I just did a victory lap around wooden columns in my kitchen and demanded high-fives all around: Against Superheroes is done. Well, technically it just topped the first hurdle.  Core writing is complete at 100,801 words. I will now do two editorial passes and then send it to my editor for clean-up. Finally, I’ll get some feedback from my wife before sending it out for independent review.

I try to write according to a daily schedule but I have historically been an inconsistent worker. I track everything using a spreadsheet and it doesn’t look pretty:

Note the long gaps. The gaps are problematic for several reasons, not the least of which is that I have to go back and read everything again to return to form. The gaps arrive with excuses, then get amplified by more excuses, then get massaged into to-do lists, and then always get resolved by unknown forces. Maybe they are unknowable.

The one consistency that I have found is that I always start strong and finish strong, bursts of enthusiasm for the project arriving with runner’s high on the trail, or while waiting in traffic. The plot thickets open to luxuriant fields. When I’m in the gap periods I distract myself too easily, finding the deep research topics an easy way to justify an additional pause of days, then weeks, sometimes months.

I guess I should resolve to find my triggers and work to overcome these tendencies, but I’m not certain that it matters. There is no rush, and those exuberant starts and ends are perhaps enough of a reward that no deeper optimization of my soul is needed.… Read the rest

The twin horns, the god dilemma. In retrospect, for that period and the aberrancy that flowed through my mind, there remained a small piece of me that was grounded in the sad derelicts of my moral constructions. Could I simply be moral because I was a god? Or was the moral order external to me making me irrelevant. Irrelevant or arbitrary. I reflect now, under some control, on my perverse desires during that period (really they never left me but were just suppressed and—what is the term?—sublimated into other actions). But perhaps that is the very nature of the trajectory I was on: the breakdown and atomization of my soul or personality, and the reconstruction of it like some child emerging from the jungle, biting fellow kindergartners, until the rough edges of her being are chiseled off by running the complex maze of sharp-cornered lessons. I had been reborn and was still the wolf child.

The mythologies I was trained in tell me only sometimes about the growth of gods from childhood. Endymion, Bellerophon, Baal and Anat, they all emerge without any sense of tempest in their birth or any period of maturation. Even Jesus was born, revered, and then was spreading the word of his own godliness without any explication about the transitional period. I can only imagine the difficulty of raising that boy, whether he was arrogant towards his mother and stepfather or was stinking of zen, as the Japanese would say, so holier than thou that mother and father just suppressed contempt until the little carpenter was old enough to be thrust out into the world.

There was an intensity to the feeling and beliefs during the transformation, a rising up of what might be translated as pride, but a pride that was baseless, having been sucked of all the historical content of achievements and accolades that might result in pride.… Read the rest

Back among the Western minds, first in Iceland and then his home country of America, living under a cloak of pretense, Sinister appears more human than ever since his transformation. We note that he has taken on a rather different engagement with his powers that is more nuanced and self-reflective. The gradual transformation from an undiluted, power-mad self into this new form operates at several different levels. First there are the physical transformations that ultimately recompose him into his human form. Then there are the mental acrobatics that allow a new sense of self to emerge out of the rubble of the tempestuous being that drove events at Oasis.

We take a moment to try to correlate his rather detailed descriptions of the nature of his powers with known current technologies. He describes the physical world as collections of particles that have deterministic trajectories, for example, and describes his engagement with those particles as affecting that determinism to change both material things as well as affect the “neural” structure of humans themselves. Other Collectives have weighed in on how precisely this technology might work, but the general conclusion is that it closely resembles the bio-essence fields of levels 2 and 3, as well as their control. His misunderstanding of how the technology works is quite understandable; he lacked the educational context that we have.

It is important to consider his statements within the broad contours of his primitive worldview. He views the world as fundamentally composed of small components of material things (atoms and molecules), and he also conceives of mental function as derivative of the motions of these things. We know this to be a primitive and fundamentally bizarre way of comprehending reality.… Read the rest

New sample cover art for Against Superheroes, available December 2015:

… Read the rest