‘Sailor Moon Eternal’ Headed to Netflix

Netflix just announced that Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon Eternal the Movie (yes, that is the title) will be available worldwide on . I’m crossing my fingers that the original Japanese will be available in the U.S.

This movie is a sequel to the troubled Sailor Moon Crystal series, which sought to hew closer to its source material than the much-beloved Nineties anime did. Poor animation and several other bad choices hindered it. The movie, at least, is likely to have a higher quality than the television series, or so we hope—I can’t help but notice that the teaser trailer is nothing but transformations and attacks, which always have the most impressive animation in a magical-girl show. So we’ll have to wait and see whether the rest of the film is as good.

As you may recall, I have previously discussed Sailor Moon Super S, which is the original anime’s interpretation of this same story arc. Fans generally consider Super S the weakest entry in the Nineties anime, so it will be interesting to see how Eternal the Movie compares. It will, at least, have a lower bar to clear than Sailor Moon Crystal did.

Jake and the Dynamo, Book 2 Cover

Here is a color version of the detail from the cover of Dead 2 Rites, which I previously posted in black and white. This is the sequel to Jake and the Dynamo, which will be available again soon in a newly revised text; when it goes up, Dead 2 Rites should simultaneously become available for pre-order.

The character featured here is Magical Girl Metal Huntress Vanessa Van Halensing, a vampire-hunting rock starlet who battles the forces of evil with her crucifix keytar. She plays, let us say, an instrumental role in the story that unfolds in this exciting second volume: Ancient conspiracies, alien gods, murderous cabals, and sugary foods come together in an effort to destroy the remnants of the human race—and only Jake and the Dynamo stand in the way!

The Importance of Owning Physical Media: Amazon Censors Manga

Amazon has grown increasingly censorious in recent days. The online sales giant became huge by offering anything and everything, but over the past few years, it has, like the other tech giants, begun banning content.

Once a corporation gets a taste for censorship, it will steadily grow more censorious: As I previously discussed, Amazon in 2020 began banning light novels, apparently at random. Then, of course, they coordinated with Twitter, Google, and Apple to delete the microblogging platform Parler from the internet. More recently still, they banned Ryan Anderson’s book, When Harry Became Sally, because it criticized the new religion.

In recent days, I have taken to downloading manga on my Kindle because it’s convenient and cheaper than print. I have a few series I’ve followed that way. Recently, as I was looking over my digital copies of the harem manga We Never Learn, I noticed volume 3 was missing from my collection even though I had purchased and read it. So I checked the Amazon store; it is gone from Amazon entirely, both in print and digitally.

I contacted Amazon, and the tech to whom I spoke eventually told me the book was no longer available, and then he told me this gem:

Screenshot of chat conversation

I slightly regret my emotional incontinence, which I directed at a mere underpaid staffer who is not privy to the reason my property had been taken from me. He did not know why Amazon had deleted a book from my personal library without notice or explanation.

Screenshot of chat conversation

He told me that the availability of the book was up to the “author or content owner,” sidestepping the uncomfortable fact that it is also up to Amazon itself—which has considerably more power—and also sidestepping the fact that Amazon had not merely stopped selling the book but destroyed my copy.

The book, by the way, is still available on Barnes & Noble as of this writing, which indicates that this is an act of censorship on Amazon’s part. As with the previously censored light novels, we will probably never know the reason for sure, but it likely has to do with someone getting offended by the swimsuit on the cover.

We Never Learn Volume 3

This is not the first time Amazon has destroyed customers’ property. Back when the Kindle was new, Amazon revealed that it has the power to delete digital books from our possession without explanation: It famously deleted copies of 1984 right off people’s devices.

The guy I talked to didn’t know why my book had disappeared, nor is there any reason he should. The point of all this, however, is that, when you buy digital, you don’t assume the full control you have when you buy analog, especially in an age of streaming and constant internet connections, an age when our overlords want us to “own nothing and be happy.”

Had I spent the extra money for print copies of this manga, I would still have the whole series without gaps in it; Amazon can delete stuff off my device but can’t break into my house and raid my shelves—yet.

Given how censorious Amazon is becoming, buying print books is increasingly important. This little example of censorship involves a trivial work; its disappearance annoys me, but I won’t shed tears over it. There are, however, much more important and substantial books that will eventually be in our overlords’ crosshairs, and the day will come suddenly when, as with those six Dr. Seuss books, you simply won’t be able to get them at all, anywhere.

Project Update with a First Peek

I know I don’t post enough these days; aside from my projects, I’m getting used to the new baby. But I have some good news: The cover art for Dead 2 Rites, the second book of Jake and the Dynamo, is well underway.

My plan is to get both covers completed at once; then I will re-release the first book and offer the second for pre-order. I will hire a logo artist to make the graphics to go over the cover art, but I want to have both covers in hand first so I can offer them to the logo artist to do all at once.

In the image on this post, you can see an initial sketch of Van Halensing, the vampire-hunting rock starlet who features prominently in Dead 2 Rites.

Since I’m new at this, I’m still not comfortable giving a projected release date because I’m unsure how long the logo art will take, or whether there might be some additional delays on the roll-out. But I am still hoping to release Jake and the Dynamo this month and Dead 2 Rites a month later.

In the meanwhile, I am still working on the manuscript of Rags and Muffin, tightening the prose and putting on the final polish before I generate the books. I like the work of my present artist but haven’t decided yet whether to use him for Rags and Muffin or to find someone with a more gritty, and perhaps photorealistic, style, which I think would be more appropriate for this particular book, which is less cartoonish. There are plenty of pro cover designers who would be interesting to work with but also more expensive.

Social Credit, Dystopia, and the ‘Spirit Flyer’ Series

As the world goes on and history continues to be one damn thing after another, I often hear people comparing present events and circumstances to various dystopian novels—1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Brave New World being constant favorites. However, on the rare occasions that I make the mistake of turning on the news, I am reminded most of an obscure series of children’s chapter books called the Spirit Flyer series, by John Bibee.

I had not read these books since I was a small child, and they were intended for a niche readership, so when I recently went looking for them, I expected to have to dredge up informational tidbits from dark corners of the internet. However, it turns out that the books have their fans, and three of them (there are eight in total) are currently available on Kindle.*

The Magic Bicycle

The first of these books, The Magic Bicycle, was published in . Written from an explicitly Evangelical Christian perspective, The Magic Bicycle is an early example of what came to be known as “CBA fiction” (CBA stands for Christian Booksellers’ Association). It also comes from the era of the so-called “Satanic Panic,” which informs much of its imagery. It is a precursor to the most successful, or at least best-known, CBA novel, Frank Peretti’s This Present Darkness (), which it somewhat resembles, albeit without Peretti’s stylistic finesse.

Peretti’s work is largely responsible for popularizing a movement within Pentecostal Christianity called “Spiritual Warfare,” which involves finding out the names of “Territorial Spirits” who control various places and things, and presuming to command them. (Older Christian sects would consider such activities superstitious, dangerous, or both.) In any case, at least one site sees a link between the Spirit Flyer books and the Spiritual Warfare movement, which may or may not be accurate.

Although an adult reader will immediately notice their shortcomings, the Spirit Flyer books stuck in my mind after I read a handful of them as a child. They contain exceptionally weird imagery and a set of villains capable of terrifying the youngest readers; indeed, I recall that I attempted to read one of these books (I think it was book 3, The Only Game in Town), and quit because I found some of the content too disturbing.

Continue reading “Social Credit, Dystopia, and the ‘Spirit Flyer’ Series”

Sneak Peek: Jake and the Dynamo’s New Cover

Here is a detail from the new wraparound cover that will grace the re-release of Jake and the Dynamo. It still needs to go to the logo artist for title graphics and the blurb and so forth, but it is otherwise complete, thanks to the impressively fast work of Eduardo Moura Barbosa.

This (finally!) captures the image I have long wanted of Jake and Pretty Dynamo together: Dynamo flying on her board with a panicked Jake hanging by his fingertips. Although not precisely like any particular scene, it captures the relationship between these two characters in the early chapters.

Editing and Formatting: Rags & Muffin

I am currently putting the final touches on Rags and Muffin, the book project, a long time in coming, formerly known as Rag & Muffin. I still like the original title better, but I changed it because the ampersand is a special character in HTML, so it would likely cause me grief when posting it on other sites.

Also, the book’s antiheroine main character is named Rags, and I’m tired of people asking me why it’s “Rag,” singular, in the title. The reason is because of the pun, but I don’t want to explain anymore.

I have said previously on this blog that Rags and Muffin was through the editing phase. This is my first novel (first written, not published), and like many first novels, it needed years’ worth of work to make it worthy of print. It really had been edited to death before now, but I’ve recently learned a lot about improving sentence structure and deleting unnecessary words, so I am giving it one last round of improvement—and then I will finally let my baby out into the world.

This will be the third book I release this year; it will appear after the re-published Jake and the Dynamo and its sequel Dead 2 Rites.

Once I’m done with this, I am back to working on the third book in the Jake and the Dynamo sequence, which runs under the working title of The Shadow of His Shadow. I hope to finish and release that book this year also.

Jake and the Dynamo, Re:Formatted

I’ve got the cover art farmed out for both Jake and the Dynamo and its sequel, Dead 2 Rites. With fingers crossed, I proclaim that Jake and the Dynamo will see its re-release next month, and Dead 2 Rites the month after. I can’t absolutely confirm that yet because art is the major factor again, and I’m not the one making the art.

The re-release is a new edition with a revised text as well as new formatting. The screenshots here are from Dead 2 Rites, but the J&tD re-release will look the same.

The new edition of the first book will be thicker than the previous one though the revised text is slightly shorter. The second book is a hefty 530 pages, partly because it is a long novel (132,000 words) but also because of layout: The layout of these books is more polished than before with a larger font and wider line spacing for more comfortable reading.

The internal illustrations of the first book will be the same. Roffles Lowell was not entirely pleased with the way his drawings originally turned out in the paperback; however, aside from uploading the biggest and best files I can, I have no real control over the appearance of the illustrations, so I assume they will look the same as in the first edition.

For Dead 2 Rites, however, Roffles produced black-and-white versions that we hope will print more clearly.

Internal illustration from Dead 2 Rites.
Example of an internal illustration.

Both books will feature full-color internal illustrations in the eBook versions. The books will go up on multiple platforms simultaneously, but on this blog and in my social media accounts, I will probably only advertise the Amazon versions since that’s where sales rank really matters.

Print editions with full-color internal illustrations are possible, but there would need to be a strong interest.

I am starting in on the formatting of Rags and Muffin, which is the now-official title of my third book. This begins a separate series. Previously, the working title of this book was written as Rag & Muffin to emphasize the pun, but that would likely cause a lot of grief later on since HTML and ampersands don’t get along. An ampersand will likely appear on the cover, but the official title has “and” in it.

Printed pages from Dead 2 Rites.
Example of printed pages.

Book Update

I just hit a major milestone in the effort to get my books (at least three with hope for five) out this year. It’s late where I am, so I’ll give more details later, but let’s just say I am most relieved that I can move ahead, as this particular phase—as things often do—took longer than I anticipated.

In any case, it’s exciting! Once Jake and the Dynamo makes its reappearance, I will have the long-awaited sequel Dead 2 Rites out the month after.

‘Gangsters in Space,’ or, What even Is Science Fiction?

An author among my mutuals recently made a comment on Twitter with which I disagreed, and only too late, after expressing my disagreement, I realized I was diving back into the endless debate over what defines a genre.

So, here is the original comment from Misha Burnett:


And this was my reply:


My further discussion on this subject follows after the break:

Continue reading “‘Gangsters in Space,’ or, What even Is Science Fiction?”