MF GALAXY

When I grow up, I want to be Milton Davis. Let me tell you why.

He’s an Atlanta-based chemist, the entrepreneur heading the pioneering Afritopian publishing house MVmedia, a key figure in the development of Sword & Soul and Steamfunk, the co-editor of four anthologies including Griots and Griot: Sisters of the Spear with Charles R. Saunders, the author of numerous adult and YA novels including The Woman of the Woods and Amber and the Hidden City, the co-producer of the new animated series From Here to Timbuktu, and the co-developer, with fellow Afritopian creator Balogun Ojetade, of the breakthrough role-playing game Ki Khanga! Ki Khanga is innovative for numerous reasons, as you’re about to hear, but especially because it’s the first standalone Afritopian RPG ever made.

I spoke with Milton Davis by web video on December 19, 2018; in full disclosure, I tried to get co-creator Balogun Ojetade in the same call, but the gremlins who destroy online conversations made sure that couldn’t happen. But Balogun joined us in spirit. Milton Davis and I discussed:

• How he and his co-creator chose their target audience for Ki Khanga and how they’d attract them to the game
• How their fantasy RPG would be innovative far beyond the exhausted cliches of J.R.R. Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons
• The impact that Ki Khanga is already having in the Western hemisphere’s most African country and in which non-African countries it’s having the most surprising appeal
• Why entertaining games can be educational but educational games are almost never entertaining
• The best strategies for funding RPG development, and
• How to promote table top games using the internet.

Along the way, Davis explains that Ki Khanga uses “ashé” as part of its point system; ashé comes from the Yoruba religion of Nigeria, Benin, the Caribbean, and Brazil, and is the cosmic-cognitive power to create and alter reality.

I began by asking Davis what makes Ki Khanga different from all other RPGs, including ones with African content.

  KiKhangaRPG.com kickstarter.com/projects/mvmedia/ki-khanga-a-sword-and-soul-role-playing-game facebook.com/groups/KiKhangaRPG   SUPPORT MF GALAXY ON PATREON SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iTUNES SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON iHEARTRADIO SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON PLAYER FM SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE ON STITCHER FOR MORE INFORMATION + LINKS  

Nalo Hopkinson is one of the most acclaimed science fiction and fantasy writers of our time. The Routledge Companion to Literature and Science calls her a luminary in the science fiction community. Her Afritopian career began with the late 20th Century breakout novel Brown Girl in the Ring, a dystopian science fiction adventure set in near-future Toronto featuring an African-Canadian heroine and the gods of Nigeria, Benin, and the Caribbean.

Hopkinson's career has ascended through books such as Skin Folk, Sister Mine, The New Moon’s Arms, and many more. She’s also a professor of Creative Writing at the University of California Riverside in the only dedicated SF writing programme anywhere in the English-speaking world.

Recently Hopkinson added another accomplishment to her dazzling career, as a comic book writer in Neil Gaiman’s DC-Vertigo Sandman universe on the series House of Whispers with artist Dominike Stanton. I knew that writing comics, with their extreme economy of words, was a special challenge for novelists, who revel in the luxury of whatever word-count they choose.

So I spoke by web video with Hopkinson on December 23, 2018, and we discussed:

• The unique magic of comics and their ancientness in classical African literature
• How she’s had to help university students without comics experience learn to read and understand them
• Learning as a novelist how to write comics without any industry-standard script
• Building creative cohesion with artist Dominike Stanton, and
• How to make money as a writer even when you’re not writing

 

Nalo Hopkinson.com

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For many Africans, comics were an excellent entertainment of our childhoods, but we still had to face that most comics creators pretended that we didn’t exist at all. The comics universes were places we could dream of visiting, but the on-page demographics made it clear we couldn’t become citizens.

Yet over time, North American culture has increasingly embraced being universal, so that Marvel and DC have added or enhanced numerous African characters, as well as Indigenous, Latin American, and Asian characters. But even though the Big Two have featured more African characters and hired more African creators, there still aren’t many of us on the inside and we don’t answer to African editors or publishers, so we still don’t control the fates of characters who look like us.

But thanks to creators and indie publishers such as Kelvin Nyeusi Mawazo, that’s changing. Mawazo is the creator of Black Sun, a science fiction-adventure series set in the futuristic world of Alkebulan, about an heroic group of people struggling to liberate their world from a devastating invading armada. The comics are amazing, and fans are loving them.

One production aspect of the comic that seems almost science fictional itself is that Mawazo doesn’t use pencils, pens, ink, or even paper to create the comic. Instead, he uses 3D digital models to create the art entirely inside his computer, and finishes the work in Photoshop. Since I’m producing a graphic novel myself using a similar approach, I was eager to find out how he does what he does. And fortunately, he’s posted video tutorials right on his website BlackSunComics.com.

I spoke with Kelvin Mawazo by web video on December 30, 2018. We discussed:

• Which software he’s chosen to create and modify his characters and worlds with, and why
• The multiple artistic and production-flexibility reasons he’s chosen to use 3D modelling
• How his experience as a photographer helped him race up the learning curve
• What he’s learned from early publishing mistakes to become profitable, and
• The promotional work that has been indispensable for growing his audience

Along the way, Mawazo refers to PSDs, or Photoshop files, and I refer to rendering, which is the digital process of turn posed, virtual 3D objects into completed 2D images—kind of like taking and developing an old-fashioned photograph.

Black Sun Comics.com

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Daniel José Older probably saved lives working for a decade as a paramedic, but I’m sure he has elevated plenty of souls as a novelist.

He wrote the YA historical fantasy series Dactyl Hill Squad, which made him a New York Times bestselling author. He’s also penned the Bone Street Rumba urban fantasy series, Star Wars: Last Shot, and the award-winning YA series the Shadowshaper Cypher. That won him the International Latino Book Award and was shortlisted for the Kirkus Prize in Young Readers’ Literature, the Andre Norton Award, the Locus, and the Mythopoeic Award. Esquire put it on their “80 Books Every Person Should Read” list. He’s also a musician, and you can catch his music at danieljoseolder.net.

Years ago I needed some career advice and even though we’d never met, I emailed Older, and he immediately made time to speak with me by phone. Since then it was clear to me he was a righteous cat. So it was a real pleasure to speak with him by web video on December 23, 2018. We discussed: 

• The key literary lessons he’s learned that he wishes he’d had at the beginning of his career
• How he reacted when an agent told him to junk the final two-thirds of his first Shadowshaper novel
• Why you need to find the core of your story and how you can do it
• Why you must resist the over-emphasis on reading and writing on your path to be the best writer you can be
• And how acting classes and improv workshops can help you sell more books and build your career

 

Daniel Jose Older’s homepage Ghoststar.net

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Doug Drexler is an absolutely amazing artist in the magic of making movies and television. If you’re like me and grew up watching US science fiction and fantasy movies and TV, then you’ve definitely seen the make-up work of Doug Drexler in films such as The Hunger, Starman, Dick Tracy, and Star Trek: The Next Generation—he was the artist responsible for creating the decades-older Jean-Luc Picard in the classic episode “The Inner Light.” But even if you didn’t watch science fiction and fantasy, you probably saw his work in Manhunter, Liberace, Fatal Attraction, Three Men and a Little Lady, or The Cotton Club.

But unlike plenty of professionals who achieve expertise in their fields, Drexler chose to expand his range of excellence into other fields, thus ensuring his career longevity throughout changes in technology. He became a designer on shows including Deep Space Nine and Enterprise, and the movies Star Trek: Generations, First Contact, and Insurrection.

Then he went to work in visual effects, helping to create movies such as Starship Troopers and Defiance, and the TV series including Star Trek: Voyager, Battlestar Galactica, and Caprica, the pilot movie Virtuality, the Galactica web series Blood and Chrome, and the remastered director’s edition of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Drexler’s outstanding work won him a BAFTA, a Saturn Award, and an Oscar for Dick Tracy, two Emmy nominations for The Next Generation, and two Emmy Awards and a Visual Effects Society Award for Battlestar: Galactica.

Doug Drexler spoke with me by web video on December 21, 2018. We discussed:

• How popular interest in space exploration is at an all-time low, while love of on-screen SF is at an all-time high
• The difficulties for some of making a living in movies when movie-making technology has changed so much, and why he’s been able to embrace the changes
• The triumphs of subtle CGI to create everyday scenes that viewers never notice, and
• The economic case, even for fan and indie films, for building entirely digital sets for green screen, rather than practical sets using wood and paint.

 

LINKS THAT DOUG DREXLER HIMSELF PROVIDED:

Doug Drexler’s Vimeo page

Matt Jefferies Aviation Illustrator

Mike Okuda Introduction – Iconic Graphic Design – Arch II Class – Week 09

Andrew Probert – Redesigning Cultural Icons – Arch II Class – Art Center College of Design – Pasadena – Week 02

Herman Zimmerman – Designing in Realtime - Arch II Class – Art Center College of Design – Pasadena – Week 05

Joseph Hodges – Production Designer – First Trek Cutdown R02

 

Noam Chomsky is a pioneering linguist and political analyst who has been called the most important intellectual alive. He’s spent decades documenting the crimes of US imperialism and corporate power, and how the US government and corporate media engage in propaganda that he compares with totalitarianism. He risked prison in the 1970s by working with Daniel Ellsberg to release the Pentagon Papers, a document trove exposing massive US crimes in Southeast Asia that at least three US presidents had lied about or covered up.

He’s the author of more than 150 books on linguistics and politics. His latest release is Optimism Over Despair: On Capitalism, Empire, and Social Change.

I’ve been interviewing people a long time, but the first major interview I secured was through CJSR FM radio in Edmonton, and it was with Noam Chomsky back in 1993. To be completely honest I was extremely anxious. Like plenty of people in my circles I revered Chomsky for his accomplishments and his relentlessness. I was so nervous that when he answered my telephone call and asked me how much time I needed, I couldn’t bring myself to say “an hour,” so he kindly just offered an hour.

To put that in perspective, I some times struggle to get minor celebrities and authors no one has ever heard of to give a few minutes to help me promote their work. Chomsky, one of the most-interviewed scholars alive and one of the most quoted in history, had nothing to gain for himself by giving me an hour. I’ll always be grateful for his generosity.

When we spoke by telephone twenty-six years ago, we discussed:

• The reality behind US military cuts under then-president Bill Clinton
• The real purposes of the US Pentagon
• Why he predicted fewer US invasions of sovereign countries than was the previous norm, and what new domestic force would prevent the US from committing such crimes
• And what Original World nations would need to do to prevent imperialist attacks

The world has changed in uncountable ways in the twenty-six years since Noam Chomsky and I spoke by telephone. So, a few reminders about the changes, and some expressions:

Many Americans assumed that following the one-term presidency of George H.W. Bush, the US would become a less violent superpower. But even after the first US-Iraq War of 1990 to 1991, the US continued to bomb Iraq regularly to enforce its aerial occupation. Under Clinton the US attacked Somalia, waged war in the former Yugoslavia, invaded Haiti, and bombed Sudan and Afghanistan. But as Chomsky notes, these attacks were not in the style of its war against Vietnam.

The term “propaganda model” as created by Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman is the analysis of how corporate media works: through concentration of ownership among the super-wealthy, being subordinate to wealthy advertisers, and relying on government and corporate mouthpieces to present their claims about society to the exclusion of almost all voices that challenge US government and corporate power systemically.

“Intervention” means assassination, bombing, invasion, overthrowing governments, and even reducing countries to slavery, as France, the US, Canada, and others did to Libya when Barack Obama was the US president.

Chomsky also cited an earlier US attack against Libya, the 1986 US bombing code-named Operation El Dorado Canyon. Mobutu refers to Mobutu Sese Seko, the Western-backed dictator of Zaire, which is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Finally, I posed a question to Chomsky in which I said that because US invasions were declining, there would not likely be a case in which the US was overstretched due to fighting three simultaneous wars, or what Che Guevara called “three Vietnams,” but I hadn’t anticipated that under a then-unimaginable Obama presidency, the US would be engaged in five simultaneous wars and imperial occupation wars in 2011: against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, and Somalia.

I apologise for whistling feedback during first 2 minutes; after that, the audio is pretty good, especially considering the technology we had in 1993.

 

Noam Chomsky official website

Noam Chomsky books

More on US crimes against Vietnam

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Years ago I was working on a book about HBO’s police drama and social realistic epic The Wire as created by David Simon and Ed Burns. Through a range of ways, including the help of a friend, I got electronically introduced to a number of people who made the series as creators, writers, directors, and actors.

They were a remarkable group, and while for a range of reasons I had to put the book on hold, I have had the chance to share some of those interviews over the years; if you check the MF Galaxy archive, you can find my conversations with Sonja Sohn who played Kima Greggs, with Wendell Pierce who played Bunk Moreland, with director Ernest Dickerson, and with writer-director Joy Lusco-Kecken. There are still around a dozen more interviews that no one has heard but me.

Yet of all the ones I did, I think the most fascinating for me was with actor Robert Wisdom who played Baltimore City Police Department Major Bunny Colvin in Season 3 and then the same character but as a school consultant in Season 4. Interestingly enough Wisdom had auditioned for the role of Stringer Bell, a role that went to Idris Elba; but Wisdom was so piercing and iconic it’s now impossible to imagine him in any other role in The Wire.

Of course, as a flexible and superb performer, he’s occupied many other roles, including in Barbershop 2, Prison Break, Supernatural, Happy Town, Burn Notice, The Dark Knight, and Freedom Writers. He was also once a producer for All Things Considered which ran on the US network National Public Radio.

For me the most remarkable aspect of speaking with Wisdom was the depth and breadth of his analysis. I’ve interviewed many actors over the years, and while a few rose to Wisdom’s level of intellectualism, none ever discussed so many characters and situations that were not centered around their own work. That curiosity and generosity in sharing the spotlight was, in my experience, unique, refreshing, and instructive about the type of man he was and is.

We spoke by telephone on April 6 and 13, 2008, during the US election race between Barack Obama and John McCain, a race that affected all the interviews I did for that unfinished book on The Wire. We discussed: 

• How what I call The Tarzan Complex drives White Saviour stories in Hollywood, especially in movies and TV shows about the education system such as Freedom Writers, and how it played or was subverted in The Wire with Bunny Colvin and Roland Pryzbylewski working with the kids of season 4
• How Wisdom reacted to the claim by one person working on the series that middle class African-Americans face no barriers in the US,
• Why The Wire couldn’t do more to change American racism, regardless of the goals of its creators
• Along the way, we also discuss Wisdom’s views about novelist and social analyst Ishmael Reed, who was fiercely critical of The Wire, and Reed’s call for a version of the show that focused on White suburbs, a show that as it turned out had just begun, called Breaking Bad

 

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I first met Tate Young back around 2004 when we were both giving readings at a local indie book store. We both had pseudonyms, we both had shaved heads, and we both produced often shocking writing, so we hit it off immediately.

Three years after that he was helming a literary game show called The 3-Day Novel Contest for which he invited me to be one the “celebrity” judges. The show was amazing. We even did a second season before he went to become a movie director and editor best known for the indie science fiction and fantasy features Haphead, Ghosts with Shit Jobs, and the recent short film Timebox, which he also wrote. And he did all this without going to film school.

I wanted to ask Young to explain how to make great indie films while treating cast and crew with respect, so he spoke with me by web video from his home in Toronto on October 31, 2018. We discussed:

• Being self-taught and going DIY while working your way up the film-creation ranks
• How he entered television directing for a national network with only minimal formal training
• Why, despite thousands of hours of free online video tutorials on filmmaking, he still buys and pores over books on screencraft
• How to keep working in movies while you’re waiting to direct
• Why a good union culture and attitude should make a film set a good place to work
• The most important artistic aspect of creating a beautiful shot that plenty of indie filmmakers don’t understand
• Why no filmmaker should ever say, “We’ll fix it in post,” and
• What, more than sexual harassment, is the biggest ongoing complaint about working in movies in Canada
• The conversation will appear to begin abruptly; Young and I had just been talking about the importance of books.

 

TateYoung.com

The 3-Day Novel Contest TV Series

Fight Choreography The Art of Non-Verbal Dialogue

Gareth Edwards: Film Keynote at SXSW 2017

Bruno Delbonnel’s Cinematography on Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

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Lyda Morehouse is pretty terrific. We first met at NorWesCon in Seattle when we were both finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award. She was totally down-to-earth, fun, funny, and welcoming. She was also an extremely accomplished author who by now has written at least twelve books, including the cyberpunk Archangel Protocol series, and under her pen-name Tate Hallaway, the Vampire Princess of St. Paul series.

Like most authors, Morehouse has had career lows and not just highs. But unlike most authors, she’s always been open about those difficult journeys through the valley of print. That’s the kind of generosity with vulnerability that makes it possible for other people to learn, and it makes me respect her all the more.

Lyda Morehouse spoke with me by web video on October 23, 2018. We discussed: 

• Why a career crisis-point forced her to take a new name
• Whether a Philip K. Dick Award nomination or win is a career-killer
• Why she once filled a coffin with her own books
• How to rise to the challenge of writing whatever genre you’d always claimed would be easy
• Why to be a “hybrid writer”—that is, publishing through corporations and independently at the same time, and
• What you need to understand about your plot and your readers to get the most out of your endings

 

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So you want to write mystery fiction, crime fiction, or detective fiction, but your characters don’t crackle, your plots don’t pop, and your mysteries don’t sizzle. What should you do? How’re you going make readers keep turning those pages?

You need to listen to mystery writer S.G. Wong.

Oh, there are other writers, right here in E-Town, who are admirable. We’ve got them in every form and genre, and they do amazing work. But there’s only a handful of people I know who are a combo of outstanding craft, outstanding teaching, and outstanding organising for the writing community. And standing tall inside that select group is S.G. Wong, the creator of the Lola Starke mystery novels featuring a hard-boiled but beautiful detective, a carefully-constructed alternate Earth in which the Chinese colonised what we know as Los Angeles to build Crescent City, and a crackling mixture of magic and ghosts.

Such imagination has gotten SG Wong shortlisted for the Arthur Ellis Awards in the Best First Novel and Best Short Story categories. Maybe speaking four languages is an asset to thinking widely and wildly. Wong is a member of the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and Sisters in Crime (National), and Past President of the Sisters in Crime—Canada West chapter. She’s organised numerous writer events, and taught and spoken more places than I can mention.

Recently SG Wong taught a Canadian Authors Association (Alberta Branch) workshop on crime fiction; she taught plotting, while EC Bell taught researching, and Jane Bernard taught creating voice. Wong and I spoke by web video on October 22, 2018, and we discussed: 

• How to make better plots by building better characters
• Why your characters must make choices that you as the writer totally disagree with
• The one question that can totally fix contrived characterisation
• How to make your story-world a place where readers want to visit and stay, and
• Why she loathes the phrase “strong female protagonist”

SG Wong.com

Lola Starke series of novels and of the Crescent City short stories

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