My interview with the Blasters and Blades podcast is now live. You can listen to it on Anchor FM or on YouTube:
My wife listened to it earlier and said to me, “You talk too much,” which is true. I was nervous during this interview, and when I get nervous, I talk.
During the interview, we mostly talked about Rags and Muffin, which, it just so happens, would make a nice Christmas gift for the geek in your life.
For years, I’ve collected study Bibles. For a while, this was my hobby, but I recently acquired what I believe will probably be the last study Bible I ever buy, both because of the expense and because I doubt any will come out in my lifetime that I like better.
As well as a collector, I am a compulsive Bible annotator. I anotate as a kind of religious discipline: In my office, with no illumination except a desk lamp, bent over the page and writing in my finest print with a Sakura Pigma Micron, I have my own little scriptorium.
Although I own many more than that number, I have over my life used three study Bibles to hold my notes and am now on the fourth. I started with an NIV Study Bible I scribbled in as a teen, followed by the Nelson Study Bible I purchased from its editor at a retreat, followed by the HarperCollins Study Bible, which I purchased while in graduate school, took two years to read, and carefully wrote in for over a decade.
My HarperCollins is now falling to pieces. For that reason, I reecently spent a year and a half consolidating all of my notes. Then I purchased my fourth and (as I anticipate) final study Bible, into which I have begun copying all that work. I expect this project, the complete duplication of my annotations in a new volume, to take three years at least. I will probably add to these notes until I die or at least become incapacitated.
My notes are eclectic: They consist of everything from summaries of sermons to summaries of archaeology journal articles to quotations ranging from Bertrand Russell to the Bhagavad-Gita. There is no theme or discipline to my notes; they consist of things related to the Bible, either directly or through thematic association, that I want to be able to find again.
I’ve had a heck of a time getting a chance to write blog posts, since our little daughter has hit another phase where she doesn’t want to sleep at night (and she never likes to sleep if “Dada” isn’t in the room). Nonetheless, I’m working on a project I’m excited about. I’ll give updates later, so stay tuned.
At last, I have acquired my “new” computer. My old one had become unusable, so it had to be replaced. The new one, which is refurbished, definitely has some disappointments, but it should last a few years, in which time I might be able to save up for something better. One way or the other, the old one had to be replaced, so I can’t really complain.
That being said, I found out that, stupidly, I failed to make sure it has WiFi. I guess I sort of thought everything today has WiFi. As it turns out, it doesn’t have it. Fortunately, my desk is currently close to the router, so I was able to plug it in.
Also, the “free” monitors that came with it are blasting my eyes, even when I turn the brightness down to zero and probably because of bad framerate or something. I might have to replace them with something less cheap just to save my vision.
Also, the computer does not have suitable specs to be upgraded to Windows 11, which surprises me as its specs are mostly decent (aside from the missing WiFi), but Windows 11 is apparently quite specific about what it will run on. I suppose I will plan to replace this thing approximately around the time Microsoft stops supporting Windows 10, or when I want to move my desk across the room.
But the good news is, I can open the word processor without the computer freezing up for fifteen minutes! That is like a revelation. This should increase my productivity immensely, assuming the monitors don’t give me constant migraines. I’m currently copying over all my documents from my backup drive, after which I can get to work. Also, I now have dual monitors for the first time, so I can go all Minority Report with my windows.
I’ve been posting too little lately, but my laptop computer, several years past its prime, has recently become nearly unusable. Merely booting it up, wrestling it into opening my browser and staying unfrozen long enough to post, has become a major hassle. You will be unsurprised to know it’s killed my writing productivity as well.
In fact, to avoid the hassle of turning on the computer, I’m writing this on my phone.
But good news: My tax refund finally arrived, so I have purchased a desktop computer, which should arrive in a little over a week. Due to expenses, I decided not to buy the high-end machine I was thinking about and instead went with a refurbished computer with respectable business-level specs and a large solid-state drive. I won’t be doing any hard-core gaming on it, but I was unlikely to do that anyway. And since it’s a desktop, I can upgrade the sucky graphics card later if need be.
In short, I aim to write more in the near future when merely booting up the computer and opening the start menu take less than an hour. This is the first time I’ve bought a refurbished machine, so I’m crossing my fingers.
My wife and parents have been urging me to produce some child-friendly writings, and I’ve been thinking I really should, especially since experience indicates that kids show the most interest in my work. Besides, I’d like to produce something I can read to my daughter, who’s currently under two. Since she was born, we have taught her to love books, and now that she’s beginning to form complete senteces, she often brings us books with the command, “Read the book!”
Today is the last day of our Covid isolation, and we’re all just about back to full health. We were lucky not to get sick during the height of the pandemic, and to come down with a mild variant that never went into our chests. I am currently working primarily on two projects: I just finished the draft text for a children’s picture book and am also editing and rewriting a more advanced children’s novel. On top of that, I’m working on the third volume of Jake and the Dynamo, which runs under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow.
I don’t have experience writing for kids. My wife, looking over the draft of my picture book, immediately said the vocabulary and sentence structure were too advanced. But that doesn’t surprise me; I was already aware that, as I was writing it, I slipped back into my natural style. That can be fixed.
I’ll be wanting an illustrator in the near future to come in on this project. I’m not sure who to pursue as of yet, though I wish I still had contact with Roffles Lowell, who did the interiors of Jake and the Dynamo, and whose style would be great for a children’s book.
Happy October, courtesy of my daughter’s plastic-free, Montessori-friendly toy collection.
(My daughter has a huge collection of these toys, thanks to the efforts of my wife, and I credit them for our toddler’s unusually large vocabulary: Around six months, she was constantly picking up these toys and showing them to us to learn their names. And yes, for the record, some of these are here just for the picture: We keep the small ones out of her reach for now to avoid choking hazards.)
My family has been struck down by the Wuhan coronavirus, though we’re lucky enough to have caught it in a variant that amounts to little more than lassitude and a mild head cold. Since we’re sick and off work, we’ve spent this time lounging around, complaining, and watching too much television.
I have mentioned before that I recently bought my toddler daughter a pair of training chopsticks that serendipitously introduced me to the Korean magical-girl series Secret Jouju, a CGI cartoon aimed at young girls and built around a toy line. At the time, I was unable to discover any detailed information about the series or find episodes in any language except Korean.
More recently, however, I stumbled upon the series in English. It’s actually right there on the official YouTube channel for the franchise, but despite being owned by Google, YouTube’s search function failed to discover it for me. Instead, I ultimately found it through Brave Search.
Here’s an embed of the first episode of the first season. Anyone interested can easily find the rest of the English-dubbed episodes from there:
My daughter is barely beginning to speak in complete sentences, but she can already say “Choochoo” (Jouju) and even wave her hand around and cry, “Chiriring chiriring,” which is Jouju’s catch-phrase when she casts spells. So, despite some shortcomings, this show clearly appeals to its target demographic.
Also, if my daughter has to watch some television, I’d rather it be something obscure like this where an ocean separates her from the toy franchise it’s based on. Unlike some other toy franchises, she won’t be able to see Jouju anywhere and everywhere to the point that she is tempted to build her personality around it.
Conceptually, Secret Jouju appears to take its inspiration from Pretty Cure and Sailor Moon with arguably a dash of Winx Club, though it has toned everything down and mushed everything together to the point that it lacks individuality. Although most magical-girl titles have franchise tie-ins, this one feels especially like a weekly toy advertisement, a feeling that is not helped by the look of the cheap animation, which makes the characters look like plasticky action figures.
That being said, the character designs—which improve notably over the course of the series—are fetching and also a relief from the sexually provocative designs that have come to characterize Japanese magical girls in their late stage. Jouju and her friends prefer flowing gowns (reminiscent perhaps of Wedding Peach) rather than micro-minis and bikini tops, which make me more comfortable letting my daughter watch this.
When I reviewed the Korean magical-girl series Flowering Heart, I noted that it jumps into the story with almost no explanation. Secret Jouju does something similar.
The premise (what there is of it) is that Jouju is a fairy from the Fairy Tale Kingdom. One day, she impersonates the princess Cinderbella in order to woo a handsome prince and convince him to marry her. However, the real Cinderbella then shows up and reveals the deception. As if that weren’t enough, an evil witch suddenly attacks the kingdom. Jouju attempts to fight the witch but loses her magic in the process. Sensing this crisis, a magical item called the Secret Diary activates and seals away the witch—but also seals away everyone else in the Fairy Tale Kingdom, Jouju excepted.
The next day, Jouju wakes up to find a talking teddy bear and the Secret Diary in her bed. Both give her instructions to travel to Earth where she must make friends and help others in order to return Fairy Land’s inhabitants to normal. Each friend she makes receives a “Secret Flower” to make her a member of Jouju’s magical girl team. And although Jouju is oblivious, the viewer will easily discern that the longsuffering talking teddy bear following her around is actually the prince she’s in love with.
There’s something interesting here that I, as an adult, would like to see explored in more depth, though the intended audience of early-elementary girls might be bored with it: Jouju’s former job as a fairy had been to turn girls into princesses, which apparently means that she served in the role of the fairy godmother from the Cinderella story, granting girls their wishes in order to ensure their happily-ever-afters.
But Jouju had found, she tells us, that these girls were always ungrateful for what she’d given them, so she finally decided to use her power on herself instead. All of this is delivered to us in brief hints, leaving us to fill out most of the details ourselves, but it informs much of Jouju’s behavior: She insists that she never again wants to use magic to help other people—even though doing so is the only way to restore the Fairy Kingdom.
When I first came across this series and watched some of it in Korean, what I saw came from later seasons, so some elements of this first season have surprised me. The first surprise is the character design, which is primitive in the first season but improves later on.
As a second surprise, Jouju in the early episodes is decidedly obnoxious. Taking inspiration from Sailor Moon, the heroine here is thick-witted, selfish, and gluttonous. She differs from Sailor Moon in a few important aspects, however: She is headstrong rather than cowardly, and she grows noticeably over the course of this series, whereas Sailor Moon’s character flaws (in the animated version, at least) get turned into a running gag.
A parent can easily see that Jouju’s shortcomings are things that Jouju needs to overcome if she is to complete the Diary’s tasks and save Fairyland, but I wonder if my tiny daughter is getting the same message or is merely thinking that Jouju’s funny antics are worthy of imitation.
If a subtitled version of this show exists, I have not found it. The options at the moment appear to be the Korean version with no subtitles and an English version. While imperfect, the dub gives the impression that the voice actresses are sincerely giving it their all despite dubious material.
The dialogue frequently plods, but some of this awkwardness is clearly due to the young target audience: Characters express themselves in clear, simple terms and often say things in more than one way as if speaking to someone who has difficulty understanding. Since the intended audience is probably about five years old, we should excuse these affectations even though they sound unnatural to an adult. The dub frustrates me occasionally, but I don’t feel fit to judge it.
I have barely scratched the surface of what is now an extensive franchise with multiple seasons. Although I intend to keep seeing it with my daughter, I’m not binge-watching because I don’t want to let her watch too much television, so this post is a set of first impressions rather than a thorough review. My thinking at the moment is that this is little more than a generic magical-girl title for the youngest audience. Jouju’s bitterness over her role in Fairyland is intriguing, though it’s unlikely to get thorough exploration and probably couldn’t hold the attention of the average adult viewer.
Recently, I gave an interview to the podcast Blasters and Blades, so it’s only fair I give them a shout-out, though my interview won’t go online until late October (I’ll let you know when).
You can find the podcast several ways, one of the easiest being their YouTube channel.
I got onto the Blasters and Blades podcast thanks to Declan Finn, a prolific pulp author who gave the podcast’s hosts several recommendations for interviewing new talent.
I was on the podcast discussing Rags and Muffin, of course. This was my first podcast interview, but I think I acquitted myself fairly well. I likely droned a little, and since I was nervous, I made a few silly mistakes: For example, I’m reasonably sure that, in describing the technology of the book, I accidentally implied that I thought there were no electronics in the 1980s. Aside from that, I don’t think I came across as too terribly stupid.
So check out their channel, and I’ll let you know when my interview goes live.
The blog of Cirsova: The Magazine of Thrilling Adventure and Daring Suspense has produced a new review of Rags and Muffin:
This one was a bit of a surprise, I’ll admit. All I knew going in was crime-fighting catgirl with an Asian dragon dog. I didn’t know what to expect, really. Certainly not an incredibly rich fantasy setting heavily inspired by Indian mythology.
As an aside, the “pseudo Indian” (as he calls it) setting almost didn’t happen. When I first started this project, the setting was a more generic dystopian city vaguely resembling Blade Runner. But while I pondered what kind of city it was, I mused that it might be a religious capital; I then asked myself, “Which religion?” and the answer instantly came, “All of them.” After that, an early test reader said the book had an “Indian vibe,” which further encouraged me to build the world in that direction.
Also, the novel’s conception of religion is partly drawn from the syncretistic and drug-fueled stew that was Vedantism and perennialism in the 1960s. The portrayal of people getting doses of hallucinogenic drugs as a shortcut to mystical experience is ultimately inspired, albeit indirectly, by Timothy Leary, whose ideas I absorbed as an undergraduate through third-rate philosophers like Huston Smith, John Hick, and Marcus Borg. Of course, Leary, Huxley, and their disciples were all enamored of Hinduism, however deficient their understanding of it, so a pseudo-Hindu setting seemed appropriate for a story about a world where drugs and religion are inextricably linked.
But what ultimately convinced me to go all out with the Indian elements was my happy discovery that the religious practice I invented as a central feature of my fictional world—the worship of young girls as living goddesses—exists in real life. Although I obviously employed a lot of artistic license in my fantastical portrayal of it, kumari puja is a real thing: It is particularly prominent in Nepalese Buddhism, but there are versions of it in India as well. In the world of Rags and Muffin, of course, it is essential to every religion, which is why early chapters give the reader brief glimpses of both Christian and Tibetan Buddhist kumaris.
Cirsova also says,
I used to be something of a Hindu Mythology wonk in my younger years, so this was a pleasant surprise. Davidson incorporates the cultural textures without overly romanticizing them, showing both the beautiful aspects which Lord Curzon fell in love with as well as the ugly and downright evil.
If I depicted anything as evil, it was on account of plot necessity rather than personal opinion. My attitude toward India and its neighbors is about as neutral as it is possible to be: I am enamored of Indian culture and people, but my view of their history, religion, and mythology is almost purely academic. The Bhagavad-gita is a book I like to return to from time to time, but mostly because it has fine passages; I am not especially moved by its sweeping theology nor repulsed by its amoral and fatalistic stance on ethics.
Even kumari puja, which often exercises Western philanthropists and busybodies who believe Nepal’s worshiped girls are being abused, is a practice on which I have no strong opinion. On the one hand, I find it a rather charming form of idolatry. On the other hand, I think its critics are likely correct that it leaves its pampered girls unprepared to cope with the real world once their stint as goddesses is over. But on the gripping hand, Reuters and the BBC hate the practice, as revealed by their frequent exposes on the subject, and anything those organizations hate must have something good about it.
On another note, it was originally my intent to be entirely agnostic about the religious beliefs and practices portrayed in the book, allowing the reader to draw his own conclusions as to whether any of the mystical experiences are real or just drug-induced hallucinations. However, as the story developed, I reached a point where I was forced to reveal that the gods truly exist, which I partly regret.
Cirsova has one prominent criticism, which is quite fair:
There’s a lot of excellent worldbuilding in Rags & Muffin, but as a book, it’s a little all over the place in setting things up. A number of seemingly unrelated events, as well as side excursions of the main characters, tie in to the world and add a backdrop to the story but go nowhere on their own in this volume.
He’s correct that the book spends some time hanging Chekov’s Guns to be fired in later volumes, but part of the problem he detects is that I blended two different types of stories without complete success: This is first of all an action story, which requires a tight structure. But it’s also a milieu story, which is allowed to wander around.
That’s why there’s a sub-story, starting in chapter seven, in which an elaborate, city-wide, syncretistic religious ritual ends incongruously with a terrorist blowing up a bus: That sequence exists purely to show you what kind of world I’m drawing you into. Plotwise, it is barely justified because it introduces both Rags’s medical problem and the characters of Miss Marie and her henchmen, but its true purpose is to display the city, which is really the main character of the book.
Buy Rags and Muffin here.
