‘Jake and the Dynamo’ Now on Sale!

Get yours while supplies last.

Are you interested in a combination of uproarious humor and fast, bloody action featuring a bewildered teenage boy and a whole truckload of goofball girls? If you are, now’s the time to get you some, because the eBook version of Jake and the Dynamo: The Wattage of Justice is now on sale at Amazon for 99 cents.

Get it here.

An Interview (and Some Other Business)

Fiona of the blog Author Interviews graciously interviewed me, and you can go read the results.

Here’s a snippet:

Fiona: Is there a message in your novel that you want readers to grasp?

I am wary of messages in fiction. Many years ago, I was tangentially involved with several authors in the Christian Booksellers’ Association; there are some talented storytellers in that set, but I got a sense that they tended to elevate message over entertainment, often to the detriment of their work. I drifted away from them, I think, because of a difference in artistic vision. In the broader publishing industry, we are now seeing something similar to what I saw in CBA, what with the heavy emphasis on social justice or inclusiveness or whatever you want to call it, where message is emphasized to the point that craftsmanship gets neglected.

The reader is free to find any message or none in Jake and the Dynamo. I am sure some of my opinions crept into the text, and anyone who wants to try to tease them out may do so. But the only messages I had firmly in mind were along the lines of, “magical girls are awesome,” and “being a teenager sucks sometimes.”

In regards to other business, I am soon leaving to join Family for a Christmas vacation. I’ll be taking my computer, of course, but my plan is to spend as much of my spare time writing as possible. I am ambitiously hoping to have a complete rough of the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo by the time my Christmas break is over.

While I am at it, I’d also like to do some maintenance on the blog. I habitually use an ad blocker, and it shows an embarrassingly high amount of blocked content on my own site, for reasons I know not. I’m going to try uninstalling and reinstalling the plugins and then deciding which ones I can remove, to see if I can cut down on this blog’s code, which is much heavier than it has a right to be.

I’ve also been gradually learning about HTML and CSS, mostly for my job, and I’d like to try my hand at possibly adding some schema.org markup, which I know Google search likes. There are plugins for that, of course—but they probably stand a good chance of adding yet more trackers.

I’d like the code on this blog to be better than it is, but the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t do everything I’d like, and adding the code by hand takes so dang much time.

New Project

I have just today begun a new writing project under the working title Son of Hel.

I have long been fascinated with fantasy works that syncretize existing lore, and this particular book will be an attempt to bring together various traditions about Saint Nicholas, or Santa Claus, and place them in a sci-fi story loosely inspired by the famously bad movie Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. It will feature Black Peter as Nicholas’s faithful Saracen companion, and Krampus as a dark and violent projection of his troubled psyche. It will also feature aerial battles involving magic reindeer and flying saucers.

This will be, for the time being, a side project in addition to the second volume of Jake and the Dynamo. I have no projection at present, though I’d like it to release somewhere around Christmas when I complete it.

Is Crunchyroll Crashing and Burning?

I’ve been hesitant to talk about it because most of what is coming my way is rumor-mongering.

I’ve sometimes defended Crunchyroll on this blog because I like what they do, mostly, but I’m becoming increasingly displeased and am beginning to share the same distaste for Crunchy that colors much of my Twitter feed.

First, there’s Crunchy’s longstanding failure to update its player, which is still running on the security nightmare that is Flash while the rest of the internet has moved to HTML5.

Then there is High Guardian Spice. It’s not so much that Crunchyroll wanted to follow other streaming services in creating dubious original content, but that it rolled it out in the most obnoxious way possible, failing to advertise the show itself but instead virtue-signalling about the sex of the staff working on it. On top of that, further checking reveals that the cartoon is based on somebody’s Tumblr comic, and that the characters are the standard smorgasbord of “diversity,” meaning everyone in the story thinks, talks, and even looks the same. Naturally, Crunchy caught flack for this, and naturally, their response was to accuse fans of various phobias and isms, which only increases my displeasure.

More recently in the same vein, Crunchyroll is now getting accused of manipulating translations to match American political fixations. This is an issue Funimation had in spades, most infamously with Prison School and Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, but has taken steps to correct (by firing its freelancers). I don’t know for sure if Crunchy is actually doing this, but given what we saw of their staff in the High Guardian Spice ad, I’d be surprised if it wasn’t true. It’s becoming increasingly clear that the religion of social justice (for it is a religion) suffers nothing beside itself, so we are almost certainly going to see more and more politically incorrect gender-benders out of Japan being forced through a Gender Studies mold when translated into English. (Ten years ago, if you had told I would be defending Japanese animated traps against the charge of being transgendered, I would have responded 1) that you’re crazy and 2) that I don’t know what those words mean, yet here we are.)

And the huge deal that was Crunchyroll’s partnership with Funimation? Yeah, it’s over. The casualties, according to random people on my social media feeds, amount to 250 series being taken off Crunchy, including several I was looking forward to watching. Rumors have flown all over the place about what led to this, but the official explanation is that it has to do with Funimation’s acquisition by Sony. Some claim that this is Funimation’s rebuke to Crunchy’s rollout of High Guardian Spice, but I suspect that’s wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, Sony, which now owns Funimation, has made a bad reputation for itself with weebs because it is in the habit of heavily censoring eroge games. Personally, I don’t mind if hentai addicts are unable to get their drug, but I am nonetheless against censorship on principle: If they can censor hentai, they can easily move from there to censoring other things—such as anything that doesn’t accord with the social justice cult. If Sony doesn’t want T&A in its video games, then it shouldn’t port the games, not port censored versions. Telling an artist you don’t want his work is fine, but taking his work and changing it to suit yourself is extremely disrespectful. (Ten years ago, if you had said that I would be criticizing the censorship of pornographic video games, I again would have told you you’re crazy, but hey.)

Crunchy was for a while more-or-less the only game in town, but that’s starting to change. Amazon Strike didn’t get off the ground, and Netflix is too busy navel-gazing, but HIDIVE, which is now on VRV, is starting to look like a good alternative for anime streaming—though VRV is closely related to Crunchyroll and was created by some of the same people, so we’ll see what this means in the long run.

I will not be surprised if Crunchyroll goes the way of Tokyopop in a few years. We’ll see. If it does, it might take VRV with it.

I can’t justify more than one streaming service at a time given the pace at which I watch shows and my income. I’m currently on Amazon Prime (mostly because of interest in Made in Abyss), but once I’ve had my way with everything that looks interesting on Amazon, I may make the switch. I notice, for example, that HIDIVE has A Little Snow Fairy Sugar, though only in the dub, and that’s one I’ve wanted to see. In fact, it also has Made in Abyss.

UPDATE: As a reader informs me, Crunchyroll actually has updated its player. I guess I haven’t been on their site in a while. However, a few tests indicate that the new player doesn’t work with ad-blockers.

Happy Thanksgiving

I am visiting family for Thanksgiving and left my computer at home, so I am attempting a post from my phone for the first time.

I wanted to share a picture of magical girls celebrating Thanksgiving. Ladybug Girl will have to do instead. She counts. Sort of.

And Now for Something Completely Different: ‘Flowering Heart!’

I have some important things to discuss, but I spent this evening writing Jake and the Dynamo and listening to Rammstein instead, so I regret nothing.

But I am also at present making my way through the Korean magical girl series Flowering Heart, a simple and sweet show for kids that makes for a good palate cleanser after Magical Girl Site.

I’m watching Flowering Heart on Amazon Prime, but the entire show is also available on the official YouTube channel, so you can join me in watching it if you like.

There is both a Korean version and an English version available, but, alas, there appears to be no Korean version with English subtitles, so I’m watching the dub.

The story features a trio of fifth-grade girls who form an after-school club to help people with their problems. They get a magical boost from a flying, talking hamster who grants them magic rings that can turn them into adults. They have to do good deeds to gather “hopeful energy” to replenish the Heart Tree in the Flowering Kingdom, but nefarious forces are working to gather “hopeless energy” to make the tree wither.

It is reminiscent of LoliRock, probably because Flowering Heart and LoliRock both take their influence primarily from Minky Momo, though Flowering Heart appeared in 2016, so it may take influence from LoliRock as well. For reasons I can’t quite explain, however, I found LoliRock to be a slog, whereas Flowering Heart is quite pleasant.

I’ll deliver a full review when I finish the first season. For now, I’ll simply recommend it as entertaining yet undemanding—though keep in mind that it is very much a show aimed at little girls.

 

The Emperor on Deep POV

I stumbled upon an interesting blog post at The Emperor’s Notepad. There, his imperial majesty addresses the subject of “deep point of view,” a technique of narration that is currently in vogue. His post is entitled, “Deep POV Is Shallow,” and I recommend perusing it.

I can’t recall if I’d heard the particular term before, but I recognize the technique: it means writing in third person, but sticking with a particular character’s point of view and remaining in that single point of view throughout a scene, with no “head-hopping.”

His majesty explains that he believes the technique is over-used because an omniscient third-person narrator can be more useful in many cases for setting scenes with less dreary dialogue and fewer awkward tags. He makes his case well.

As long as we’re coining phrases, I’m going to say that my own preferred technique when writing in third-person is “descending POV.” Readers familiar with my work may notice that I usually begin by setting a scene, and then move in to focus on an individual who becomes the consistent POV character for that particular scene.

But I’m not strict about it. Sometimes I cheat, of course: Jake and the Dynamo opens with an omniscient narrator and then descends into the POV of the Dark Queen for the first scene. In the second scene, it remains in omniscient POV throughout, but sneaks into Grease Pencil Marionette’s head near the end. Most of the rest of the book is from Jake’s POV, with occasional diversions to the Dark Queen, Chirops, and Marionette. A few characters are not allowed, for arbitrary reasons known to the author, to be POV characters at all, ever. Among them is Pretty Dynamo.

My preferred method is analogous to a film setting up with a location shot. The inability to do this is his imperial majesty’s primary complaint about so-called deep POV. So as an answer to both him and the writers he criticizes, I will claim it is actually possible to have one’s cake and eat it too on this matter. Although an admittedly new author, I have never yet received a complaint about the way I start with an omniscient narrator and then focus in, though I did just once receive a compliment for it.

Jake and the Dynamo

The universe is a tomb, and Lord Shadow is the one to give us all our proper burial. There are those who serve him willingly, and those who serve him unwillingly, but there are none who do not serve.

Happy International Cute Witch Day

Once again, it is Halloween, the second most important holiday in the magical girl calendar. Tonight, magical girls can go abroad without calling undue attention to themselves.

This year, I am dedicating International Cute Witch Day to Little Witch Academia. I much enjoyed the short film (it came out in 2013) some years back, but I admit I’ve not seen the widely popular television series that came after it and became available in the U.S. last year. It’s on my list.

art from Little Witch Academia

For some reason, I barely remember what the short film was about, though I remember enjoying it. It was was an obviously Harry Potter-influenced story of quirky girls going to witch school, and it had some high-flying broom scenes with the kind of creative yet jerky animation for which Studio Trigger is known.

art from Little Witch Academia

Speaking of Trigger, I finally got around to watching Kill la Kill about a year back, and it completely blew my mind. It might be the best skewering of the magical girl genre I’ve ever seen, because it not only mocked it mercilessly, but unlike the slew of grimdark shows we’ve had lately, demonstrated in the process that it actually understood what the genre is about. So I trust the studio to know how to handle magical girls.

screenshot from Little Witch Academia

If they could do magical girl warriors so well, they could probably do cute witches well, too, and the popularity of Little Witch Academia tends to confirm that.

Screenshot from Little Witch Academia

I’ve Been Added to the Official Database of Oklahoma Authors

The Oklahoma Department of Libraries maintains several information databases, including one of Oklahoma authors. I was recently added, so you can check out my profile and add meta-tags to it if you like.

Sooner or later I should make a table on here of all the social media and similar places where I appear, mostly because I won’t be able to keep track of them otherwise.