Joe Vasicek is the author of more than twenty science fiction books, including the Star Wanderers and Sons of the Starfarers series. As a young man, he studied Arabic and traveled across the Middle East and the Caucasus. He claims Utah as his home.
The life of Simón Bolívar is the tragedy of a great and magnanimous man, whose lack of self-mastery over his own passions ultimately drove him to become the very tyrant he had sworn to defeat. A man who loved deeply but never faithfully, the last mistress whom the liberator cheated was Liberty herself.
(with a hat tip to Mike Duncan)
This movie is fantastic. It’s so fantastic, I saw it in theaters twice.
It’s one of the best war movies I’ve seen in years, but it’s not like other war movies. There is no one main character, there is no heroic charge or last stand, no clear victory or defeat. At the same time, there are cowards as well as heroes. There are men who care only about survival, and there are others—many others—who put their lives on the line to save people they’ve never met.
There’s lots of chaos and death, but very little blood. There’s also very little gunfire for a war movie, and very few explosions. When they happen, though, they’re all the more earth-shattering for the long lulls between them. That seems a lot more realistic to me—and a lot more terrifying.
I really love the fact that you never see the face of the Germans. For the guys on the ground, they’re more a force of nature than something they can actually fight. Even the guys in the air are more worried about how the dogfighting depletes their fuel than they are about actually getting shot down.
One of the things that really fascinates me about this movie is the context in which it happens. Most World War II movies take place in the second half of the war, during or after the Battle of Britain. When the Nazis failed to invade Britain, it was clear that they were going to lose (or at least that it would end in a stalemate on the western front). But when Dunkirk happened, everyone fully expected the Nazis to invade and conquer the UK just like they’d conquered France. It appeared at that time that the Germans were going to win.
It also strikes me that Dunkirk was where World War I met World War II. In the run up to the first world war, the Germans expected to sweep across France and push the British into the sea. They expected that victory was only a matter of weeks away. In the run up of the second world war, they expected a repeat of the brutal trench warfare that bogged down the western front for years. Instead, they got exactly the scenario that the Germans had expected in the first war but never gotten.
This movie made me think a lot about the major defining conflicts of previous generations and what our major defining conflict is going to be. I don’t think we’re far from another Dunkirk. Will we rise to the level of heroism that the British civilians showed when they rescued their soldiers stranded across the channel? Will we come together in the face of the next existential threat, or will we come completely apart?
Dunkirk is a fantasic movie, and I highly recommend it. It’s definitely one of Christopher Nolan’s bests.
Things are like people. They serve you best when you show them gentleness and love.
I’ve had such a ridiculously hard time lately trying to look up old characters, either from half-finished WIPs that I’ve recently picked up again, or from books I plan to publish but need to give a character description for the cover artist to work from. My Google-fu is pretty good, but a text search will only take you so far.
So yesterday, I put together a rough template for a character sheet. I plan to fill one out for every major character in my WIPs from now on.
====================
CHARACTER SHEET:
====================
FULL NAME:
AGE:
HEIGHT:
WEIGHT:
BUILD:
SKIN:
HAIR:
EYES:
OTHER:
MYERS-BRIGGS:
POLITICS:
SOCIAL CLASS:
RELIGION:
EDUCATION:
OCCUPATION:
RELATIONS:
==========
BACKSTORY:
============
MOTIVATIONS:
=======================
STRENGTHS & ADVANTAGES:
==================
FLAWS & HANDICAPS:
================
SYMPATHETIC HOW?
The federal income tax is simply a modern iteration of the corvée. It forces each citizen to spend a portion of their time and labor working for the crown.
No one is free who refuses to accept the consequences of their own actions.
Holy crap, is it the end of July already? I guess it is.
So I’ve been making progress on my current WIP, A Queen in Hiding (Sons of the Starfarers: Book 7). Not quite as much as I would like, but it’s coming along. As usual, of all the stories I could have written, I’ve chosen the hardest one to write, but that’s okay because it’s going to turn out quite well. And if it doesn’t, I’ll put it aside and come back to it later.
I haven’t been writing as many short stories as I would like, but I’ve got a couple in the works that should open up some interesting new universes. Also, my thoughts on short stories are starting to change. There aren’t very many markets for original fiction that are really worth it, once you factor in the wait time and the circulation along with the payout. However, there are a ton of places that pay only token amounts but take reprints and simultaneous submissions.
I still think it’s a bad idea to self-publish first, but I may only submit to three or four markets before publishing my stories myself and moving on to the reprint markets. If I can flood the smaller markets with a bunch of my stories, that might be better than waiting for them to trickle through the submissions pipeline one at a time.
On the publishing side, the next big project is The Sword Keeper. I just got the edits back. Haven’t gone through them yet, but I’ll do that as soon as I’m finished with my WIP. The big holdup is finding a cover artist. This is my first fantasy novel, and I really want it to be awesome. Need to get the ball rolling on that real soon.
Ideally, I would like to get to the point where I’ve got a new short story coming out every two to three weeks, and at least one novel on pre-order all through the year. The idea is to put another novel on pre-order before the latest one is fully released. The short story end shouldn’t be too hard, as long as I can keep writing them. The novel end is a bit tougher, as it requires publishing four novels a year (maximum pre-order length is 90 days).
It’s not impossible, though. I’m scheduling the last four Sons of the Starfarers releases so that the next one is up for pre-order before the latest one comes out. That will hopefully buy some time to line up a few full-length novels in the queue. Just need to keep up a solid writing schedule for the rest of the year.
And on that note, I’m going to get back to writing. Take care!
There are none so poor as those who only have student loan debt.
The greatest and only truly lasting legacy we leave is written in the hearts of those we serve.