It's mostly been a weekend of relaxing here at Super Powered Fiction Central! This has been on purpose as I cool off from spitting out 50,000 words in thirty days as part of NaNoWriMo. The First: Hero's Dawn isn't quite finished yet, but it will rest for a bit as I make sure I've got the first three months of stories set for the huge roll-out of twice monthly (or more) new fiction on Patreon.
I'm also getting things prepped for the roll-out of another top ten wrestlers for the year ending 2018 over at the Wrestling Deep End, as well as writing about recent independent shows I've attended.
Next up on my docket is the wrap of Lightweight Book Four, more Shockwave and then finishing up The First: Hero's Dawn. From there, I'll then wrap Quadrant Book Two before pulling out a couple older works to finally bring to an end.
So I have lots of plans ahead... but not much to talk about for them right now! I'm sure I'll have more in the near future however, as things get ready to launch for the next wave of Lightweight tales in just a few short weeks!
Today's image is of D'Compose, a great villain from the classic cartoon Inhumanoids, by artist Kelly Williams. I've had giant monsters from beneath the ground in my head for awhile lately, so it seemed fitting to share this one here!
My writing time proved limited over the weekend, as I visited two wrestling shows in two different towns, neither of which were Cedar Rapids. First I visited Des Moines with my brother to check out Pro Wrestling Revolver with my brother. Then I traveled back near home for a show in Walford put on by another Iowa indie called Central Empire Wrestling. I did some sleeping and some shopping in between but very little writing.
At the current time, I'm about a day behind on the par I've set to keep my forty thousand word goal attainable. I still think the number is quite doable. I just need to double down and get to work.
The new Lightweight chapter continues along quite nicely and rather quickly. Book Four will finally work to set a sort of status quo for Kevin going forward, but in the process I get to show off a few more corners of the globe. At my current writing pace and alternating, I'm producing about one new chapter of the saga a month, with switches to Shockwave and the horror book as well. If I can keep that pace and more folks sign up for the Patreon, I might consider moving the publication of individual chapters to a monthly schedule. But I want a lot more stories banked before I make that decision permanent.
I'm working Atomic Werewolf 2000 to a stopping point in the next couple days. From there, I'll mostly focus on a couple short ideas I've had kicking around as I prep for Project TEAM in November. I'll continue working on Lightweight and Shockwave as TEAM continues. I always like to have a few irons in the fire at once. I find it keeps me from burning out on any one project.
WWE's The Shield: Dean Ambrose, Roman Reigns and Seth Rollins.
As I write this, a big piece of wrestling news has derailed my mind a lot from the writing process. WWE Universal champion Roman Reigns relinquished the title due to the return of the leukemia he first suffered eleven years ago. While it's a surprise to see any athlete or celebrity fight any kind of major disease, Roman's fight with cancer hits close to home only months after my own cancer diagnosis. I got lucky and had the tiny growth on my kidney removed before it could spread, but its presence at all puts me at risk of continued development. So I can relate to his fears and struggles, especially as a husband and father. I honestly fought back tears when I saw the announcement. But while it derails me tonight and breaks down a lot of the high of the weekend, I will use it as another focus. I don't know how much time I have left in this world, and I plan to spend it with my family or creating my universe for as long as I can.
So forgive me for making this one so wrestling focused despite me having a whole other forum for that. Thanks for reading and let's all keep moving forward!
Most of my first week of my 30,000 word September was actually spent building upcoming posts for this blog. As part of my commitment to regular writing, I also plan to do some regular blog posting as well, although perhaps a bit more esoteric than in the past. I will add a few more personal anecdotes here and there or sometimes just talk about something I'm really enjoying. But I want to have this blog and Newer Gods with a regular recurring number of posts, while The Wrestling Deep End will continue to show new posts two or three times a month.
While I'm also looking at a few long form non-fiction ideas, my focus outside of many, many blogs has been on the two projects I've been working on for several weeks now: the eighteenth chapter of the ongoing Lightweight saga and my new Atomic Werewolf tale. I'm nearing the wrap on this chapter of Lightweight which will continue to alternate with the local hero concept I'm currently developing the first years worth of stories on.
If I can continue at my increased pace, I hope to have both near completion by November. That will leave time in that month for my focus to be on NaNoWriMo and one of several new projects I'm developing. I still haven't decided which project I will focus on in November, but I've been doing research on all three, waiting to see how the muse strikes.
The new Atomic Werewolf tale is a jumble of ideas all flowing out right now. It started as a conglomeration of a couple ideas and I expect to weave in a half dozen more before the book ends. While I originally thought of this one as a novella, I have a sneaking suspicion it will be much larger than that when I finish.
Alright, enough blogging. I have more words to write and more wolves to were!
Big Van Vader died today. If you're not a wrestling fan, you may not know about the alter ego of Leon White. But he was basically the Juggernaut in early 90s professional wrestling. He was a big mean villain of superhuman proportions, the kind of guy that literally plowed through the competition. He appealed to the comic fan in me.
Over at the soon-to-be-renamed Wrestling Weekday, the annual countdown of the year's top 10 wrestlers has began. Go check it out today and follow it for the rest of this week and the next as we countdown the ten biggest stars of the year!
I ran the The Wrestling Weekday concurrently with this blog for a couple years. While it has mostly been shuttered for the second half of 2017, I will do a full re-launch next year under a new name with less frequent, but more engaged thought pieces. But one tradition that won't be going away is the year end Top 10.
Full details on voting can be found in the re-post below!
I am over here dusting the Wrestling Weekday homepage off. This site will get something of a face lift over the next year as it will feature some long form works and almost certainly, a name change. But none of that matters, the relaunch starts in the last week of the year. That means it is once again time for the year end Top 10.
And I need your help to determine the ten best wrestlers of 2017.
Who will join 2015 winner Sasha Banks and 2016 winner Broken Matt Hardy
as the best wrestler of 2017?
As in previous years, the process is simple. All you have to do to vote is to send me your list of the top wrestlers from anywhere in the world. Your list can be as short as one or as long as 25, but it needs to be ranked in order of worst to best. Send your choices to wwfmegs{at}yahoo{dot}com (or leave them in the comments below) and I will tally the fan choices as well as my own top ten to give a full list of the top stars of 2017.
The only requirement for a wrestler to be eligible for the list is if they were active in the calendar year 2015 as an in ring worker. Promotions, gender and age are not limited, just as long as they wrestled a match at some point in the year 2017. Wrestlers should be rated on quality of match rather than out of match promos or shenanigans, all though those can be taken into account as an overall reason for your choice. Tag teams and units must be listed separately on this list.If you feel they had equal levels of performance in your list of twenty, please put them one after another.
Though it is not required, any commentary on the wrestlers you chose and why you chose them would be appreciated, as it will be included as thoughts on the wrestler in the final Top Ten list.
All votes must be received by December 24, 2017, at midnight Central time.
April this year, much like last year, has been all about Camp Nanowrimo. And while last year's project ran into roadblocks that caused me to at least temporarily abandon it after the Camp, so far this year's project is firing on all cylinders.
This year I'm deep at work on a project called Outlaw, a mixture of super powered fiction, classic action adventure and urban fantasy. It is also planned as the first book of a proposed multi-author series. Regular Metahuman Press cohort Travis Hiltz is my co-creator on this one and will have his own volume down the line. Right now, I'm working to lay out the basic world and supporting cast so other writers can see where we're going with the character.
I expect to work on this one both this month and at the next Camp Nanowrimo in July. While it won't see publication to (at the earliest) this time next year, it will have an important part in a new Metahuman Press project down the road. But I may have already said too much about that one...
I also continue work on Dino Force. I am just about done with the main section of my contribution with only a brief epilogue to the shared universe anthology to add on. Fans interested in this one should stay tuned for next week, when the Kickstarter launches for the project!
And that pretty much wraps up my work on the writing front. But if you're a wrestling fan, don't forget to check out my thoughts over at The Wrestling Weekday.
Don't know the artist to credit on this one,
but she offers a hint on one upcoming project.
In case you had yet to notice, my time posting here on Super Powered Fiction as well on The Wrestling Weekday has grown more limited over the last few weeks. My focus for much of the last three months of last year, January and February have been mostly involved with getting myself into a better place than I have been in quite some time.
I don't talk about depression issues on here often, but with a long family history of depression (including bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder), I have had particular challenges all through the last twelve months but they were intensified as the year ended as extended family issues seemed to overwhelm everything.
And sometimes something has to give.
In case you don't get my gist, it looks like 2017 will be a very slim year for me.
I do not foresee 2017 as being a strong year for new work from Super Powered Fiction or Metahuman Press. That is not to say I will go without any releases, but I suspet most of my work will be limited to fulfilling prior commitments.
This includes a long gestating shared world anthology based on a distinctly non-Western take on superheroes, a co-edited project that continues my love for weird ideas brought to print and (hopefully) the long awaited first Pulpsploitation novel by Teel James Glenn. It will also include a handful of short stories owed to a few different publishers.
I suspect those projects to take most of the first six months of the year to complete. With the ongoing need for greater attention to home issues, my time writing and editing are far more limited. I plan to see through the release of those works before I start looking into other projects.
Some of the other works I have hinted at in recent months, such as the remainder of F.O.R.C.E, the sequel series Executive F.O.R.C.E. or the fourth volume of Lightweight are still ahead, but they are backburnered. I will give more details on their release as work returns on them.
That is not to say I am without plans. I have a big series launch planned for early 2018, one which I suspect will take up much of my energy in the new year, but one I also hope will change the face of super powered fiction for years to come. But that one is still very far away.
When I originally wrote this post, Wrestlemania XXX was just days away with a future for Ultimate Warrior and WWE that looked bright. He was back working with Vince, a new DVD reliving his legacy was out and I was watching clips left and right on the very new WWE Network. I hadn't paid this much attention to the Ultimate Warrior in a decade.
Sadly, less than 48 hours after his induction into the WWE Hall of Fame, the Ultimate Warrior was dead. But this article isn’t about Jim Hellwig, Jim Warrior or whatever name he used outside the ring. He was just a man. But the Ultimate Warrior was a legend. This is an article about the character he created inside the squared circle.
The Ultimate Warrior is all about character. Or more accurately for this column, being the best character ever.
He started out much in the same way as current NXT star Mojo Rawley, a guy that blasts to the ring and never stops for a second in his victories. And the then-WWF used television for months to make it clear why we should love him. He ran to the ring for months to completely destroy jobbers in ultrashort matches that made him look like a million bucks.
By the time he got his first loss to Rick Rude, it didn’t matter. He started to cut long winded promos about his ability and power, often adding new and interesting words that didn’t exist until that moment.
But it was his victory over the Honky Tonk Man, the wrestler that had held a stranglehold over the Intercontinental title for 14 months, longer than any star before or since. The Warrior made short work of HTM.
This happened to Rick Rude a lot.
The title win was the start of Ultimate Warrior’s rise to the top of the card. His impressive victories, great look and amazing—albeit crazed—promos cemented him as a fan favorite of the WWF’s young fans. Discussions over who the greatest WWF star began among young fans. Was it WWF champion Hulk Hogan or the new Intercontinental champion?
That answer came in 1990 at WrestleMania VI. In the main event of that show it was title versus title. The Intercontinental champion beat the World champ and Ultimate Warrior rose to the top of the heap.
Unfortunately, the Warrior’s story didn’t really work once he was the king of the heap. He always worked best in weird psychological battles with the likes of Rick Rude and Jake the Snake. Standing at the top of the heap as the guy with the belt only exposed his weaknesses as a talent. After nine months as the top guy, he lost the title to the turncoat Sgt. Slaughter.
In the year after his loss, he once again entered some great feuds, starting with a battle with Randy Savage that gave him his finest match at Wrestlemania VII. But after his exposure as the champ, the Warrior’s shine had faded. And with steroids becoming an issue for WWF, the most obvious roid user on the roster became more of a liability than a moneymaker.
The Warrior left in late 1991 and outside brief runs in ‘92, ‘96 and ‘98, his career was basically at an end.
Of course, those long absences were sometimes just fine with me. Post-1992, he dropped the Ultimate from his name and started writing in an insane but great comic series starring himself simply called Warrior.
Huh?
The comic is probably best remembered for the issue he tortured Santa Claus. Yes, really.
Looking back now, it is clear that the Ultimate Warrior was all about personality and look without the needed skills to truly work as a great wrestler. But not even Hulk Hogan was able to so aptly and easily catch the young wrestling fan’s joy. Everything about the Warrior is worthy of study, simply to show the ability of great booking and an amazing personality to make a star. And because of that he truly is the best character of that era of pro wrestling.
The Warrior is one of the few characters out there that directly inspired a work of fiction by me. I will talk a bit more about American Arsenal later today, but his pattern of speech is based directly on the Ultimate Warrior’s often strange promos.
Rob Schamberger's Warrior painting.
Image credit: RobSchamberger.com.
Here is what else I have written on the internet this week. You may notice it is a bit wrestling focused. (Okay, totally wrestling focused.) But if you haven't checked out The Wrestling Weekday yet, these articles are your chance!
Out There is a new weekly column where I sum up everything else I have produced on the internet while you have been reading this fine blog (or not as is the case with this week’s posts; more about that in the future.)
So without any more ado, let's take a look at some other posts, all of which this week come from my new blog: The Wrestling Weekday.
This will actually be the last edition of Wrestling Wednesday to appear on this site in this form. Starting next week I plan to debut an official wrestling related blog to separate my wrestling commentary from my thoughts on superheroes and super powered fiction. But I thought it was time to go out with a bang—or at least a great song—so here is the official video for Killer Mike’s Ric Flair. FYI, the lyrics are anything but safe for work, but the song is freaking sweet.
Stay tuned for more details of the new site in the next few days.
The daily countdown over at the Wrestle Blog of the Top 100 wrestlers in 2014 continues today and through Wrestlemania weekend and its aftermath. Already wrestlers 100-21 have been revealed over the last six days. Later today, the final multi-man list goes up featuring the twentieth best wrestler to the sixth best wrestler right before the daily top five kicks off tomorrow.
Check out the convenient links below for all my contributions so far!
Back on the old site, I often devoted Wednesdays to wrestling matches and articles about the (pseudo-)sport of kings. I am going to return to that on occasion, starting today with a great video everyone, wrestling fans or not, should definitely check out. But before I get to that, I want to direct my readers over to The Wrestling Blog, where starting tomorrow, I will be participating in the grand list of the top 100 wrestlers of 2014. I will be contributing blurbs for some of my top picks, so keep an eye out for that as the countdown stretches over the countdown to Wrestlemania XXXI.
Back on topic though, let me direct you to a new video by Max Landis as he perfectly deconstructs the history of Triple H. In the process, he creates something I truly love to do: a full narrative of a wrestler’s entire history in a company. It is a great read and truly distills what makes Triple H compelling at his best. And yes, I highly recommend it to any fans of fiction, not just wrestling fans. Give it a look.
and 
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