Liberate Liberty

Stories shouldn’t be preachy but that doesn’t mean they can’t impart a lesson or relay a message. Indeed, the theme (along with motifs) is one of the five components that a story must have. So every story is teaching or promoting something. This is why people often resort to storytelling when they want to spread a lie—a false belief or ideology. Conversely, storytelling is equally useful in helping people discover the truth.

Screen Rant published a column on Dec. 23, 2017, revealing how, “Batman Comics Are Fighting For Transgender Awareness.”
At the time, we couldn’t help but appreciate that Batman supported Victoria’s transition, mentioned and alluded to in vocabulary that non-LGBTQ readers could completely miss. But those in the community would see the exact message being sent by writers James Tynion IV and Marguerite Bennett. In the months since that issue, Detective has kept the conversation going. But as other comic titles and publishers battle the opposing forces of readers call…

Providence, “a Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy,” reviewed the movie Black Panther on Feb. 9. And if comic book movies appeal to foreign policy journals, then my fiction—which regularly features contemporary national security issues, cultural issues, and even Christianity—should appeal to them too.
Providence published, “What You Should Know About Wakanda,” last week, providing a backgrounder of the fictional nation that is home to the Black Panther.
And last March, Providence published a rather in-depth review of the movie, Logan, entitling it, “An Ode to Men of a Violent Mold: Logan, a review.”
Both Black Panther and Logan are, of course, based on comic books. But they are high-profile movies and there are some legitimate national security angles at which to review them. So it’s understandable why foreign policy journals highlight them.
But my fiction regularly features real (or close to real) foreign policy or national security issues. It also often deals with c…

“Sex sells,” is a common enough saying. And it’s true. It’s so true that people prefer to look at beautiful women pretending to be something they aren’t instead of looking at people being who they actually are. Case in point, people prefer looking at Kate Upton pretending to be a marine over looking at me being an actual soldier.

There’s nothing wrong with the truth that people prefer looking at beautiful women over others. So this isn’t a complaint. And while I don’t have official statistics on how many people have viewed the following imagery of Kate Upton working out with the U.S. Marines, I’m quite certain the number is much higher than the number of people who have looked at any of the imagery (which, by the way, are quite rare) of me in uniform being an actual soldier.

And people preferring beautiful women to non-beautiful people is why I include beautiful women in my fiction and the professional art I commission from time-to-time (see one such example below).