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National Cocoa Day 2023
Perfect for a chilly December Hump Day, it’s National Cocoa Day. So, break out your marshmallows and your peppermint swizzle sticks and let’s go cuckoo for cocoa!
Calories In Chocolate Don’t Count
The calories in chocolate don’t count because chocolate comes from the cocoa bean, and everyone knows that beans are good for you.
~Jill Shalvis
I love that leap of illogic. It’s classic comedy misdirection, but sadly not true. It’s not technically the chocolate that bears the calories so much as the sugar that’s added to it to make it so gloriously delicious.
Whether you find a sugar-free option or stick with the classically decadent sugar-rich variations, cocoa is a classic holiday beverage.
It’s a perfect comfort beverage from the first frost of 🍂 Autumn 🍂 through the shortest and coldest days of ❄️ Winter ❄️ and even into the earliest days of 💐 Spring 🌷.
Some say that a job well done is its own reward. I’m not so altruistic. I feel that the reward of a job well done is that it stays done and I can kick back and have a mug of sugar-free cocoa.
It’s not so much to ask, really.
Perfect Cup Of Cocoa
Binging with Babish: Judy the Elf’s Hot Cocoa from The Santa Clause
Nothing better than a bored foodie rising to the challenge. I’m not sure that I’m foodie enough to go to all that effort, but I have been known to attempt to optimize the occasional mug of cocoa.
Fortunately, I have a variety of sugar-free hot chocolate options. Clearly, one of my favorite is the Pumpkin Spice Hot Chocolate. Sadly, this isn’t sugar-free, so I have to either consume it sparingly or make my own from standard sugar-free hot chocolate and Pumpkin Spice coffee syrup.
Suit Yourself
Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it. ~Jesse Stuart
That holds true for software, as well. A friend of mine told me way back at my first computer job said, “When you try to make something that’s everything for everyone, it winds up being nothing for noone.”
There’s a theory of marketing that suggests selling a universally appealing product. Problem is, there’s no such thing.
Everybody needs water, but not everybody wants water. You might want it on a hot day, but a lot of people will want juice, sports drinks or even soda instead.
People have definite preferences, which is why niche businesses exist. Broad groups of people have diverse preferences, which is why department stores and diners exist.
Even in the latter case, the stores and restaurants have specific products and services that they offer. They don’t sell “everything”. They sell stuff that most people want occasionally in a few varieties. You can’t buy absolutely anything at Target or Walmart. You can buy basic staples such as groceries, clothes, housewares and seasonal items in varieties that they think you might like at a price point you might be willing to pay. They look like they’re trying to be everything to everyone, but they’re actually not. They’re trying to be useful to the average consumer.
On the other hand, specialists only sell to people who have a specific interest. This isn’t as restrictive as it sounds. As with the general store shoppers, a lot of people will sometimes want a specific thing. On the other hand, there are specific people who want a specific thing as often as they can afford it. Since we see audience-specific stores that survive for years and decades, the infrequent general shopper and the frequent specialist shopper is a big enough clientele base.
The same is true of genre fiction.
If you write what you are interested in or even passionate about, you will find this niche clientele that keeps comic book stores, coffee shops, jewelry stores, head shops and even adult boutiques open.
As I’ve said, there’s a lid for every pot. There are some people who like hard sci-fi like The Expanse and there are people who like space opera like Star Wars. There are a lot of people who like both, just because it’s sci-fi. There are a few people who will try it because it’s the latest thing. This is a pretty broad audience. This encourages studios to take a chance on sci-fi again and again. Some of it’s low-budget schlock with bad acting, poor storytelling and awful effects. Some of it is extraordinarily well done with all the key elements in place. Most of it is somewhere in between. Sci-fi is a viable genre whether Disney is wrecking Star Wars or not. It doesn’t help, but it doesn’t hurt all that much overall.
The same is true of fantasy. Tolkien’s peers were aghast at his decision to write fantasy. You’re a college professor, for goodness sake. Write something serious and scholarly. He certainly was qualified to do so. He could have written the English alternative to War and Peace or whatever he set his mind to. The good professor had this personal mythology he had created. It was demanding to be told. Any writer can understand that. He wrote what suited him, what he was personally interested and invested in. We’re all the richer for it.
We’re coming up on a century of superheroes. The so-called Golden Age of Superheroes began in the 1930s. Some of the most iconic and enduring characters in the world were created in the creative madhouse of classic comic book publishing. Despite the MCU and DCEU doing horrible things with their IPs, people hold out hope that the next thing with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman or Captain America will be as great as they remember their first time having opened a comic book.
I like all three of these genres. I enjoy most of the works in these genres.
I like loosey-goosey Space Operas like Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek and Star Wars.
I like The Expanse and would like to see more works like it. I’m not that big a fan of “hard sci-fi”, because it’s a little too obsessive for my taste. I prefer story over message.
I’d like Far-Flung Reaches to be mostly story, but reasonably grounded in possible science. I also have an interest in it spanning different ages. Not that I am looking to make some great sweeping epic, but rather that I see this genre as a broad field where I can write something that takes place in the near future with what is now cutting edge or theoretical science and I can write other stories that take place centuries or millennia in the future several light years or even kiloparsecs from Earth.
I’ve loved fantasy even before I began playing D&D or read The Hobbit. There’s something intoxicating to me about “olden times”, even though I wouldn’t last a minute in such a setting. All the classic movies replayed on UHF like The Vikings, The Black Shield of Falworth, various interpretations of Robin Hood, King Arthur, fairy tales and anything with a sword, a wizard or a monster excited my imagination. Once I got into D&D, fantasy media absolutely took off with movies like Excalibur, Legend, Conan the Barbarian and so many more. The more sophisticated that special effects and animation became, the more imaginative the movies could be. Ralph Bakshi and Rankin & Bass took preliminary runs at The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit before Peter Jackson hit a home run with his trilogy.
I’d like Tales Of Olde Auringia to be mostly story with a reasonable grasp of the limitations of a pre-modern frontier setting. It will also span various ages of the imaginary world where the land of Auringia is located. I don’t know that I want or need that to be a fully interconnected, contiguous epic. I expect that certain books will set up the conflicts of other books, but I’m not looking to tie it all together in a single narrative thread.
I’ve loved comic books since the first time I received one. I also had the joy of watching superhero reruns on UHF, such as classic Spider-Man, Aquaman, Batman, even Underdog and Mighty Mouse. As the years rolled on, superhero media improved and expanded in both animated and live-action presentations. We got Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno as the Incredible Hulk, Christopher Reeve as Superman, Michael Keaton as Batman and on and on and on. Even with the low-grade special effects of a body builder in body paint and a green wig pushing heavy stuff around or a guy in a track suit jumping onto the roof of a multi-story building (actually, it was a stuntman hopping off the roof backwards into an airbag and the film run backwards to make it look like the Six Million Dollar Man was jumping up), we had engaging stories and just enough superhero panache to make it uniquely interesting. Better effects and higher budgets have given us great shows and movies, but the story has to be central. That’s why I love the Netflix Daredevil series so much. Sure, it’s not as high-end as Iron Man or the Guardians of the Galaxy, but there are still effects that are so good that you don’t even realize they’re effects. The bullet wounds, the fight sequences. the way he bounces batons off the wall to hit the bad guys are all special effects that are so good and so believable that you don’t even realize they aren’t real. Amazing.
I’d like The Sentinels to be mostly story with a grounding in a realistic world where super powers have become available to a very, very few individuals. Everybody else has to live life by all the normal rules of daily life. I’m interested in examining what that does to the people with the powers and to those around them.
These are the stories that interest me. I have no other marketing proof that anyone else is interested in these stories than the fact that this media is available to me in massive abundance, that I’m clearly not the only one consuming this media or that companies are making enough money producing it to justify its continued production.
A quick search of Amazon Prime Video shows quite a few movies and shows in each genre that are available directly as a Prime subscriber or for individual purchase.
It’s not just the mainstream Hollywood stuff, either. I watched Guardian, a Russian superhero movie and enjoyed it. The Japanese have virtually owned the animation space since before I was born. From Speed Racer to My Hero Academia, my whole life has been blessed with the artistic productions of the Japanese imagination. Bollywood, Nollywood and the various other regional outlets have joined their East Asian forerunners in the creation of unique and wondrous tales.
I’m not the only one writing this stuff.
I’m not the only one reading or watching this stuff.
These genres have known financial viability, regardless of how some of the bigger studios are screwing it for the rest of us. Eventually, we’ll move past what certain people in boardrooms want us to want and people will produce what they actually want.
I’d like to be one of them.
That’s it for a mid-week cocoa break. ☕ Go be productive for a while and earn yourself another tankard of perfect Christmastime cocoa…