Apocalypse Now
Updates
Metropo
Metropo is now available in two new flavours. The prose stories from the collection are available for the Kindle and the comic shorts are now ready for your viewing pleasure on ComiXology.
Go Home & Disconnect
Art, covers, etc. are now locked down for these two projects. Both are now ready for their re-release and release respectively. The wheel of comic book development turns slowly.
Prose
I’m currently at work on a short story after spotting an anthology submission call that fit an idea I was already in the middle of developing. I’m currently aiming for around the 5000 word mark. I’ll label this one Project Tokyo for now I think. The initial draft will be done in the next few days. Then the fun begins.
Additionally, I’ve been taking advantage of Joe Mynhardt’s mentorship program for most of August so far. Joe is the Bram Stoker Award winning editor and publisher behind the excellent Crystal Lake Publishing. The chats/emails with Joe have opened my eyes to a side of writing that I’ll admit was a real weakness of mine - the business side of things, thinking of aspects such as branding, the different avenues of promotion, etc.
On top of that I got some good feedback from Joe on two recent shorts. As an aside, if you’re a process fiend like I am I highly recommend Crystal Lake’s selection of non-fiction books. Their ‘Writers on Writers’ series is a particular favourite of mine.
Editing
I’ve also been busy in the editing salt mines for the past few weeks. I often beat myself up (emotionally, not like Ed Norton in Fight Club) about productivity, etc. but writing all this out has actually made me realise how many plates I’m spinning at the moment. None have smashed. Yet.
Links
A fairly environment focused selection this edition.
First up, Outside has a piece on the alternatives to meat that now exist:
“Cows are not optimized to make meat; they’re optimized to be cows. It takes 36,000 calories of feed to produce 1,000 calories of beef. In the process, it uses more than 430 gallons of water and 1,500 square feet of land, and it generates nearly ten kilograms of greenhouse-gas emissions. In comparison, an Impossible Burger uses 87 percent less water, 96 percent less land, and produces 89 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions. Beyond Meat’s footprint is similarly svelte.”
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On the same tack George Monbiot talks about how the livestock industry is helping destroy the planet:
“Research published in April by the Harvard academics Helen Harwatt and Matthew Hayek, also missed by the IPCC, shows that, alongside millions of hectares of pasture land, an astonishing 55% of cropping land (in other words, land that is ploughed and seeded) in the UK is used to grow feed for livestock, rather than food for humans. If our grazing land was allowed to revert to natural ecosystems, and the land currently used to grow feed for livestock was used to grow grains, beans, fruit, nuts and vegetables for humans, this switch would allow the UK to absorb an astonishing quantity of carbon: equivalent, the paper estimates, to 9 years of our total emissions.”
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Bringing this theme to a close is this excellent piece from The Intercept about some of the historical and political context around the current devastation in the Amazon. Make no mistake, the current fires are a continuation of human and commercial interests:
“Scientists warn that losing another fifth of Brazil’s rainforest will trigger the feedback loop known as dieback, in which the forest begins to dry out and burn in a cascading system collapse, beyond the reach of any subsequent human intervention or regret. This would release a doomsday bomb of stored carbon, disappear the cloud vapor that consumes the sun’s radiation before it can be absorbed as heat, and shrivel the rivers in the basin and in the sky.”
Consider all three of these links and come to your own conclusions.
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I’m a big fan of Reid McCarter’s writing on video games. Here he talks about the lack of nuance or message in Wolfenstein:Youngblood.
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Current Affairs on our descent into cruelty and the recent surge in authoritarianism around the globe.
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The awesome Autumn Christian blogs at LitReactor about the ‘8 Signs You Are Afraid of Writing’.
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In one of their recent editions, the excellent nothing.here newsletter included a link to Bellingcat on El Paso and ‘the gamification of terror’. It’s a really good piece and if you found it interesting I highly recommend you seek out more work by the piece’s author Robert Evans.
He’s recently produced a (free) audibook called ‘The War on Everyone’ (available here) that is concerned with the history and rise of fascism and the far right. It’s a thoroughly interesting (and alarming) listen. Evans also has two podcasts, ‘Behind the Bastards’ and ‘It Could Happen Here’. The former is a dissection of the worst people history has to offer with an emphasis on millionaires and dictators. Recommended.
He also recently did a ready of ‘The War On Everyone’ for BTB that includes some extra commentary. It’s worthy of your ears and time.
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Right, I’m off to revel in the rare beauty of a three day weekend. See you in two!