Call it a promise to a friend.  I became aware that Jim Aubuchon, whose book Heartstone I reviewed a couple years ago, was looking for someone to review his graphic novel Third Eye Shut.  I had enjoyed Heartstone and was looking forward to the sequel, so I offered to look at this and he sent me a copy.  I put it near the top of my reading list, and soon had the opportunity to get through it.

That was when I realized I was out of my element, and in several ways.

The most obvious is that I am not an aficionado of graphic novels.  It is not quite that I have not read them since they were called comic books.  I did read one by another friend, C. J. Henderson.  However, I still think of them as comic books.  I did not find C. J.’s graphic novel to be on par with his other books.[1]  I realize even comic books need to be taken seriously within the rules of their own genre, but my limited exposure makes it difficult to identify those rules.

Then there is the additional problem that the story is, at least to my eyes, clearly allegorical, but I know that I am missing bits of the allegory.  Aubuchon’s background includes an extensive understanding of occult practices which I lack.  Even the title, Third Eye Shut, is a reference to an occult concept of opening a third eye to see spiritual things.  The story asserts that to the degree our third eyes are open we are blinded by the illusion created by the enemy, and it is only by closing our third eye against that illusion that we can see reality as it truly is.  The spirits we see when we open our third eye to the spirit world are intent on deceiving us, and so the more we open that eye the less clearly we see reality.

In the end, though, on my first reading I could not find the point.  The story made a significant issue about how important the young heroine Amber is to the plans of “The Leader”.  However, we never see her do anything successfully.  She rejects the Third Eye Open teaching, learns to close her third eye, and sees the world as it really is, and then goes into training to fight with the forces of The Leader against the evil of “The Warlord”.  Next she is part of a failed mission to save her family, and then she attempts to rescue another of The Leader’s warriors from the fortress of The Warlord, and gets captured and is held prisoner for a long time until others rescue her, The Warlord is defeated, and she renews her promise to fight against The Warlord in other cities around the world–presumably in the next issue.  She never actually succeeds at anything that matters.

I was having trouble understanding the point.

I set aside the book, read something else, and after several months picked it up afresh.

To risk a pun, the second reading was a real eye-opener to me.  I realized that this was the point.  Amber is important not because she is going to bring down The Warlord or accomplish great tasks herself, but because when she fails and is captured she becomes the reason for the rest of the forces of The Leader to mobilize and destroy The Warlord’s fortress to set her free.  She is not the heroine in the traditional sense of the one who wins the victory, but in the sense of the one who inspires others to win the victory because she is in need.  In an excellent display of understanding of spiritual battles, Aubuchon has given his heroine the role we all take, the failure who needs salvation, for whom heaven is mobilized to deliver us.

All of which is to fail to speak of the experience of the novel itself, which is certainly worth recognition.  Aubuchon weaves realities seamlessly.  The little old retired missionary widow across the street is also the powerful armored warrior when you can see the reality.  The apartment where Amber lives with her useless boyfriend is simultaneously a cell within The Warlord’s fortress.  The messages in television, advertising, school, and elsewhere are all ultimately about rejecting The Leader once the veneer of appearances is removed.  It is in many ways reminiscent of a master of the blending of realities, Charles Williams,[2] as city streets become battlefields against the invisible enemy using the invisible weapons.  Kudos to Rob Ewing, Atlantis Studios, Noval Hernawan, and Oscar Yanez for illustrations which captured this blending of worlds.  However, with the changing of artists, some of the characters were a bit inconsistent in appearance such that I once or twice had to check who was speaking.  Amber’s hair color and sometimes her facial structure changes according to who is rendering her, and some of the minor characters when they recur in subsequent chapters are only clearly identified by being named in the dialogue.  The lettering is always legibile, and although there were a couple of errors in the spelling these were rare and minor; overall it is an excellent book in that regard, for which again Atlantis Studios and also Khari Sampson, KJ Media, and Terminus Media share credit.

Overall, I wish to commend Jim for his very clever story and insightful execution, creating a fantasy world in the midst of our own, in which warriors combining elements of swords & sorcery, mecha, and video game are hidden from most of us by the illusion we call reality.  It is an excellent book.

_____

1  The Things That Are Not There is an excellent fantasy horror novel from him.

2  Descent Into Hell is probably his best in this area.

I stare at the screen wondering what to type.  It is very like writer’s block; I do not know what to say.

Of course, it isn’t really writer’s block.  The reason I don’t know what to type is that I was here late last night and am back again early this afternoon, and nothing has happened in the interim.  Of course, it’s not true that nothing has happened.  I got a phone call last night telling me that the Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1 books would be arriving today (according to tracking information)–and lo, as I am typing the crunch of truck breaks out front alerts me to the arrival. I have now seen copies, and they look good, so assuming I make it, they should be with me at Ubercon.

While I’m on the subject of Game Ideas Unlimited, let me call attention to the next in the series, Screen Wrap.

I did not actually get to bed early–I did, but not early enough–and so I am already tired from a somewhat early start intended to manage anticipated disruptions which have already occurred.  Let me press forward, in the hope that I can finish before I am again too tired.

–M. J. Young

Not every day can be a milestone.  In the past week I’ve seen two books finalized and made available for purchase–Faith and Gaming yesterday and Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1 over the weekend.  I have done a bit of announcing of these books here and there, although there are probably a few more places where I ought to announce them.  I should also get them added to the web sites–but today is Tuesday, always busy, so it is unlikely that these tasks will be completed just yet.

We’ll see how it progresses.

At the end of last week I received word that someone about two hours away needed a ride here by midweek, and it was agreed that I would pick him up on Monday, that is, today, after taking care of my mother-in-law’s shopping trip.  To some degree I scrambled my day, so that I could make sure people were fed and get a fair amount of the work done before making what was to be a six hour errand.  It did not all work exactly according to plan, but I had finished the first half of it and was about to make the last jump when I got word that there had been a change at his end, that complications had arisen and he was not certain he could make it and would make other arrangements.

I’ll confess that I was disappointed but also relieved.  He is a big help when he is here, but I was already tired and knew I had much to do still–particularly since the final front cover for the Faith and Gaming book had arrived in the e-mail, and I was going to have to deal with formatting and uploading files to finish that book.

That book is now available.  It is in a sort of pre-release form–only because the next formal step is to set up a distribution package, which means adding an ISBN, which means editing that onto the title page of the book and uploading the edited text and losing a few days of availability while everything is put in place–a few days I cannot afford if I am to have copies for Ubercon.  So I am ordering my copies for that (not too many, but enough to have available), and when I get a chance to clear my head I’ll take the next step.

That means copies ordered now will be different from those ordered in a couple weeks, as they won’t have the International Standard Book Number or barcode on them.  I know some people like having those unusual copies.  Of course, it also means I’ve not seen them and don’t know how they actually look, but that’s part of the charm.

Much to do.  Let me get to it.

–M. J. Young

I have just come from the directors meeting, where it was agreed to release Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1 at the price of $18.95.  You can view and purchase it at the new CafePress storefront created specifically to host these books.  The plan is to have some in hand at Ubercon, although of course with the time getting close there’s no guarantee that we will.  I should mention that this joins our two other CafePress storefronts.  The one we have promoted to some degree is known as the Valdron store, which sports T-shirts, mugs, and other paraphernalia including the dice poster.  The other is the NagaWorld store, which features the nerf-like creatures of NagaWorld but also has the poster based on the cover of the novel.

So the book is available for those who wish to have the first two months of the series in a convenient portable format.

–M. J. Young

You probably have to be a geek to laugh at the title of this blog entry; that’s all right, because I had to be a geek to think it was clever.

As of last night, the PDF (Portable Document Format) files for the new books, Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1 and Faith and Gaming, were completed and uploaded to their respective printers.  That means that the first of those is complete, but that we the directors, meeting this weekend, will have to agree on the price.  As to the latter, I’ve agreed on the price, but do not yet have the cover art; this has been promised for early next week, so I might just have these ready for Ubercon, as hoped.

On another front, the Collision concert has been postponed a week.  This was a decision made by the organizers, who apparently had overlooked a conflict with a local high school play.  Fortunately, we’re all good with that date, and pleased to have the extra rehearsal time–we might even be able to do three songs instead of just two.

I’ve much to do tonight, so I’d better move to doing it.

–M. J. Young

Although I cannot claim much progress yesterday, I can mention that there is progress happening.  The cover for the first Game Ideas Unlimited book has already been uploaded, apart from the spine which I am assured will be simple once the text is uploaded.  I’ve received some rather promising drafts of a cover for the Faith and Gaming book, as well, produced by a young lady (transactions mediated by her father)–although they are having technical difficulties getting her hand-drawn artwork to scan right.  So the books are moving closer to completion despite the fact that I’m not making much progress on them.

Meanwhile, I was invited to sing at a church coffeehouse, a sort of talent show setting where they have many different sorts of performers sharing the stage.  I in turn passed the invitation along to Collision, and tonight’s rehearsal will be preparatory for a two-song first gig.  I was concerned that I had not heard back from Brittany, our vocalist/rhythm guitarist, but lead guitarist Baxter tells me that she’s very excited about this.  Bass guitarist Adam, meanwhile, is rather nervous–it will be his first public performance, and although he quite well knows the two songs we’ll be doing, he’s still worried about making mistakes.  I suppose it will be after Saturday night’s show that he will decide whether he really does want to be in a band or not, as it will be his first experience of the real point of it all.

Our youngest houseguest has an appointment this afternoon, and almost as soon as he arrives home from school I’ll be leaving to take him there.  Meanwhile, with dinner to prepare and a rehearsal slated, I’m doing my best to complete as much as I can in the gaps.

–M. J. Young

I’m still working on those two books, Faith and Gaming and Game Ideas Unlimited Volume 1.  The problem presently is that the new Adobe Acrobat program, while it probably works much better than the one I was using, does not work the same as the one I was using, and I’ve not been able to figure out how to make it do what I want it to do.

It has to do with font embedding and paper size, both of which have to be right, and different for each document.  There are two ways to move a Word document into Portable Document Format–one by opening Word and exporting it, the other by opening Acrobat and importing it.  These have different requirements, different controls, and different default settings.

The printer that will be handling Game Ideas Unlimited requires that the pages be an unusual size–what they call Comic Book Size–and that the files be kept small by embedding all the fonts needed but no others.  If I work from Acrobat, it will import the file exactly as it appears, automatically setting the page size to match the settings in Word–but I cannot get it to embed any fonts at all.  This is particularly frustrating, because it is evident that were I able to get it to embed all the fonts, I could then remove all the fonts I do not wish to have embedded; but with no fonts embedded, I cannot add them.

If, however, I work from Word, it asks me to select a paper size for the target document, from a list of paper sizes that have not dimensions but names–things like A2 and Legal.  I know what those are, but I do not know even a tenth of the document names, and I do not know which one would be right for the “comic book” dimensions I’m using.  Nor have I been able to find a listing anywhere of what size each of those names indicates.  I do have control over font embedding from that end, but I’ve not worked out how to get the right paper size.

So I’m racing against the clock, and the artist, who has already uploaded the cover images (and I’ve not had time to review them, but I trust him on this), needs the PDF completed and uploaded so he can get the spine dimensions and finish that; but the clock keeps me running in other directions, too.  My mother-in-law had to take her social security check to the bank today, which means I had to be there early enough to do that before taking her shopping; I also had to fix dinner, because the man who loves to cook for us is now cooking for someone else for the present.  I don’t mind doing it, but it is time consuming.

So here I am, the night slipping away and no extra time in it, trying to finish today’s work and be ready for tomorrow’s, letting you know that I am trying to have those books ready by the end of the month, but it’s going to be a challenge.

–M. J. Young

I awoke today and looked at the bedside clock, the one with numbers large enough that even I can read it without my glasses, as long as I’m somewhere on the bed.  It told me that there wasn’t much time before my wife would be getting ready for work, so I’d better hurry if I wanted to use the bathroom.  I pulled myself upright, and grabbed my watch–which gave me an entirely different view of the matter, telling me that I had plenty of time to get coffee and get organized before her alarm would ring.

Of course, her alarm is in that other clock, the one with the considerably later time on it.  However, I realized, impressively quickly given how foggy I still was otherwise, that the bedside clock had compensated automatically for the change for Daylight Savings Time which was not to be this weekend, because we did it several weeks back.

I was working on moving both new books toward publication when I hit a snag.  I had both publisher sites open, because I figured I could upload Game Ideas Unlimited:  Volume I to the one site while uploading Faith and Gaming to the other.  The former is with a printer who has done merchandise for us in the past, but never books, so I was fighting my way through there process and very pleased finally to have come to the place where I could upload the text.  I had not to that point done the conversion to portable document format (PDF), but that’s a relatively quick fix.  After all, I’ve had Adobe Acrobat Professional 4.0 on my computer for most of a decade, and never had any serious problems with it.

However, I encountered my first serious problem with it.  It is not Adobe’s fault, but MicroSoft’s.  It seems that when we made the change to the new operating system, it failed to recognize the Acrobat software as printers.  If you have an Acrobat writer on your computer, it shows up as several different types of printer drivers, which permit you rather simply to hit “print” and turn just about anything you can print into the universal portable document format.  However, those options were absent from my system.

Nor does MicroSoft make it easy to move printer drivers around.  Obviously, the drivers are still on my computer, in the printers folder on the old hard drive; however, the printers folder apparently is not called that, and I could not find it.

Mercifully, I had to drive someone home last night a “fur piece”, about eighty miles each way, which put me in the neighborhood of our friend and treasurer Adam Keller, who owns a disused copy of a newer version of the software (he has purchased a yet newer version for his own use, so this was an unused license).  I will be upgrading later this afternoon or early this evening, which hopefully will resolve this problem in plenty of time.

So I have much to do, but hopefully enough time in which to do it.

–M. J. Young

I had finished the regular work last night, and was working on proofreading the Faith and Gaming collection (which I finished earlier this afternoon), when a call came from a young lady, a dear friend of one of our sons who has found herself living in our living room (odd that it should fall to that purpose) before.  She had been evicted from her apartment, an hour away in Philadelphia, and needed to move herself and her things immediately.

I agreed to get her.  I called my wife, who was finishing up at work, to let her know my intentions, and she said to wait until she called me back.

Oddly, while I was awaiting that call, I came upon the old article, Faith and Gaming:  Friends.  I say it is odd, because the piece recounts another night, years ago, when it was my wife who was taking the truck to go help a friend in need in the middle of the night, and I who was accommodating her.  The article speaks of unbalanced ledgers, and how it is not the point of friendship to look for balance, that what we gain does not always equal what we pay.  It was an interesting and indeed timely reminder.

My wife insisted I take the boy along who is most closely her friend, and he agreed that he should go despite the fact that this would mean being crowded in the unheated cab of the truck.  We at the time did not know how crowded, nor how complicated, this would be, as in addition to the girl we also picked up a cat in a carrier and a ferret on a leash, and there was no place to park along Tenth Street south of Mifflin in Philadelphia even at one thirty in the morning when we arrived, so I was sitting by a fire hydrant with the back end of the vehicle extending into an intersection for most of an hour while they first carried boxes and packages to the truck and then attempted to coax a ferret out from under a neighbor’s balcony so he would not be left behind.  We also had to feed the young lady on the ride home, at almost three in the morning when all we could find was a McDonald’s Drive-thru, even in so busy a place as the Deptford Mall area.

I neglected to mention that our eldest and his wife, who missed Easter with us because of his work, managed finally to make it down, arriving minutes before the phone call which took me away.  They were still here when I returned; in fact, it was after four when I finally got to bed, and they were still here when I awoke shortly after five to get boys to buses.  Thus I did not see much of them, but my wife did, and that’s a reversal of the usual circumstance, so that’s good.

I probably did not get eight hours of sleep before I was folding laundry (another thing I tucked into that time) and trying to start my day, but I’m not slowing down yet.  I have a Collision rehearsal tonight, and it happens to be Baxter’s birthday, so I’ve asked our resident cook if he could make a cake just in case Baxter makes it.  Meanwhile, I’m hoping to get everything else out of the way sooner rather than later, so I’ve got time to do some other stuff at some point.

–M. J. Young