Hello friends,

While I’ve been failing to use my energy as a platform for other voices, I’ve understood for a long time how to build my own, so I’m declaring Extratone’s primary goal for the next year to be publishing original, emotionally and intellectually-stimulating work as it comes, while my personal goal will be building my own literacy in both the trade and the subjects which we are here to cover. Though in the now, the latter could not be more at odds with the core mission of this magazine, you can trust me when I tell you that my commitment to building this publication has not waned in the slightest — it’s simply time to figure out another way to achieve it.
 

I seriously doubt readers or participants in the community will notice much aside from the way I treat my own work. I’ll remain constantly in our Discord, immediately reachable by email, and my enthusiasm for new work will always be huge and immediate, but in the time between pitches and submissions, I’m going to focus on the list of potential works I’ve built up. I doubt also that I will equire more than a few months to figure out how to proceed, and I promised you’ll be exhaustively apprised of my progress in real time.

I then immediately jumped on one of my pet arguments of the past few years: that Google is replacing the church.

When you build a collection of the world’s smartest people in a self-sufficient environment that discourages exploration of other lifestyles and ideas, and you sustain the society with a gargantuan, relatively low-maintenance revenue stream, you create a culture which is not only well-primed for isolationism, but is also extremely inefficient.

And finally, after going to see Solo: A Star Wars Story on its opening night last night, I finished up a whole 5000 word review today, which discusses the film's bizarre maltreatment of some very sensitive themes.

In response to the forced violence between two drones for spectator sport, L3 is completely enraged, and she cries (among other things) “we are sentient!,” but her distress is trivialized as hysterical distraction (see: Django Unchained.) When she suggests to Qi-ra that Lando (who is already illegitimized as a cheating narcissist, and therefore effeminate) is attracted to her, it’s a joke (which many in my audience laughed at) at the expense of her trivialized sexuality. After she triumphs and declares the liberation of her kind to be her true cause, she is immediately destroyed fighting for its sake, yet her ideology is not once acknowledged by her fleshy companions, and her body is quickly gutted for the data on her “central processing unit” as it’s interfaced with the Falcon. Granted, Lando does thoughtfully muse “she’s part of the ship now” shortly afterward, which would be nice, if you’d forgotten his last words were an outright lie. Lastly, it’s worth noting how apathetic the main characters themselves are toward the Kessel miners, especially as they are packing up to leave, when the camera pans over the chaotic struggle between the liberated and their guards in very close proximity to the awaiting Falcon, yet there was not a suggestion that they would even consider letting them take refuge from the violence in their very spacious freighter. Aside from Han’s or Qi-ra’s, Solo treats liberation as charming or amusing, nothing more.

I know it's a lot, but I think a lot of it's quite entertaining, though this isn't much compared to the progress I've made on Blimp's Burden. If you'll remember back to February, I told you I was beginning work again on a novel which I'd originally conceptualized way back in early 2015. Then, I reported that I was just surpassing 10,000 words which is... barely a full idea yet, in novel terms. Since then, I've learned a lot about how I want to write this thing, but I've also inevitably been learning just how much I don't know yet.

Now, though, I am as near as makes no difference at 100,000 words of mostly-polished first draft (no, I still can't help but edit on the fly,) and a good portion of that needs to be entirely rewritten. Still, I have samples which I am eager to share with anyone who'll read them because - as I've said - writing a novel is very hard work. Though showing other people your work before it is complete is commonly regarded as a bad idea, I happen to end up with my best ideas when I'm able to bounce them off somebody, so feel free to reply with any feedback you have about these two excerpts.

First, here's a scene of the first time our dearest Barney wakes up in the hospital after his rabid destruction of the MapQuest office.

And The Terrible Theodore's Midnight Cheese Heist.

Both of these heavily borrow from my original Drywall movie notes, and I think they're the two that still make me laugh out loud during revision, so I hope you'll find them fun, too.

On a more personal note, that sensation I've been talking about that I've suddenly become invisible to the Twitter friends I used to engage with daily has really begun to despair now that I am away from all friends, online and otherwise. Isolation can lead to periods of ultra-productivity in me, which - I must confess - is much more appealing to me than the idea of going out to make new friends. I realize that I should work on a healthy balance now and resist the temptation to keep going.

Anyway, thanks for reading. Talk to ya soon.

David