Authors Electric

So I had covid. Double jabbed in March and May, and then caught the bloody thing last month. It’s a nasty little bugger too – wiped me out for 10 days, more or less, although not life-threatening by any means. Luckily we have good friends and were well-supplied with necessities, but for a good many days, there was nothing but television. I couldn’t even summon up enough energy or concentration to read.  Netflix comes to the rescue again. This time it’s Gotham . ** Spoiler alert: do not read on if you don’t want to learn what happens **  We’re still watching this now (just started season 5). I have mixed feelings, although I’ve got through 4 seasons so it’s not all bad! Leaving out the fact that nobody important really seems to die and our heroes keep getting captured and tortured and fight time and time again, and yet never seem to suffer more than a few cuts and bruises; ignore the caricature characters – this is comic territory after all – and forget the fact that the cops ...

Or Why Moonlighting Was and Remains One of the Best Shows in Television History This month, I had planned to continue my countdown of the five best metafictional comic books . I really had. For those of you who have forgotten (or are too lazy to go read the previous posts), though, I wanted to preface it with a brief recap of metafiction . However, the recap got away from me and kind of became the whole post. But, hey, it's educational and funny, and it has lots of great clips of David Addison and Maddie Hayes playing Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd. So sit back and enjoy. Metafiction, as the previous link explains, is any work of fiction that is, either overtly or subtly, aware of itself as a work of fiction. There are essentially three types of metafiction. There's the metafiction in which the characters are literally aware that they are works of fiction. This is, perhaps, the type of metafiction that is by far the easiest to spot. Characters often "break...

If you've been following my posts for the last few months, you know that I am now embarked on  another countdown . This time we're counting down the five best metafictional comics. These are comics that in some way deal directly with the art of writing. Before we move on with the countdown, though, I thought I'd like to take a minute to explain the highly scientific method I employed to arrive at this list. First, I approached a trained team of comic book scholars . . . Well not exactly like this group... yeah, that's more like it. . . . and asked them for recommendations. From this list, I eliminated the titles that were not applicable to my purpose (or that I had not read and were too long to skim over). I then chose the five titles that best fit my description of metafictional (in other words, the ones that I liked best). Finally, I presented my team of experts with my list and asked their opinions, eliminating any opinion contrary to mine. ...

I know, it seems like I just finished my last countdown . But once again, I find myself without an idea for this month's blog post. I used up all my righteous anger with Amazon last month, and it's been relatively quiet on the self-publishing front, so I don't have anything new to be upset about. The month before that, I gave advice on developing ideas , so anything I write about that will seem to be treading on my own toes. and that never ends well. I had thought about writing about creating convincing dialogue, but as soon as I sat down to do that, I forgot all the words. I could give you pointers on writing a self-published bestseller, but I'd have to do that first. So that leaves a countdown. However, I am going to do it a little differently this time around. Last time, I held fast to my schedule and made sure I continued the countdown until it was done. I put new ideas aside, determined to use them when I was finished with the countdown. I wound u...