Month: November 2021

Hawkeye Disney+ Show

This is my review from 2019 of the Hawkeye graphic novel, that seems to have heavily inspired the new show (which as of this post I have not seen). My Life as a Weapon and the following releases, Little Hits, Rio Bravo, and LA Woman seem an unlikely inspiration for a television series starring the marksman Avenger. His career as Ronin (briefly hinted at in Avengers: Endgame) would have been bad-ass. Flashbacks to his life as a super villain in the comics would have been neat. But, Clint Barton apartment complex owner who gets a dog, a girl-sidekick, and deals with the likes of the TrackSuit Mafia, gets the shit kicked out of him, and battles the villain known as (Spoiler) is a great choice for plot line to bring to the small screen. It’s exactly what I would have picked.Matt Fraction’s run on Hawkeye is amazing and different from any superhero comic you will ever read.

Volume 60: Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon (2013)

“What’s his name?”
“He’s not my dog. What’s his collar say?”
“Collar says it’s ‘Arrow’”.
“I’ll come up with something better.”

I thought this would be an ordinary story about a team superhero member on a solo adventure. Typically these solo missions involve their backstory, maybe a love interest, they might confront the person who trained them, and so on. You know, superhero stuff that expands the character but probably won’t come up again in the context of a team book. 

Wrong.

Hawkeye: My Life as a Weapon features Clint Barton, a powerless, but not helpless Avenger. Clint’s meager apartment building is about to be sold and its residents evicted by a Russian slumlord aka Tracksuit Dracula. Clint offers to buy the building but the offer is rejected causing him to suspect something larger and more sinister is going on.  

Enter Kate Bishop, Clint’s young replacement during his recent absence. Together they journey to Madripoor to attend high stakes a high stakes auction of a videotape showing an assassination that the government and SHIELD and the Avengers would rather not be seen by the world. Everyone who is everyone is there to bid on the tape, including The Kingpin, Hydra, the Hand, and Madame Masque. 

This new (from 6 years ago) direction for Hawkeye is fun and the writing and art are perfect. Fraction uses some bold storytelling techniques including shifts in time without warning, something your creative writing teacher would say, “…is jarring” but it works, and what does she know anyway?

My only complaint is the disparity in Hawkeye’s combat readiness. Early-on he gets into fights with untrained thugs and the sheer number of opponents combined with the danger of combat and he is taken out. More than once. You might think, “Okay, it’s gonna be one of those kinds of stories where the hero gets his ass beat,” but later Hawkeye takes on trained and armed ninjas and beats them like they were cub scouts. What does this mean? I don’t know. Otherwise, Hawkeye, written by Fraction makes me happy.  

by Matt Fraction (Writer), David Aja (Artist, #1-3) Javier Pulido (Artist, #4-5) Matt Hollingsworth (Color Artist), Annie Wu (Illustrator) Chris Eliopoulos (Letterer), Alan Davis (Penciler), Francesco Francavilla (Illustrator)

Check out my other reviews on my Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/janivesthewriter

Best Laid Plans…

Confessions…Quickie Edition

I read the book 20 Books to 100K. The premise for this (and the similarly named Facebook group) is that if you write twenty books, you’ll have enough algorithm recognition from Amazon that you’ll make, well, 100 thousand dollars. I’m not sure if that means per year or overall, but I like the idea either way.

Another premise put forth by the author Michelle Kulp is to write “Quick Reads” and put out a book of 100-pages or less per month every month. Her focus, and the focus of the other books that push the same idea seems to be based on list-based non-fiction I.e. instructional books like 23 Ways to Organize Your Life. I disregarded the non-fiction angle and ran with applying this to my current work, a sexy vampire novel. I  had also just started writing a superhero novel based on my own graphic novel that would be perfect for the fast reads category.

What an inspiration! “But won’t you sacrifice quality for quantity?” you might ask. “Great hypothetical question!” I would reply. That’s an obvious thought for anyone, but imagine this- consider making a dozen tiny meals versus the planning and execution of a single  banquet. The answer is, that both are unique and require their own difficulties, but to be able to focus on smaller portions frees the mind from the daunting task of planning, writing, editing and releasing an entire 300ish page novel. You have a faster turnaround from idea to release, and one might imagine there is a market of readers not looking to invest the time and money in reading long books. 

“But readers love trilogies and they love to sink their teeth into a, or curl up with, a thick book!” Sure. That’s true. But in this short attention span world, I can see readers who like to finish a book in a single sitting and move onto the next. At less than 100 pages, the quick read isn’t quite a short story and it’s not as big as a novella. “It’s just right,” said a little girl, settling down in a bed that’s not hers.

I was psyched as I browsed books (and sales numbers) in Amazon’s short reads category. I emailed their customer service and asked to have my graphic novel put in that category, thinking that it would be possible to promote my book at a lower price point and achieve the coveted “Best Seller” status, even for a week. The reply to my request was, “You don’t decide to be in this category. We decide to put you in the category.” Shit! And this from a company that lets obvious erotica that is not super heroic be placed in the “super hero” category by publishers seeking an easier best seller title.

Sigh.

That isn’t going to stop me. I’ll still release my short novel and start on the next one to see what happens. Hopefully I’ll be invited into the short reads category, but at least I’ll be able to get to the goal of 20 books more quickly.

I wonder what I’ll do with my 100k…

Confessions: Good Meows/Bad Meows

Confessions: Good Meows/Bad Meows

11/2/2021

After a month of work, Jake Hunsbusher and I (mostly him) finished recording the audiobook. What an experience! You would think it’s as simple as reading the words and recording, but for an emotional project with different characters of varying ages, accents, and sexes it felt like a little movie with me as the director.  I would have him rerecord a few sections with the inflections and emotions that I imagined while writing. The audio read by a true voice actor adds a layer to the story for the reader/listener, just like an artist for a comic book adds dimension the writer could never have imagined.  

That’s the good news. The negative news is that I had some difficulty with a promotional aspect of modern-day publishing. Many indie writers swear by a service called Pubby which promises to get your book reviewed for a monthly fee. The monthly fee (a year’s worth all at once is not a monthly fee, btw) is charged at the end of the ten-day trial. I put a note in my calendar to assess and cancel if needed, and off I went!

The way Pubby works (in a nutshell) is you get stars for reading and reviewing books. You can use those stars, as well as your introductory stars and stars you purchase, to get your book reviewed. As you look for ways to get stars you are offered a limited selection of books to read. I chose a few that might be of interest and went to work. I had a hard time because the books were not interesting enough to complete so I stopped until I could find books that I could read and like. Here’s comes the problem. A day or two into my trial, I had one review for each of my books I had made available. They were positive in a generic sort of way that indicated the person may or may not have read the book all the way through. They read like, “If you like science fiction with lots of action, this is the book for you.”

That’s just it. The people on this service are writers looking for reviews. They want to get their stars and move on. If you don’t read the book, at least you can should a positive review like you hope other readers will do. I went at it all wrong; I wanted to READ the books!

It reminded me of Meow Meow Beans on the show Community. If you haven’t seen it, one episode features a social media ap that allows you to rate your fellow students for arbitrary reasons and the people with the highest rankings are worth the most Beans and thus rise to become the ones with the highest social values. 

I don’t want to get reviewed that way. I want people to love or hate my work on its own merits, but I at least want them to read it. Just like I don’t like when someone gives a bad review based on the first two chapters, I don’t want a positive review if all they read was the blurb on the back of the book.

So, I cancelled. Here comes issue 2. They gave me a partial refund. I asked and they said that was all the charges they saw. I checked with my bank and they said I had been charged the whole year. I went back and forth with Pubby and they couldn’t find my charge because I had spelled my email wrong the first time I signed up. The customer service person was super snarky, saying things like, “Again, did you sign up under a different email address?” And “Does this email ring a bell…? I had spelled my email wrong on the initial signup but I was still getting correspondence and further charges, so they could have easily looked it up another way. After a frustrating experience and terrible customer service, I give Pubby ZERO Meow Meow Beans.

Side Note: While talking with my credit card company representative, I felt the need to explain that Pubby is not a porn site. She laughed and told me she doesn’t judge. Which makes me think that she thought it was indeed a porn site, Pubby. Yeah.