New year, new show!

Got a show to do this Sunday! I had a table at one of Martin Hirchak's last shows in Clawson, MI, but the venue closed, so he had to move house. I went to the Warren Elks Lodge last week to check it out...looks like a good place with lots of room, so we're all hoping for an awesome inaugural show!

Blue skies smiling at me...

 Thirteen years ago, after a stumbling start, I joined Facebook with the notion of using it to help promote my then-upcoming novel.  As I said at the time, I'm neither social nor do I network, so I didn't really have a desire to deal with the site, but hey, I wanted to sell books, and I reckon the Swords & Sixguns page I set up there helped to a small degree.  It also led to me to becoming admin for the Jonah Hex, Via Pony Express page because I simply asked Darren Schroeder if he ever considered setting up a FB version of the Yahoo group he ran (good thing I did, too, 'cause Yahoo Groups is long gone!).

Fast-forward to today: the S&S page has 334 followers and VPE has more than three times as many (the old buzzard has the advantage of name recognition).  Considering that I've never bought one ad on FB, I think that's pretty good, but I daresay those numbers may not get any bigger thanks to the algorithm actively working against virtually every page out there (and no, putting money into this won't help, as I've seen enough other, much-bigger pages report that ad buys no longer move the needle).  Still, I don't want to lose those numbers, so I keep on keeping on over there, but from what I've been hearing lately, it seems like the general environment at FB might reach a point where many folks abandon the place altogether.  In fact, over the last few months, I've seen that a good amount of people have been setting up accounts over at the Twitter-ish site BlueSky.

Now, I've been long resisting the pressure to set up on another social media site, but I've finally decided that having a backup isn't a bad idea.  That's actually why I started this blog: years ago, when the future of the DC Message Boards was in question, I set up here and let other Jonah Hex fans know about it in case that place went kablooey...and it eventually did, so good call by me.  So yesterday, I set up an account on BlueSky, which will serve as a combo of all three of the FB pages I have: my personal page, my S&S page, and a trimmed-down version of what I do over on VPE (the lack of a Photo section on BlueSky prevents me from doing much of what VPE has become known for).  It'll be a different vibe, to be sure, but I plan on keeping things fun, especially since I plan on unleashing the massive meme archive I've accumulated over the years upon the place.

So, if you're on BlueSky, look me up under "Susan Hillwig" and help me build this new venue into something special.

Kindled, then extinguished

 Got an email from KDP recently letting me know that they were discontinuing the Kindle Vella program, due to it not taking off the way Amazon expected since it began in December 2021.  Frankly, the response to the two stories I'd started on the platform was a bit underwhelming, as you can see by the graph here depicting every time someone read at least one chapter.  Most folks appeared to pop in, read one or two chapters, then leave.  Two ambitious folks read both stories in their entirety, but despite including my email at the end of virtually every chapter and damn-near begging people to drop me a line if they liked it, I never got any feedback save for getting some thumbs-up marks on the chapters (which I honestly didn't even notice until today).  Since they're shutting down the whole dang program, I imagine this was typical for most of the writers who tried it out.

On the upside, I made nearly twenty bucks thanks to KDP sending participants bonuses for contributing to the program.  It's a damn sight better than the royalties those two stories earned, which amounted to about forty cents over those three years.  Not exactly a hidden goldmine, right?

So, what now?  The stories will be finished eventually, so if you're one of the few who read them, physical copies will one day exist, but I wanna get the published version of my Jonah Hex history project done first, not to mention the second Swords & Sixguns novel.  Low response means low priority, unless y'all want to convince me otherwise.

And if you never read them at all, then you've got until February 2025 to read them on your Kindle.  You can find the first four chapters of Godheart here, and the first seven chapters of Forgotten Be Thy Name over here....and if you like them, for goodness sakes, tell me!

An EXPANDED History of Jonah Hex!

 

While the book version of "An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex" is not ready for publication yet, I have made enough progress to officially say that the edits on Chapter 1 and 2 -- encompassing the entirety of Jonah's time at All-Star Western/Weird Western Tales -- are 100% COMPLETE!  Unless something earthshattering is uncovered prior to publication or I stumble across a massive typo, I'm not noodling with those chapters anymore.

In celebration of this feat, the first two Hex history posts on this here blog have been expanded with all-new material, making them 2-3 times longer than the originals!  I've added a couple of new images as well, though I've decided to remove the hyperlinks since I no longer use Photobucket, as well as me doing my level best to get all the info "on the page" this time around since that's how it'll be in book form.

Okay, that's enough chatter.  If you want to read the updated chapters, you'll find the new Chapter 1 here and the new Chapter 2 over here.  Hope you enjoy them, and don't forget to wish Jonah Hex a happy 186th birthday!

Hex history update AND MORE!

Progress on the book version of "An Illustrated History of Jonah Hex" is still proceeding at a slow pace, but it has gotten far enough along that, this November 1st, I will be updating the first 2 chapters on this blog with BRAND NEW MATERIAL!  That's right, y'all will be getting a sneak preview of what the book version will look like!  I haven't decided yet if I'll update every single chapter, but the first chapter alone is now double its original length, so it didn't seem fair to hide all that new info in the book alone.

In related news, my work has once again been cited in another article!  Nathan Cabaniss of Screenrant contacted me a month or so ago after coming across my blog, as he was looking for some info about a 1980s write-in campaign to get Clint Eastwood to make a Jonah Hex movie.  I informed him that the Eastwood/Hex connection went MUCH deeper than he expected, which soon led to a full-fledged article with quotes from Yours Truly!  You can read all about it right here on Screenrant...and yes, this story will be covered in a much briefer form in Chapter 1!

Okay, I gotta get back to work.  Two weeks to go until the update drops!

Your plastic pal who's fun to be with

 

Got the new Jonah Hex figure from McFarlane Toys in the mail last week, so I decided to shoot my very first unboxing video!  It's nearly 25 minutes of me talking Hex and cracking little jokes.  Hope you enjoy it, and if you want your very own plastic bounty hunter, go to the McFarlane Toys online store and order your own while you still can!

Refugee from the Round File

 I put up a post recently on the Swords & Sixguns Facebook page that contained a quote from actor/composer Paul Williams, wherein he said, "Be careful about throwing something in the round file as garbage" because what you view as a failure might lead to something spectacular down the line.  I admitted in my repost that I had thrown out tons of stuff over the years, though I try to do so less often these days.  I have a box in my office labeled as an "archive" that contains various drafts of the book, along with flyers and convention lanyards and such.  I also keep on my desk the original black looseleaf binder that held all of my work from the moment I first sat down to write my novel exactly 30 years ago today.  It still holds drawings and notes and other little things going all the way back to those early days.  I could put it in the box, but it sat on my desk for so long, it doesn't seem right to tuck it away.

This sentimentality is a huge change from how I treated my work 30+ years ago.  I have no idea how many pieces of paper I ripped up and tossed way back then, but it was a lot.  Not just writing, mind you, but art pieces as well.  I would get into "I suck so bad" moods and just chuck things that I hated at that moment.  This is why I tell people that the 400-page first draft that I wrote longhand was my "final" first draft: all the drafts before it were never finished, they'd just get destroyed or cannibalized for the next iteration that would also get destroyed and cannibalized for the iteration after that, and so on and so on.  If my husband hadn't challenged me to "Just keep writing" and crank out 100 pages before the year 2000, I'd likely still be in that same destructive cycle here in 2024.

But there are bits of those earliest drafts that remain intact in the black binder I mentioned.  Things that never made it into the published version, yet can't be inserted into a hypothetical "expanded edition" because there's no place to plug them in.  So, to celebrate the 30th anniversary of me taking a week off of my paying job to start writing this crazy idea I had in my head, here's eight pages written by early-20s me, with commentary by 50-year-old me interspersed.

The first thing that likely jumps out for you folks is J'nath saying "you" instead of "thou".  I don't recall when I began having him and Pietruvek talk with "all them 'thees' and 'thous' and shit" (as Richard would put it in published version of Chapter 5), but it's not present at all in these pages, so it obviously didn't surface for a while.  You'll also notice a line at the bottom of the page that not only says that there are nine countries in Arkhein -- as opposed to the "Seven Known Lands" H'landa refers to a couple of chapters later -- but the Kana-Semeth are referred to simply as Guardsmen, a holdover from the very first version of Arkhein which I discussed in a post about 10 years ago.  However, a variation on the middle section did make it into the published version, as did the "dine-of-might" gag (changed to "die-of-might" and uttered instead by H'landa near the climax of the book).

A few different things here: J'nath hasn't seen what a gun can do yet (the slip-up in the snow didn't exist in the earliest drafts), there's talk of a war about 65 years prior (a throwaway line, no real intent behind it), and Nina's eyes are described as hazel instead of "too blue" (Richard's words for the vibrant blue eyes many Arkans have).  You may also notice that, while Nina is present for the gun demonstration, Pietruvek is not.  In the earliest drafts, the youngest Bannen had been sent to the capital city to collect the only known remaining piece of the Heart of Avisar (that wasn't embedded in a Crossroad, that is).  While I never got far enough in the earliest drafts to write the scene, Pietruvek's return would've brought with him Lieutenant (not Lermekt) H'landa as well as news that the aforementioned piece of the Heart hadn't survived the centuries, officially stranding Richard in Arkhein.

Stuff like this is why I kept these pages instead of tossing them away like I did the 45 pages the preceded it.  I was happy with the staging of the scene and the descriptions I'd made, but it didn't fit well with what became the final first draft.  Richard here is fairly relaxed, he's making jokes, and most importantly, he thinks he's going to be able to leave Arkhein.  The attitude he has in the published version of Chapter 5 doesn't match how he acts here, so it had to be put aside.  Luckily, as you've seen already and will continue to see, I was able to utilize parts of these pages later on in different ways...

...like the majority of this page, for example.  This exchange was repurposed nearly word-for-word in Chapter 9, with H'landa speaking J'nath's lines as he makes ready to release Richard from jail.  Speaking of which, you'll notice at the bottom of the page that J'nath refers to him by his proper name, not "Reshard"!  That gag didn't start up until I began working on the Arkan language in earnest -- it's barely present in these pages aside from a couple of words -- and decided that there was no letter C in Arkan, which meant I'd either have to invent a symbol to represent the "ch" sound in Richard's name or just have everybody mispronounce it.  The latter was funnier, so I went with it.

Pretty much from the beginning, I'd decided on there being a language barrier between Richard and nearly everyone in Arkhein, but since I had barely started work on the Arkan language yet, Nina has zero lines in these pages.  Rereading them now, it looks awful that I have her in these scenes saying literally nothing -- the closest I have is Richard's narrative comment about her and J'nath "talking about something".  In my author talks, I tell new writers that they need to avoid the "sexy lamp", which is a woman who's just there, not contributing anything to the plot/conversation...and I see now that my earliest draft was super-guilty of doing that to Nina throughout.

More shitty writing towards Nina.  Insulting her cooking, making a semi-lewd comment that she can't understand but her husband definitely can...gah, this is awful!  And yeah, Richard still hasn't properly met the doc yet.  While I don't remember exactly I wrote in the previous chapters of the earliest drafts, I do recall rushing through scenes a lot, and that they were much shorter than what you see in the published version.  Richard's shock over waking up in Arkhein was a rather quick thing, no real disbelief or arguing.  I hadn't yet learned that conflict is a good thing in a story, nor did I understand how to let a scene breathe, so to speak, and just let the characters do their thing.

While the Feast of Halitova did exist in the earliest drafts, it wouldn't have been the first time Richard went to town.  Again, I was rushing, which in this case meant I wasn't thinking about story structure.  What's the big deal about Richard being at the party if everyone has seen him already?  So in the published version, he's more-or-less confined to the Bannen household until Halitova, with only a couple of people seeing him beforehand.  It gives him time to acclimate and learn some of the language, not to mention heal up from all the wounds I'd inflicted on him.

 Our last page, and our last repurposed scene.  You'll recognize the gist of it from the end of Chapter 9, but the impetus and attitude is totally different.  In the earliest draft here, Richard just gives up his guns to put J'nath at ease...and looking back at it, this doesn't really fit with who he is at this point in the story.  It's the first sign that he can change his outlaw ways, but it's not earned yet, it just happens.  In the published version, this happens after he's screwed up multiple times and been tossed in jail by Lermekt H'landa for a while, leading up to him realizing that he's going to ruin this new life as badly as the old one if he doesn't get his shit together.  Now the change is earned, now voluntarily giving up his guns means something, and I'm much happier with how it plays out.

I don't recall exactly what I'd written after these pages, but knowing how awful I usually felt about my work just days or weeks after writing it, I likely didn't get much further before the tearing of pages began.  There are other bits of scenes I still have tucked away in that binder, so if you like what you read here, let me know and maybe I'll do another stroll down memory lane around this time next year.