Gina Carano and Disney/Lucasfilm settle: House of Mouse "bends the knee"

It seems that Disney and Lucasfilm did not want to go the distance with Gina Carano.  Disney could have simply let Carano go four and a half years ago after they didn't like her conservative-leaning commentary on her own social media (why are liberal-leaning actors forgiven for their commentary, huh?).  Instead they had to disparage her personal character by making her out to be someone with hate-filled qualities.  And that's where Disney/Lucasfilm went wrong.

So Carano sued Disney early last year, and she had Elon Musk among many others in her corner.  And today Disney/Lucasfilm capitulated and settled with Carano out of court.

GeekTyrant, one of my favorite websites, has the details of the settlement (or at least which details the parties are allowing to be publicized).

Not only has Disney backed down, they have also taken a conciliatory stance toward Carano, and furthermore have said that they would be willing to work with her on future projects.  Which sounds like more than what Carano had aimed for.  I know that her Star Wars character Cara Dune was immensely popular with fans, many if not most of whom sided with Carano after her firing.  I don't know if there is going to be room for Carano in the current Mandalorian/Ahsoka part of the Star Wars mythology (The Mandalorian and Grogu motion picture is due out in less than a year) but anything is possible, I suppose.  Or it could be that Carano's Dune gets her own project... which was something that was slated to happen before Disney/Lucasfilm dismissed Carano and slammed her as a person.  Would Carano be up for that?  Maybe.

I might be tempted to sign on with Disney+ again, if this move by Disney is an indicator of the company moving away from identity politics.  That is certainly something that has impacted the company's bottom line well beyond what has happened within the Star Wars franchise (especially The Acolyte, which if Disney was smart they'd bury that show beneath the Disney Vault and never let it see the light of day again).  There are a few things that Disney has done which I have been sincerely interested in seeing (live-action Grand Admiral Thrawn is one of them) but haven't because of my own boycott against the company.  If Carano is open to working with the company again, I might be open to giving the company a little bit of a chance, too.

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Remembering Mike Ashley: The older brother I never had

 His name was Mike Ashley.

I don't have a photo of him.  But in my mind's eye I can still see him.  Nineteen years old.  Brown hair and a little bit of a mustache.  He was a handsome young man.  With a twinkle in his eye and kindness in his words.  He was as all-American a boy as you'd ever be likely to find.  A pure wholesome country Christian man.  And a hard worker and just as much an eager learner.

Dad had known Mike's father.  The elder Ashley had died a few years earlier.  Mike's father had been a farmer.  Something that Mike had found himself wanting to get into.  And so it was that late in the spring of 1985 my dad brought Mike aboard on our family's farm.  Mike wasn't just going to help out with the operation.  Dad made it his mission that he was going to teach Mike everything that he knew about what it meant to be a dairy farmer.  Being with us was going to be like college for Mike.  It was an education he took to with enthusiasm and zeal.  And it was one of the happiest times that I had ever seen Dad.  He was getting to be a mentor to a young man.  I can't remember Dad ever being such a teacher-figure to anyone else in his lifetime.  But he certainly took Mike under his wing and was going to teach him all that he could about the dairy business.

But that's not all that Mike was to us.  To our family that fast took him in as one of our own.  Mom thought the world of Mike.  My sister, I am pretty sure, had a crush on him.  And as for me...

Mike fast became someone who I never knew that I needed: the older brother that I didn't have.  He was someone I looked up to.  I respected Mike and he respected me.  I showed him some things too, that he had never seen before.  During the lunch break that lasted a couple of hours each day (while the cows were replenishing their milk), Mike would often come by my room. I got to show him my Transformers toys: something he VERY quickly picked up how to make them change from robots to vehicles.  I let him read my comic books, and my many copies of MAD Magazine.  The latter was something he especially found hilarious!  I can still hear him laughing at some of the stuff he was finding in MAD.

Mike was eight years older than I was.  He was the kind of person who I wanted to grow up to be like someday.  I don't think he had a girlfriend but if he ever got married, she was going to be a very blessed woman to have him in her life.

On the day before it happened, on August 6th, Mike had been in my room during the lunch break.  And I showed him how to change some more Transformers.  After he and Dad left to go back to the barn for the afternoon's milking, I found myself thanking God that He had put such an amazing person into my life, and that I hoped to be like him someday.

It was forty years ago today, on August 7th, 1985, that we lost Mike.

He had been behind the barn, on a tractor, scraping cow manure into a manure spreader. And if you don't know already cow manure is some of the best fertilizer imaginable. On a small farm it is a very valued and precious resource. And scraping it into the spreader was something that had been done like a zillion times.

It worked like this: the manure spreader was parked below the high end of a concrete ramp. Whoever was on the tractor would tow a bladed attachment and scrape manure that had come out of the barn and cattle stalls, off the ramp and into the spreader.

That is what Mike was doing.

We will never know what caused it to happen. Maybe he saw a deer off in the field and was momentarily distracted.  Maybe it was something else...

The tractor drove over the top of the ramp and flipped over and onto Mike.  He was probably killed instantly.

It was Dad who found him a short while later. He saw smoke coming from behind the barn. And then he saw the overturned tractor with Mike crushed beneath it.

My sister and I had been told that Mike got killed. We watched from our house as first responders, an ambulance, law enforcement and many other people descended on the farm.  A short while later Mom arrived, she had left  work as soon as Dad had gotten through to her.

That evening Mom took my sister and I to my grandmother's house in Reidsville.  Dinner was pizza from Domino's.  I was in such shock, my heart torn in pieces, that I really couldn't taste the food.

Granny said something that night that has always stuck with me: "The good die young."  It's still the closest thing to an explanation for why God would take someone as wonderful as Mike, so young, as I've ever heard.

A few nights later was the visitation at the funeral home.  It was an open casket viewing.  I now wish that I had not gone.  It didn't look like Mike.  That's the best I can put it.  I didn't recognize him.  And that became one of the many memories that I've had to carry for the rest of my life, that I want to go away and never torment me again.

Nothing was the same in our family after that.  We had lost one of our own, very much so.  Dad came in from the barn every evening afterward and would sit by the fireplace and break down in tears.  Two months later he himself was involved in another farming accident, one that almost cost him his right hand.  Dad figured that God was telling him to get out of the farming business.  Several months later, that's what he did.  But I digress.

Every year on this date, I remember Mike Ashley.  And I tell others about him.  He's mentioned in the book I've written and as I say in it, I refuse to let the young man who was the closest person I ever had to an older brother be forgotten by the world.  Because more than most he deserves to be honored.

And now you know about him, too.

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Johnny Robertson has died

The word arrived a short while ago that Johnny Robertson, who there has been no small amount of contention with at times over the years, passed away earlier today.

Life is too short than to spend any more moments than necessary in bitterness.   We aren't guaranteed tomorrow.  We have to make the most of what we have, because there is no knowing when it will be taken away.

That being said, I will ask that his family and friends be kept in our thoughts and prayers.

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A Midsummer Night's Meme

If we shadows have offended,

Think but this and all is mended:

That you have but slumbered here

While these visions did appear.

And this weak and idle theme,

No more yielding but a dream,

Gentles, do not reprehend.

If you pardon, we will mend.

And, as I am an honest Puck,

If we have unearnèd luck

Now to ’scape the serpent’s tongue,

We will make amends ere long.

Else the Puck a liar call.

So good night unto you all.

Give me your hands, if we be friends,

And Robin shall restore amends.

-- from A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare

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The book: It is finished.

Well, it's done.

As of twenty-five minutes ago, I have completed putting the entire manuscript through Grammarly, checking for grammar and syntax.  That's the better part of three weeks that it took to accomplish that.

There will be some going through it with a fine tooth comb, no doubt making a few minor changes here and there.  But otherwise, the text of my book is complete.  It has underwent multiple revisions and checks.  It's pretty much as good as it's going to be.

From completing the first draft last November on through its final form today, it's been eight and a half months of work.  The grammar checking has been done well ahead of schedule.

I've been focused, very nearly wholly dedicated on completing my book, since January of 2024.  And here it is, early August 2025.  I like to think that I'm coming out of the process none the worse for wear.

All that needs doing now is formatting for publishing.  And that won't take long.

I'm going to allow myself to feel good tonight.

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Twenty-four hours later...

...since the previous post.

I have just finished writing an epilogue for my book.  It wasn't planned.  It just kinda hit me between the eyes a few hours ago and I needed to commit it to Microsoft Word.

The book has a much more beautiful ending now.

Final word of it: "grail".

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Thoughts at a quarter til 3 a.m.

Cannot sleep.  Mind won't stop dwelling.

Like, how I want to believe in places beyond madness.  Beyond cruelty. 

I want to believe that there is a realm where there is no more farewell forever.  Some land of eternal innocence, where even the most damaged and weary can be like children again, to gambol and frolic together in boundless grace.  

I want to believe that for all of one's sins, there can still be redemption.

I want to believe that forgiveness is real.

And I want to believe that it is not foolishness to desire such things.

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Semi-regular book update for end of July 2025

Where things regarding my manuscript currently stand:

The more that I have looked into it, the more it seems that publishing through Amazon - which would make my memoir available as an ebook on Kindle devices/apps as well as printed as softcover or hardcover - is going to be the way to go.  I've been keeping a list of all the agents who I've queried with about representation and, well... it's a lot who I haven't heard from.  A few have contacted me back to tell me that they're turning me down.

Regrettable, but also understandable.  A very good book will still have to struggle to find an agent, going about things the old-fashioned way.  And I've always known that this book is going to be a very difficult proposition.  But publishing isn't what it used to be twenty or ten or even five years ago.  There are ways to get a book out there for readers to discover.  I'm going to make the most of that opportunity.  On the day it's first available I intend to have the ebook, the softcover, and the hardcover ready to order.

The other week I set a goal: to have my book up for sale by the end of the year.  And maybe even by late November, which would mark the first anniversary of the first draft being finished.  That would be nice.

I think that one thing I need to be better at is marketing the book.  Only now am I discovering what "marketing" means exactly.  To that end, and at the suggestion of a friend who has gone on to be a published author, I will be setting up a website devote to my writing.  I'm also going to try to put together an e-mail list.  And create a Facebook group.  So far as X/Twitter goes, I can't arouse new followers on there to save my life!  If I could figure out what I'm doing wrong I would absolutely take steps to remedying that

Okay, let's get into the technical status of the manuscript itself...

Right now I am doing something that perhaps I should have been doing all along: running the chapters through the Grammarly writing assistant.  I was very reluctant to take this step at first.  I don't like involving artificial intelligence into what should be a pure human effort.  But a fellow author convinced me that Grammarly's free edition does nothing more but catch grammatical errors, repeated words, misspellings... very basic things.  This author told me that the free version of Grammarly is very good at this.  But that if I were to use the premium version, which is $30 month to month, there would be the risk of the document coming across as "enhanced" by AI.  So I'm choosing to be content with basic Grammarly.

So, that's what I'm doing to my manuscript right now.  I'm running it through Grammarly... one chapter at a time.  And there are a lot of chapters to process.  But it's making a difference.  And I'm catching a bunch of places that could use improvement.  It might be another week before they're all finished in this part of production.  And then I'll go over the manuscript with a fine eye and whatever else.  And then... then... maybe, finally putting this together for publication.  It's going to be a positivalutely MASSIVE Word document.  The biggest I've ever worked with.  Going to have to learn how it's formatted for publishing.

A lot more still to tend to.  But over the course of this past year and a half of dedicated work a lot has been done.  This project has come a very long way and I'm letting myself feel accomplished.  The finish line is almost in sight.  Just a few more things to fall into place and my first book will be out in the wild.  A friend remarked a few days ago that it's a sign that you've really arrived when you have written a book.  This will indeed be a fine feather in my cap.

Oh, by the way, this book will have its own ISBN number.  I'm going all out.

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Random fun with AI

 Here is a Chiss playing chess while chomping on cheddar cheese:

EDIT: A friend came up with a good one...

Chiss chess champion chewing cheddar cheese.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Someone suggested that he could also be "cheating".  But that's something that Grand Admiral Thrawn is above doing.  He certainly wouldn't do that with chess.  It would be too dishonorable.  Still a fun idea though :-)

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Hulk Hogan has passed away

A big piece of my childhood has gone.

Thank you Terry Bollea, known forever to American history as Hulk Hogan.  You brought a lot of joy and pleasure into our lives.

There is a chapter of the book I've written, that focuses on the Eighties.  As I say about the year 1984, any twelve months that kicked off with Hulk Hogan defeating the Iron Sheik for the WWF championship was bound to be on fire.

Hulkamania, now and forever.

EDIT: it has been a sad day, but Hogan's fans are remembering the many good times we had watching "the Hulkster" as he entertained us both inside the ring and out.

I think Hogan would be laughing hard at this article from The Babylon Bee, one of my favorite websites.

Hulk Hogan Makes Surprise Entrance To Challenge Jacob To Wrestling Match

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This is officially the craziest thing I've heard all summer...

 Word on the street is that there is a remake in the works of Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man.

This might be the LAST movie that comes to mind where remakes are concerned.  Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man is a 1991 film starring Mickey Rourke and Don Johnson as two bikers in the then-future 1996 who put together a bank heist in order to save their favorite bar from foreclosure (by the same bank).  There is more to it than that, but I won't spoil the pure over-the-top ridiculousness of it all.

Then again, with the right cast and direction this might work.  In addition to Rourke and Johnson the original film also starred Tom Sizemore, Giancarlo Esposito, and Vanessa Williams.  That wasn't too bad a collection of talent.

By the way, the remake may be starring Jason Momoa and Tom Hardy.  I'm only reporting what I've heard.

I guess we'll see if this pans out.  In the meantime if you want a real dose of Nineties-flavored dystopian action-comedy, Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man may strike your fancy.  Worth checking out if for no other reason than its opening sequence set to Bon Jovi's "Wanted Dead Or Alive".

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I know why CBS is canceling Stephen Colbert

 

Colbert and Trump in happier times (2015)

Stephen Colbert can stamp his feet all he wants about CBS ending his late-night show.  He can scream and tantrum to his heart's content.  But in the end the loss of The Late Show is squarely on him.  And the rest of the "talent" on late at night would do well to learn from his example.

Here's the secret to success at television after the eleven o'clock news.  Most people do not want the last thing that they allow into their minds before going to bed be unrelenting bitterness.  Late-night hosts like Johnny Carson, and Jay Leno after him, knew that people at that hour wanted one last shot of laughter to end their day on.  And those hosts provided that.  Viewers tuned in, got a good chuckle, and wound up going to sleep feeling that however rotten the day had been, it ended on a somewhat happy note after all.  It's a formula that kept television audiences tuned in for decades to those hosts of times past.

Colbert and the rest of his kind never understood that or ever really cared to.  That kind of "comedy" isn't their forté.  They believe that "humor" is vile and mean-spirited and they went to great lengths to proclaim that they represented "new comedy".

But in the end, their "comedy" for the past decade had only one setting: "Trump Bad And Republicans Evil"(tm).  People got tired of that.  Bitterness can only go so far in a business that is allegedly about entertaining people instead of preaching down to them.  If nothing else, Colbert was doing his best to insult half of his potential audience... and that's never a good practice, either.

No, it wasn't politics that led CBS to can The Late Show With Stephen Colbert.  It was solid numbers that Colbert and his staff weren't justifying having a presence with.  I'm seeing that it cost the network $40 million a year to keep the show running.  What kind of an audience does that kind of money supposed to achieve?  Carson had higher numbers than that during his long tenure on The Tonight Show, with far less a budget.

It wasn't politics.  It certainly wasn't President Donald Trump waving a cloaked sleeve like he's a Dark Lord of the Sith telling his minions to "do it!" to anyone who merits his wrath.  It was nothing but raw hatred and anger, perpetuated long past their expiration dates.  It's kind of ironic: Stephen Colbert liked cancel culture.  Until cancel culture came to cancel him.

Maybe the pendulum will begin to swing the other way now.  I've believed for awhile that the ground is fertile for a late-night host in the tradition of Carson and Leno.  Hosts who devoted at most three jokes a night about the president.  They were men who understood laughter and people's need for it.  Something that Colbert and his sort never did and probably never will.

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In memory of Malcolm-Jamal Warner

The very sad news broke today that Malcolm-Jamal Warner, the extremely talented actor and director and producer whose greatest role Theo Huxtable on The Cosby Show kept us uproariously laughing, has passed away at age 54.

It was hard to name a favorite character from that series, but Theo was definitely up there on my list.  Maybe because he was the only son of Cliff and Claire.  A lot of the comedy was his to bear because of that and he did it magnificently!

When I think of all the Theo-centric episodes of The Cosby Show, there is one stands out above the rest, and I believe that a lot of other people are going to say that this is funniest the character had.  Here in Warner's memory is a clip from the first season episode where Theo buys a "Gordon Gartrayal" shirt.  The interaction between Theo and his parents is hilarious!

Thoughts and prayers going out for his family.

EDIT: Wow, there's a part 2 from that episode that's been uploaded!  Here it is, Theo in the shirt that Denise made for him:

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About the alleged Obama-led conspiracy against Trump...

Someone asked me what do I think about it now coming out that Barack Obama, in the closing days of his presidency, conspired with several others to sabotage the incoming administration of Donald Trump.  There is a lot of evidence now that this indeed happened and if it did, then a lot of people including Obama deserve to go to jail.

It won't happen.

I'm old enough to recognize a rigged game when I see it.  And that is what the Trump Administration is facing.  Nobody is going to be arrested.  There may be indictments but they won't go anywhere.  And even if they did, there is going to never be a "guilty" verdict from a jury from the District of Columbia.  Washington is a company town, practically everyone there is on the payroll of that company.  The corruption has long taken too much root.

There may be some small-time members of the conspiracy who will be indicted, who will be expected to "fall on their swords", but the bigger names in the scheme?  They will go on as if nothing happened.  They have nothing to fear.  They've been playing the game for so long that they know they're invincible.  And they know that we know it.

Then take into account that it's only the "alternative" media - something that is fast becoming THE establishment press, traditional journalism has fallen so hard - that is really reporting this.  The legacy media isn't covering it.  To them it's as if there is no story.  Which in my mind demonstrates why they have lost all credibility about being trusted at all.  More people than ever are tuning into the podcasts and the blogs for their sources of information, but those aren't the ones that "the firm" is influenced by.  "The firm" still operates based on what CNN and the New York Times chooses to publicize.  Trump's win in November was a defeat for "the firm" but it can't be the only one, not if there is to be sustained progress.

If Obama headed up an engineered plot against Trump during his first four years of being president, then Obama and those who conspired with him ought to go to prison.  This is far worse than Watergate ever was.  Come to think of it, a LOT of things are worse than Watergate.  But for some reason we're still expected to tolerate those.  In saner times the citizens would be stomping toward Washington D.C. and demanding heads on pikes, if not decorating the lampposts Mussolini-style.  Figuratively, of course.  I don't want to see ANYBODY get hurt.  Not even the ones who have destroyed much of this country.  That can't be said for a lot of other people though who have been drained of compunction.

I hate to be a "downer" about this.  I really do.  But I've watched politics for awhile and I know something about the corruption of unchecked human nature.  And I really don't think anything is going to come of this.

But I would like to be proven wrong.

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"You're still blogging? Who still blogs?"

In the fall of 1994, I dialed into a friend's bulletin board system for the first time.  If you're wondering what that is, or was, a bulletin board system - BBS for short - was a computer system that you could phone into with a modem and share messages, download files, play games... it was a taste of the Internet way before most people had any access at all to the "information superhighway".  They were something like CompuServe, America Online, and other commercial services of the Eighties and Nineties, but they tended to be much more local.

BBSes were almost always the projects of hobbyists.  My friend Mark's BBS, which he named NEXUS, eventually had five phone lines.  That's five different people who could be dialed-in at a time, conversing or playing games with each other.  It was something that blew my mind and it made me wonder what things would be like once full-bore Internet arrived (which it did several months later).

It wasn't long after discovering Mark's system that I had an idea, if he was up for it.  Would it be possible to set aside part of the BBS for my own use?  The notion that had gripped me was to have some "op-ed space" on the board.  A place that I could write for, on whatever topic struck my fancy.  It would be like the letters of mine that the News & Record published on a semi-regular basis.

Mark thought it was a terrific idea.  And yes, such a thing was possible.  And that's how Knight's Corner was born.  It was my own little niche of the online world.  A place where I could share thoughts and opinions.  I used Knight's Corner to talk about a little bit of everything: the 1994 elections, a review of Star Trek Generations, sharing a recipe for Chex snack mix (one that includes assorted nuts)... lots of other topics.  I would post a new Knight's Corner every week or so.

Then in January 1995 Mark's BBS and several others were featured in a newspaper article.  The reporter made mention of Knight's Corner.  Within a few days NEXUS saw a lot of new users, dialing in from all over the Piedmont area.  And it was so amazing, all those people who were now also reading my stuff.  It was almost intoxicating.  And it made me wonder all the more what it would be like once I was on the real Internet.

I mention all of this because there's a paper trail that can be established going all the way back to late 1994, that I've been writing for online consumption this entire time, on and off for over thirty years.  When I started classes at Elon I learned how to make webpages, and I "migrated" Knight's Corner to my account there, for all the Internet to see.  I kept that up until I graduated, and then I found hosting on a free service.  Less than a year after that I was invited to join the staff of TheForce.net, and I wrote a lot of original pieces for that site, and was getting read by a daily audience numbering in the tens of thousands.

And now it's this blog, which I've been maintaining since early 2004, pretty much continuously apart from a little less than two years between 2016 and 2018, when I was traveling across America with my dog and then taking some time to address a few personal issues.  Even then though, I was posting some stuff for friends to read on Facebook.

So that's the vast majority of my life that I've been writing for an online readership.  It's a part of my personal legend now.  I'm not happy unless there's a keyboard and an online connection nearby to be a gateway for my thoughts.

I write.  It's what I do.  I have been writing like this ever since my English teacher in my freshman year of high school told me that it was a gift that I have.  I've done my best since Mrs. Rutledge told me that to make the most of it.

At least three times in as many months recently, I've been met with some incredulity when I've said that I have a blog.  People can't believe that that sort of thing is still being done in this day and age of social media.

Maybe there is some disdain because I'm being old-fashioned.  "Blogging"?  That requires actually reading something.  It's not moving images, it's not sound.  People aren't taking the time to read anything anymore.  Instead it has to be slickly packaged in something possessing motion and noise.  People expect their senses to be assaulted by sensory input.  And merely reading words doesn't satisfy that need.

I know that.  I accept that.  And that makes me want to blog that much more.

Media changes.  It always has.  Ever since the pharaohs dictated their decrees to be recorded in hieroglyphics.  But the meaning, the pure thought behind the visuals, that doesn't change.  It's not how the thought is expressed, it is that it's expressed at all.

So it is that I choose to employ a purer method of conveying my ideas, and ultimately myself.

I've experimented with posting video.  Perhaps I need to try that more.  I don't think I'm terribly un-photogenic.  I've made appearances in public and on television, talking about everything from bipolar disorder to digital copyright law, and I can present myself masterfully enough (I like to think so anyway).  But there's something about words that are permanent and immutable and can be appreciated again and again, and again.

Most modern media is designed to elicit an immediate response.  And that's not really what I'm out to engender from anyone.  I believe in being thoughtful.  I like for the recipients of my media to take some time to think about what it is that I've come to say.  Instead of being forced to hurtle on to the next thought without time to ruminate upon what I've just said and need them to consider.

In the end, I believe that my blogging will be of more permanence than any TikTok video or picture posted on Instagram.  We've been using textual sharing of information, in some form or another, for going on six thousand years now.  What I do with this blog isn't too terribly removed from the Gutenberg press, or illuminated manuscripts, or parchment, or papyrus scrolls.  It's just a refinement, several generations on, from impressing clay tablets with cuneiform.

I love my audience.  I'm very thankful for that.  It may not have readers in the millions or even the hundreds of thousands.  But then, I don't necessarily write for the masses.  I write for people who will truly appreciate what it is that I am bringing to the table and the conversation around it.  That's the way I've always been, looking back across the decades of my life.

It may lack the numbers that it once did at the height of blogging.  But I choose to continue blogging nevertheless.  And one never knows.  It could be that what I write today, will be read by many more people in the years and decades to come.  Like I told a fellow writer for Elon's student newspaper, when I gestured toward the bound volumes of past years' editions: I don't just write for the people today.  I write for them too: the ones who come after.  I write in a way that I hope leaves a good impression upon them.  That is especially why I write what I do.  My audience is potentially vast.  Much more so than what I can perceive today.  And I owe it to them to give them my very best.

Yes, I still blog.  I know I'm not the only one either.  But even if I were, The Knight Shift is my own little piece of acreage on the Internet.  It's my well-tended garden, as Samwise Gamgee would put it.  Made and built-up with my mind and my own two hands.  I intend to keep tending to it for as long as I can.  Indeed, if something were to happen to mine I've made arrangements for friends to post about that here.  And there is even an "end of the world" post that I've specially composed for when the apocalypse happens.  One final bit of myself to share with readers before the end of humanity.  I don't think that's macabre.  I just like being prepared.

So to anyone who's wondering why I have The Knight Shift and if I'm going to give it up because people aren't reading blogs anymore: I've no intention on going anywhere.  And if the muses of technology are kind, these words will endure long enough to be read by whoever may be interested in my eccentric life generations from now.

I like to think so, anyway.

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Book Report: My challenge to myself

The search for a literary agent continues.  But I'm afraid that I really might have written something that cannot be represented as most other books can.  I've said it a few times already: the book I 've written may be too liturgical for a secular audience, and too worldly for more religious readers.  There are a lot of elements in it that would fit in something found on the shelves of the average Christian bookstore.  But there are also a lot of things within its pages that would absolutely disqualify it from that kind of retail market.  For an agent to pick it up for representation would be a risk.  I can understand that.

Dad was the one who most believed in this book.  A lot of people have told me that they wanted me to write my story.  But Dad especially.  I wrote this in his memory, more than for others.  Well, I may have written it for my dog also.  Tammy doesn't come into the book until a bit later, but she has definitely inspired and encouraged me to stay the course.

So I'm considering other options for getting my book out.  I believe in it.  It's going to find an audience.  It doesn't necessarily have to get to them through traditional publishing.  But there have been other books that have seen distribution outside the normal channels, and they have gone on to great things (The Martian by Andy Weir and Legally Blonde by Amanda Brown come to mind).  Who knows, maybe mine will find a little bit of success too.

Well, I've written a book.  It's now well past the first draft that  I completed the week before this past Thanksgiving.  It's not going to get out there just sitting on my iPad Pro.  Some initiative on my part is called for...

Here is the goal I have set for myself.  It's going to be hard, it certainly won't be as easy as many if not most people think it might be.  I'm going to have to learn quite a bit about proper formatting.  But this is what I'm setting out to accomplish.  I'm going to aim to have my book on sale on Amazon by the end of the year.  Maybe even by the one year anniversary of the first draft's completion.  New Year's 2026 is going to find my autobiography available on Kindle tablets and apps, as well as printed form in softcover and hardback.  Which would include a proper jacket, and I've some ideas about what I want that to look like (the photo of Tammy and me on the beach in San Diego on Thanksgiving Day 2016 would be great for the back cover).

Between then and now is some editing and proofreading (trusted friends have been doing some of that), as well as legal counseling.  There are things in this book that I need to be really careful about.  A lot of people get mentioned in my book and I have to do right by each of them.  I like to think that they will be honored.  This is my chance to give them credit where it's due.  And also to do my best to make up for some things that I regret.  As I've said in the proposal that I've been sending out, one of the things that my book is, is an act of penance.  Maybe that will be made clear if it comes out.

Hey who knows.  It might even be ready for the holiday season!  THAT would be pretty neat, to give out my book as Christmas and Hanukkah presents.  Hey, sometimes Dad would make knives to give to friends and family for Christmas gifts.  I would be following in his stead.

That is my plan.  To have the book available for purchase by the new year.  We'll see if I can pull it off.

I've shared this before recently.  It is a picture I came upon the other week.  It's from the Codex Manesse, a German illuminated text dating to 1304 A.D.  This image is perfect for the cover of my book.  It says so much, without giving anything away at all.  I've already got a draft of the cover, just needs a bit of fine tuning.

When you see this picture on the front of a book, you will know that I've succeeded.

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