Justin Connell – Writer and Weirdo

Small Impacts (What Have I Got in My Pocket?)

Hi, it’s been a while. Life came and went in 2021, and now onto 2022. Of course, my promise to keep this updated and push myself to write has been lax; heard on the grapevine that I’m not the only one either. Lots of changes happened, which one can guess from this post – I’m a father to a beautiful daughter.

Tackling a brief thought, her being my world started midway through 2021. And from processing this, I feel like I couldn’t exactly live before now as I should. See, we’ve been planning on this for as far back as four or five years. What went from anticipation and excitement came a daunting realization that having a family was not in the cards. When you have dreams and wishes that seem to be “stuck,” so does the rest of the world no matter how hard you try. Fast forward to after multiple appointments, locations, and remote meetings with specialists (all while a pandemic was happening), we were ready to travel far to get the help we needed. That was, until, a positive test came along.

A small impact that changed my world.

And so I sit here, typing away as our little mini-me snoozes and squirms. We kept anticipating something to be wrong, but so far, we’re reassured that the diagnosis is we have a healthy, happy, baby girl named Clover. I can’t tell if this is two impacts or one very long one. I suppose it could be both.

After these past two weeks, it has already felt like months. Not to mention the universe points in my direction sufferings that hurt a little deeper: I had a very good friend (also a father and husband) who was laid off and move across states for a new job; I had heard the news of one of my classmates losing her oldest daughter in an accident; another friend who has had doubts of being the best for their children under difficult circumstances.

If at any point you wish to help out, please reach out to me on some of these situations. All of them would appreciate good vibes and prayers.

By the way, for the things that seemed “stuck,” I’m going to try to pick back up shortly in the matter of writing. There’s currently a comic script I’m churning out, little by little, that has been with me for some time now (before this small impact). There’s also another bigger idea that I can’t seem to whittle down into something resembling a scope, but it will come in due time (whether it is another comic script or a full manuscript, I’m toying with the ideas around).

I have friends and family that are rooting for me to completing these ideas into something you can hold in your hands. More importantly, I have a strong and wonderfully supportive wife (who’s now a badass mom) pushing me by asking the simplest question: “Did you write today?”

But most importantly, I have a tiny audience member who one day will hear about his all.

Peace,

April 13, 2022

On Unfinished Stories – the Impact of Kentaro Miura’s Berserk

My wife woke me late last night after a session between the pencil and the page. I’ve heard this tone from her before and it reminds me bare feet gently walking on moss covered stone and mist. It’s a tone meant to ease the listener to brace themselves.

Kentaro Miura, creator of the quintessential, dark fantasy manga Berserk, passed away nine days ago. Apparently from a bad ticker.

Bridgit and I talk openly about our nerdy fandoms, as any nerdy marriage I hope would be. They’re kindle to our fire pit of creativity, even if mine are sometimes smoldering embers (still here!) and hers is the crescendo nights of Burning Man. We listen and see the connected dots in our creative voices. I’d like to think at this point there’s a constellation of all these wonderfully crafted stories that makes us … well, us.

Miura’s Berserk became one of my favorites surprisingly not too long ago, right before we were married six years ago. I’ve seen it much longer before from the Dreamcast game, or PS2 later on, but I had no clue about the story and saw the screenshots of “anime-dude-giant-sword-mayhem” in gaming magazines or the promotional info on the back of game boxes at Best Buy. Of course young me thought “Hell yeah that’s cool!” But that was all. The anime wasn’t accessible until much later (all anime was hard to come by in Stanly County), and manga could only be bought at really niche brick-and-mortar shops before they were cool at malls.

Anyway, let me put away my cane. The interest for Berserk greatly peaked when I saw a random Reddit post about their latest chapter in a long while. And it was way, way different than what I remembered back in the day.

I’m not going into a history lesson on how I became a fan of Miura, but this image set off the Struggler’s rabbit hole for me. In one panel, there was a story to tell; and as I dug deeper, the story wasn’t just a troupe of a man who was too angry to die. The story to me was an individual named Guts who was dealt an exceptionally bad hand since childbirth in a grim-dark medieval setting (where everything is just bad for everyone). And with every obstacle, whether it be kingdom warlords or barons of hell, he overcame them while wielding an impossibly large sword that others couldn’t fathom.

I feel like part of this epic tale transformed from this macho, rule-of-cool comic to an expression of Miura’s life, albeit keeping it very personal. The story unfolded slower, yes, but deliberately and precisely to his standards. No one knows except those closest to him knew of Kentaro Miura’s struggles, but it would be foolish to think he wouldn’t share what he learned from them. Lessons to me that will forever ring include:

Yes, things can always get worse. But it’s never the end.
There is always daybreak, no matter how long the night lasts.
No matter how much you think you got whatever you struggle under control alone, it will never be as rewarding as taking it on with company.
There is always something worth fighting for.

Kentaro Miura, you were loved by those who knew very little about you, especially me. I hope your story is finished the way you meant for it, whether you planned for this or not. You did tie up some loose ends and that may have been enough for you. But now, you struggle no more.

May 20, 2021

What a Week Down the Foggy Road

So, what a week in America, eh? The rhetoric and noise died down a little during the holidays, but kicked right back into gear and into eleven after 1/6/21. My mind has worn out from all of the info dump and acknowledgement of what has happened since then to make sure something wasn’t amiss. With that comes seeing what others think.

I’ve hemmed and hawed on whether I should put a statement on here when I heard the best advice I could: everyone has a statement. It’s the same as everyone has an opinion, except everyone now is on the tower with their megaphone and blaring out their own thoughts to make sure you got the message. So I’ve stopped until now, only on a personal note.

I’ve had this thing that happens when I get really, really tired. I think it looks like the scene in the Matrix where Neo is getting super powers downloaded to his brain at Google Fiber speed and he’s involuntarily roiling at all the info being dumped. Except instead of gaining something useful (say “I know kung fu” and voila!), I feel like I’m loosing out of oxygen and my focus is nil. My eyes feel flutter and it’s like my brain just had a record lock that needs to cleared out by doing a hard reset. Pull the plug, wait 15 seconds, plug back in and wait.

It’s happened more after looking through on what the hell is going on. With research comes voice, and that voice holds opinions. And they’re some opinions, while I respect and believe everyone should freely express, that make me very, very tired. It feels like my skull is a modem that has been out of warranty of 15 years and you can’t afford the upgrade.

David Lynch stated in his masterclass about Creativity (if you can afford it, get the year’s worth. That class and Neil Gaiman and Story telling is well worth the price). He said something along the lines that “Anxiety and fatigue will kill creativity.” I’m paraphrasing without looking up my source, so if I got it wrong my bad. But it was something that resonated to me and my aspiration to world build and create something cool for the world.

Ok, got that out of the way. I hope that whatever is to come we can shuffle through and pray we can become better than this. No one has all the answers, but at least can we make the moves to be better people? And by that, I mean we treat people like what they fucking are: people. No organizations, no groups, no swift catch phrases. If there were any, here it is.

Don’t be a dick.

Peace.

January 11, 2021

Turn to Page 2021, Please.

Welp, here we are! Happy New Year to 2021! It’s my first day off vacation and had felt the itch to get back into things, both at my day job and writing.

I’m already feeling optimistic about this year with what I have planned, even though I keep repeating in my head “Don’t say that! You said that the last time and looked what happened!”

I did. And by golly, I’ll do it again! I’ve had multiple conversations with my wonderful wife on how this feels different, despite the complete chaos and dire situation the entire world went through.

It all comes down to choice. We choose to find the good in this. No matter how awful, repugnant, loud and cruel things are, we choose how this affects us or weirdly control us. It’s because, in the truth of it, we gave up on that control. We spent almost a year in a mentality of hopelessness thinking the things outside caused it.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of pain happened. And some of that pain is near irreparable. Some of that pain we still choose to fight back, because there is no room to let pain that will hurt us or others at our table.

So I say along with so many others: if you made it this far, I’m glad your here. If you wish to create, so create. If you wish to speak, so speak. If you wish to laugh, find my freshman high school photo and you won’t regret it.

January 4, 2021

Gimme Gimme Cyber-danger (Afterthoughts Reflected on Playing ‘Cyberpunk 2077’)

So I’m treating this like a warm-up. The holidays have come and gone and I’m on my last week of vacation before starting my usual Developer grind. One would think with all this time, I got a ton of writing done, right?

Wrong, but I won’t say I was unproductive.

Throughout my vacation, I played through the main storyline of ‘Cyberpunk 2077’ (don’t worry, this is spoiler free). It’s not a perfect game with the bugs and missing content (I’ve read articles on how incomplete it feels and I have to agree on this). But I’m rooting for the devs to pull through the bug fixes and adding in more to make it more like the vision it promised to be.

What I did absolutely love about it were three things:

All of the wonderful nods and influences that defined the cyberpunk genre. Sure there are easter eggs from Akira and Blade Runner. But the overall mood and theme that makes the genre so wonderful seeped through my play experience while venturing Night City: holographic images that glow in the night; never-ending rain with the sounds of bustling street life, where so many languages were echoing throughout and somehow everyone lives in this disgruntled harmony; the potential dangers of human beings surviving with so little to have despite so much ‘advanced’ technology society has achieved. It also touched on the questions and thought-provoking aspects the genre touches that are made to make you think. Despite some of the release fumbles I can see that there, deep in the dark net of ideal, there was a love letter to the growing cyberpunk genre.
The story and world-building behind Night City. I love running tabletop RPG’s and creating home-brew worlds to run my creative bug, but I also love taking other built worlds that many people know and building more from that. Within the main storyline, you go through this paper trail of events and people that exist beyond through Mike Pondsmith’s RPG material timeline. And what CD Projekt Red (CDPR) does so well is doing their homework on the source and then using that to tie it into their own storyline; your introduced to characters, stories, rumors, second-hand knowledge and more are call-backs to Cyberpunk 2013 or 2020 modules and written works.
The narration. While I strongly prefer third-person limited narrative, I feel like I gained a further solid example of using first-person story-telling. I do have my fair share of criticisms (i.e. driving in first person. I felt like hopping into a car as a child and forgot my booster donut), but it gave me some insight on how a story is told through a person’s own perspective (and sometimes mistakes). This wasn’t necessarily ground breaking since I’ve played other RPG’s like Fallout and Skyrim with first-person perspectives. But what hit it home was the interactions with other characters. Development of relationships through someone other than myself felt more alive and human than the aforementioned have. And to me, the natural flow of person to person development in story telling is a must have for me.

I’m fairly certain that there are other things that are worthy of more attention along with criticisms. My attention to coming back here to write has been recouping the burnout from my daytime job. I’ve had long talks before with my wife on running through the guilt of consuming instead of producing. However, we all know that is necessary for creatives. We are not machines running on content-producing autopilot. We do not have augmentations to never sleep, or eat, or take a moment to breathe. We do need time to look into the clouds and let our imaginations play through. And sometimes when that is a struggle, we always have a guiding hand of someone else’s story to experience.

Be well. I hope to have another post before the end of 2020.

December 27, 2020

Ready Or Not, Gotta BIC HOK (or ‘How To Find The First Steps On Writing’)

Hello all,

Title says it. It’s been years since tinkering with a WordPress page, but for different reasons. I used to build web pages for a small company that gave big opportunity to me today on WordPress templates. Now, this is just to get my words out (a reminder to myself to not overthink it).

I’m a person who’s mind wonders to strange places. Its favorite stops includes having their feet in both traditional and alternative fantasy elements. It likes to dream of worlds with elves and dwarves, but also wonder if they lived in a history of backroads in farms of North Carolina. It loves the serenity of silence in the woods and the smashing of punk rock guitars and nosebleeds. It also likes to peak into dark corners, where it may find something truly beautiful and equally terrifying.

A decade ago, my mind was truly lost. Whether it was in a Matrix-style sleep or just needing a checkup from the doctor, who knows. But there was something really missing there that needed something filled. I didn’t take good care of it then.

The road to get to here was when someone gave me a swift kick in the creative ass: my wife now, Bridgit. I’ve known her for a while in college, fell off a wagon of self discovery, and then saw her name in a comic convention pamphlet. But that’s a whole other story.

In 2019, I went to DragonCon and met the great Brandon Sanderson. I told him, frankly, that like many others his stories awakened something in me and brought over my tiny idea notepad to be blessed by him. I get tongue-tied easily and awkwardly stopped my sentence there, so it surprised me when he asked “For what? On reading or writing?”

I felt a little silly when I responded, “Uh, both.” Which is true from my sleepy brain as I was just trying my hand in writing but working on my reading muscle.

He laughed and asked “And how’s that going?” I answered that it could be better, it was (still is) a trial and error process for me. He signed it and asked me if I knew what BIC HOK was. I didn’t comprehend and shook my head, so he said it but it left me almost immediately since I my brain became overwhelmed that this conversation has carried on this far. He jotted that down and handed it back to me and said “It’s the one true rule to writing. That’s where you start.” I thanked him for his time for the advice.

I was starting to kick myself again that I couldn’t catch what he was saying until it dawned on me.

“Butt in Chair, Hands on Keyboard.”

Today is my birthday, and I dedicated to myself that I would write. This page, and hopefully more posts to come, is meant to be an accountability partner to my writing. I kick myself over and over again on not doing my due diligence to keep at plugging away on my stories.

December 21, 2020