Jack of Harts

Here come the monsters! Fanged and hungry! Featuring creatures both predatory and silly! Relive the nostalgic days of your whimsical monstrous youth! Find it all in Creature Feature!

I completely missed Columbus Day this year. I blame it on Middle East Peace and me being excited about the stories I’m writing. You could also blame it on a news media that wants to forget Europeans ever ventured out of Europe to explore the world unless it is to say how many innocent peaceful natives we killed when we did it. Me, I like to celebrate the greatness of man and what we have accomplished.

When Columbus sailed the ocean blue in fourteen hundred ninety two, he opened up a new world to all of us. Was he the first? No. Was the second? Also no. But the Spanish Empire followed the path he found to build many of the places we live in right now. Even us Americans. Never forget that the Spanish colonized the American Southwest first, long before we expanded into those areas and brought our version of civilization to them. His voyage is one of the most famous voyages of the Age of Discovery when Europe stretched out to sail the ocean blues and find faster routes to places all around the world.

We built the world we live on based on voyages like these, and we should never forget to remember and celebrate them.

I’ve been a fan of Transformers, the toys not the energy network converters, for pretty much my entire life. The TV show and the comics and the toys filled my childhood, even as I could barely afford them. We didn’t have cable most of my childhood, so I rarely got to see the cartoon, but I rented what videos I could from Blockbuster back in the day. And the toys were expensive, so I didn’t have many of them. But the comic I could buy for 75 cents a piece back in the day. I could afford that once a month, and the Transformers comic became one of my reading pleasures along with Star Trek and Star Wars novels. They were my window into a world where good fought evil and usually won. Or at least survived to fight another day.

You may not be surprised to learn that the first fan fiction I wrote was Star Trek and Star Wars related, and Transformers was in there as well. And what might surprise you is that the first story someone else ever published that I wrote was for a print magazine that published Transformers fan fiction. Now I spend most of my time writing my own fiction looking to get paid for it, but I have soft spot for that old Transformers story, and it was one I never finished. I’ve always wanted to go back and complete that story, but never had the opportunity.

Well, the opportunity has arrived. The guy who ran that old fan fiction magazine has resurfaced on the internet and started doing his old thing again. We are all twenty years older than we were back then, but I quickly volunteered to redo my old story for his magazine. Just because I’m a fan and I want to do it. At first I thought I would just do a polishing up job and resubmit. But then I read it and realized how just how rough it was. So I shelved that over twenty-year old version and rewrote from scratch. The first part has been published already. The second I’m working on now, with a deadline of two days now. I’m mostly done. I’ve written the beginning and end and am working on the big fight in the middle as we speak.

I’m taking my time and introducing things a piece at a time. The first part was basically setting the stage, and acted as a kind of refresher for people who haven’t read the comics in thirty years. Yes, it has been over thirty years since the original comic ended, and this story is a direct continuation of it. So I needed to do a lot of universe rebuilding in part one. Part two is where the action really starts, and we get to see Transformers doing Transforming things in the here and now. You’ll get to see it soon if finish on time. Which I had better do. I did promise it on the 15th after all, so I need to finish that fight scene and get it all polished up and nice for publication.