s infiltration of SHIELD, which the tv show dealt with much of the fallout from Winter Soldier).

Oh, and Agent Carter, which tied into the Captain America movies as well as Black Widow.

Regardless, the movies played on one side and the tv shows were on another. The movies were the only thing to push the overall Infinity Stones story-arc forward.

***

It’s actually sad that there wasn’t a Marvel show set during the 5-years post SNAP. It seems like there might be a lot of stuff to mine from that era, and yet aside from a couple of flashbacks here or there, there isn’t much story being told about that time.

***

However, when you talk about Phase 4, you can’t ignore the tv shows. Or, at least, you likely can’t ignore them. Hawkeye is somewhat of a sequel to the Black Widow movie. Loki introduces Kang, who is our villain in Ant Man 3 and is the BIG BAD for the Phase 4 through 6 movies. Falcon and Winter Soldier sets up Sam Wilson as your new Captain America, leading straight into Captain America 4: New World Order. Even Ms. Marvel is going to be in the Captain Marvel sequel: Marvels.

Oh, and I nearly forgot about Scarlet Witch in WandaVision and then following up on her in Doctor Strange 2.

Ok, we get it. You need to watch the tv shows to get the full picture. So what?

Well, here’s the thing. If you are only focused on the cinema side of things, then you are going to miss out on not only the introduction of some (many) of the characters and storylines in the upcoming Phase 5 (and potentially Phase 6) movies, you are potentially not seing the bigger picture. It the multiverse storyline feels a bit hodgepodge to you, perhaps it is because you didn’t watch Loki (or What If?) where that is an extremely important portion of the overall story. In fact, it pretty much sets things in motion for the next phases of stories.

Put another way:

Phase 1 – 6 movies (2008 – 2012)

Phase 2 – 6 movies (2013 – 2015)

Phase 3 – 11 movies (2016 – 2019)

Phase 4 – 7 movies (2021-2022), 8 tv shows (2021-2022)

Phase 5 – 6 movies (2023-2024), 7 tv shows (2023-2024)

Phase 6 – 7 movies (2024-2026)

We’re used to getting about 6 movies ever two years. However, for Phase 4, we not only had 7 movies, but another 8 tv shows. Now there’s an arguement to be made that might be too much, but the other aspect is that if you are bitching you can’t see the BIG STORY from the Phase 4 movies, I’d argue you need to watch the tv shows as well. They have clearly been intended as a part of the BIG STORY.

To put it another way, it would be like reading the BIG EVENT Comic Book, without reading some of the key issues leading up to it. Sure, you can understand what is going on alright enough, but you might be missing out on some of the bigger context of how things connect.

It’s something Marvel hasn’t asked us do prior to this last two years either. Where before the tv shows were something that could be watched or not watched, these fall more in line with potentially KEY STORIES. Which the end result is to allow Marvel to tell their story over the course of 6 years rather than 12 years.

***

This isn’t to say you have to watch all the tv shows. I haven’t gotten to all of them, and I would argue that Moon Knight doesn’t really tie to anything else (as of yet). What If? is also one that is more for those paths not taken and could be skipped. But, for better or worse, Marvel has decided to make these shows a part of the narrative. To ignore them is to only get a portion of the story.

***

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

Marvel Phase 4 – Just What is Going On

  By ,

The third Ant-Man came out in theaters this past week, and due to family commitments I haven’t been able to venture over to the movie theater to see it. I have, for the most part, managed to stay Spoiler Free thus far (though it has only been out 6 days at this point, so I’m not going to pat myself on the back just yet). What I do know is this movie will launch the next Phase of the MCU (Phase 5), which is supposed to better bring into focus the direction for the future films and give movie-goers insight to exactly what the big story is going to be.

What’s odd is that for the last 2ish years, I’ve heard one of two refrains about Phase 4. The first is that is has no direction, no cohesiveness, and whatever the “Multiverse” aspect of things may or may not be, doesn’t feel like anything to excite people over.

The second is that other people love the idea that we got some stories that don’t push the BIG STORY so hard, and instead let the movies and characters feel a bit more self-contained (or one-shot, if you will). Which is something those people loved about the early phases of the MCU experiment.

From my perspective, though, this is no different than any other build up to a comic book crossover event. Just because some Events are more telegraphed than others, shouldn’t diminish them.

Way back when, there was a comic crossover called Infinity Gaunlet (might sound familiar). But the thing is, for a person collecting comics monthly, I didn’t necessarily know that some of my comic book reads were leading to that story. All I knew was Silver Surfer was dealing with this guy named Thanos who seemed to be up to no good. Thinking back on it, I don’t remember there being any Avengers issues or Spider-Man issues where the Infinity Gauntlet was a thing. Instead, Thanos popped up in a couple of comics, had a little 2-part mini series (Thanos Quest), and then we got the big crossover.

The thing about comics and the story-telling within is that they have to tell an ongoing story, month in and month out. Sometimes that means you might get long, multi-part storylines which last for years and other times you get a 20-22 page comic that tells a single story.

We also seem to have short term memories when it comes to how Marvel rolled out some of these early Phases.

Phase 1 was always leading up to the Avengers being formed… right?

In retrospect, it is very obvious that’s where the direction was heading. No, what Phase 1 had to do is introduce us to “new” characters.  Iron Man was a big risk. Thor was a big risk. Captain America was a big risk. The Hulk was a big risk (though he certainly had the most name recognition back in 2008, which is a weird thing to say 15 years later). Any big flub and we might not have gotten any of these movies.

They had to set the stage with characters we knew and liked. They even reused Loki from Thor so that we’d have a villain we understood in Avengers.

Phase 2 was leading up to Civil War, right? Again, the answer is a bit more complex. We had continuations of the Big 3 Avengers, we had a sequel to the Avengers movie in Age of Ultron, but we also had two of the quirkier MCU debuts during this time: Ant-Man and Guardians of the Galaxy. Phase 2 is the one that I see Phase 4 mirroring as much as anything else.

Phase 2 had 4 sequels and 2 brand new characters (or team in the Guardians case). Phase 4 has 4 sequels and 2 brand new characters (or team in the Eternals case). It also has the weird outlier/bridge prequel movie of Black Widow.

Guardians was definitely the big break-out of Phase 2, and I feel like Shang-Chi is likely that for Phase 4.

So I look at Phase 4 as trying to do a few things. Whether they succeeded in some or none of those things, I’m not always sure. I think they needed to wipe the slate clean in the aftermath of End Game. If they’d immediately jumped into the next big story, people wouldn’t have known how to handle it. We all needed to have a bit of space to reflect on the 20+ movies we’d seen. Phase 4 is trying to put some new characters out there while still being able to tell the continuing stories from our favorites. And, it needed to hint at the bigger picture, which the Multiverse is obviously tied into that.

My hope is that all of this will be very clear in a couple of years when Phase 6 is complete. At that point, we’ll look back at these movies and go – Oh, now I see what they were doing.

Just in time to start complaining about Phase 7 (and the X-Men?).

***

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 – Atlanta Will Never Be A Baseball Town & Finally!!! Atlanta Braves Win!!!

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Pitchers and catchers are reporting soon (nowish). So I thought I’d do a combo repost. The first is from 2014, when the Braves were really entering into their rebuild. A time that while I had hope, like every fan does, you never know what is going to actually happen. And unless you are a fan of the New England Patroits or Alabama (and now Georgia it seems), you don’t really expect it.

While the second is in the aftermath of the Braves winning their first championship in over two decades. The strangeness of that moment.

Pitchers and catchers are reporting. What a great time of year.

***

We are only a few weeks away from the worst time to be a sports fan. The Super Bowl will be over and with it another season of futility for my Miami Dolphins. We’ll have the better part of a month to wish it was March and therefore time to fill out our tournament brackets with any number of theories on why this team or that one will end up in the Final Four. You will try to convince yourself that just because you did not watch one minute of college basketball up to that point that your opinions should still be valid.

But really we’re all just biding time until Baseball and Opening Day.

I’ve spent most of my life in Georgia in one form or another (minus about a year or so in Florida when I was 4 and about 2 weeks in Virginia) so there is only one baseball team as far as I am concerned:

The Atlanta Braves.

Braves

Forgive the flash, though it landed right where the tomahawk hit…

This is my favorite picture hanging in my house. I’ve had it since 1991 when my mom got it framed for me. It’s gone with me through a handful of moves, but I always make sure to find a place for it.

While I know the exact point in time that I became a Miami Dolphins fan (January 23, 1983 The Miami Dolphins defeated the NY Jets in the AFC Championship game and that was all it took – I shudder to think what would have happened had the game gone the other way), I have no idea when I became a Braves fan. At some point it became a part of my conscious, surely helped by lots of readily available viewings on TBS.

But it was probably cemented by the trips to Atlanta I spent with my Dad. We would do a week there, and then a week in south Georgia with my relatives. During that Atlanta week we’d see the Braves at least twice (there might have been even one year where we saw them three times). Looking back I can’t say I remember any specific game that we went to, though I remember seeing them play the Padres at some point (possibly more than once). At one point I even knew their record in games I went to (for such a terrible team during most of the 80s, they tended to win more than they lost when I was there), though that knowledge is long since lost from the recesses of my mind.

I remember my Dad telling me stories about the Braves though. “Did you know that Dale Murphy used to play catcher?” “Did you know that Pascual Perez once got lost on I-285?” (It is the perimeter around the center and he never got off… just kept going in a circle).

And I knew I would get a chance to see Dale Murphy play. In person. Number 3. Your starting center fielder for the Atlanta Braves (maybe he’ll hit a home run!).

In Waycross, Georgia (the largest city, in the largest county, in the largest state… east of the Mississippi – look it up) (where I lived) you better believe that Braves cards were gotten at a premium. But a Dale Murphy? That was the end game. You opened pack after pack in hopes of seeing #3.

Dale Murphy Baseball Card

I’m pretty sure I have this one… sadly it is not worth what it once was.

Mercifully much of the 80s Braves, for me, is tied less to their record and more to their baseball cards. And it really remained that way until 1991.

But in 1991 it all changed. I remember how that season made every single person a Braves fan. I went to our High School Homecoming football game and people were doing the tomahawk chop (by the way, yes we stole it from Florida State… who cares, most of those people were Braves fans anyway). People would honk their horns and stick their arms out the window. And every night as the season progressed I’d look in the paper to see if the Dodgers had won the night before.

And when they won the division? And then when they won the NL? It was ridiculous. There is no other words to describe it. And had Ron Gant not been pulled off the bag by Hrbek, well… (no, I’m not still bitter about it 22 plus years later).

Still, they were not the losers anymore.

For the next decade plus we got treated to seeing one of the greatest rotations of all time. I don’t know that I even realized it until it was close to over at the end of the 90s. Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz under Bobby Cox’s managing brought wins to a town starved for them. It is a fine thing to accomplish winning, but when you win as much as they did and make it where people are slightly bored of the winning (not me, but some). That is a true accomplishment. They turned the Atlanta Braves into a model for how to win.

Last week two of those three were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And while I would join my voice in with the people who feel Maddux should have been a unanimous decision (if not for people gaming the system), I’m too excited about the prospect of this years ceremony being so Braves focused.  Though there is a bit of weird timing as this year will be the first without any true tie to those division winning teams (Brian McCann leaving to become a Yankee) is the same year where a huge reason for their being a streak will get their honor by all of the baseball world. I guess it really is the end of an era.

And yeah, maybe we only won the 1 World Series, but being it the thick of it every year, having a chance… I’ll take that all day long.

Braves Pitchers

Smoltz will be in there shortly with you guys.

So thanks Bobby, Greg, and Tom. Get the place ready because we’ve got two more of your teammates (John Smoltz and Chipper Jones) coming to really give the Hall a nice Braves feel.

***

This is no longer the Darkest Timeline.

We finally got to see the damn sailboat.

It’s magical.

***

I didn’t have faith earlier in the summer.

There have been years where I watched the Atlanta Braves throughout the course of a season and knew, just knew that the team was destined to go deep in the playoffs and end up in the World Series.

That wasn’t the case this year.

So many things seemed to go wrong. And being an Atlanta fan (and Miami Dolphins fan), I can recognize when one of my teams might be snake bit.

After the All-Star break, we literally went two weeks where we’d win a game and lose a game. It set a record.

I didn’t think it was possible even at the trade deadline. We traded for a guy (Eddie Rosario) who is on the Injured list? Really? We traded for a guy who is batting under .200? What the hell is going on?

Even as they started winning I thought, well, maybe we could make a run at the division. Maybe we’ll get to watch meaningful games in September. The way the season had gone to that point, that would have been magical.

And somehow we won the division. I thought, well, maybe we can win against the Brewers. Why not?

Then it was the Dodgers, and I recalled being up 3 games to 1 and somehow losing the year before. And we went up 3 games to 1 and lost game 5.

And the doubts began to creep in again. The ghosts of sportsball years past whispered their lies in my ear.

Then we were in the World Series. Somehow, someway. And I finally believed it could happen.

(Photo by Elsa/Getty Images)

And last night, it happened.

It struck me weird. My wife was jumping up and down, but for me, it got a little dusty in our living room. I wrote about how even with the 1995 World Championship run, I wasn’t focused on the Braves as much as I had been the previous years or how I would be the following years. So even though I felt great about it happening, I didn’t really experience it. I didn’t live and breath and die with every pitch. My heart didn’t threaten to explode out of my chest when they had men on base.

I thought about how I’ve watched all these games this season. The crazy amount of enjoyment I’ve gotten from watching these grown men hit and throw a small ball. It’s silly. And Crazy.

And amazing!

***

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

A Love for Everyday – Part 13

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Six years ago, I created a homemade book for my wife with all these quotes about Love from our favorite TV Shows and movies and books and then I added to it great quotes about love from history or just great quotes about love from anyone. For the past five years, I’ve shared a few from the book around the holidays.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

Part 5 is here.

Part 6 is here.

Part 7 is here.

Part 8 is here.

Part 9 is here.

Part 10 is here.

Part 11 is here.

Part 12 is here.

 

January 8

 

One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.

Stephen Hawking

 

February 11

 

What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

 

March 8

 

The very essence of romance is uncertainty.

Oscar Wilde, The Importance Of Being Earnest And Other Plays

 

April 9

 

And I guess I realized at that moment that I really did love her. Because there was nothing to gain, and that didn’t matter.

Stephen Chbosky, The Perks Of Being A Wallflower

May 5

 

My heart, it feels like my chest can barely contain it. Like it doesn’t belong to me any more. It belongs to you. And if you wanted it, I’d wish for nothing in exchange – no gifts. No goods. NO demonstrations of devotion. Nothing but knowing you loved me too. Just your heart, in exchange for mine.

Stardust

 

June 7

 

I want you. All of you. Your flaws. Your mistakes. Your imperfections. I want you, and only you.

Anonymous

July 10

 

A true relationship is two imperfect people refusing to give up on each other.

Anonymous

 

August 4

 

Love and hope can conquer hate.

Barack Obama

 

September 7

 

Give a man a ball, he will be happy for a day.

Give a man a woman, he’ll be happy for a night.

Give a man a woman who loves football, he will be happy for life!

Anonymous

 

October 7

 

I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

Og Mandino

November 5

 

And I’d choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I’d find you and I’d choose you.

Kiersten White, The Chaos Of Stars

 

December 4

 

You’re my everything. Everything else is just… everything else.

Anonymous

 

***

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

Being an Advocate for Yourself

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… Because you can’t count on other people doing it for you.

This idea has come up recently in my life. The idea that sometimes just showing up and doing good work may not be enough to get what you believe you deserve (or have earned). The mere fact that you’ve written a comic or a novel or short story or screen play or whatever doesn’t guarentee anything at all. There are other aspects that you have to be able to do, to help grow your potential fanbase, to help more and more readers find your wares.

But this isn’t about the marketing parts of being an independent writer. This isn’t about trying to do a mailing list every month or bi-weekly or weekly (which I am the worst at doing). This isn’t about the ads you need to run in order to drive people to your books.

It isn’t even about writing more books.

Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay

Except, maybe it is about all of those things. I gotta admit, I’m not entirely sure of exactly what it consists of.

I struggle with it. The thought of needing to pitch myself to every person I meet. Cold opening somehow letting people know that I write is not in my DNA currently. I do much better with a wingman/wingwoman who can do the whole “Did you know John writes?” Then I can launch into a conversation about it and we’re off to the races.

To be able to have a confidence that not only are your ideas and words good enough for their money, but also that they are good enough for their time. I’m not writing to get rich (though I wouldn’t turn it down, to be sure). I write because something in me makes me want to spill my thoughts onto the page. My hope is that someone else will read something of mine and come away with it having left an impression on them.

So how do I manage to be that advocate for myself? How do I find that spot in random interactions? How do I make sure that someone is willing to take a chance on a short story? A Kickstarter?

How do you prove your worth to those who have no idea who you are? How do you prove your worth to those who do know you?

No one else is going to do it for you. And I’m not sure anyone can really teach you what you need to do. My hope is that I get better at it with practice (at conventions, in online conversations, in random interactions).

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

Maybe this is one of those take a small step forward every now and then and soon enough, you’ll have come a long way?

I certainly hope so.

***

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

Another Year Around the Sun

  By

I’ll be celebrating another birthday early next week. Another trip around the sun as they say. I’ll be 47 which feels like one of those ages that is insane for me to process. It’s not one of the bigger ones… 18…21…25…30…40..50..60… but for some reason it feels like one of those ages a younger version of me wouldn’t even understand. Not that I’m a wild child and “never expected to make it this far”, but more in the idea of how did I get to be 47? It sometimes feels like it was only yesterday that I was back in college, wondering when that portion of my life was going to end so that I could move on to that next stage of things.

***

My first memory is when I was 4ish. I remember seeing Star Wars at a drive in theater. I remember the moment the movie started and the space battle and the Star Destroyer that ate up the majority of the screen.

And I don’t know if that is the truth.

***

At some point it switches, right? Early on in life, we are in a hurry to get older, because through getting older we obtain a greater freedom. You get older and you get to stay up late. Stay home by yourself. Learn to drive. Go to college. Get a job. Get married.

And so on.

Sometime in there you need to start enjoying the current status you have obtained. Somewhere in there you need to make sure that you aren’t still living for the weekend. That you are happy with the life you have chosen (or perhaps the life that chose you). It means taking a little time to make sure you appreciate where you were, with those little dreams and big dreams and everything else in between. From that very first memory you have all the way to the next time you lay your head down to sleep. Every little moment has led you to this place. This moment in time. This mental state. For good or bad, we are what our experiences are.

***

You see, the movie certainly could have been playing a drive in theater in 1979. But there is another part of me who wonders if my mind constructed this memory from pieces of a dream. But then I remind myself that I would have to had seen it on the big screen back then. And I know I saw Empire Strikes Back (twice in the theater) and knew what it was. Knew what had happened before.

But I never can truly know, right?

***

We can never know where our path is going to go. Sometimes you need a kick in the ass to actually get moving on your dreams.

***

About 13 years ago, I was laid off.

I had dabbled with ideas for short stories. Dabbled with ideas for things that might make a cool novel. I’d even written some short comic stories.

I’m not sure if it would have become much more than that had I not been laid off. If my wife hadn’t told me to “just write it already”.

***

Star Wars, like so many others, has become a part of my life. My history. My lexicon. I remember the Special Editions and taking my future wife to see the movies for the “first time”. The moment in the theater with my friends as the opening scroll of the Prequels began and we all cheered.

***

Did that all happen because its my first memory? Or was I destined to fall in love with those movies?

Did the words I’ve written happen because I was laid off? Or would I have always found my way to writing?

I hope that I would have found my way to where I was writing in some capacity, but I was already in my 30s at that point and hadn’t pulled the trigger. So what makes me think that I would have changed my path.

But I grabbed the opportunity.

***

So I take another pass around the sun. Some memories as fresh as when they were made and others buried somewhere deep in my subconcious, waiting for the moment to come back to the surface to remind me of a lesson I need to learn, straighten out my current path, or just give me a smile on a rough day.

***

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

Why Are There So Many Crazies On The Road?

  By

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

My day job is being a Road Designer. I often joke that it really is to close ramps on I-285 (which is the perimeter around Atlanta) so that people continualy drive in circles, never to be able to get off the roadway. The thing is that I sometimes get excited about stupid engineering things on roads which my wife torments me about all the time. Mostly it is me looking at something and wondering why they did X or Y thing.

Roundabouts as far as the eye can see

My wife started working for a company based out of Indiana a couple of years ago, and as those things go, she had to take a trip up north. When she returned she had a bit of trivia for me:

“Where are there more roundabouts than anywhere else in the United States?”

“I have no idea.”

“Carmel, Indiana.”

So I looked at Google Earth, searching for these endless roundabouts. Because the way she tells it, you drive from one roundabout into another one to the point she actually said she felt a little car sick from the motion.

I can’t find anything.

Well, I can find some. Here or there, but nothing like she is describing. In my mind there are a few more than normal, but nothing that would get you in the record books.

But she continues with this story for the next year and a half. Until this past December when we decide to go up for the Holiday Party. Now, again, she is trying to prep me for the insanity we are about to experience. I half feel like my head will explode when we finally get there.

Yet, from the airport to the hotel… nothing. From the hotel to the resturant… nothing. A different way back to the hotel… nothing.

I’m pretty sure my wife is gaslighting me now. Until I talk to one of her coworkers the following day, and they point us to the right direction.

And she was right. There was roundabout after roundabout. There were double lane. There were single lane. There were ones that looked like infinity symbols.

And everyone seemed to know what they were doing. In fact, the only times that there was an issue was a random stop sign in the middle of the downtown area. That one had every driver confused as we sat there waiting for someone to make the first move. Apparently they are much better with Yield Signs than Stop Signs.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

A form of Road Rage, I guess

I find as I have gotten older, the one thing that sets me off are people not driving the speed limit. Now, I’m not talking about speeding. I could care less about you going too fast on a road (within reason). No, I’m talking about all the people who are in front of me on my drive home and won’t drive 45 mph. They go 35 or maybe tease me with a 40.

The thing is, if you have your hazards on… go as slow as you need. But that’s not what is happening. These are the regular streets where these people likely drive every day. If it only happened once in a while, I might not think anything about it, but it happens multiple times in a week. And I fume.

It’s not really a big deal, but it is like they are stealing my life from me. I could be home a whole 20 seconds earlier. I could be at the resturant with friends. But no, I’m forced to crawl behind you because you can’t be bothered to look at the speed limit.

The One Question I Always Get

I feel like most people, when they tell someone what they do for a living have some standard questions they get over and over. I feel like medical professionals are immediately asked about something that might be ailing the person. A lawyer normally is solicited for advise about something.

When you are a glamerous Civil Enginer who designs roads, you always get some form of the following:

“Oh, so you design roads? Do you know what’s going on at the corner of Random Road and State Route 999?”

Everytime.

It never fails.

And I have to let them know that there are hundreds (if not thousands) of ongoing roadway projects and I work on about a dozen or so in the course of a year. So, no, I have NO IDEA what you are refering to, nor do I know why they have closed 7 lanes and aren’t working for the last month. Not a clue.

Save for one time. One time I was talking to a friend’s mom, and she hit me up with The Question… and I actually knew the project. I had worked on it. For once I was actually able to answer nearly all the questions someone had.

It was a minor miracle.

***

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 – John’s Top Six Video Games of All Time

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If all of your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge would you do it?

If all of your friends wrote articles about their favorite video games, would you complete the series?

For completeness sake you can see Jeremy’s list, Amanda’s list, and Chad’s list. Compare and contrast to this one, whatever you want.

There was a guy who lived down the street from me when I was about 11 or 12. While I was stuck playing Space Invaders for the ten thousandth time, he had a Nintendo. No matter how much I pleaded going into Christmas that year my parents wouldn’t budge. I had an Atari and we had a computer. My Dad in particular couldn’t figure out why I’d want a game system when a computer could play games and other things. Luckily my buddy would let me come over after school, and from about 3 until around 6 when it was time to go home we’d do one of two things: play basketball or play Nintendo. Typically we’d play outside when the weather was nice and when it rained we’d move inside and play Super Mario or Contra or even Duck Hunt. There were more than a few afternoons where I wished for storms so that I could play super mario world switches. Anything was an upgrade over what I had. Here were games with better graphics and story lines. Heck, you could beat these games… there was no “beating” Joust, things just got faster and harder.

I think it was the following Christmas that the Nintendo came… oh, happy days.

But when I look back to those early days I’m not sure a list of 6 is even fair. There were so many games that I spent hours upon hours playing and reading old issues of Nintendo Power to try and gain even a slight edge. But far be it from me to buck the trend.

 

Tempest (Arcade Version)

tempest

Yes, it doesn’t look like all that much, but when you’re 8 it is amazing!

My first “favorite game” was one that I played at the local arcades early on. Instead of a joystick you had a dial that you’d spin and slam your hand on the firing button as fast as you possibly could hoping to hit all the alien/insects/whatever the heck they were from crawling up the Doctor Who style hyperspace tunnel.

At least, that’s how I like to remember the game. I believe it was more my memory of the game, than the actual game play itself, but for many years I’d look specifically for this game whenever I entered an arcade.

 

WCW/NWO Revenge

2409917-box_wcwnwor

I’ll admit it. I like wrestling. Back in the 80’s the best part about Saturday afternoons was the fact that one of the local stations literally played wrestling shows all day. Guys I’ve never heard of and guys everyone has heard of. These were the days of the WWF and then everyone else who were “stuck” in the regional organizations. Flash-forward to the late 90s and wrestling was going through a second golden age. Those wrestlers from the 80s that we all recognized were beginning to clash with the newer generation. And possibly the biggest storyline throughout that decade was the NWO vs. WCW feud. It turned the fan-favorite Hulk Hogan into a villain, something the ten year old me would have never thought possible, and the teenage me thought was amazing. This game really set itself up perfectly by captializing on that feud, splitting your characters into their NWO or Wolfpack or WCW.

But the reason that I list it among my favorite games is that it was the first wrestling game I had ever played that used a “Grapple” system. Where in older games it sometimes came down to who could hit buttons faster than the other guy, this game encouraged you to perform moves after the characters locked up. For some reason this made it feel more like skill was involved. It really introduced a strategy that future wrestling games have seemed to abandon to go back to the “push buttons and hope” techniques.

I’ve played wrestling games since this one, but this is the last one I would pop in just for the hell of it and run a match… that’s how good the controls were.

 

Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem

Eternal_Darkness_by_professortorcoolguy

True enough!

The single scariest game I have ever played.

Many a night I would turn off all of the lights in our town house and play this weird Lovecraftian adventure through time. You see, you’ve inherited the family house, which would be great if it wasn’t right on top of some kind of other-worldly portal. You would move around the house looking for clues about the overall plot and read about these ancestors who’d also had the misfortune of ending up in the Old One’s crossfire.

But the best part of the game was the Insanity Meter. As you took damage or weird stuff happened, your meter would increase. At first you might just hear strange noises coming through the TV. Maybe a baby cries in the distance… but you know that it is just a game. And then you open a door to look in a room you’ve looked in 10 times already and a dead body is waiting for you.

Yet, all of that was child’s play for how the game played you. My favorite moment, that moment when I knew that this might be one of the greatest games I’ve ever played, was when, in mid-mission the screen turned black and a few words came up on the screen asking you to buy the full version of the game. As I say there, staring at the screen… thinking I’d somehow gotten a defective game, things flipped back to normal and you were back in the game.

They’d gotten me.

Eternal-Darkness-pic-9

If they ever do an Eternal Darkness 2, I will be buying that game at midnight and taking the next day off… that’s how good that game is.

 

Madden

madden-covers_00s

To be fair I can’t narrow this one down to a particular version. I’ve been playing some form of Madden football games for the better part of 2 decades. Now, I must admit, even though it is the best football game available (and the only one with the NFL license so that you can play with your favorite teams and players), I don’t buy every release. Typically I buy the new one every other year, as things (improvements) don’t change that much year to year. To me, this is the only football game worth bothering with (well, since Techmo Bowl back in the day, I guess). Upon releasing the latest one from its plastic prison, I launch directly into franchise mode with the Miami Dolphins and rack up Super Bowl victories until I grow tired and move on. But like a warm blanket, whenever I get the itch to play, it’s there, my franchise waiting to go into year 5 or something.

 

Rock Band

Rock_band_cover

Hey, I can be Eddie Vedder if I want to be!

This might be the greatest party game ever invented (apologies to Mario Kart) (I’m including the full gambit of Rock Band Games in here because of their song export feature).

For those that have played the game, I think they get it. Those who haven’t, I can see how it would be an odd thing to want to play karaoke with somebody holding plastic guitars and someone else banging on plastic drums. And yes, it is odd. I’d probably be one of the first to crap on the idea had I not gotten hooked on Guitar Hero first. Somehow it just works.

And then there is the the soundtrack. Without a solid soundtrack of songs everyone will know, the game wouldn’t have worked. But they even provided a work-around when you got tired of Dani California for the tenth time with downloadable tracks so that you could customize your experience. You like more heavy stuff? Go and spend a few more dollars on those songs. Want Pearl Jam’s Ten album in its entirety (yes please!)? The only bad thing about the game is that this whole genre of games seems to have died out… no new songs are being converted. Still, there are plenty of songs out there to get, so odds are this is a very small problem to have.

I still remember the very first night I bought the full band pack (a birthday present) we brought it over to some friend’s house who were going to have us over for game night. I might have felt bad about hijacking the event, but since everyone seemed to love it – I’ll count that one as a win. Recently Courtney and I broke out the plastic instruments for a comeback tour. Any game that my wife actually gets excited about playing is worthy of my list.

 

Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag

AC-Black Flag

Yo ho ho, and a sword in your gullet!

Assassin’s Creed with pirates. Need I say more?

Yes? Ok, let me just say that when I finish a game and am immediately looking for something more to download, more missions, more anything it is either that the game was waaaay too short or the game ruled. Having just finished Black Flag, this one falls into the later category. I skipped a couple of installments on the way, but tying the franchise into the Golden Age of Piracy not only made complete sense, the fact that captaining the ship didn’t feel like a minor bit of the game, but actually was integral to multiple pieces of the plot, made it almost feel like two games in 1.

The overall story line seems to be getting closer and closer to revealing what’s exactly going on, which is cool as well, as the story outside of the stuff in the past (this makes sense if you have ever played any of the games) does a decent job of feeding you just enough information to have your brain work overtime.

Honorable Mentions: Dragon’s Age, Final Fantasy 1, Dragon Warrior 1, RBI Baseball, Batman: Arkham City, Castlevania 1-3, Zelda (all sorts), Frogger, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, NCAA Basketball 2k8, Super Mario 3, F Zero, and numerous others I’m sure I’m forgetting.

***

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

Nine Years In

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As we turn the page on 2022, I like to take a minute and highlight some of the posts that I’m either especially proud of, posts I think deserve a second look, or just ones that struck me as worth highlighting.

Physical and Digital Copies Still Available! https://john-mcguire.square.site/

Behind the Comic: In Our Dreams Awake

Last year Egg Embry and I launched a Kickstarter for out comic book In Our Dreams Awake. While it was a bit more of a struggle to get across the $$ finish line we’d set, we managed to get it done and out. As we are preparing to at least do a Kickstarter launch for issue 2 this year, this was a comic project over 15 years in the making, with lots of twists and turns. It became that project I was sure would never see the light of day, and now we’re nearly 1/2 through the story. The post linked above takes you down that road with us.

 

Getting Scolded

One of the things I can struggle with as a writer (and a person) is not taking the time to appreciate my victories. Most of the time it is simply easier to focus on our failures instead. Focus on all the little things we haven’t done. Lament the list of things we should be doing. So I wrote this as a reminder to myself to celebrate how far I’ve come (even if I have a lot more to go).

 

Gen Con 2022 Recap – Part Two

There is a Part One which I also think is worth reading, but Part Two has some details on both the best game of the convention and the worst game at the convention… all within hours of each other.

 

The Reason Why – The Echo Effect

One of the things this blog is supposed to do is highlight my works (prose and comics) to those who might stumble upon it. However, I’m the first to admit I’m not the best at marketing myself. This year I decided to lean into an idea of telling those potential readers the reason why I wrote the stories. Sometimes it was where the idea came from or perhaps just an incident which ended up in a tale. But I liked taking a few minutes over the course of two months laying out my “Why”.

***

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 – Sincerely Yours, The Breakfast Club

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This is a week of rest. A week to recover from not only the last month and a half but from the last year as well. And it is also a time to reflect back on everything. This marks the end of my ninth year writing a blog (nearly every week, I think I’ve missed 1 over all that time and that was not planned, life just got me). So with that, I thought I’d go back to nearly the very beginning for a Christmas-ish repost about how the relationship between my sister and I changed for the better due to time spent together watching a not-very-Christmasy movie: The Breakfast Club.

***

I mostly recall fighting with my sister as we grew up.

Oh, sure, there were those times where we hung out and acted civilized to one another. Obviously, we loved each other, but more times than not my memories are of her chasing me around the house with a knife (this happened on more than one occasion) or me throwing a bouncy ball at her and her friends (“just leave me alone!”). Fights over whose night it was to do the dishes, and somehow her twisting things so that it was miraculously my night more times than not (you would think that I would have marked it on the calendar, but I didn’t). Heck, fights over trying to get her to “play Transformers right” (“No, they aren’t going to play friends!”).

dinobots

These guys don’t want to be friends. They are dinosaurs! This isn’t the Land Before Time!

So when I went away for college (or actually more to the point, my parents moved from Georgia up to Richmond, Virginia… the joke being that since I didn’t go far enough away to school, they needed to put some distance between us), I did not expect that to change very much. That first quarter I’m not sure how much, if at all, we really talked on the phone. I was trying to get accustomed to a whole new experience, living on my own, etc. And she was in the process of starting high school in a brand new school, in a state she had lived a total of about 3 months. Sufficed to say, we were busy.

Then Christmas Break was upon me, and I made the trek northward, not exactly sure how that would be (I lived in that house a total of 2 weeks before moving into the dorm, so it wasn’t like I was going “home”… I was going to the house where my family resided – a huge difference). My sister’s room was over the garage, which really meant that she had the largest room in the house. At the opposite end of the top floor from the parents, she could pretty much listen to music as loud as she wanted, stay up as late as she cared to, and so on. Somehow, during one of those first nights I decided (or maybe she suggested it) hanging out with her up there. After some talking, she popped in The Breakfast Club for us to watch.

breakfastclub

And we bonded.

Thus began a tradition we maintained for probably 6-8 years. Every quarter break I would return home and at some point we would sit down, normally around midnight, and watch that movie.

We expanded to various other 80’s movies Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Princess Bride, Adventures in Babysitting, The Goonies,  insert your favorite, we probably watched it. But not Ghostbusters 2 or Who Framed Roger Rabbit. I love both of those movies  but those are two we watched with my brother far too many times over the course of about 3 summers when he was 2 to about 5, so we had that one memorized. We recorded both of those from HBO on one VHS tape and in an effort to make sure he didn’t disturb our mother (who worked nights) would put that tape in and he’d sit content as could be. It got to the point that we were so sick of watching those two that my sister tore the name tag/tape off of it and he still knew which one it was.

S-VHS-cassette-tape

But I digress.

Those movies somehow became a part of us and our relationship. A chance to finally connect over common interests, which had eluded us for so very long when we were younger. Maybe we saw something within that one movie that spoke to each of us. Her just starting high school and me just starting college. That awkwardness of not knowing what the future will hold. Worried about how others perceived each of us. How those characters on the screen summed up much of each of us.

Perhaps it also was this place where our differences could be represented within these characters. The beautiful thing about that movie is that every single one of us is not just one aspect of the nerd or the criminal or the jock or the basket case or the princess, but made up of multiple ones. As they became friends on screen, I’d like to think that my sister and I became friends beyond just being family. That we could see our differences and embraced those things which formally put us at odds.  In those moments, I think we felt like it was us against the rest of them (whomever “them” may be on any particular day). Not quite kids, not yet adults, at times feeling like outsiders to the greater world.

It seems weird that this movie, which came out when I was 9 and my sister was 4 has come to mean so much to our relationship. A movie that when it is on TV I’ll end up watching, wading through commercials (even though I own the DVD).

Or how the lines still creep into my everyday talk (for better or worse):

bull and horns

“You mess with the bull, you get the horns.”

“Don’t talk, don’t talk, you’ll make it crawl back up.” (I use this one far more than I probably should)

“Impossible sir, they’re in Johnson’s underpants.”

Nothing wrong with having a little John Hughes dialogue running through my brain.

So thank you, Breakfast Club, for showing me how to get along with my sister and her with me.

***

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

A Love for Everyday – Part 12

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Six years ago, I created a homemade book for my wife with all these quotes about Love from our favorite TV Shows and movies and books and then I added to it great quotes about love from history or just great quotes about love from anyone. For the past five years, I’ve shared a few from the book around the holidays.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

Part 5 is here.

Part 6 is here.

Part 7 is here.

Part 8 is here.

Part 9 is here.

Part 10 is here.

Part 11 is here.

January 5

 

For it was not into my ear you whispered, but into my heart. It was not my lips you kissed, but my soul.

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

 

February 10

 

There is always some madness in love. But there is always some reason in madness.

Friedrich Nietzsche

 

March 7

 

Never stop doing little things for others. Sometimes, those little things occupy the biggest part of their heart.

Anonymous

 

April 5

 

When I am with you, we stay up all night.

When you’re not here, I can’t go to sleep.

Praise God for those two insomnias!

And the difference between them.

Jalaluddin Rumi

 

May 2

 

I want to be in a relationship where you telling me you love me is just a ceremonious validation of what you already show me.

Steve Maraboli, Life, The Truth, And Being Free

June 6

 

It had flaws, but what does that matter when it comes to matters of the heart? We love what we love. Reason does not enter into it. In many ways, unwise love is the truest love. Anyone can love a thing because. That’s as easy as putting a penny in your pocket. But to love something despite. To know the flaws and love them too. That is rare and pure and perfect.

Patrick Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear

 

July 8

 

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Pablo Neruda, Twenty Love Poems And A Song Of Despair

 

August 3

 

The best thing to hold onto in life is each other.

Anonymous

 

September 6

 

When you kiss me my whole world vanishes.

Anonymous

 

October 6

 

Gravitation is not responsible for people falling in love.

Albert Einstein

 

November 4

 

I love you more than any word can say. I love you more than every action I take. I’ll be right here loving your till the end.

Anonymous

December 2

 

Love has given me wings so I must fly.

A Knight’s Tale

 

***

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

Reflections on Christmas Past

  By

The Truth Hurts

My roommate in college had a great story from the holidays. He’d gotten a gift, a large box, not too heavy, but there was definitely some weight to it. He was young (probably 8 to 10 years old I believe), so while his spidey sense was there in regards to what the shape of the box might contain, this one didn’t trip any alarms. Finally, it was time, and he dove into this gift, tearing the wrapping paper asunder, he popped his fingers under the gaps in the box and ripped the tape… only to reveal clothes. Clothes, clothes, and more clothes. So he turned to the person the gift was from, and spoke (in a voice as loud as he could make it given his youth):

“Clothes AREN’T gifts!”

 

A Cruel Trick

Growing up a Jehovah’s Witness meant that a part of my family didn’t celebrate Christmas, but, because my parents were divorced, I still got gifts from my Aunt, Uncle, and grandparents. Which meant, I was making my own list of all the items I could never afford. And for much of my youth, that meant Transformers figures. You see, back in the day, they had two different-sized figures. The smaller ones (like Bubblebee) were around $5 or $6 (if I’m remembering correctly). They were just the right amount that maybe, just maybe, if your parents were in a good enough mood on your visit to Wal-Mart, you could convince them to spring for a new one. The other group was the larger ones. This would have been the Megatrons and the Optimus Prime sized figures and I have no idea how much they cost, but it seemed like they were in the $30s.

Something that expensive was definitely out of my reach.

So I would make out a list (after scanning through the Sears Catalogue) of all the Transformers I wanted so that when I was asked by my dad, I would have them ready to pass along to my relatives. And I was very reasonable, normally only asking for one or two of the more expensive figures (OK, maybe like five or six of them, but still), knowing that if I put a few different names on there, the better the chance they would have to find them in Albany. And then I waited until the promised day. The packages were ready to get opened, and I could only imagine which toys I’d actually gotten. I opened that first one and saw a smaller package… hey, no big deal. A Transformer is a Transformer.

Except, it didn’t have a Transformer label. It had a Go-Bot label. For those not in the know, the Go-Bots were like knock-offs of Transformers. They were a little cheaper in price and generally all the same size. And they “transformed” which I’m assuming a bunch of out-of-the-loop adults took to mean they were Transformers.

A cruel trick from the rival toy companies.

Image by Pawel Grzegorz from Pixabay

You’ll Never Guess

As I said above, my mother’s side of the family were Witnesses, which meant Christmas wasn’t observed (nor were birthdays, ugh), but we did do a sort of “Gift Day” over the years where we exchanged presents, but we didn’t do any of the other stuff. There were no stockings or trees or decorations or any of that stuff. Sometimes Gift Day occurred in January, other times it was more convenient to have it on December 25th.

After I went off to college, it was the longest time I was away from home. I flew up for Thanksgiving, and then come December, it was time for Winter Break. Maybe a week or so before it was time to drive up to Richmond, I get a call from my sister.

“You’ll never guess what is sitting in our living room right now.”

After playing 20 questions, I still didn’t have a clue, so my sister blurted it out.

“A Christmas Tree.”

I thought for sure that she was making a joke. Figured that she’d have a good laugh once I walked in the front door and saw nothing out the of the ordinary. But when I arrived at the house, I walked into the Living Room and sure enough, a huge tree, covered in ornaments and decorations and anything else you could think of. Even with the foreknowledge, I was floored by this.

(And there has been one up every year since.)

***

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

 

Tales from the Cubicle – Part 6

  By
Even though these last couple of years have introduced the Work From Home model of hybrid life to me, I still spend a ton of time in the office, which means weird interactions with your jobs, your fellow co-workers, or just strange days that you might not always be able to explain. I’ve written about a handful of my own here, here, here. here, and here.

I Wouldn’t Say He Had a Poker Face.

Many years ago, a couple of co-workers and myself, made it a nearly daily ritual of going somewhere for lunch. It was a good way to get out of the office, and a better way to spend time than staring at the computer screen at our desks. However, it turns out that even with a plethora of options near the office, you will eventually run out of new places to eat. And the repetitions may or may not start to wear on you. I think in our rotation we had Wendys, Mellow Mushroom, and Chick fil la.
However, it turned out that on one particular day, none of us could determine where we wanted to eat (much like many married couples). I suggested that old standby of Chick Fil A, and my friend James made a face like I’d offered him the worst/grossest thing he’d ever heard.
From that day onward, anytime he gave us that particular look, we referred to it as the “Chick Fil A Face”.

Clean, Old Fashion Hate

In Civil Engineering there have been two dominant programs that we use for drafting: Microstation and Autocad. Typically (in Georgia), Microstation is used for roadway projects and Autocad is used for site design projects. This really means that because you don’t have a choice once you’ve chosen your path, you also must hate the other program with a passion. No matter what is presented to you, you have no choice but to hate the program, the person running the program, and potentially any offspring they might have.
Or in the terms of Nick Miller (from the tv show New Girl), “I will teach my kids to hate his kids, and I expect him to do the same.”
For me, it wasn’t quite so clear. See my first two years on the job I pretty much used both programs every day. Sometimes in the morning I would be working on one type of project and then in the afternoon, a completely different type. I had to retrain my brain to use both because they do some things very backward. In one, you double-click to do something in the other program you only right-click. For the most part, I can see the benefits of both but am much savvier in Microstation.
But one of my co-workers couldn’t accept that. You see, he used both and there was a clear winner in his mind: Autocad. And no amount of discussion was going to change his mind. I believe I wore him down over time until he finally gave his line in the sand:
“Autocad is better because you can print directly to the plotter from the program, while in Microstation, you have to create a pdf first.”
Now, this was news to me, as I had been printing directly to the plotter from Microstation since the first day I started working. But he didn’t believe me. Until I brought in some plot drivers I’d used at a different company and demonstrated it. There was silence for a moment, I think his brain must have been spinning to try and figure a way to save face or something. Instead, he went another way.
“Yeah, well… Microstation still sucks.”

Image by Tiny Tribes from Pixabay

Children Work Here
This one is a very recent entry in my career as one of my coworkers has plenty of theories about life that he likes to share with the rest of us. I have told him he should write them down, but I doubt he’ll take me up on it, so I’ve decided to record this one for the future generations!
We were having lunch one day when the discussion of wings and spice and heat came up. I volunteered that I wasn’t really a spicy wing guy as I don’t find much pleasure in trying to kill myself with my food (at least not in that way), and would rather enjoy my meal (and not suffer the consequences later). In the process, I made my mistake. I admitted that I probably liked boneless wings better than the real thing.
Had I been in Buffalo, I would have never said such a thing, but I thought I was safe here in Georgia. However, he looked at me, with a smirk, and said “Boneless wings are for children.”
I didn’t have a response, and when I thought about it, they are basically chicken nuggets which my nephew pretty much only eats. So, after some dilberation, I think he may be correct.
Of course, I’m not going to stop eating them because I’m an adult… and I’ll do whatever I want! 🙂

***

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

Book Report – The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

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I’m a sucker for a few types of stories. Time travel, parallel worlds, time loops… and Deal with the Devil stories. I’m fascinated by the portrayal of the Devil in these tales. Sometimes he comes across as a sheer power of evil that only hopes to catch the deal-maker in a Monkey’s Paw-style wish fulfillment. The type that is going to rules lawyer you into the worst version of the deal you could have made because words have power… and specific terms can allow for precise parameters. Other times we see a version that is less adversarial. A version that is merely a being doing a job, trading a wish for a soul, the basic bartering system. A being who is both above it all, and also very much a mirror to reflect our own wants and desires.

Other times you get the best of both worlds, and it is left up to the seller to figure out exactly what kind of deal they’ve made and exactly what kind of being they have made it with.

That’s where we find ourselves with Addie LaRue. She’s a person who made a deal that is twisted into saving her from an impending marriage (that she does not want) to becoming an immortal who can do pretty much whatever she wants… with one caveat:

No one will remember her.

She can interact with people. She can carry on conversations with people for hours upon hours, but once she leaves their sight… they forget her.

Image by Edar from Pixabay

Throughout the book, we alternate chapters set in the present (2014) and in the past, beginning in the 1700s and slowly working their way to catch up with the present time. We’re told her story in these little bits and pieces, filling in some of the gaps in her present-day existence. V.E. Schwab does a deft job in not lingering too long in any one time period, though, it might have taken a little too long to get to the deal (not sure of the page count before the moment, but as a reader you know it is coming and yet it felt like it took a couple of chapters too long to get there). That being said, once the Deal happens, the book begins building steam as we rocket to the next big moment:

Addie meets someone who doesn’t forget her.

Throughout the novel, we get to see exactly how the life of someone who is forgettable actually might work. Schwab doesn’t shy away from the more unsavory portions of her life when she pretty much has to do whatever she can to get through a day. And this is the part of the novel that really contrasts with every other story about immortal beings. Most of the time they are able to enjoy their existence, day in and day out, even if the days pass into months and then into years and decades. Here we get someone who really has to experience her life one day at a time. She has no home, no clothes save for the ones on her back, no friends, no family, and potentially nothing holding her back.

All along the way, she gets to deal with somewhat yearly visits from the Devil (Luc). A bit of a contest between the two of them, for it is his job to collect her soul, but how do you convince someone who is immortal to give up on that? The confrontations range from verbal sparring to more of a carefully constructed dance between two beings who are playing a game on a level the rest of us will never know or see.

Luc is dealt with as a “someone” while also reminding Addie (and the reader) that he is more of a “something”. And like the titular character, I found myself wondering about his interactions with her, trying to determine how genuine he was or wasn’t. Even though the book isn’t about him, he is both this seen and unseen force always lurking in the background (or directly in the foreground). You can’t defeat him in a traditional sense, so you have to hope that Addie is able to outsmart him.

It is nice to see a version of the Devil shown in a complex way. He should be a being that is above the everyday things of the world, but also one who seemingly preys on the unsuspecting. However, they are the ones who make the deals. He never forces anyone to do anything they didn’t want… even if they don’t always understand the true meaning behind the contract they “signed”.

***

As we approached the end of the book, I had determined a possible ending for the novel, and it turned out I was both right and wrong… which I think is probably the best way for it to have ended. It’s nice to have a little bit of a surprise.

***

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

A Love for Everyday – Part 11

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Six years ago, I created a homemade book for my wife with all these quotes about Love from our favorite TV Shows and movies and books and then I added to it great quotes about love from history or just great quotes about love from anyone. For the past five years, I’ve shared a few from the book around the holidays.

Part 1 is here.

Part 2 is here.

Part 3 is here.

Part 4 is here.

Part 5 is here.

Part 6 is here.

Part 7 is here.

Part 8 is here.

Part 9 is here.

Part 10 is here.

 

January 3

 

Family isn’t always blood. It’s the people in your life who want you in theirs;

The ones who accept you for who you are.

The ones who would do anything to see you smile

And who love you no matter what.

Natavia, Who Wants That Perfect Love Story Anyway

 

February 9

 

Romance is thinking about your significant other, when you should be thinking of something else.

Nicholas Sparks

March 6

 

Gamble everything for love, if you are a true human being.

Rumi

 

April 4

 

I sustain myself with the love of family.

Maya Angelou

 

May 1

 

To be fully seen by somebody, then, and be loved anyhow- this is a human offering that can border on miraculous.

Elizabeth Gilbert, Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage

 

June 5

 

For he would be thinking of love

Till the stars had run away

And the shadows eaten the moon.

W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Four Plays

July 2

 

If she’s amazing, she won’t be easy. If she’s easy, she won’t be amazing. If she’s worth it, you won’t give up. If you give up, you’re not worthy.

Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.

Bob Marley, Guitar Chord Songbook – Bob Marley

 

August 1

 

I’d rather have bad times with you, than good times with someone else.

I’d rather be beside you in a storm, than safe and warm by myself.

I’d rather have hard tomes together, than to have it easy apart.

I’d rather have the one who holds my heart.

Anonymous

 

September 5

 

I always say that there is no greater act of courage than to be the one who kisses first.

Mad About You

October 5

 

Live, and be happy, and make others so.

Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

 

November 3

 

But I love your feet only because they walked upon the earth and upon the wind and upon the waters, until they found me.

Pablo Neruda

 

December 1

 

Somewhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight, someone’s thinking of me and loving me tonight.

Linda Ronstadt

 

***

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\

My Avengers Team

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Over the summer, Marvel Studios gave a breakdown of their upcoming releases for their cinematic universe. One title, which caught many people’s eye was Avengers: Secret Wars. Now without going into the full breakdown of what Secret Wars may or may not mean to comic readers, one of the ideas (since this is all a part of the multiverse) is that we might see different versions of the Avengers come to help stop the big bad. And this got me to start thinking about the Avengers comics and how they are constantly changing their line-ups, giving different characters a chance to have a bit of the spotlight here and there. This might be hard to believe if you’ve only seen the movies and their somewhat core group plus the trio of Captain America, Iron Man, and Thor seemingly always needing to be there.

But in the comics, that isn’t the case. In fact, one of my favorite runs (West Coast Avengers) only had Iron Man of that trio, and later he wasn’t even there at all.

Regardless, I thought it might be fun to give it a go. Now, these would be the comic book versions of the characters, as some have not appeared on screen as of yet.

Hawkeye (Team Leader)

Probably my favorite avenger due to his run as the leader in West Coast Avengers, but it was as I learned about his past that he became my favorite. You see, he started his career wanting to be a good guy, but happened to fall under the spell of the Black Widow, who used him as a pawn against Iron Man. They tangled quite a few times, but when the Avengers experienced their first big roster change waaaay back in Avengers 16, it was a cocky archer who broke into their mansion as a way to show them he was worthy of membership.

Scarlet Witch (Magic)

Another first-timer from that same Avengers 16, it wasn’t until John Byrne began working on the West Coast title, that I understood the character’s importance, not only to the Marvel Universe but to the Avengers themselves. While the Fantastic Four are definitely Marvel’s First Family, the connections within the Avengers for many of the characters are such that they are the bringing together of many different characters. Her husband is the Vision, her brother-in-law is Wonder Man, her brother is Quicksilver, not to mention that gives them direct links to three of the bigger villains: Ultron, Grim Reaper, and Magneto.

And even though, she’s hit upon some hard times due to the fallout from “No More Mutants”, I love a redemption story.

Songbird (Sonics)

In the comic, Avengers Forever, a mismatched team of Avengers from various time periods are brought together to defeat a greater enemy. Some are from the past, some from the present, but two are from some point on the future timeline: Captain Marvel and Songbird. The thing is, when that comic came out, she was still appearing in another comic, Thunderbolts, which showed you who she really was: a member of the Masters of Evil – the big bad guy group. So here we had someone who was struggling with her place in the world. Who had been a villain forever, but because of the ploy the T-bolts were running, she was becoming addicted to being a good guy… a hero.

And then we see that maybe, just maybe, she will be able to redeem herself and join Earth’s Mightiest Heroes (and she can bond with Hawkeye and Scarlet Witch as they all have been on the wrong side of the law).

Nova (Cosmic)

I had never heard of Nova before the comic book New Warriors came out. He had his run in comics back in the 70s and early 80s but had mostly been forgotten until the early 90s. I loved that he was someone who had lost their powers, lost their way, and suddenly found a new purpose with a team of teenage heroes. He doubted himself, was angry at times and fell for one of his teammates. That comic was everything you’d want in a comic book.

Then it ended, and he sorta disappeared again. While a couple of his running crew joined the Avengers (Firestar and Justice) he never got his due… until the Annihilation Wave storyline began and he found himself fighting alongside and against some of the biggest baddies the Universe had ever seen. If there was ever any doubt that he was deserving of being an Avenger, his run through those space epics changed all of that.

Blink

An odd choice, as the entirety of my experience, reading about her is directly from the Exiles, a comic about a group of (mostly) mutants who jump from parallel world to parallel world trying to set right what once went wrong. Her was a character I got to see grow from an unsure hero into the leader of this squad, forced to make extremely difficult decisions about the fate of multiple worlds. I also like the idea of adding another character from the X-Men side of the universe. Sometimes things can get too insular, and you miss out on the oddites of weird and new combinations of characters who have never had the chance to interact before.

***

While we might (we’d definitely) add another character or two at some point, I like the idea of a somewhat small team to start. And the thing is there are multiple ties between characters, former villains, dealing with cosmic threats, and a couple of mutants mixed in. And perhaps, they are brought together by someone who has a sense that bigger things are at play across the multiverse… that perhaps Kang (and Immortus) are beginning to make their latest play for power.

***

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

Prepping for Nanowrimo

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So I’ve decided that this is the year that I’m going to give this Nanowrimo a shot. Of course, I’ve thought about it over the years, and I think I gave it a start a couple of years ago, but life got in the way. This decision means that I’m a little bit behind the eight ball, as it were because I made the decision all of about 7 days before the end of October. So I did what anyone might do, I started with some old-fashioned research on what things I needed to do to have the best chance of succeeding with my goal.

This list has been cobbled from my reading so many blogs out there. I tried to see what were the common themes that I kept seeing repeatedly. The biggest thing was asking the big question:

What am I getting out of this? What’s my goal beyond just having 50,000 words written at the end of the month?

Part of me is curious if I can do it at all. I’ve talked about this idea that if only I could keep my butt in the seat, then maybe I could write more than 1 draft in a year. I want to get going on book 2 of this series. I’m excited to push to make sure that the work progresses. I also know that my bigger goals only work if I can increase my word output. And finally, I just spent the weekend at a convention where I got to see all these people displaying their dozens of books, and I had my three plus a few comics. While I’m proud of the work I’ve done, I need to catch up!

Set up your calendar.

This is obviously a big one. Trying to figure out the days I’m available and the days that I certainly won’t have time to do much writing. It is not for the first time that I wonder whose bright idea it was to do this during a month with only 30 days and with a major holiday at the tail end of the month (you know, probably the time when you are going to want to play a little bit of catch-up). Looking at it, I definitely need to account for the days I can write but especially figure out those days when I cannot.

It breaks down like this: 50,000 words in 30 days = 1,667 words/day

That’s a bit intimidating.

November-2022-calendar-b18.jpg printable calendar

Clear the calendar of the to-do lists.

Some items cannot be cleared. Others will need to be juggled a little bit. One of the things I do every week is the blogs for TesseraGuild, so I sat down over the last couple of days and wrote out all the blogs for the remainder of the year. In fact, it might be the furthest ahead I’ve ever been since I started doing this.

 

Set up your Nano account

Need to set up my nano account (I guess). I saw this a bunch about having a group to help build friendships and discussions and whatnot for encouragement. It can’t hurt!

 

Outline the book.

I’m lucky in that I know exactly what book I’m going to be writing for the project. I also have already begun working on the outline prior to the start. However, I have plenty of blank spots leading into this that I will need to fill in.

For the first book, I did something called 40 sentences, where I basically had a beat sheet or plot sheet broken into 40 bullets, with the idea that each one would be a chapter (I don’t think that’s exactly what I ended up with), but it worked well to have that roadmap to fall back on, and it is interesting to review to see where I departed from the original breakdowns.

Some of this also falls under the list of having your title, having the story idea, having your characters and who they are. This is book 2 in a series, so with that comes a couple of known characters (my two POVs), but I do need to take a little time to flesh out some of the supporting cast for both.

 

Writing the story logline and/or pitch.

I don’t know that I’ve ever done this upfront, but then I realized that I basically have done it when I’m pitching the various ideas I have to my wife. She listens to me stumble around, trying to figure out the exact way to frame whatever it is, and generally is a good sounding board. For this story, I haven’t really told her much about it because she’s read book 1, she knows how things ended, and I kind of want to keep it all as a surprise. So I’ll need to do this on my own.

Have a tracking system

I have been tracking my writing over the years with a simple excel spreadsheet. I figure if it ain’t broke…

 

Research

Normally research is something that is a nice break from the actual writing process, but it also becomes this not-so-fun time sink. However, when writing the first draft, I mostly don’t concern myself with too much on the end of the research. If it is something that is only going to slow me down, then I should probably cut it for this draft and worry about it when I go to do my first editing pass next year. However, I did see something that talked about images (which I already use), but maybe spending a little of this prep time to grab some more for the story might not be a bad thing.

Another thing that enters into this is the idea of making a cover for your potential book, which is another rabbit hole I could definitely spend a ton of time diving down.

 

Notebook

I need to keep one of my notebooks with me at all times during November. I have a couple that are blank, so they might make the best ones to use for this exact process.

 

Mindset

I’ve seen in more than a couple of places talk about getting into the right mindset. This is truly a marathon (but perhaps one made up of a bunch of sprints). This is something that many attempt and don’t end up getting to that mythical finish line. So if I’m going to have a shot at writing that much during this month, then I need to prep my brain to get onto the good path.

***

Anyway, here I go. Wish me good luck!

***

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

31 More Days of Horror

  By ,

In my annual quest to try and use October to watch a bunch of horror movies, I present the first three of the month…

No Escape Room

This was a Sci-Fi Channel movie, though I didn’t know that when I started watching. I was lured to the movie by Netflix’s promise of “horror” and “time loops”. It was interesting to try and convey an escape room as the place to stage a horror movie. I think that is extremely clever as I have done an escape room and there was certainly a moment when the door locked behind where my mind went to the place of “are we legitimately trapped in here now”. Of course, this is half a second flight of fancy.

In the movie, our characters move through this house, solving various riddles while still holding on to the hope that this isn’t some death house, but just a super realistic game. And from a sort of SAW-lite style movie, it has its moments. However, towards the end, one of the characters effectively dies off-screen, which is a huge blunder. It would be one thing if this was done to convince the remaining characters that everything is still ok, but that ship had long since sailed.

 

 

The Belko Experiment

The setup is straightforward, a group of employees for the Belko company have to kill a certain number of their own or twice that number will be killed at random.

That’s it. Put out the terms. Kill one person to prove you can do it, and then let human nature take its course.

I dug this one. Even though there are certain characters you immediately know are going to start hunting and others you know are going to try and figure out a way through it, I thought there was still some middle ground in the questions being asked. I mean, if it is a matter of me or a loved one or a bunch of strangers… well, I hope I would keep my moral compass, but you can never be too sure.

The only thing I wasn’t a fan of in this movie was the new employee character. I really thought she was going to slip through the cracks, but instead her death is treated as an afterthought late in the movie making me wonder why we spent any time with them at all if they weren’t going to factor into much of anything.

 

The Rental

Really this was two movies combined into one. The front half is the tale of two couples going on a weekend getaway only to have two of the members hook up with each other. The slow burn of the lies are complicated by the idea that they might be under surveillance from someone. The second movie is a straight-up slasher flick where you are wondering who, if anyone, might survive the madman’s blade.

The only problem is that the first half of the movie works extremely well. While there are certain beats you will recognize from any number of other stories, the actors are all crushing it. And much of the tension comes from the worry/expectation that they will be found out, sending everyone into a downward spiral none of them could pull out of. Had that been the only thing the movie was about, I think it would have been a better place to take things. Once the killer is properly revealed, it loses a bit as we are now in a race to the end of the film.

***

While not every story in anthology has to work, I think it is important to figure out why or why not they might have worked within the framework we’ve been given. It’s something that I’m thinking about for my own work.

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

How To Make a Me – Halloween Edition

  By ,

Image by Enrique from Pixabay

There is a thread on Twitter where the whole point is to try and list 10 horror movies that sort of describe your Halloween tastes. I’m not taking it as strictly a Best Of or a Favorites list, but more of the movies which helped fashion some of my own horror tastes. These are things/themes which carry some level of importance because of the movie itself or because of some story around it.

Jaws

The joke in my Bio says it as plain and accurate as it could possibly be “John McGuire claims he would have been a marine biologist if it weren’t for Jaws.” When a movie scars you from walking down a career path, I’d say it somehow helped to shape your being.

Scream

Until I’d seen Scream all the slasher movies (save for Nightmare on Elm Street and we’ll get to that in a second) kind of ran together for me. Yes, Halloween is amazing, but the follow-ups to it and Friday the 13th plus an untold number of other 80s Horror had kind of killed the genre for me.

Then came Scream. It turned things completely upside down and showed us that there was still something unique to say about the genre. It was a breath of fresh air that I wasn’t expecting but found myself returning to repeatedly.

In the Mouth of Madness

Sometimes a movie rocks you to the core, makes you think about the world in a different way, and exposes you to thoughts you might have never reached yourself. That’s what In the Mouth of Madness is for me. My first real exposure to Cosmic Horror. A reminder that the universe is a big and scary place. It is something that we try to define and really, we have no fucking idea.

The Thing (1982)

A movie that only gets better with age. I am constantly amazed on rewatches how much the story not only holds up but that I find little bits and pieces every time. I just simply love everything about the movie.

Nightmare on Elm Street

This might have been the first horror movie I ever watched. I remember going over to a friend’s house for a sleepover around 10 years old and somehow we watched this (with his parent’s knowledge). It was my gateway horror movie.

The Howling

I have always been more of a werewolf guy than a vampire guy. Something about the internal struggle of someone not feeding into their base natures. That struggle had always been at the forefront of the creature. It was a curse… until this movie. These werewolves were enjoying what they were. In addition to having some of the greatest transformations ever, it really showed me that you can always look at the classics in a slightly different way.

The Lost Boys

However, I do love a well-done vampire story. This movie hit around the time I was getting into comic books, so to see the main characters in a comic store, understanding the lore around the creatures, hell, hunting the creatures. If you ever wanted to be in a horror movie when you were a kid, this was the one I’d choose.

Cabin in the Woods

Many years after Scream we got another movie that decided to look at the horror genre and turn it on its head. And maybe that’s what I really enjoy when you can subvert the tropes or use them in a way we’ve not seen before. Due to all the Easter eggs, this one has a ton of rewatch value.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

I love Night of the Living Dead, and I like the original Dawn of the Dead a lot, but something about this version really struck me as a great way to do a remake without losing the spirit of the original. In many ways, it and 28 Days Later (see below) ushered in this new age of the Zombie, a genre that was due for some spotlight (an odd thing to say all these years later given you can’t turn on a streaming service without seeing a dozen such movies.

28 Days Later

The loneliness of this movie. The whole purpose of showing us that it is the family we choose who we have to remain true to. The imagery… him walking the deserted London streets… him hunting in the rain, turning more and more like the infected around him… the tunnel. This one is just so well done, I could watch it any and every time it comes on.

***

While not every story in anthology has to work, I think it is important to figure out why or why not they might have worked within the framework we’ve been given. It’s something that I’m thinking about for my own work.

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