“It: Welcome to Derry” and franchise overload

I’m late to this party. I didn’t realize that yet another television adaptation of Stephen King’s It was in the works. So now I know.

Forgive me if I skip this one. I love Stephen King’s books. (Or well, I love many of them, anyway.) But I read It for the first time as an 18-year-old in 1986. (I purchased one of the original hardcovers at the Waldenbooks in my local mall.)

I reread the book once in the 1990s. I’ve seen two screen adaptations already.

I always preferred King’s shorter, tighter books, anyway. For me, It marked the point where every Stephen King book was no longer a guaranteed page-turner.

But that really isn’t the point. This story has been in my brain for almost 40 years now. I understand that Hollywood prefers stories with prequalified demand (i.e., decades-old franchises). But there comes a time when I want something new.

No disrespect intended toward Mr. King. It was entertaining, the first—even the second—time around. But do I need yet another tour through the mythical town of Derry? Of all the teenage experiences I’d like to relive at the ripe old age of 57, this book doesn’t rank very high on the list.

-ET

Pearl Harbor + 84 years

This happened 27 years before I was born. But I grew up hearing about it from my grandparents, who were members of the World War II generation.

In 2025, the living ranks of those who remember this as news are growing thin. But for me (largely because of my grandparents), December 7 will always have a special significance.

And this Pearl Harbor Day, like the first one, falls on a Sunday.

-ET

Pop music and the GOP: never the twain shall meet

We can blame Bill Clinton for starting the trend. A generation ago, Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop” became the theme song of the 1992 Clinton-Gore campaign. The song was played during the televised Clinton-Gore victory celebration in the wake of that year’s general election. Ever since then, the (somewhat inane) mixing of pop music and politics has become a standard practice for both political parties.

This always backfires on the GOP. Few famous musicians are Republicans. Every election cycle, a Republican politician will use a pop song without permission, and the singer/group will issue a finger-wagging public disavowal, along with a cease-and-desist request.

Even fewer musicians are MAGA Republicans. It is therefore no surprise that Sabrina Carpenter, a 26-year-old musical moppet with fashionably left-of-center views, objected when her song “Juno” was used in the soundtrack of a White House video celebrating recent ICE raids.

As a general rule, Republican politicians should probably eschew mixing music with political campaigning. This never ends well. And why does politics need a pop music soundtrack anyway?

More specifically, why do we need snappy videos celebrating ICE raids? Cracking down on illegal immigration is one thing. Turning such activities into a set-to-music social media spectacle is another.

-ET

Politics and papal opinion: be careful what you ask for

Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as the Chicago-born Robert Francis Prevost, has criticized US immigration policy. (Do we actually have an immigration policy anymore? Or is it mostly just a deportation policy?) The Holy Father has also encouraged Europeans not to be fearful of mass Muslim migration. What, the Pope asks, could possibly go wrong?

Following the social media comments on various platforms, I note that this has occasioned much glee among the left-of-center (or simply anti-MAGA) crowd. “That’ll show the MAGA Catholics!”

While I can’t begrudge the social media peanut gallery such low-hanging fruit, I also have to ask: do you really want to govern the country by papal opinion, let alone papal decree?

As a lifelong Catholic, former altar boy, and Catholic school graduate, I can tell you what that would entail:

  • No same-sex marriage
  • No acknowledgement of LGBTQ anything
  • No abortion
  • No birth control (other than the rhythm method)
  • No premarital cohabitation and—while we’re at it—no premarital sex. (And this would probably be a good idea, since the rhythm method is notoriously unreliable.)
  • No divorce

***

Yes, there would also be open borders, minimal or nonexistent national defense, and various forms of share-the-wealth socialism.

My question for the New York Times-reading, The View-watching crowd: which do you love more, unfettered immigration, or your fashionably left-of-center libertine values? Are you willing to give up your rainbow flags, your condoms, and your no-fault divorce?

No? Then Pope Leo is probably not the voice you want to bring into national policy debates.

Be careful what you ask for.

***

It is important to remember that the New Testament addresses personal conduct and individual faith, not national policy. There were hot-button political issues in Jesus’s day (the Roman Empire being chief among them). Various people tried to pull Jesus into contemporary politics. He resolutely resisted such attempts.

Remember that quote from Matthew 22:21: “Give unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s”.

-ET

How about a haunted road tale?

ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT is a tale of horror on a haunted road.

Jason Kelley is a college student who agrees to take a walk down the most paranormally active road in Ohio. His mission: to document the phenomena he encounters on the cursed stretch of rural highway. 

Along the way he encounters hellhounds, malevolent spirits, and trees that come to life. 

If you like traditional supernatural horror tales, you’ll love ELEVEN MILES OF NIGHT. Available on Amazon now.

Tariffs, AI, and over-hiring in years past

Private-sector payrolls “unexpectedly” dropped in November, according to payroll processing firm ADP.

The overall US unemployment rate is still 4.4 %, far rosier than the 6.9% of 1991, when I entered the workforce as a new college grad.

That said, new grads of 2025 (and probably 2026) are facing a far more difficult situation than the grads of only a few years ago.

The mainstream media pundits are blaming tariffs and AI. It has now also become fashionable to blame the sharp decline in immigration that has occurred since the new administration took office. (This last notion is counter-economic: a decrease in the labor supply should raise demand for labor, not lower it. But how many mainstream media journalists know anything about economics?)

Here’s a simpler explanation: during the post-pandemic boom of 2022 and 2023, large corporate employers hired more new college grads than they could productively use. At most Fortune 500 companies, there is still an excess of young employees from just a few years ago.

I saw this coming during the hiring frenzy. Companies were hiring new college grads at inflated salaries, often with signing bonuses. Anyone with a modicum of business experience and economic sense could see that this wasn’t sustainable. And now, two years later, lo and behold, these same companies are scrambling to freeze or reduce headcount.

They want you to believe that this is because they are now running their enterprises on whiz-bang “AI” automation, or for fear of the next tariff ruling. AI is barely a factor in most corporate workplaces at present, and tariff uncertainty—while real and undesirable—is not the decisive factor here.

The truth is that hiring managers screwed up in 2022 and 2023, by hoarding young grads like consumers hoarded toilet paper during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. (And yes, in some cases, companies did deliberately hoard young hires, as if the factory that made young college graduates was in danger of closing its doors.)

The people who run our major corporations are not exactly fools; but they are not as smart as they would like you to believe, either. They are, moreover, very susceptible to groupthink—which is how most of them rose through the corporate hierarchy in the first place.

-ET

(Mostly) ditching X in 2026

I was never a big fan of Twitter, and I don’t find the Elon Musk-owned X to be much of an improvement. Twitter was already in decline when Elon Musk (unwisely, in my opinion) purchased the site for $44 billion in October 2022.

Complain about Facebook all you want—but at least Facebook is mostly inhabited by real people. X consists almost entirely of sock puppet accounts, which are increasingly located outside the US.

And while there is too much political nonsense on Facebook, real people do still post real content from their lives there. X is all political screeds and political memes. (Oh—and ads, too.)

Then there is the fact that, as noted above, Twitter was in decline even before Elon Musk and the 2024 election. US usage of Twitter peaked in 2017, almost nine years ago. The platform has been losing US engagement ever since.

What about Bluesky—the so-called anti-X, you ask?

Uh, hell no. Bluesky is nothing more than the leftwing, mirror image of X. Just as I have no interest in reading MAGA slogans and memes posted by bots, I also have no interest in an endless, repetitive stream of anti-Trump/GOP posts written by sock puppet accounts. (From what I’ve seen, there aren’t a lot of real people on Bluesky, either.)

Life is too short. Moreover, only about 6 percent of US adults use Bluesky regularly, and that number is not expected to grow.

I do plan to keep my X account in 2026, and I may make the occasional post there, perhaps once or twice per month. Any more than that is beyond the point of diminishing returns.

-ET

Vogue and age-gap relationships

From this morning’s Facebook peanut gallery: the unwashed masses of social media are debating Vogue’s recent article on age-gap relationships. Opinions, as you might expect, are all over the board.

The clichéd expectation about an age-gap relationship is the following: a wily older man lures a nubile young woman into his embrace, usually exploiting some sort of a power dynamic. Because—as we all know—everything turns according to the whims of the patriarchy, which is dominated by Evil White Men Over Forty. Cue sinister music.

Here’s another example, this one from real life instead of internet memes:

My friend’s younger brother is married to a woman 18 years his senior. They met in the early 1990s, when he was a comparatively naive young man of 21, and she was a 39-year-old divorcee with two children.

More than three decades later they are still married. She is now seventy years old, and he is in his early fifties. Because of the age gap, my friend’s brother has never had children of his own. He is now caring for his much-older wife much in the way one would care for an elderly parent.

It has been said that opposites attract. Perhaps, but over the long haul, opposites tend to clash, and serious differences in age, religious beliefs, socioeconomic background, and political ideology are more likely to divide a couple than to unite them. In an ideal world, we would each marry a high school sweetheart, a boy or girl who grew up down the street from us. But of course, that scenario has become increasingly more difficult in the fragmented and mobile twenty-first century. We move around and marry late, often far from our origins.

I don’t think that age-gap relationships are inherently “exploitive”. If a 25-year-old woman (or man) can be so easily manipulated by a partner just because the partner is a few decades older, then I want to raise the voting age to forty, because young adults are clearly too simple-minded to make decisions about our democracy.

The real problem with age-gap relationships is not the “power dynamic”, but the actuarial differences between say, a 40-year-old and a 65-year-old.

Most of us love our parents. Being in love with a man (or woman) who might have gone to high school with Mom or Dad is another matter entirely. And this tends to be a lot more difficult over the long haul.

-ET

Writing gurus to avoid

I have no fundamental qualms against the writing guru. This is, moreover, a common sideline for the fiction writer, at various levels. Almost everyone who writes fiction eventually reaches the point where they want to publicly talk or write about it.

Sometimes they do this on blogs and social media at no charge to the reader. (That’s kind of what I’m doing here.)

Some feel they have so much to say that it justifies a paid book or course.

Nothing fundamentally wrong with that, either. I’ve spoken highly of the writing books of Jessica Brody and Johnny Truant, among others.

Sometimes, however, the fiction writer decides/discovers that aspiring writers provide a far more lucrative market than potential readers.

These are the gurus I would urge you to beware of.

How do you recognize them? They are almost always the ones pushing conspicuously high-dollar courses, “mentorships”, etc.

Over the years, I have landed on the mailing lists of a number of these folks. Just this morning, I received an email sales pitch for a $2,000 “mentorship” arrangement that, when you broke it down to its substance, was pretty thin gruel.

When assessing these various offers in the marketplace, use your common sense. Don’t spend hundreds of dollars for basic material/knowledge that is freely available on YouTube. Caveat emptor.

-ET

Youth culture: what should a grizzled 50-something adult know about it?

I made the mistake of reading the comments on a Facebook article tonight.

Hayley Williams, a singer I had never heard of (more on this shortly) told Clash magazine that she doesn’t want any racist, sexist, or transphobic people to attend her concerts.

Since Hayley Williams’ statement is so vague as to be meaningless, the comments devolved into a war between older folks who smugly asked “Who?” and younger folks who seemed to regard Hayley Williams as some profound thinker.

Although my Gen X instinct is to yawn and roll my eyes at yet another instance of celebrity political preening, the aforementioned trend of the comments raises a question: when is it okay to leave youth culture behind?

In 1985, I thought that Def Leppard and Rush were the most important musical forces in Western Civilization. My parents (then right around 40) knew nothing of them. And my grandparents (then in their 60s) barely knew that MTV existed.

No—scratch that. My grandparents probably didn’t know that MTV existed. And they had certainly never seen a music video.

I’m going to suggest that there comes a time in adulthood when it is perfectly permissible to stop keeping up with youth music. I don’t feel ashamed that I had never heard of Hayley Williams. Nor do I tout this lacuna as a badge of honor.

I’m 57, and I continue to learn. I read multiple books each month, and I study new foreign languages. But I’m at a point in life where knowing the latest pop culture icon just doesn’t seem as important as it did in 1985.

Young people, for their part, should neither ridicule nor resent this. Let me ask the youngsters out there: do you really want 50- and 60-something adults to have a say in what is “popular” on the youth scene?

My guess is that you would prefer us to stay far, far away. And the vast majority of us are happy to leave youth culture to the young.

-ET

The BBC and the unspeakable horror of eating meat

Matilda Welin, a writer for the BBC, wants you to be disgusted by your next sirloin steak or salmon filet. The more grossed out you are, the better!
 
In an article entitled “How a month of abstinence can lead to ‘meat disgust'” Welin encourages readers to give up meat in anticipation of the New Year, during “Vegan January”, or “Veganuary”. While her article includes most of the usual vegan talking points, she focuses on the idea that meat is disgusting:
 
‘The more meat people managed to cut out during Veganuary, the more their meat disgust grew over that month,’ says study author Elisa Becker, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oxford in the UK. “When you stop eating meat, that disgust ramps up, which is really interesting. “This suggests that just one month of meat abstinence changes how you view meat.”
 
Perhaps. A few years ago I spent two weeks in Japan. During this time, I subsisted on slivers of raw fish, rice, and seaweed. When I returned to the USA, I craved steak, chicken, and eggs, like a ravenous Viking. No meat disgust for me!
 
From a purely clinical perspective, though, meat is disgusting. So are childbirth and sex. (Most vegans, being the ultimate killjoys, are against these, too.) And for that matter: the inevitable bodily functions of anyone who eats anything (vegan, carnivorous, or otherwise) can be quite disgusting. Should we stop exercising those body functions, too?
 
As Tennyson said, “Nature, red in tooth and claw”. Nature is not vegan, and human beings are part of nature. (Just try to sell a great white shark on the idea of going vegan.)
 
Like most articles on veganism, Welin’s piece is political, both in what it emphasizes and what it omits. I would love to see the British government ban halal slaughter. (Perhaps London Mayor Sadiq Khan could lead the effort.) But the BBC is much more concerned with lecturing ordinary Brits about the evils of eating bangers and mash.
 
-ET

What writers can learn from ‘Mayor of Kingstown’

I’ve recently been binge-watching Mayor of Kingstown, the gritty prison town drama co-created by Taylor Sheridan.

A few years ago I listened, just for giggles, to a lecture entitled “How to write a bestseller”. The lecturer, an author and a fan of women’s beach novels, warned her audience not to set their stories in impoverished or depressing environments.

Kingstown is a fictional small city in Michigan, on the Lake Michigan coast. Kingstown is the epitome of rust-belt poverty and decay. Kingstown is wracked by street crime and gang warfare. Mayor of Kingstown makes me grateful that I live in southwestern Ohio—no easy feat.

The only real industry in Kingstown is the city’s state prison. Most of the storylines involve the prison in one way or another.

There is no Jack Reacher-like superhero at the center of this show. Nor is there a good-looking young dude who is sure to make the female audience swoon. The hero (I use that term loosely) of Mayor of Kingstown is Mike McClusky (Jeremy Renner) a fiftyish ex-con and fixer who tries to bring some semblance of order to the town. The female lead in Mayor of Kingstown is Iris (Emma Laird) a prostitute with a history of abuse.

This show depresses me every time I watch it. But I can’t help tuning in, because the storytelling is so compelling. Every scene in Mayor of Kingstown is filled with multiple levels of conflict, and usually ends with a polarity shift.

Mayor of Kingstown is entertaining television. But for writers looking to branch out beyond clichés, the show is also proof that you don’t necessarily need to write “the same, but different” in order to find an audience. You just have to tell a good story.

-ET

RIP Sarah Beckstrom

Sarah Beckstrom, one of the West Virginia National Guard members shot by Rahmanullah Lakanwal, has died.

Beckstrom was twenty. I had no connection to this young woman. But as someone who has lived nearly three times that long, I have a sense of all that was taken from her. 

And for what? Blind faith in immigration policies that have proven disastrous for everyone involved.

Beckstrom’s death has led to a predictable debate about the wisdom of bringing so many Afghan refugees into the USA following the American bug-out from Afghanistan. (Which happened, incidentally, less than one year before Ukraine became “essential to our national interest”.) 

Sarah Beckstrom’s murderer was one of the 77,000 Afghan refugees brought to the USA in the wake of the Taliban takeover. 

I wrote on X:

“This goes both ways. I certainly wouldn’t recommend relocating 77,000 Americans to Afghanistan. If you did, there would be similar problems.

Islam is one of the world’s great civilizations. But it has never been compatible with Western civilization (or vice versa). The best way to keep peace between Islam and the West is to keep them apart.

As for the Afghan refugees post-Taliban, they should have been resettled in another Muslim-majority country. There were more than 50 to choose from. Why bring so many people to an alien civilization that so radically clashes with their own cultural values? It makes no sense.”

I am not a performative Quran burner. (That’s just asinine, not to mention very unoriginal, in 2025.) Nor am I in favor of turning a blind eye to the plight of refugees.

But nor do I agree that it makes sense for everyone to come here, as if the USA (or some other Western country) was the only option. 

There are in fact, many other options, many of which would better serve refugees from non-Western countries like Afghanistan.

-ET

 

The first date financial question

Who should pay on a first date? This question has been coming up a lot in my social media feeds in recent weeks. I must therefore conclude that many people are in a quandary. And since daters tend to skew young, I’ll also assume that young people are especially in a bind over this.

Many young men seem to fear that the money they spend on a first date is a sunk cost that may lead nowhere. The young lady may decide she’s not interested in you, or the dreaded, “I like you a lot—as a friend.”

This can, indeed, be the outcome. But this is nothing new. Young men faced the same range of possibilities in the 1990s, when I was a twentysomething. Such outcomes were possible in the 1980s, when I was a high school student. They were the same in the 1970s, and so on.

A first date is not, and has never been, a sure thing.

And yet, men do the inviting, and men do the paying. I’m not going to play a dirge on my violin for you because you’re a man and you end up paying for first dates. Just like I’m not going to play a violin dirge for women who complain that they must bear the burden of childbirth. Nature—and that includes human nature—is not egalitarian. There are downsides to being a man, there are downsides to being a woman. Deal with it.

Nevertheless, a little common sense can mitigate some of the economic “risk” involved in a first date.

I’m not a gambler, but an occasional (and financially solvent) gambler once told me: don’t gamble money that you can’t afford to lose.

When applied to the first date, this means: cheerfully pay, if you’re a man, but keep the first date modest in scope. The details of this will obviously depend on your age, working status, region, and socioeconomic level.

This really isn’t that hard.

-ET

‘Save the Cat!’ and the fiction writer 

I recently listened to the audiobook version of Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat!

Save the Cat! was originally conceived as a screenwriting book, but there is now a series of Save the Cat books for fiction writers, too. I’ve read Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat! Writes a Novel: The Last Book On Novel Writing You’ll Ever Need.

V iew it on Amazon

Save the Cat! is a 15-point formula found in many screenplays and movies. Is this formula worthwhile for novelists and short story writers?

Yes, and no, and maybe.

Save the Cat forces you to think about stories as systems of moving parts. This may be a new and necessary insight for many writers.

Most fiction writers know that they need an inciting incident, and a climax/conclusion. Where fiction writers most often struggle is in the vast middle portions of novels (and even long short stories). Save the Cat has remedies for this. The midpoint and “bad guys close in” are concepts that can be profitably employed in any story form.

One can argue that novelists should write with movies and television in mind, anyway. Visual media has affected the expectations that readers bring to fiction, and you ignore this at your peril. Try to write like Melville (or even Saul Bellow) today, and you won’t get far.

View it on Amazon

That said, stories and novels are fundamentally different from screen-based media. A novel is not a screenplay, just as a screenplay is not a novel. This may be why screen adaptations of novels are seldom satisfactory for viewers who have already read the book.

In particular: the screenwriter’s obsession with scenes and “show don’t tell”. Scenes are the building blocks of any story, but they aren’t the sole building blocks of fiction. All fiction contains some backstory and exposition that simply couldn’t exist in a movie. This is true even of commercial fiction. The “show don’t tell” dictum, when carried to extremes, can become counterproductive. In this regard, it’s a lot like the oft-repeated “no adverbs” rule.

If your goal is to write screenplays, stick with the original Blake Snyder book. If you’re interested in writing fiction, go with the Jessica Brody spinoff, Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.

-ET