Welcome to the website of author Edward Trimnell!
The manuscript for Revolutionary Ghosts (which I’ve been serializing here on the site) is done. I’m finishing up some final edits.
Then it goes off to a third-party editor and proofreader.
Revolutionary Ghosts should be available on Amazon by February 1st.
Don’t hold me to that, please…but that’s the plan.
You know how it is with publishing…the best laid plans often change.
I’ve been adding pages of my dark fantasy/horror serial, Revolutionary Ghosts to the site more or less every day. (I did miss a few days during the holidays.)
The online version of the text represents a rough draft (with a brief editing pass for flagrant typos). This version of the book will remain online.
Before Revolutionary Ghosts is published, though (in formats that I’ll be actually charging money for), it will undergo additional editing and proofreading passes.
The basic plot of the story won’t change during the editing phases; but the descriptions may be enhanced, the character dialogue will be tweaked, etc.
Awkward sentence structures (inevitable in any first draft) will be eliminated. I’ll also make sure all the typos are nailed down. (I’m sure a few have slipped by me in the online version.)
E-book, audiobook, and paperback editions of Revolutionary Ghosts will eventually be available–not only from Amazon, but also from Barnes & Noble, Kobo, and Google Play.
You are welcome to read the full text here. (That’s one of the options I had in mind when I decided to post it online, after all.)
You might alternatively choose to merely sample it here, and await the fully edited, finalized versions in the stores. (They won’t be expensive. Don’t hold me to this: But the ebook version will probably retail at $3.99.)
I plan to have retail versions of the book available no later than March 1st.
How you read Revolutionary Ghosts is up to you. In any case, I hope you enjoy the story.
It’s that time of year again. The time of setting New Year’s resolutions—or not.
Since I belong to a gym, I approach January 1st with mixed feelings. On January 2nd, I know that my gym will be overrun with hordes of new members. They will fill the parking lot, take up locker space, and wander aimlessly around the exercise floor, as they struggle to master the nuances of the pec fly machine and the StairMaster.
The New Year’s resolutions members, we call them. Roughly half of them will be gone by Valentine’s Day. By the Ides of March, two-thirds will have fallen by the wayside. By Tax Day, they will be a shadow herd, less than ten percent of their original number.
This is, to a major extent, how fitness facilities make their money: They sell scores of memberships that go unused after a few months. The owners of every gym know that the year-end, that time of New Year’s resolutions, is the prime time for such sales. Because so many people make New Year’s resolutions that they quickly abandon.
This raises a natural question: Are New Year’s resolutions even worthwhile? Or should we go into the default mode of post-modern cynicism, and assume that New Year’s resolutions, too, aren’t what they’re cracked up to be?…Another residual cliché of a bygone age.
Yes, New Year’s resolutions do have a notoriously high failure rate. And yes, the New Year’s resolution has become something of a cliché. I’m going to submit to you, however, that the New Year’s resolution is still a very worthwhile undertaking.
Consider the significance of January 1 as a juncture for clearing the decks, hitting the reset button, starting over.
The first day of January is a completely arbitrary date, from a scientific, mathematical perspective. Theoretically, you could start afresh on any day of the year. Why not March 10th? Or May Day? Or Thanksgiving?
(I’ve occasionally tried to start afresh on my birthday. This hasn’t worked well at all—at least partly because my birthday falls in the humdrum, dog days of August.)
The entire world has earmarked January 1 as a new beginning. The way we designate time subtly changes, as the year is altered by a single digit. The New Year is hyped in the media, and practically everywhere else.
I’m often a cantankerous contrarian. But even I know when to go with the flow. Even though you could theoretically start afresh on any given day of the year, there is a great deal of cultural momentum behind New Year’s Day. Why not use it in your favor?
New Year’s Day, in fact, has a semi-spiritual status in some Asian cultures. The Japanese celebration of Christmas is purely secular (Christians are a small minority in Japan); and the Japanese don’t recognize Hanukkah at all. But the New Year bears a special significance within the animist beliefs of Japan’s native Shintoism.
In Japanese corporate settings, there is the bonen-kai, or “forget the year party”. Held in late December, these are occasions for putting the previous year firmly in the past, so as to facilitate a fresh start in the New Year. New Year’s Day in Japan is a time for visiting friends and loved ones—much like Christmas Day in the West.
Speaking of corporate settings: Even though many companies end their fiscal years on October 31st or July 31st for accounting purposes, most use the New Year as a time to rally employees, suppliers, and customers for a new set of goals. Why not do the same, at an individual level?
New Year’s resolutions become more important as we grow older. Children, teens, and very young adults rarely set New Year’s resolutions, and with good reason. Their lives are already focused on change and transformation.
When you are in school, after all, there is a natural progression built into the transition from one grade—and from one major level of education—to the next. Your life is going to change whether you want it to or not. The process is going to kick you forward.
The setting of new goals, likewise, is built into the process. Many of these goals are predetermined. You don’t really have a choice about the goal of moving from the fifth grade into the sixth, or graduating from high school.
As an eighteen year-old high school graduate, you’ve got to do something next. If you’ve been blessed with caring parents and other conscientious adult authority figures, you’ll have no shortage of advice. But either way, you can’t remain in high school. The only way to go is forward…toward something.
After we become entrenched in the adult world, however, that systemic forward progression no longer pushes us along. In its place arises an inertia that encourages us to fall into ruts. The external trappings of this year might not vary much from those of the previous year, or the year before that. Change is quite often something that has to be initiated from within, versus accommodated from without.
And this is how we get “stuck”—in any number of ways.
I recognized signs of this pitfall in my own life in the mid-1990s, as I passed the midpoint of my twenties. I was five years removed from college, and about ten years removed from high school. I was just another working adult, and I could already sense myself falling into ruts.
So in 1995, I began two new habits.
The first of these was the setting of annual, quarterly, and monthly goals. I set goals in all areas of my life: financial, physical, social, professional, and “skills” (areas of knowledge that I wanted to improve or acquire).
I also began keeping a daily record of my activities. Nineteen ninety-five was still a largely analog world, so I used a paper-based system: I acquired a “business diary”, and used this for my daily records: accomplishments, setbacks, challenges met and overcome, memorable events, etc. Nothing fancy or too elaborate. Just something to give me a bird’s-eye view of the year the following December, when it would be time to set the next year’s goals.
I’ve been following this practice for twenty-four years now. I still have my 1995 diary, as well as my diaries for all the years in between. It’s interesting to see how my goals and priorities have changed since the Clinton era.
I’m naturally nostalgic (most conservatives are); but you don’t have to be obsessed with your personal auld lang syne in order to benefit from such a system. It is as focused on the future as it is on the past.
And the pivotal day of that system is New Year’s Day, January 1st, when I set aside one diary and open a blank one.
All those pages—twelve months of time.
A lot can happen in a year. A lot can be accomplished in a year. That is as true for me today, at age fifty, as it was on January 1, 1995, when I was twenty-six. But at age fifty, I probably rely more on this tangible reminder of what the New Year means.
That word tangible is important, by the way. I would encourage you to record your annual plans (and results) in a written, paper format.
I know: iPhones and Word files and “the cloud”. Fiddlesticks. Holding a year in your hand, in a single bound document, makes that year more psychologically substantial. This will be true on both January 1st and December 31st. And it’s definitely true later on, when you’re looking back on long-past years. Use a physical diary to both plan and record your personal year.
Back to the gym. I know that the bulk of the New Year’s resolution members will come and go by March 15, because I’ve seen them come and go so many years in the past.
Likewise, I have fallen short on many of my New Year’s goals. So will you—unless you set goals that are unambitious (and therefore, uninspiring).
That said, the past twenty-four years have taught me that my New Year’s planning has a direct and proportional impact on the success of each subsequent year. This is why I maintain the practice, and probably always will, until the day when my New Years are no more.
Chapter 54 has been posted just for you. Enjoy!
If you haven’t read any of Revolutionary Ghosts yet, now would be a great time to start.
Or maybe I’m fascinated with that old enemy, the Ruskies. Islamic terrorists I simply want to see annihilated. Kill ’em all, and let Allah sort ’em out. But the Russians are intelligent and innovative enough to be interesting, even if they aren’t always likable and almost never trustworthy.
My Cold War fascination undoubtedly played a role in my enthusiasm for The Americans, the Cold War spy drama that ran on FX from 2013 to 2018. I suppose, too, that I was a naturally receptive audience for Red Sparrow (2018) , a movie about a Russian ex-ballarina who is recruited into “sparrow school”, where the comely are trained to be ruthless, to use their sexuality in the service of the Russian state.
Note that I said “Russian” and not “Soviet”. Red Sparrow is set in the Putin era. Russia’s new leader-for-life isn’t directly portrayed in the film, but he is constantly referred to as “the president” (the same disingenuous title used for Saddam Hussein during his long, dictatorial reign in Iraq).
The Russia depicted in Red Sparrow is appropriately cold, snowy, grim, and brutal. Within the first ten minutes of the movie, you will be tempted to turn up your house’s thermostat. You’ll also be thankful that you live in the United States (or in some other Western democracy)–and not there.
(Another personal aside here: My grandfather spent a year in the USSR during WWII. His U.S. Navy duties also took him to Syria, Egypt, and a host of other places that most Americans wouldn’t eagerly visit in 2018. The only place he described in negative terms was Russia. As he put it, “the asshole of the world”. Not only did he hate the weather, but the Soviet soldiers were uniformly unfriendly, and ordinary citizens were afraid to even look at Americans, lest they be accused of treason. But to be fair, this was during the Stalin era.)
Jennifer Lawrence stars in Red Sparrow as Dominika Egorova, a Russian ballerina who supports her mother on her dancing income, until her career is ended by an injury. Dominika is then approached by her uncle, Ivan, who heads the Russian SVR. Ivan has a job for her.
I don’t want to summarize the whole plot for you. But suffice it to say that Ivan is creepy and evil. He also has incestuous designs on his niece. Through a series of carefully orchestrated circumstances, Ivan closes off Dominika’s options until her only real choice is to dedicate her life (and her body) to the service of the Russian state.
There’s much more to the movie, of course; and the real fun begins when Dominika starts interacting with her American CIA adversary, Nate Nash (played by Joel Edgerton). Nash and Dominika have an affair. (Of course: If a Cold War-era spy movie has a pretty female Russian operative and a CIA male agent, they must have a sexual liaison.)
Speaking of sex: There is a lot of it in Red Sparrow. In this case, however, it really is integral to the plot, as Dominika has been trained to use sex as a weapon of espionage.
A word about Jennifer Lawrence. Jennifer Lawrence is one of those Hollywood types with whom I have a love-hate relationship. On one hand, she is a complete idiot when she opens her mouth about political matters–something she’s been doing increasingly in recent years.
On the other hand, she is a brilliant actress. I became aware of her years ago, when I saw one of her first movies, Winter’s Bone. In that movie, Lawrence convincingly became an impoverished Missouri teenager. She is just as convincing as a Russian ex-ballerina-turned-secret-agent. You don’t have to like Jennifer Lawrence’s off-screen behavior (and I for one, don’t), but you have to admire her mastery of her craft. (Now–if she would only just stick to that craft, and spare us the moonbat political activism.)
Dominika is understandably bitter about her mistreatment at the hands of her uncle and her native country. She is therefore ripe to be turned by Nash, who recruits her as a double agent. But has Dominika truly turned? The viewer can’t be sure. As the plot of Red Sparrow evolves, you aren’t sure if you’re watching a movie about doomed Russian patriotism, an espionage double-cross tale, or a classic revenge story. It’s worth the two hours and twenty minutes it takes to watch Red Sparrow in order to find out.
If you’ve been watching CBS in recent years, you’ll have noticed that many of the network’s top programs are reboots of shows from the 1970s and 1980s: MacGyver, S.W.A.T., Hawaii Five-O.
Now you can add a new one to the list: Magnum PI.
I’ll admit: I was a skeptic. The 1980s coincided with my high school and college years. I didn’t watch much television during that decade. But I did make time for Magnum PI. The original Magnum, starring Tom Selleck, is one of my favorite television programs from my youth.
I was sure that CBS would make a mess of the remake.
I was wrong. The new Magnum PI is just as fun and entertaining as the original.
I’m a conservative, and all conservatives are naturally nostalgic. We tend to believe that things were better in the old days, that previous versions of things were better than the new and updated ones. In this vein, there was a part of me that would have loved to have seen Tom Selleck star in the 21st-century reboot of Magnum. (Selleck presently stars in Blue Bloods, another CBS staple, as the patriarch of an NYPD family.)
But another part of me knows that would have been ridiculous. Tom Selleck is very fit for his age, but he’s now in his seventies. The starring role in Magnum PI is one for an actor in early middle age: 35 to 45.
CBS has cast Jay Hernandez as Thomas Sullivan Magnum. And while Hernandez brings his own style and interpretation to the role, he pulls it off with as much flair as Selleck did before him.
The new show more or less ports the characters and the basic premise over from the original: with some necessary changes. In the original show, Magnum and his sidekicks (TC and Rick), were Vietnam War vets. In the 2018 reboot, they’re veterans of the wars in the Middle East.
There is one fairly major character change: In the 1980s version, Higgins, the majordomo of the Hawaiian estate where Magnum lives (off the largess of the never seen Robin Masters) was played by British actor John Hillerman. In the reboot, Higgins is still British, but Higgins is a woman (Perdita Weeks).
Conservatives like me are supposed to hate it when rebooted shows arbitrarily change the genders of characters. I don’t necessarily hate this practice in a knee-jerk sort of way, but I’m always skeptical of it, often with good reason. (The reimagining of Boomer and Starbuck as female characters in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica produced uneven results.) But in the case of Magnum PI, the distaff version of Higgins works perfectly. I think–sorry, Mr. Hillerman–that I even like the Perdita Weeks interpretation of Higgins better.
The show includes lots of fun details that were crucial to the 1980s Magnum, like the dogs Zeus and Apollo, and Magnum’s habit of thinking aloud to the audience. TC and Rick (Stephen Hill and Zachary Knighton) don’t get much character development. But then, they were little more than affable sidekicks in the original version.
The Magnum PI reboot is as good as any purist could have asked for, 38 years after the start of the original series (and 30 years after it went off the air).
Sometimes the networks botch things, but sometimes they hit home runs, too. The new Magnum PI is a home run
I was part of the original Star Wars generation.
I remember being nine years old in the summer of 1977, sitting with my dad in the cinema, watching that first epic Star Wars opening crawl.
I became a total fanatic for Star Wars. And yes, that meant Star Wars action figures, Star Wars trading cards, and much else. During that first two years of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, I wasn’t thinking about stagflation or the energy crisis, or Jimmy Carter’s “malaise”. I was thinking about Star Wars.
Among my favorite Star Wars memorabilia of that era were the four Star Wars posters issued by Burger Chef. (Burger Chef was a once popular fast food chain that went out of business in 1996.)
I had all four posters, and they were hung all around my bedroom. (I can still recall the exact placement of each one, in fact.)
These are now collectors’ items, of course. But they were just delightful children’s bric-a-brac in 1977.
The original Burger Chef posters from 1977. (I can vouch for their authenticity, because I was there!)
Star Wars replica posters you can buy on Amazon (quick link):
If you’ve been keeping up with my serial dark fantasy/horror novel, REVOLUTIONARY GHOSTS, there are more chapters posted online for you to read.
If you’re in the mood for a coming-of-age supernatural thriller with chills, historical themes, and a 1970s feel, this one is for you.
As of this posting, there are seven chapters of REVOLUTIONARY GHOSTS posted in the serials section for you to read.
REVOLUTIONARY GHOSTS has the Headless Horseman, undead Hessian soldiers, and lots of other nasty spirits.
