Clouds in the Future: The Great War of the Worlds #2
Now available for pre-order!
Thursday, June 27, 2024
A monk said to Jōshū, “I have just entered this monastery. Please teach me.” “Have you eaten your rice porridge?” asked Jōshū. “Yes, I have,” replied the monk. “Then you had better wash your bowl,” said Jōshū. With this the monk gained insight.
In other words, get to work.
A very simple teaching that is very difficult to implement.
Before you get to work, enjoy another Gen X flashback:
Happy Wednesday! It’s time for a Morning meditation.
“This body is the Bodhi tree.
The mind is like a bright mirror.
Polish it and keep it clean,
let no dust mote settle there” - Shenhsiu
Still slowly progressing on Clouds in the Future. I’m behind schedule, but hanging in there.
Back to work.
Making progress on Clouds in the Future. It’s slow, but steady. Also have a few irons in the fire in terms of spreading the word.
Ran across this classic gem while procrastinating. Must be my week for rediscovering bands from Brixton.
It’s been a while since I posted here.
Mostly because I’ve been busy working on Clouds in the Future and on marketing Shadows of the Past. Shadows has been selling better than expected.
Hopefully I can get back to a regular posting achedule here.
In the meantime, this Youtube channel is a goldmine for folks in a certain age range.
For example:
Sometimes It’s Best to Move on
I just came across Scalzi’s review of Godzilla Minus One for Uncanny Magazine. He, unsurprisingly, nails what makes it one of the best Godzilla movies made since 1954:
Godzilla Minus One is terrific in no small part because its Godzilla is not a friend, it is a force, violent, implacable, unable to be reasoned with or controlled in any meaningful way.
Godzilla works best a metaphor. For nuclear weapons in the original and Minus One, for Fukushima in Shin Godzilla.
The problem is, as Scalzi points out, that only works a few times.
Godzilla got domesticated because he became a star. Being an unknowable terror is fine for one film, and possibly for a sequel or two. But apparently the thinking is, if you want to keep people coming back film after film, eventually you have to make your monster someone the audience roots for, even if the monster is still nominally a bad guy.
After a while, you gotta move on.
That’s where Legendary is. Their Godzilla fought the MUTOS, played hero against Ghidorah, fought Kong, teamed up with Kong to fight, um, more Kongs…
Yeah, time to move on.
Just finished The Day of the Martians by H.E. Wilburson.
The terror of the coming of the Martians is all but a distant memory, a bad dream that has faded with time — until the shocking discovery years later, of an unopened Martian cylinder….
After gaining five awards at the 2020 Los Angeles Science Fiction Film Festival (Audio Drama category) The Martian Diaries series, continuing The War Of The Worlds, is now available as ebooks and audiobooks.
If you’re a fan of the H.G. Wells alien invasion book, start this award-winning 3-part sequel today, because you won’t want to miss this story!
Day of the Martians is a different take on a sequel to H.G. Wells War of the Worlds from Shadows of The Past. It’s written in a style close to Wells, starts sooner after the attack, and has the Martians attempting another direct attack. You could picture it being a sequel written by the original author.
More critically, it has the survivors outright avoiding Martian technology, rather than working to harness it like they do in my version.
It’s a quick read, and I am looking forward to reading the next book in the series soon. Check it out!