The Marshmallow Ranch Gazette

Volume 5, Issue 9 - Monday, March 9th, 2020

Howdy, patrons!

I apologize for missing chapter 7 last Friday; the day job ran into some unexpected turbulence last week due to coronavirus protocol. I'm working from home for the next two weeks -- as are a lot of colleagues in the tech sector -- and in a global organization that means a ton of last-minute meeting shifts and all kinds of checks and double-checks to make sure we're good for it. We're through the fire drill, at least, and I'll be doing my day job through the Secret Burrow Location for the next two weeks. 

Between that and -- ugh -- Super Tuesday, I was pretty much wiped. I promise not to say too much about the political situation here in the United States except that it's as fucked as it ever was. The amount of vitriol online rapidly sapped my will to engage anywhere, with anyone, so I ended up taking a big step back from social media for the time being. My mood is stabilizing now, and I'm hoping to have chapter 7 AND 8 out for release this week. Wish me luck!

I honestly wish I could be more resilient; or at least, at the level of the profession where my emotional state didn't dictate whether or not I can make a deadline. I know I'm working towards that, and it's a process that will take some time, but it's frustrating to feel as if you're a slave to your own mind. Wishing my brain wasn't my brain doesn't make it so, though -- so progress marches on. I'll have to figure out what I can do to make these kinds of hiccups less likely in the future.

This week, I've learned a lot about how to marry real-world issues to fiction by watching "Invisible Man", the new Universal horror movie starring Elizabeth Moss and directed by Leigh Whannell. Whannell is one of the biggest names in horror right now; he co-created the Saw franchise, and wrote the first two Insidious movies. He's great at finding ways to inject incredible suspense into domestic situations and playing with horror tropes to ratchet up the terror. One of my favorite horror movie moments in the last ten years is that scene in Insidious where the family moves out of the haunted house and "Tiptoe Through the Tulips" plays while they're moving in. Just masterful.

Here, Invisible Man is repurposed from a cheesy monster movie into a much more modern horror flick. Moss is the abused girlfriend of a controlling tech genius who finally manages to escape him, triggering his supposed suicide weeks later. However, as creepy and unexplainable situations grow more severe, she becomes convinced that he isn't dead -- he faked his death and found a way to be invisible. No one, even her well-meaning family and friends, know quite what to make of her paranoia; she's clearly been traumatized by the experience, and who wouldn't be a little cracked in the wake of that? Watching her try to explain what's happening to a series of bewildered faces is its own kind of horror; so many abused women deal with the same thing every day. Even though this fantastical situation could never happen in real life, it still puts its protagonist in an all-too-real pattern. 

If you're a fan of horror, it's definitely worth a look. I'm really glad the movie seems to be doing well in theatres. I'm already thinking of how to mold the real-world concerns I'm bringing into "Crushing The Competition" through the story in a more elegant way. I don't want to beat anyone over the head with a message, especially since this is just meant to be hot, silly porn. But the more I thought through the outline, the more I realized that the central metaphor speaks to a real fear of mine. Money buys significantly outsized power, the kind that is all but insurmountable to most of us normal folks. How do you deal with living in a world where someone has so much power you might as well be an insect, economically-speaking? In a world that prizes money as much as it does, what does it do to your sense of self knowing you'll likely never be a titan of industry? How do you make peace with that?

I want to wrestle with those questions in the hottest way possible! Hopefully, as my writing process matures and I become more consistent and resilient, I can figure out how to do that. 

See you folks a little later this week; good luck out there. 

-Jakebe