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It’s Getting Hot In Here!

Today is a bit of “Summer” being Summer. We’re looking at high 80s or low 90s. I’m not liking life in conditions like this and not just because of the nasty weather…

Hot AF

Nelly – Hot In Herre (Official Music Video)

“They” told us the first round of COVID19 would go into hibernation once the temperatures started going up.

Unfortunately, “they” still have us wearing masks to go to the store or the doctor’s office.

Strangely enough, “they” don’t seem to have a problem with people rioting and burning stuff down while not wearing masks or being 6′ apart. The hypocrisy is staggering.

Truth is, we’re sick of “them“.

We’re sick of their incessant bullshit and their divisive agendas.

We’re sick of the Saul Alinsky playbook.

We’re sick of the secret money
paying for bricks to be delivered to
rampaging assholes and paid “protestors”.

We’re sick of being trapped at home
unless we’re contributing to the chaos.

We’re sick of being told whether or not
we have the rights stated in the US Constitution.

Enough of this damned hoax already.

We’re sick to death of the never-ending bullshit.

It needs to end now.

The 🔥 Hottest 🔥 Woman Alive

The Crew Cuts – Sh Boom Sh Boom

I’m only too happy to be grateful for the gift that is my beloved wife. I don’t have enough hours in the day to fully express just how wonderful she is to me.

The only thing I don’t like about her is that she keeps deleting cute pictures of herself from her phone. She takes selfies with or without our fuzzies and they’re always so adorable. Then she scrolls through her camera roll and deletes them!

Noooooooooooo!

It’s awful because I like a lot of the ones she deletes. I like every part of her, even the parts she doesn’t like herself. ⚭ She’s my favorite person forever and always. 💙

I Can’t Help Myself (Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch)

Essence of the Antihero

He Who Fights With Monsters…

There’s something to be said for “fighting fire with fire“, but there is also such a thing as “too much of a good thing“. As the narrator of the video above notes, the temptation among some quarters of society to begin combatting the Alinskyite tactics of BLM and AntiFA by using the very same tactics against them risks becoming the monster they seek to destroy.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

The issue is that there is a surplus of “useful idiots” who don’t mind getting paid $15/hr to run around and commit acts of mayhem. The other issue is that there are ridiculous sums of cash in circulation to undermine society as we understand it. It’s as sickening as it is ludicrous. The cognitive dissonance is mounting to a fever pitch.

One of my characters faces a similar dilemma. In the Sentinelsverse, there is a collection of essentially immortal people who have been running Empire City since the days of the first Dutch settlement. He’s the only one of the viewpoint characters who has any idea who these people are or what they’re up to. Another character is aware of them in a separate context but her struggle is different.

This guy has been drafted into the organization as a successor to a member who has been present since the Seventeenth Century. As she reveals more of the group and their activities to him, the more horrified he becomes. However, as a member of a dangerous secret society, he is under constant threat of death. If he does not agree to join, he dies. If he lets on to people outside of the society that he has joined or that the society even exists, he dies. If he openly opposes the group or their many functionaries, he dies.

The weight of this burden is every bit as horrifying as it is for those of us who have calmly stayed home since March so as not to “kill Grandma” or be a “Typhoid Mary” to see all these unmasked maniacs burning, looting, rioting, maiming people, defacing public structures and destroying historical monuments and statuary within less than 6′ of each other.

OH, THE HUMANITY!

So, our antihero will need to play it close to the vest in order to preserve his own life and the lives of those he loves while taking the fight to the monstrous masters of Empire City. The question remains, will he retain his humanity while combatting the inhuman menace he has been unwittingly groomed to join since before his own father’s birth.

How far can he go to put an end to an unseen horror without himself becoming the darkness that fills the void?

It’s been said that “Every villain is a hero in his own mind.“. Would a man who has gone too far even know when he stopped being the actual hero? If his struggle was necessarily secret, how would anyone ever know he was any kind of hero to begin with?

It’s an interesting thought experiment. Perhaps that’s why I included him in the story as a POV character! You know? Sometimes I amaze even myself…

The Basis of Drama

Drama is anticipation mingled with uncertainty. ~William Archer

Each of the viewpoint characters in the first book of The Sentinels series has his or her own defining conflict. The resolution of each of those conflicts is, to some extent, interdependent on the needs and reactions of the others.

I’ve boiled the viewpoint characters’ struggles down so I can plot effectively.

Tanda wants to be a superhero but doesn’t know she has been all along. Tanda was a fan of the Sentinels from the first time she saw them at a school assembly in Second Grade. She dedicated her life to being a superhero when she grew up, but she didn’t really believe she could achieve that goal. Even when she got her superpowers and joined the Sentinels, the doubts continue to plague her. What can possibly happen to convince her that she has already achieved the goal she doesn’t believe she can ever attain?

Meirhe is a superhero but doesn’t want to be. She was happy at home. Life was safe, if boring. She was an apprentice to a florist, picking arrangements under the direction of her mentors. Suddenly, she’s in Empire City. Everybody is a terrifying giant. The pace of life is unnervingly frantic. The environment is jarringly ugly compared to her homeworld. She hates everything about being here and she just wants to go home. How can she ever come to terms with being stuck someplace she despises?

Dave wants his dad to just be a guy so he can be his dad for once. He is the son of the world’s first professional superhero. His dad was doing all the stuff people imagine comic book heroes would do. Foiling bank robberies, shutting down smuggling rings, defeating crime of all kinds is his dad’s claim to fame. Dave doesn’t care. He just wants his dad to exclusively be his dad for the first time in his life. How can he help his dad to hang up the hero biz once and for all?

Claudia is a superfan who wishes she could just be rid of the gangsters. She’s a kid who idolizes the Sentinels much as Tanda did. Unlike Tanda, she didn’t have naturally blue hair to reinforce the idea that perhaps she could be a superhero when she grew up. She thinks of herself exclusively as a normal person who will live a normal life, except that she already isn’t. How can a girl in a neighborhood besieged by gangsters hope to make life better for herself and her family without superpowers?

David got drafted into The Conclave and he’s appalled. Here’s our antihero. David is from a well-to-do family and has never wanted for anything. He’s precociously intelligent and graduated college when he was 16. At 22, he’s the superintendent of a collection of charter schools spanning several disciplines. He thought this was his ultimate destiny until his aged aunt reveals that he’s to take her place in a secret society that runs Empire City in the event of her demise. How is a basically decent young man going to survive the horrors of a centuries-old criminal conspiracy that he was specifically bred to join?

That’s the approach I’m taking to make this story work. I guess we’ll see how the readers take to it.

The basis of drama is… the struggle of the hero towards a specific goal at the end of which he realises that what kept him from it was, in the lesser drama, civilisation and, in the great drama, the discovery of something that he did not set out to discover but which can be seen retrospectively as inevitable. ~David Mamet

I’m sitting here roasting to death, so it’s hard to get on with the writing but get on with it I shall. Well, after I’ve had a late lunch and gotten started on some sort of dinner, that is…