I've been putting together the next book.  It's actually making me feel better to get back to what I used to do before the dark year.  And I will admit that it makes me miss using my facebook posts.  They could be as long or short as needed and I could put them together thematically for my standard essays.

The blog feels like a more serious writing task which takes more energy than a random facebook post.  Here I have to think about what I'm saying before I start writing and keep it up until pushing post.  I can write about different things but it's all in one post so editing will be harder.  With the facebook posts, I could grab a few comments I made about, say, Biden, in a single day and blam, there's effectively an essay.  Then I could add in any other related posts that day.

I've been re-reading Preacher over the last few weeks.  I think it's Garth Ennis' best series because he was still pretty new at the time and basically didn't have as much of a clue about his limitations or what couldn't be done.  Arguably The Boys and some of his individual war stories are as good if not better, but Preacher is where he made his mark.

It's also awesome as an example of what adult comics can be.  There's sex, violence, swearing, often at the same time, but the story is so much deeper.  And, maybe because it's been several years since I've read it, I was surprised that there wasn't actually as much sex or violence as expected.  Plenty of swearing though.  It wasn't a lot of long sex/fight scenes, the violence was rarely more than a few panels long and didn't happen that often, much less than I expected.  There was lots of talk about sex but all we ever really saw were Jessie and Tulip's love story, and it's not like there was anything explicit.  Herr Starr's sex-life was more explicit and we thankfully never had to see any of that.

Herr Starr is one of the greatest comic book villains of all time, probably just as part of Ellis' story.  The series is a western and it needs an ultra-bad villain, a serious threat to the heroes and what they defend and Starr didn't let us down.  He was pretty insane from the start but by the end he was destroying himself just to get revenge on Jessie for not serving him.

I always liked how it was Tulip, one of the best action chicks I've ever seen [granted I haven't seen very many] who actually finished off Starr in the climax.  The whole epic had suddenly turned around to be focused on Jessie and his ex-friend Cassidy and it was the hero's girlfriend who had to clean up what was expected to be the series antagonist but fell short after their own failure.  Tulip and Cassidy were supporting cast.

I'll probably say more later, I haven't finished the final book yet, I just wanted to show how off-throwing it is when I suddenly switch topics on a single post.  Also, it's almost midnight and it looks like the blog is technically 'published' when I start a new post, so I'll wait a few minutes to see if that's what actually happens.

It did say November 8 after I clicked "publish."