The Marshmallow Ranch Gazette (Patreon)

Volume 4, Issue 12 - Thursday, August 1st, 2019

Howdy, patrons!

After six weeks of being unemployed, one thing is clear -- even with all the time in the world, you're not going to get very far on any of your projects without a good plan, good time management, and discipline! I was hoping that I would be able to take July and fill in a lot of gaps on various writing projects, but that just hasn't happened. I think I might have needed to decompress a bit more than I thought. But also, learning how to be self-motivated and organized is a process; while I'm making progress on that process, it still hasn't fully baked yet.

Episode 20 of "Crushing The Competition" might be a little late, as a result. I'll be working on it today in the hopes of having it posted this evening, but it might not be ready until the weekend. My apologies about that! I'll be making an effort to make sure future installments are ready to go well ahead of time. You've heard this before, dear patrons, but hopefully the proof will be in the posting!

I've been spending quite a bit of energy on the job hunt over the past week, and that's beginning to pay off. I've received a few calls from recruiters looking to fill various positions, and there will be a phone interview a little earlier today. I'm not sure if I want the position -- or even if I'm qualified enough to get it -- but I figure that any opportunity to sharpen my interview skills should be taken, right? Learning how to be at ease in these situations takes practice, and to be honest this is the first time I've really had to hunt for a job in about ten years. I'm rusty as all hell, and my resume and cover letter game could use a serious shape-up. Still, things are looking up!

Jonathan Hickman's reboot of the X-Men comics franchise started last week in "House of X" #1; this week, its companion series "Powers of X" (Powers of Ten) debuted. Both limited series will run for six issues released every two weeks, so we'll get a new issue updating the status quo (and history) of the X-men weekly. So far, it's quite interesting. Hickman is already painting a massive scope for his story, introducing new factions, timelines, and characters with a surprisingly deft touch. I'm really intrigued by the way he draws very clear lines between mutants through the choices they make as they attempt to rebuild their culture from scratch and the humans who are already taking counter-measures against them in case things go sideways. Mutants, through their use of Krakoa the Living Island, are steeped in nature -- almost living a solarpunk existence as their world is built through this sentient land mass. Humans, on the other hand, are already leaning hard on their technology to create an "arc" of sorts if things go pear-shaped. And, in the first issue of "Powers of X", we know they will.

While the plot does a great job of hooking you from the jump, Hickman's characterization could still use a bit of work. He's gotten a lot better at making people sound like, you know, people -- but they're still not as distinctive as they could be. Dialogue coming from Mystique could easily be imagined coming from Emma Frost, and both Magneto AND Xavier can come off as a Kelsey Grammer "Beast" sometimes. It'll be interesting to see how other writers spin the characters out of this new status quo when both series wrap up this October.

In the meantime, I've been thinking a lot about how I would reboot the X-Men if I were given the chance. Updating the characters to live in this day and age would present a number of challenges that could be used to spin off really cool directions for their stories. How could you make a 30-year-old Magneto work if he was born in 1989 instead of 1930? What kind of atrocities could possibly shape him as strongly as living through the Holocaust? I'm not sure there could be, which means that he would be a fundamentally different character. That's not a bad thing, but it would require deep thought to get him right. 

Honestly, I could see Xavier as a technocratic liberal in this day and age; naive enough to believe that intelligence and technology could solve any problem, sheltered enough to have blind spots that would blow up in his face. I could see Erik more as a child of the Soviet Union, with the oppressive secrecy of the state shaping a lot of his attitude. Cyclops, in this version, would be an overachieving upper-middle-class black kid determined to preserve the family legacy his parents fought so hard to build. Jean Grey is a student equally fascinated by structural engineering and the peculiar social structure of YouTube. Beast is a genius plagued by a need to belong but cursed with a mind and body that ensures he never will. Iceman is an Indian-American kid steeped in the culture of his adopted homeland, ready to embrace the land of opportunity. Angel is a rich kid whose parents are funding Xavier's experiment with the expectation their son will have a hand in building it. 

It's fun to think about, but it's also a project I absolutely need to put on the back burner to deal with the work that's in front of me. With "Crushing The Competition", that means building the characters, world and conflicts so that they're at least as interesting as the sex -- and making the pacing a bit better so that things have a bit more momentum. AND revising earlier episodes so that they can be posted on SoFurry. Gah. So much work!

That's all for today, friends! See you a little later this week. 

-Jakebe