You are listening to Story Over Everything. This is MJ Munoz. I'm an author, artist, and analyzer.
You can find all my work at MJMunoz.com. You might also be able to hear my dogs play fighting with each other in the background.
I'm just not going to be able to do anything about that right now, so sorry.
Anyway, this is Story Over Everything, episode 7. Can you write a series by Bullet Points, part 2, for actually being recorded November 11th?
November 11th, 2022, which used to be called Armistice Day, and I believe is now called Veterans Day.
So thank you to all the soldiers, all the people who volunteered to put their lives on the line to help and do good for others.
And, well, I've heard it said by veterans that the best way to honor our veterans is to make sure that we don't need any more veterans
by getting into useless, stupid wars, and I have to say I agree with that.
And if you don't, we can have a discussion about that because I think I'm a reasonable person.
Anyway, I'm going to move into the body of the episode here.
And I did not anticipate editorializing because I wanted these episodes to be evergreen,
but as they are marking the progression of my work as I make it, I think maybe they'll have a little bit of color commentary, so to speak, in them as time goes on,
and they will be reflective of the time and place where they were created, or when they were created, I should say.
Place means when, or I'm sorry, where, and time is when, right?
So anyway, I guess of the time and the place that they're created, and I'll try to keep that to a minimum,
but just there will be little touch-downs you can get the sense of as time and place markers as I travel through this life, and you join me on the journey.
So, moving into the episode proper.
Story of Everything episode 6 gave me lots of ideas for the Holy Hunter series.
I need more time to work on it, so I will be doing that this time out.
Before I fire up the Fabula X Machina, I will tell you of my progress on current projects.
This is part 2 of an unknown number of parts as I plan out the series of the Holy Hunter, which is part of my larger Holy Heroes universe.
So here we go. Say hello.
So getting right into my work in progress. What is the status of my current projects?
You can check the exhaustive list either in the show notes of the episode through your podcast player or by going to the website.
Again, this will be hosted on MJMunius.com. Under Story Over Everything is where you should be able to find it.
So, for the Grow Bug series, Book 1, I was supposed to have done by this date a section of thumbnails that were going to...
I was supposed to finish thumbnails for... Thumbnail sketches for Grow Bug Book 1, pages or spreads 15 and 16, which is pages 30...
Like 29, 30, 31, and 32. And I did not do that. I finished... Well, I was supposed to do that and prep a document to send to an artist for them to do the work on this.
And I was unable to get that done, but I did accomplish finishing the thumbnail sketches.
And the reason I'm doing that is because I have a specific vision and a direction for how I want this book to go and how I want the scenes to be framed.
So, along with descriptions of the text, which I completed in previous weeks, I also decided to do very rough, very silly-looking thumbnail sketches that give at least the direction of the camera and what the camera is looking at and those sorts of things.
And by the camera, I do mean the eye of the audience or the reader of the book. I'm used to movies. I was...
I at one point wanted to go into film school, but that didn't happen. So, anyway... Excuse me. But that's what I accomplished.
And let me see... What else? Oh, so for next week, for November 18th, the next thing I have to do is get that... I say photograph and set up a reference package or document to send to artist.
So, that's what I'm going to have to do by a week from now, which that should be pretty easy or super easy, barely any inconvenience.
So, anyway, that'll be good. But I'm being modest this time because I actually took sick this week. I don't want to whine and complain and, you know...
I don't know, beg for pity or anything like that. I happened to take sick for a day or a day to three days or so I was sick and it was very unpleasant or it wasn't very unpleasant. It was okay.
But it just slowed me down and I didn't get to do a lot of stuff I wanted to do. So, anyway...
But, you know, I'm committed to this work. I want it to happen. I want to see my work out there in the world. So, I put it forward.
And, yeah, that's what I did. So, by next week, by November 18th, I should have the package ready for the artist.
And I have other stuff going on the back burner. Again, you can check the full show notes at mgwindows.com to see that.
And there was a break in my typical viewing of Tokusatsu that I've been doing for the last little while. So, Super Sentai and the weekly Comin' Raider Geats were not on this week.
But I did watch and analyze one episode of Comin' Raider Black Sun, which is available on Amazon Prime.
It's available on Amazon to Prime members. I don't know if you're a non-Prime member in Amazon, if you could just buy the episodes. But we have Amazon Prime because it's something we desire to have in this house.
So, I've been watching it through Prime, like I said, on my episode 2. And I did enjoy that.
And I did no other writing or artwork this week. But like I said, I did analyze this. And I do have lessons learned from that.
So, I will go ahead and hand it off to myself in the other segment to share the lessons learned from that with you.
And then I will come back to jump right into the Fabula X Machina section and talk about the further development of the ideas and the thoughts that I have for the Holy Hunter.
Holy Heroes. Yeah, Holy Heroes. Whatever. The Holy Heroes is the code name for the whole universe I'm working on.
And I'm calling this guy Holy Hunter right now, even though he's not like a religious hunter. He's just what I'm calling it.
Probably because it... Oh boy. Not onomatopoeia. Not a caesura. That's a thing in the middle of a poem. It rhymes.
No, the sounds. The terrific twosome of Toronto. When they love you, they do... not punctuality. Gosh, what is that called?
My writer friends, my non-writer friends, I'm sure you know. Oh, alliteration. Yes. Isn't it ironic that alliteration, the word that is the phrase that defines the fact that Peter Parker or two-some of Toronto all start with the same consonant, starts with a vowel?
I find that especially funny because I believe that the equivalent of that word alliteration that stands for when something begins with a string of vowels actually starts with a consonant. So it's like a flip-flop.
Anyway, I'll look into that and share that next week maybe if I remember. But it's a funny little detail.
But anyway, like I said, I'm just going to go ahead and hand it off to myself to finish out those two segments and you shouldn't hear joyful baby noises anymore throughout this episode.
So yeah, I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to myself from another time and ask that you look forward to the next episode and the further adventures of me chronicling myself writing the series and hopefully I'll get artwork out and things like that to show you all.
So anyway, that's it for now. I'm going to go ahead and leave you with peace and blessings. This is MJ and I am signing out.
For my story over everything segment, I do have a lesson learned from CommaNator Black Sun episode 2 and it's this.
I don't remember how recently I talked about invisible questions or what show it was in response to, but Black Sun is full of them.
I think the story spanning decades is a brilliant move because the events of each period affect each other and raise questions in the audience's minds.
I heard about starting a story with an invisible question from Shane Miller on Joanna, Joanna pens, creative pen podcast.
And it's called something like Writing Beginnings with Shane Miller. You can check it out.
I will try heartily to put a link in the description for the episode that that was on because it was really interesting.
I'll try to remember to put that both in the Black Sun episode and in the story over everything episode 7 that this is going to be a part of.
To put it in a short quick way, it would be this.
Pack your story with invisible questions so you have more threads to pull on throughout the story.
Telling a story over two time periods nearly does this by default.
If that's what you want, if you want to hook people in, get their attention, keep their attention, then I think that's a great way to go about it.
I did episode 6. I came up with a lot of ideas and I'm kind of going to restate them in a more concise form here.
So get ready to listen to that.
My Holy Hunter series will have a hunter who will, for some untold number of books, whether that be 2 books, 3 books, 80 books, 12 books, whatever it's going to be,
will be an increasingly more skilled hunter who faces different puzzles and difficulties and problems based around these extreme animals that have come into his small,
well, it's not a small place, into his wilderness, into his hinterlands or whatever you want to call it.
He lives out in the sticks, out in the boonies. Most people in his area live there because that's the state of his people.
Let's just call it broadly that, the state of the people in his landmass.
Let's just say that. I'm trying to be vague because there's certain details I want to keep close to the vest even though I'm putting my outlines out here for anybody to hear.
Which, by the way, they are mine and mine alone and they should not be used without authorized approval from the expressed written permission from the author, which is me, MJ Munoz.
Anyway, moving on. He will be hunting, so basically, I don't know if you know this, but manga, particularly self-published by Shonen Jump,
or, well, I'll just use Shonen Jump because that's the thing I have most familiarity with, is designed to be infinite.
It's designed to be an adventure that will continue and will go on or can continue and can go on forever.
That's why Yu-Gi-Oh! is as long as it is. That's why One Piece is 100 and, it's like a thousand chapters long or whatever, right?
So, I basically want to write those types of stories that can just go on and on and on.
And in order to do that, there's certain things I need to do. I want to have forward progression for the character,
but I don't have to have that all happen in a single book. I can spread it out and have them explore and interact with different ideas and concepts and challenges to keep things interesting.
And I'll keep doing it as long as it's interesting, but I still want to have an emotional arc for each story and for each character, which I talked about last time.
So, here's the idea. He's this hunter who's having struggles in the first book,
and he has to hunt and kill some sort of creature that has come from another world and is causing ecological hazard because it's basically an invasive species.
And I... excuse me. I envision this character going on a long hunt or having a long series of hunts where he is looking for this creature,
who perhaps he wants revenge upon it because it did something to him on a personal level. Perhaps not. I'm not 100% decided on that just yet.
And eventually it will lead to him training somebody to hunt these creatures as well, but that won't end the way you think it's going to,
as that evolves into the next generation series, which I have not yet... I have yet to plan out, but will take a different course and have a different emotional arc and a different focus and style to it, I would say.
That's the plan right now for there to be four generations of this character and for each generation to have its own unique feel, even though there are similarities between the four of them, because they're all united, basically.
Anyway, so this is going to be a little bit longer than ten minutes, but hopefully not longer than fifteen, because, well, frankly, I don't have that much time.
So anyway, I got to book it now. But basically, I'll structure it so that... just spoilers for the first book in the series.
He will have killed a mighty beast that is foreign to our world, but it will turn out in the next book that it wasn't the creature that he thought it was going to be.
It wasn't the creature that was at the origin of all of this, and now I'm thinking I have to cleverly disguise the creature who is the genesis of all this trouble for him.
But basically, I'll spell it out. There is another world. There's a thin veil between this world and another world.
It sometimes opens, and basically, a being from another world comes into our world, and while it, as an invasive species, throws the food chain all out of order and it starts killing all these other things, what is another biological imperative?
And by the way, it's killing them not maliciously, not to murder them, but it's killing them in order to eat them, right? This makes sense?
Anyway, what is another biological imperative for any organism? It is to reproduce itself so that it continues to live.
I'm going to say that somehow, some way, because this is an organism from another world or dimension or whatever, it is able to procreate with other creatures in our world, or in the hunter's world, let's just put it that way.
So while the creatures are these eldritch things, which they're not necessarily, I mean, they don't have to be evil, and I'm not saying this creature is evil.
I'm saying it's out of its place. It's not in the environment that it belongs in, and I think that's something important, but that's maybe a theme I'll get into, well, in a later, well, anyway, let's just say I'll get to later, because I think that's a really cool idea.
Because actions have consequences, and when something's a problem, it's a problem, even if the problem can be solved in a very healthy way that mitigates harm to everybody involved, and that ultimately has a very beneficial secondary effect or effect on the troublesome party or whatever.
Which I won't go into that. I won't belabor that point or anything, so I'm going to move on from there. But basically, this hunter will hunt these crazy creatures, and he'll keep doing it until there are no more of them to hunt, and that could take a very long time.
But the emotional arc thing that he has to go through in the first book and the last book, I'm going to have to mirror each other. I have this idea of him being young and incompetent, or not fully faithful in his abilities in the first book when he's this hunter.
And I have an idea that the last book will be when he's an old hunter, and either he has trained somebody, or either he has trained somebody, yeah, so either in the last book I want him to be, and I don't know what the emotional arc, or I don't know what the theme is there, but basically he has to, like, you know, conquer himself to overcome this creature in the hunt, right?
And it's not easy to hunt and kill. It's a difficult thing to hunt and kill. So anyway, that's the thing in the first book. He's young, he's a little green, a little inexperienced, and he's not fully, he lacks the confidence that he needs to, in order to, you know, to do this, to fulfill this mission.
And in the last book, I'm thinking, whether or not he's already trained his replacement and they're set up and doing whatever they're doing, I want him to come back as an old man hunter and hunt this thing and kill it.
And maybe in the last book he finally kills the one that he, that's like his Moby Dick, right? That's kind of the vibe, or the idea that I want to go for, that he finally gets to kill this thing, or has to kill it.
And maybe even it's to the point where, well, anyway, I would love this twist. Like, he has to kill it. Like, he finds it and it's very injured and like he basically mercy kills it, which if people aren't okay with that idea, whatever, I don't really care.
It's an idea I have right now. I may not do that, but I might do it just to be unique or interesting. Anyway, like Combinator Black Sun, I'll be controversial with this book. Anyway, I just think it's kind of a cool idea.
So, yeah, and maybe as an old man, he's like got to rely on his wisdom and his experience and like, I don't know, his gut or something more. But like he's, so he has all the skills and the knowledge that he needs.
Here it is. This is cool. For the first book, he has the youthful body and the strength, even though he's not in his full strength, but he lacks the experience, the wisdom, the knowledge that he needs to face any challenge confidently, right?
But as an old man, he has all of the knowledge, experience and wisdom that he needs to face any challenge head on with courage and without any self-doubt.
But what he lacks now is the physical strength. This is so cool. It's so cool. Is the physical strength and to be confident that he can actually tackle any challenge with no issue.
I think that's a beautiful dichotomy or beautiful bookend to this character and it reflects the same emotional arc basically. And it kind of says something about like aging and youth and like, I don't know, being a man to some extent.
So I think that's really cool because I do want to play into classic ideas in these stories. I really love classics.
I just finished mainlining The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy in like the last month or so on audiobook and it's beautiful. It's beautiful. It's good.
And I'm not saying I want to evoke that in this, but it deals with, you know, themes of heroism and honor and all those sorts of things.
So anyway, that's the idea for the book series and I might be able to stop right there, but I'm not sure I want to because I would honestly like to come up with some more ideas about what the hunter can do and how I can alter his story.
So some more ideas that I have. The creature is very intelligent and I believe I've said that already. The creature is very intelligent. The creature can procreate with other creatures, regular animals in our world.
And when it does so, the creatures are these...elder's abomination is a phrase I picked up in my tokusatsu fandom. So it's what's coming to mind. But I don't literally mean that. I just mean they're like bizarre creatures.
And because I do want him to eventually explore this world, this other world, I think I want to save that for a later generation and have there be some twists and some revelations and some cool ideas that come from that.
And anyway, I will get into those more later. A problem though, a failing that I have with this idea so far, is I want him to have particular superpowers that he gains in order to help him basically face this threat from the other world.
And I do not yet know how I'm going to factor that in. Again, spoilers. I have an idea that he actually...well, earlier, last week before I thought all this over and it really seeped into my mind.
Actually, while I was editing or listening back to the episode to edit it down and get it published, all these ideas came back to me or came to me as I was listening to it again, like I said.
And I thought, oh, he should kill it and he should eat it. And when he eats it, he gains some power from it. He gains some ability from it because it's this creature from this other world and ingesting it and you are what you eat.
And him making it part of his body, it does something to him and maybe awakens him to this other world or allows him to go there eventually or something like that.
And I may have something like that happen, but I might have it accumulate over the books and that could be something that makes each book unique and interesting, is that in each book he gains a sense.
Well, a sense or he gains an aspect of his power or level of his power and I'll do that for a couple books and then have him come into his full power set, I guess you could say, and then he'll operate with that full power set for some time and then, I don't know, it'll go from there.
Maybe it waxes and wanes. Maybe you have to keep eating these animals. And literally, the idea that I have for this is that I don't want him to have to...
So yeah, I mean there's debates and there's arguments to have with myself. Does he have to literally keep eating these animals in order to gain the power or is the idea that he has to eat something from the world that those animals come from?
And if that's the case, which is something I was thinking about, oh, then he can eat fruit or vegetation from that world and have the same constructive effect for himself where he's able to maintain this power.
And that could keep transport between our world and this world something that future generations of this hunter does or whatever.
And it could make it more interesting because I want... Well, anyway, I won't go into the other books.
But that's something I want to explore and something I want to think about because I'm not quite sure what to do with that.
But if I have it so that this creature mates with earthly creatures and they procreate, then how will it be that this matter from the other world will get into the hunter in order for him to accumulate the powers from them?
Maybe, though, I mean, there's sexual reproduction, there's asexual reproduction, there's parasitic reproduction, there's all sorts of different things that can be done. So maybe because this creature is from another world and it doesn't match up anatomically necessarily with creatures from our world, which I'm not going to be gross and get real into that.
Maybe it has some other way it can replicate itself through them using them as like a host type creature. And maybe that's one of its special abilities from the other world or maybe in its world. That's how it's supposed to function for them.
And or maybe it's even like an asexual reproduction creature, but somehow it's able to use other creatures to host itself and part of what is in it from the other world stays in the other creatures that are the offspring or the spawn.
I'll just call it spawn. Stay in the spawn from this creature and he's able to do something with that. Or, you know, the maybe the dosage or the efficacy of the, you know, exotic element is still within these creatures, but it's less potent.
And therefore that's why he doesn't fully attain everything he could. He doesn't tap into the full potential of, you know, whatever it is, the aether of this other world. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.
So I can have his abilities stair step as he hunts and kills and eats more of these creatures. And like I said, I'm going to justify this by the fact that he has to eat to survive and he has to eat to feed his family. Oh, another idea I have is he's taking this food home and feeding it to his family.
I kind of want the I kind of want this to be a bloodline, at least for a single generation. And it's be related to that. And I figure if he and his family are eating the meat from these creatures that they can all be affected by it.
Not that I want there to be a hunter family. I mean, they're literally going to be a hunter family, but I don't want it to be like the bat family, the flash family, the this family, that family, Green Lantern Corps, that kind of thing, because I want to keep the superhero aspect in it.
But what can I do with that? I'm not 100% sure. Maybe he's able to pass on certain abilities, certain powers or whatever to his child or children, because they are able to learn these things from him because the power manifests in them and awakens in them at an earlier age.
Maybe that could be trouble for him to I think that could be really neat. So this book might be less of a like straight superhero book and me more be more of like a pulp adventure, like a Tarzan or something like that.
But I'm not 100% sure. I'm okay with that. Although I do want some straight up superhero stuff for him to do. But again, I also this idea of him being like an ancient hero, you know, an ancient hero who protects the city from a monster or the village from a monster or whatever.
That's still heroic to me, especially framed in the proper context, which is what I want to do. But there will be a twist there and it will become more nuanced as time goes on and as you learn more about the other world and our world and how they interact with each other.
So I'm a lot of time for now. So I'm going to stop there. But I think this was a good session. I really like I mean, if you could, I don't know if you could tell, but I got really excited when I came with the idea of bookending his confidence stemming from his physical and non physical, his physical and mental abilities, I guess, and how that you know waxes and wanes throughout his life and how that affects his confidence level and how interesting that concept could be to explore.
Yeah, so I'm going to go ahead and stop right there.
I hope you enjoyed that. If you did, you can find more at mgmunios.com as well as my entire library of analysis, art and fiction.