Gregeration X Newsletter April 15, 2023-April's Mech of the Month!

Hello ,

Thanks for joining me for my bi-weekly updates once again. If you're new to my newsletter, thank you for subscribing and welcome aboard!

In this edition:

My Musings
Mechhaven Missives
Mech of the Month [New]
Featured Authors
Featured Promotions

My Musings

I took a quick trip to Las Vegas with my family last week. We had a fun time. The weather was nice. We ate some great food and did a lot of walking. My sons are still too young to gamble (for now), so my wife and I limited that to the late evening hours after they went to bed. We aren’t big gamblers, so we pace ourselves and stick to a budget. Once that is gone, we stop. Neither of us won big, nor lost big, so I’d say that was a success. I’ll be back in Las Vegas in November for a Writing Conference which I’m looking forward to quite a bit.

Mechhaven Missives

Over the next couple of days, I’m working on wrapping up my edits on Mechhaven Book 4: Rally Point and will send the manuscript to my editor. This is the point where I transfer the document from the program I write it in, Scrivener, to MS Word, the program my editor works, which tracks all the changes he suggests. Once it’s all done in Word, I transfer the document to Vellum to finalize the document for publishing.

I started plotting Book 5 this week. The first third of the book is pretty straightforward as it continues on from Book 4. I also know how the story will end, so the last third is pretty settled. Now, I just need to connect the first third with the last third. I expect to take another week or two to complete the outline. I may start writing a scene or three while I wait for Rally Point edits to come back, just to get started on Book 5.

Mech of the Month

April's Mech of the Month is Voltron, Defender of the Universe! Many of you may know of Voltron from the more recent Netflix reboot, Voltron, Legendary Defender, which is a pretty good show. That being said, my connection to Voltron goes back to September 1984.

Back in those days, September meant two things; Back to School, and the new Fall TV season. This was the time of year that new shows or new episodes of returning shows premiered on Network Television. This also meant new after-school cartoons, which where I lived, aired on local Los Angeles TV stations. Aside from Saturday Morning cartoons, this was prime cartoon watching time. In 1984, one of the new shows airing was Voltron.

Voltron was something new and exciting that my friends and I hadn't seen before. I mean, five human-piloted robot lions that transformed and merged into one giant robot? And that giant sword? What the heck? Voltron was so awesome!

There was only one problem. My friends and I rode the bus home from school and unlike the previous year, our bus picked us up LAST... which meant by the time we were dropped off at the bus stop and made it the rest of the way home, we missed ALL or MOST of the episode. This was before VCRs were common, and even if you had one, good luck programming it to record something. If you had parents or siblings who watched TV during that time, forget it. You were never recording the episode.

This was a situation that could not stand. So my friends and I did what any resourceful middle school students in the 1980s would do... we ran home from school. Two miles. Every day. In the heat. In the wind. In the cold. Our school didn't have lockers, so our backpacks were loaded with 25 to 30 lbs of books (or at least it felt that way). To make our route shorter, we took the most direct route, running through fields, constructions sites, and even jumping fences.

On the last leg of our journey, we’d walk through a local drugstore. We’d slip in one door, get a few moments of blissful AC, take a quick drink from the water fountain, and slip out the exit door. On days we made particularly good time, we might even stop to get an ice cream cone, or run into the local grocery store or 7-11 to check for new comic books. One thing I can say, though, is that we beat the bus home every single day. I don’t think any of us ever asked permission from our parents. We just took matters into our own hands and did it. As it turned out, running home two miles a day with fully loaded backpacks across a variety of terrain was also a fantastic way to stay in shape!

Stay tuned for the next Mech of the Month coming in four weeks! I’m still looking for suggestions for future candidates, so if you have any mechs that you’d like to nominate, please send them my way!

If you missed the first Mech of the Month, you can check it out here.

Featured Authors

On The Outward Edge

C.P. Night

Princess Serina, the last survivor of House Starfire, refuses to be crowned empress until she’s wiped out the rebels who killed her family. Only then will she prove to the bickering nobility, and herself, that she is worthy of the crown.

Just when victory seems near, mysterious messages lead her to believe the rebels have infiltrated the Core’s military. Her investigations reveal a new threat, one even more insidious than the assassination of the emperor sixteen years before. Will she unmask the conspiracy that threatens to destroy everything she sacrificed to protect? Or will she become its next victim?