My Own Trilogy

While I was plotting last week’s blog post about the failure of Disney with the Star Wars franchise, I was thinking that I would be able to write something better as a sequel trilogy. A true trilogy for one thing, but also something that would treat the old heroes with the respect they deserve while also making room for the new ones. The thought stuck with me and so I sat down and began to write down some basics for such a trilogy. Then I wrote down more. Then I plotted three novellas. The only thing still left to do now would be to write them — something I could do in three to four weeks, if I wanted to.

As had been mentioned by J. J. Abrams, the Sequel Trilogy as approved of by Disney was based around the structure of the Original Trilogy. So I wanted to start out with a structure similar to these three movies, too. I basically wanted to rely on the same basics than they had and see if I could come out of it with something better.
I wrote down a list of eight story beats per story I wanted to have — eight specific things which should happen in the story. Obviously, the first story would have to introduce the new heroes (and the secondary villain — never start out a multi-part story with the big bad!) and give us a look at the old ones. It would have to establish the plot arc (or arcs) I wanted to run through the trilogy. It also should have one part where the heroes went up against the villain, but had to flee (the Death Star escape, if you will) and then it should have a final confrontation in which they’d beat the villain (the Death Star run), but the villain was to survive (like Darth Vader did).
For the second story, I was looking at the inverted form of “The Empire Strikes Back” (which is defined by Luke making one wrong decision after the next) and decided that I wanted to split the heroes up after an early fight and have them fare less well on their own than they were faring together. I also wanted two of them captured with the third getting into trouble upon saving them. One hero would remain in captivity at the end, setting up the third story. This is also pretty close to “The Empire Strikes Back”, although it’s less based on bad choices.
Finally, I needed to start off the third story with the two free heroes coming to the imprisoned one’s help. I needed to give information on the secondary villain and the big master-plan, get him out of the way, and have the heroes face their enemies again in a rather hopeless setting. They’d win and there would be some celebration.
All of that was close to the Original Trilogy and so it would fit with the ‘we’ve based the sequels off the originals’ part of the Disney Trilogy.

Next were the basics for the heroes, the villains, the setting, and possible problems to throw at the heroes.
Starting out with the new heroes, I was going to use Rey, Finn, and Poe. I had to make a few adjustments, though, so they would work with my possible stories. Instead of being an orphan surviving alone on yet another desert planet (honestly, how many does the galaxy far, far away have?), she is now an orphan found by a Jedi and trained at the Academy (which exists). This naturally brought her together with Luke as her teacher and mentor, giving him a place in the story. Finn very much was to be a stormtrooper trained from childhood as in the Sequel Trilogy, but his latent Force-sensitivity was now a plot point, as it is what brings him into conflict with the villains. Poe came in as a pilot ordered to fly Rey around as she looks into strange things happening in the Imperial sectors. He has a problem with taking orders from someone less experienced than he, which brings him into conflict with Rey.
Poe, to take it off from there, would be under Leia’s command, so she was accounted for, too. I gave Han the job of moving among the freelance pilots and smugglers to gather information, so he’d be travelling a lot — and pick up Finn on his trip, so that he could bring Finn together with Poe and Rey.
For the villains, I had more work to do. I scrapped Ben Solo right away, but decided to take a leaf out of Disney’s book and use Jacen Solo as my jump-off point. Ben became Bail — as it wasn’t unlikely that Leia would name a child for her own adopted parents and would thus call a son ‘Bail’ after her adopted father. Yet, he didn’t fall the way Ben Solo did, but rather the way of Jacen Solo, seeking knowledge, then seeking power, then falling to the Dark Side.
For the Big Bad, I’d already settled on a cousin or aunt of Rey, another grandchild or child of the Emperor. I went with grandchild, although she is considerably older than Rey. To make sure there wouldn’t be a question like ‘why is there only one of them?,’ I would have her be after all descendants of the Emperor to ensure nobody could take her place — hence Rey’s parents died.
Setting, as mentioned, was a split galaxy — a republic and an empire — with the empire getting more aggressive again. As problems, I put down Rey’s confidence and lack of experience, Poe’s problem with taking orders from all but a selected few and asking for help, and Finn not being trusted because of his past.

When I started plotting, things got a little darker. At the back of my mind, I still had the principle of the Sith stalker — a dying Sith being surgically turned into a creature somewhere between human and non-human, between life and death, and then sent out to find and eliminate Jedi. To a degree, one can argue that Darth Vader was turned into a Sith stalker himself, as he was turned while awake and feeling all the pain.
For me, that was where Finn’s possible Force connection came in. I came up with the idea that my villains would turn dead stormtroopers with latent Force connections into stalkers. To get away without be hunted immediately, Finn would exchange IDs with a dead comrade, making the secondary villain take back the wrong body — this way Finn’s desertion would be discovered. Naturally, the villain would be after him. That made him the person to be captured and kept in story two and three.
None of my villains, by the way, is to be redeemed. Bail did too much dark stuff to be redeemed, although he gets a punishment towards the end which will give him some good karma back. Needless to say that Rey’s cousin won’t be redeemed either, but defeated for good.

I had a lot of fun plotting the three novellas and I think they would make a better trilogy, being a trilogy in the first place and not being all over the place or only trying to fit in a lot of different characters from the past stories. I know Disney would never do it, though, even if I write it — the Sith stalkers are already far too dark for anything they’d want. After all, they’re raised from the dead to make for a hard-to-destroy army. So I sneaked in a male-male relationship which Disney also wouldn’t want. Yet, I did have fun, the stories might be written one day and I might finally make an AO3 account and put it all out for others to read.

The Failure of Disney

When the Sequel Trilogy was announced, shortly after Disney had bought Lucasfilm Ltd, fans were all too happy. Finally, the story of the galaxy far, far away would continue! What we got, though, was not something to be happy about. How could Disney take over a multi-million-dollar franchise and destroy any goodwill they had with the fans in such a short time? Where was the failure?

The short answer is that Disney did not understand the franchise they’d just bought.
They saw the money Lucasfilm made with Star Wars through the TV series, the DVDs, Blue-Rays, and downloads, the books, the comics, the action figures, and the licences and assumed that they could make just as much, if not more. And they could have, don’t get me wrong. The exchange in ownership of the IP didn’t cause the fans to grow angry. The announcement of new movies was met with happiness. The movies killed that happiness effectively. Now, the TV series are working on restoring it.
Why did the movies (except for “Rogue One”) kill the happiness? Because they reviled the old heroes, gave us a rehash of the Original Trilogy (OT from here on), and are not a trilogy, despite claiming to be one. A trilogy has at least one plot arc running through all three movies, books, etc. The Sequel Trilogy (ST from now on) lacks that. Rey’s parents are the closest it gets to having one, but that topic is tossed back and forth between the two directors and ends with Rey being a niece of sorts (?) to Palpatine. (As she’s the daughter of his good clone, she’s not really his granddaughter, as a clone should be more akin to an artificial twin brother, so she’d be his niece. Relationships in Star Wars are complicated, what can you do?)
The producers of the ST had no idea what the franchise really was about, they not only dismissed what is now Legends (that was to be expected, to be honest, because it would be impossible to catch the casual movie-goer up on what happens in the roundabout thirty to forty years which have to have passed — imagine putting all of that into the title crawl, it would make the crawl two hours on its own!), they also didn’t really catch up on the canon material. They didn’t understand the characters and neither did the directors and screenwriters they chose! You want angry fans? Because that’s how you get angry fans.

The story itself also has loads of problems, though.
There is no way that the war between the Empire and the Rebel Alliance could have lasted for over forty or so years. The Legends’ solution (a split galaxy) works, as the Empire might be able to hold on to some worlds and keep them under control — others might even prefer the status they gained under the Empire. Yet, thinking that forty years of civil war would not at one point end in a balance of power is weird. Yes, I know Europe had a hundred-year war, but at that time, Europe didn’t have modern weaponry and equipment — and the galaxy far, far away has even better military equipment than that. I (and most other fans) can buy into a ‘cold war’ idea, but not into what Disney gave us.
There also was no reason to revile the heroes of the OT like that. Their character development was essentially undone and they were shown in ways which in no way fit with their character traits. Han has learned not to be all about his own advantages (even already by the end of “A New Hope”), so why is he back to being a smuggler and con-man (something he wasn’t before) all in a sudden? I can buy that his and Leia’s relationship might not have worked out — especially with their son turning to the Dark Side —, but that doesn’t mean he has to become a worse scoundrel than he was before. And then there’s Luke. Honestly, there is no way in Hell Luke would have resorted to trying to kill his own teenage nephew while he was sleeping, no matter what said nephew had done! Luke is defined by a handful of traits and the strongest are his compassion and his kindness. There’s no way he’d resort to cold-blooded murder (even though we all know a teenager can easily make you contemplate murder…).
Instead of reviling them and then killing them off, another easy solution would have been for them to be mentors or superiors in a way. At the age they were in the story, they’d have learned the lesson of leaving adventures to the younger ones and stay in the background for assistance. No reason to go out and fight evil on your own if there’s a group of trained Jedi you’ve got at your fingertips — and a Jedi should see the wisdom in that…

I also love the Emperor as much as the next Star Wars fan (or a bit more, I’m the ‘I love the villains’ type of person) and I certainly appreciate every time Ian McDiarmid steps forward and dons the robes again. That man has breathed a lot of life into what could have become a caricature otherwise. Well, to a degree the Emperor is a caricature, but a great one. Best villain ever. Yet, bringing him back for the end of the ST was not a good move. I am aware that Legends did that, too, with the “Dark Empire” story line. That one, however, was set about ten years after “A New Hope” — it seems much more likely that a clone would have stayed hidden that long. Doing it forty years later is over the top and not a good idea at all.
I’m also not going into the whole Ben Solo topic. I’d go into a rave that starts with Leia never calling her son ‘Ben’ as she knew Obi-Wan under his real name and ends with Ben being a failure as a Dark Lord — unlike the Legends character he’s modelled on: Darth Caedus aka Jacen Solo. Enough said about him.
Instead, why not use a child or grandchild of the Emperor for that? In Legends, there was a host of descendants of Palpatine around, although most of them lacked the hunger for power which drove him all the way to the Emperor position. Having a handful in canon would be easy enough. Rey is one of his descendants, why not put up a Big Bad who is related to her? That could have cut out Snoke completely and given us a strong enemy she has to prepare herself to fight. Or made Snoke a smokescreen the real ruler hides behind — also nice.

Instead, Disney gave us three disjointed movies which are definitely not a trilogy with two directors going at each other over their decisions. The Prequels gave us Jar Jar Binks, which was worse enough, but the way the ST deconstructs all that is fun and good about Star Wars is by far worse than that. Jar Jar is one character that could easily be cut out. The ST is a catastrophe that should never have happened. Disney didn’t understand the franchise and didn’t want to invest in directors who did. Now they are doing an about turn by relying on directors with prior experience for their Disney+ series — and it works. Hopefully, they’ll one day banish the ST into another ‘alternate universe,’ as they did with the Extended Universe (now Legends), and make a proper new trilogy.

Call of the Jersey Devil Review

I’ve stumbled over a lot of interesting and fun books by coincidence in my life — sometimes I’ve even found much-beloved authors that way. With this book, though, it was even more strange than normally.
I was actually looking for Aurelio Voltaire on Amazon, but not for him as an author. I was looking for his newest album, “The Black Labyrinth”. Instead, the first hit for the name was a novel, “Call of the Jersey Devil”. It had a pleasantly pulpish cover and so I looked into it and put it on my wish-list. The next day, I decided to buy it, as the e-book wasn’t expensive and I had time to waste, and I could barely put it down to do my duties during the day.

“Call of the Jersey Devil” first got me interested by the wordcraft I experienced from the very first page of the ‘look inside’ feature.
It is only to be expected, I guess, that a singer and songwriter like Voltaire would have the necessary skills to write an engaging scene, yet the wording he used was evocative and powerful and also very, very pulpish. It is also to be expected that someone who delves into the dark side of things in his songs can also write good dark scenes in prose. As I love pulp, the writing was right down my alley. Even though the story starts with a scene set in the past, this scene is also definitely setting the stage, presenting a visceral fight between good and evil, monsters and murder, and a suggestion for what the future might hold.

“Call of the Jersey Devil” is a horror novel and I am sometimes weary of those, as they often include body horror and I’m not generally a body-horror type — I usually prefer psychological horror.
In addition, I do like a balance between darker and lighter scenes, which not all horror stories offer. To me, it’s important to be able to unwind at a few points so I can be properly tense and scared again afterwards. “Call of the Jersey Devil” definitely delivers on this. There are dark and horrid scenes, there’s body horror, and the writing is visceral and very evocative throughout, yet there are also scenes of dark humour which help me relax and get ready for the horrors that await me, so I can properly experience them.
Those scenes also all offer much-needed windows into the souls and pasts of the characters, giving me more reasons to care for them.

Given the pulpish tone of the story, I was also surprised at how well-rounded the characters became over the course of the book.
They started out a little stereotypical, but they gained depth and individuality over the course of the story. Of course, most of them did not survive to the end (although in one case, ‘survive’ is debatable), but that is a given in a horror story. Yet, I cared for them, which made their eventual demise by ghouls, the Jersey Devil, or other forces all the more engaging. It’s easy to see a whole crowd of nameless, faceless stereotypes die and another to see people whose lives’ woes you know go down and be changed into something horrid (or land the worst gig in eternity).
I also love how some horror-story stereotypes were reverted in the book, especially who is allowed to see the end.

The novel does have quite some body horror, from decapitation right up to slowly turning into a ghoul, but it does its job well. I am a little suspicious of body horror most of the time, as most of it only seems to be there for the mere gore factor and not really to drive the story, yet here it is used fittingly.
A character who is defining herself by her beauty (because that is what she learned from her own mother) slowly finding her perfect skin being tarnished with boils and other blemishes, her body bloating from the quick decomposition, her beautiful hair falling out, her face becoming hideous, that is horror. Even though I myself am not defining myself through beauty, I can understand what it would be like to see that shift happening in minutes, turning into a monster, losing your identity and your past, becoming nothing but a blind, ever-hungry creature of Hell.
The book’s excellent wordcraft only enhances this and similar scenes by the visceral and evocative words used — putting pictures in my head which only enhanced the horror of what was happening. It takes a lot of talent to do this and Voltaire pulled it off in his first-ever novel. He has, of course, done it in many songs beforehand, so perhaps I shouldn’t be that surprised.

The pacing of the novel is excellent as well. There are twists and turns in all the right places, the comic-relief moments are frequent, but short, and only make the next rise in tension all the more palpable.
That is the main reason why I couldn’t put “Call of the Jersey Devil” down. The pacing gave me the moments of rest and relaxation when I needed them and then got me engaged in the story again by showing me the next horror, the next monster, the next problem and how the characters reacted to it — sometimes wisely, sometimes less so.
Together with the excellent wordcraft and the well-rounded characters, it was neigh-impossible to put the book down and I finished it within a day. While that is not unheard of for me, it’s been a while since a book engaged me that much and made me want to pick it up or go on reading while there was other stuff that really, really needed doing.

If you like horror stories and pulp, “Call of the Jersey Devil” by Aurelio Voltaire should definitely be on your ‘to read’ list. It’s well-written, has interesting characters that grow on you, paces itself very well, and also gives you a little window in the past of the author himself (since nobody can tell me that has-been Gothic singer Villy Bats has nothing to do with him, even though I wouldn’t call Voltaire a ‘has-been’). Give the story a chance if you can stand more visceral horror stories, I’m sure you won’t be disappointed.

Scrivener Experiences

It’s been well over a year since I switched from MS Word to Scrivener now, so I think it is a good idea to talk about my experiences, about what I think of the program now that I’ve used it for quite a while — and for everything from plotting to writing to editing to doing my blog posts. Yes, this very blog post, like all for the last year, was written in Scrivener. This should, of course, already give you an inkling of how I feel about it. I would hardly have stayed with the program for so long if I hated it. I still do have Word, I could always go back — but I won’t.

Before I dip into the meat of it, though, I want to start with an aspect which has nothing to do with the program as a such, but all with the mindset of the people behind it: the 30-day trial period. A lot of programs have something like this, giving you the chance to try out the full program, not a limited demo version, for thirty days before you need to decide whether to buy or not. Yet, the makers of Scrivener go the extra mile here.
Generally, a 30-day trial works like this: you install the program and this is day one of the trial period. Every day which ticks by lowers the number of days left by one, no matter whether or not you get to make use of the program. Say you install the program on a Monday, then this Monday is day one. On Tuesday and Wednesday, you’re doing other things and have no time to work with the program. On Thursday, you get around to it again — and three days have ticked by, you are now on the fourth day of the trial. Depending on how your life is going, half or more of the trial period might tick by without you being able to really try out the program.
For Scrivener (and the whiteboard software Scapple by the same people), it’s different. You install the program and this is day one like in the case above, but it changes afterwards. The day-counter of the trial only counts days on which you have actually opened the program. In the example above, it would work like this: You install Scrivener on a Monday, so Monday is the first day of the trial and there’s twenty-nine left. On Tuesday and Wednesday, you don’t get around to opening Scrivener because there’s a lot of other things to do. On Thursday, you open Scrivener and you’re on day two of your trial period with twenty-eight more ahead. With Scrivener, you get thirty actual days of trial — not that I needed them, I bought the program after trying it out for about two days. Yet, if you tried it out next NaNoWriMo, for instance, you could do your project in Scrivener without buying it at all.

I also love the way the projects are organised in Scrivener. Instead of one big file that could become corrupted (I did originally change to Scrivener because some of my projects in Campfire Pro had become corrupted), you have a folder with sub-folders and files to work with. All files are in an .rtf format which means they can be read with every kind of editor, even the simple Windows notepad, so even if the Scrivener file should become corrupted (not that it happened to me in over a year now, even with the big ones), you can still access your files and can incorporate them easily in a new project if you wish.
In addition, you get a backup whenever you want to, as you can set both when a backup is made (upon opening, upon closing, or at a certain time of the day) and how many backups you want to keep. You can even send your backups into a cloud save automatically which really keeps them safe, of course. Then there’s the fact that the program automatically saves your project after changes are made. You can set how long after you stopped typing this happens, but it always will and that means no thinking about ‘when did I last save my stuff?’
I also love how all of your files and folders are available within the program through the binder space. It’s so easy to switch between different scenes, to bring up notes or research material you have gathered, to fill out the bible I keep for each of my series like that. The binder gives me the chance to see everything at a glance while the file-and-folder structure allows for me to split up my stories into scenes which are easily found, read, or moved when need be. It’s much better than having to work with one large file in Word or having to keep several windows open at the same time because I need to reference different parts of a project.

One of my more recent discoveries is the composition mode which I have ignored for most of the year, working in the regular Scrivener window. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind, but having the composition mode where everything else is pushed in the background and you have a large space to write in with the typewriter mode automatically activated is much better.
Composition mode can be started and ended by pressing a key, although I usually use the icon in the Scrivener window to start it — yet, I usually end it with the escape key. Dropping into and out of it, therefore, is really, really simple and fast.
I’ve found this a pleasant way to write, especially long passages, such as full scenes and chapters. For short writing, or writing while I have to consult my notes a lot, I use the regular window — most of the time, that is. Composition mode helps me focus and makes doing my writing much easier.

Compiling in Scrivener isn’t easy. That is a simple fact. The compiler is a powerful tool which can create files in a lot of different formats and powerful tools are rarely easy to use.
I’ve needed my time to get more familiar with the compiler and I still have situations in which my files (normally .epub) don’t come out the way I want them to. It has helped, however, that I have made myself my own release format which is saved as a general format and also as an external file I can put up again, should I be forced to move between computers again (as I will be in a couple of years, I guess, but not any time soon).
By now, most of the time I get what I want when I compile a story. I still check them with the Kindle Viewer to see if they’ve been formatted the way I wanted them to, but I rarely see surprises.

Overall, I’m glad I’ve switched to Scrivener. It was hard work to bring all my projects to the new program, but it has paid off. I have found a program which is better suited for my work. That doesn’t mean that Word is a horrid program — for the office applications it was meant for, such as writing business letters and reports, Word is pretty good. I never had a problem with extremely long files (one of my Knight Agency novels has over 100,000 words), either, not on the technical side. Yet, I am a writer and not a businessperson and I’m glad I have a program which was made with someone like me in mind. A program that’s an ‘all in one’ solution for a writer, letting me keep all I need in one place with easy access. If you’re uncertain, check the program out, it might work for you as well — and it has a very fair trial period, too.