Free Like Tears in Rain: Meditations on Science Fiction Cinema by Alex Kane Page A

cover simply oozes Tauntaun blood—in the same way that his incredible movie posters always have. Mike Mayhew’s drawings? They cut to the heart like a lightsaber, sharply rendered and bursting with the power of the Force. And writer J. W. Rinzler, as always, speaks Galactic Basic with that distinct Coruscanti accent; his is the voice of a fan as well as a writer.
    My wholehearted thanks to Dark Horse, for making that faraway galaxy seem suddenly so much closer.
    Sincerely,
    Alex Kane
     
    I recently rewatched  The People vs. George Lucas , which I think is a fabulous documentary about geek culture and the Star Wars phenomenon in particular, and it gets at the heart of some of the places where Lucas went wrong with his franchise. But I have to say this: when we see Dark Horse or Lucasfilm doing something that reminds us why we were fans in the first place—things like  The Force Unleashed ,  Knights of the Old Republic , or a novel by somebody like Drew Karpyshyn or Matthew Stover—we really ought to let the creators know about it.
    If all the fans ever do is complain, well, I don’t think that’s very healthy for either the property or the people who seem to have this immense love/hate relationship with it. Personally, I don’t have much use for all the negativity that comes with being a Star Wars fan. Life’s too short to begrudge somebody like Lucas, who’s given so much fun and creative energy back to the world, the occasional artistic misstep.

Clarion West
    My Post-Seattle Update, Sept. 2, 2013
     
     
     
    I’ve been putting this off for a while. To sit down and try to sum up my experience at Clarion West in a single, immediate blog post is just a ludicrous idea—it can’t be done. I won’t try. But you might notice that my online presence has been scaled back quite a bit since June, and there’s a reason for that: Clarion West was exactly the kind of life-changing affair everybody had claimed it would be. Being a fairly young, impressionable dude, and not very confident in my art in the grand scheme of things, those six weeks in Seattle really did quite the number on me.
    All the negative crap we tell ourselves as artists? Most of that has been swept aside, for the time being. Replaced with the sense that all that impostor-syndrome garbage, all that doubt, is both a universal and necessary evil. And it goes away when you sit down and   do work , rather than just sitting around and bemoaning your station.
    And all the positive stuff, too. Those milestones we cherish, and quantify, and constantly try to make sense of? They’re not terribly important. Past a certain point, I’ve seen that none of those things ever satisfy the artist. Especially in the context of an emotional low period.
    Thankfully, I was happy and having the time of my life in Seattle. No regrets there. You hear the consensus that these kinds of situations—eighteen strangers sleeping in a house together, creative work happening, the occasional whiff of friendly competition in the air, alcohol being imbibed—might lead to drama of various kinds. To my surprise and delight, there was little of that for the Clarion West Writers Workshop’s 2013 class.
    We became family. I think most of us would be comfortable saying that we share a pretty unconditional love for one another, far as I can tell, and that’s an amazing thing.
    So many egos, so many national and cultural backgrounds melding together to form a household-sized society, might’ve been an ordeal for any other workshop, class, retreat, what have you. But what we had in common with each other won out over our differences, in a big, inspiring way. We became a sort of microcosm for the creative-intellectual types of the world; regardless of America’s political climate, or the idiosyncrasies of the Pacific Northwest specifically, we forged our own small utopia.
    Saying goodbye to everyone, and leaving those friendships behind to return to the so-called real world, was maybe