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🇫🇷 Pardon ⚜️ My ⚜️ French 🇫🇷
Or rather, my lack of it. My current work in progress has absolutely no characters of French ancestry, thus far. Que c’est embarrassant…
Tout à propos de l’amour
The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. ~Victor Hugo
Boy, you know that’s right.
It’s hard to be your best self when everything hurts.
It’s easy to be cranky and unlovable.
Fortunately, I have a dear wife who is even more beautiful on the inside than she is on the outside (and she’s plenty beautiful on the outside).
She kindly looks past all of the crankiness that comes of being in perpetual discomfort and loves me for me, no matter how miserable, crampy, headachy, dizzy, tired and otherwise out of sorts that I usually am.
Thank God for Kelly Knowlan!
To love another person is to see the face of God. ~Victor Hugo
🇫🇷 The French Connection ⚜️
The French Connection Documentary | Al Profit
You usually don’t think of French ne’er-do-wells as being drug kingpins. They’re typically depicted as debonair jewel thieves or gold-digging giggolos who ingratiate themselves to rich widows.
As with everywhere else, people do all kinds of things no matter where they’re from.
Marseilles is a city on the French Riviera with a long history that goes back at least as far as the Phoenicians and probably well beyond.
While serving as a hub for 1930’s drug trade (that’s the French Connection), there’s so much more to this ancient city.
In fact, it lends its name to the French national anthem as well as “jeu marseillais” (game from Marseilles) which is a nickname for the French form of kickboxing known as Savate. I’d like to visit this magnificent city one day.
In the meantime, I can always visit New York City. Of course, I’ll have to wait for things to settle down. The Big Apple isn’t what it used to be. Hopefully, there are better days ahead and I can head back to get a better feel for the place as I write my superhero series, The Sentinels.
French Connection full car chase scene
Très séduisant
The most seductive thing about art is the personality of the artist himself. ~Paul Cezanne
Can you feel the heat? Bow-chicka-wow-wow…
Okay, maybe that’s what Cezanne was saying (he was French after all) or maybe he was saying the very souls of artists runs riot through their work.
With the written word, in particular, the writer’s mind and soul are laid bare.
And then there’s editing. Naked souls/brains aren’t really fit for publication, after all.
There needs to be some craft applied in order to make it artistic or at least generally consumable.
That’s always the big question. How far into the darkness do I lead you?
I’ve got some pretty twisted ideas that need to either be pruned or sharpened into psychological pungis that will scar my readers for life.
😈 Insert diabolical laughter here… 😈
That’s really the question, isn’t it? How low do you go?
Well, there’s definitely a baseline that you can’t delve below if you want to sell it on Amazon. There are subjects they will not permit. That’s fine. We might as well maintain some kind of standards, right?
Even so, a psychological punji needn’t be explicit. Saying without saying goes a lot farther than wallowing in nastiness.
The thing is, real life is nasty. Nasty things happen every day all around the world. Absolutely unspeakable things.
Fortunately, we have the intrepid souls in the police and the military who are tasked with shielding us from all of that.
Court transcripts are enough to scar a normal person for life. It takes its toll on career police officers.
That’s what I wanted to explore with The Sentinels. What if there were people who had super powers? What are the implications of that?
In the comic books, you just put on some tights and a cape and have at it. Life isn’t quite that simple for most of us. What are the real costs of a world with superhuman people in it?
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What would your car insurance be like if a huge rock monster threw your station wagon at an armored megalomaniac? What would your workday be like if an alien invasion was tearing the city down around your ears?
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What happens when “superheroes” decide to indulge in wish-fulfillment?
Strangely, Homelander (who is a complete sociopath) was only thinking about burning that crowd.
Nite Owl and Silk Spectre actually engage in what would be characterized as “entrapment” in order to gratuitously beat the living daylights out of some random muggers.
While this is typical for comic book storylines, it usually takes place within the aegis of “patrolling” and the muggers are caught in the act rather than led to their doom by outlawed former heroes looking for a thrill.
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And can we talk about the casual way that massive amounts of people are simply exterminated by rampaging aliens?
People are just minding their own business and a blob of hate from outer space just vaporizes people and property in pursuit of eating the whole damned planet! Fortunately, there’s a corps of space marshalls to protect billions of relatively innocent people from rampaging space baddies.
In The Avengers, the “God of Mischief” from Norse Mythology has a tremendous case of trying to compensate for his insecurity. This leads to an attempt to conquer Midgard (the planet Earth) because it matters to his brother, Thor. This burst of pathetic sibling rivalry kicks off a story arc that leads to Loki’s own death at the hands of the Mad Titan, Thanos as well as half of the living beings in the universe.
Fortunately, due to a “Time Heist” (that heralds the new grand story arc), everyone is brought back and Thanos is not only thwarted but also snapped out of existence by a very traumatized Tony Stark.
Just as in The Sentinels, the big catalyst in the MCU is chaos.
During the “Time Heist”, past Loki from the end of the first Avengers movie manages to get his hands on “The Tesseract” and escape. He’s quickly apprehended by the Time Variance Authority and gets roped into an extended drama that leads to Kang the Conqueror, the next story arc’s Big Bad.
Again, Loki’s insecurity leads to absolute chaos in the form of a fractured timeline leading to a multiversal war that is guaranteed to be quite a spectacle.
I know that my story arc will ultimately lead to and through the Chaos War, but I’m not sure what that consists of yet. It’s part of the plan that’s still a bit fuzzy because I still haven’t acted on Connor‘s advice to start at the end and work my way backwards.
I am still, at heart, a pantser. It’s really hard for me to plan ahead. That’s not how my brain currently works.
I’m working on it but I’m caught up in my own maelstrom of chaos for the time being. Most of my mental energy is going to the day job.
I still haven’t attained the kind of work-life balance that will let me devote weekends and evenings to story planning and grand arcs of storytelling.
I still haven’t even started on this year’s Holiday Season Serial Romance, either. Gawd, I’m busier than a one-legged man in a butt-kicking contest…
C’est tout pour le moment. I have places to go and things to do. I hope your weekend is more relaxing than mine is turning out to be.