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22 Years Later

/ Peter Martuneac / 2 Comments

Sometimes, I long for the days when I didn’t even know what the word ‘hijacked’ meant. Just 10 and a half years old on September 11th of 2001, when my 5th grade teacher told us that two planes had been hijacked by terrorists, I had to ask my friend next to me what it even meant to hijack a plane.

My school made the decision to only show the live news to the high schoolers and middle schoolers. Us elementary kids had our Tuesday go on as normal. It wasn’t until I returned home from school and my parents turned on the news that I saw the true devastation of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

22 years later, and the national grief finally seems to have abated somewhat. We more or less go on with our day, stopping once or twice to remember the tragedy, the loss of life, and the deep, profound wounds it left on our society. For those who did not lose a loved one that day, the wound seems to have healed, though the scar remains.

Personally, I tend to mark the occasion with some somber reflection in the morning. I sit with my coffee and think about it all, from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center towers to the crushing retreat from Afghanistan in the face of a total Taliban victory.

But I’m much older now than the 10-year-old who saw those attacks, and I can no longer dwell too long on the grief of that day, nor even on how it impacted my life. I have a family, and two young children, one as old as I was on that day. Now I try to tell them each about the 9/11 attacks and what it meant to me personally and to my generation, how it changed us and our world. I want them to understand not only the tragedy of that day but also the consequences of lashing out in anger, as we collectively did in the years that followed.

But most importantly, I want them to see the hope borne of tragedy. It’s a cruel, cold world we live in, full of bloodshed and hatred, but there is also hope. More than the mass murder of that day, I want them to know about the heroism. Of the police and firefighters who died so that others may live. Of the New York Fire Department group that lost every member they sent to the towers on 9/11.

Every day you can flip on the news and find tragedy, and that usually is what dominates the headlines. But look a little deeper, and you’ll find a million little silver linings, too. And that’s what we need to cling to and fight for. The islands of hope that exist amongst seas of sorrow.

Another Ethan Chase Adventure?

/ Peter Martuneac / 5 Comments

When I was first in contract talks with my publisher, Evolved Publishing, I was asked how many books would be in my Ethan Chase series. I told them three for sure, but I was uncertain after that. They ended up asking me to try for four, but not requiring the fourth book, which I appreciated.

So since the publication of Gold of the Jaguar, I’ve been planning and plotting a potential fourth adventure. Truth be told, I was 90% against the idea to begin with. If you’ve read Gold of the Jaguar, which you can find on Amazon at the link above, then you know that Ethan’s story seems to have been wrapped up and tied with a pretty bow.

However, when I published my first ever novel, His Name Was Zach, back in 2019, I thought that that too had been tied up with a pretty bow and would be a standalone work. I ended up writing two sequels, a short story prequel, and a serialized prequel on Kindle Vella. So I’ve given the idea of a fourth book considerable thought.

Now, over the last month, I’ve also given it some serious writing. I finally had a decent enough idea of how to draw Ethan back into an adventure that he had sworn off not once but twice already. One that I not only enjoyed but felt like it necessarily advanced the series. The last thing I wanted was a blatant ‘money-grab’ of a book, something that is forced and unnecessary for the world in which the books and characters exist. If I was going to write a fourth book, then it had to feel like a natural progression of the story.

Last week, I finally hit on the big idea that could plausibly draw all the main characters back into a treasure hunt, and I went from just a 2,000 word intro to now a working first draft that so far stands at 8,000 words. I’m starting to get really excited for this one, and I’m already seeing betrayals, conflicted loyalties, and maybe even an ‘enemies to lovers’ subplot. Nothing is certain right now, but the draft is full of potential, and that’s the beauty and the fun of writing something new!

However, the framework in my mind is still very loose. I’ve broken my one rule of writing: never start a book until you have the ending finalized. I currently have no idea how this work-in-progress will end, if I choose to take it to the end. I’m in uncharted waters with this one. I don’t even know what treasure will be at the center of it all.

There’s a lot of work still to do before I can call this a true manuscript, and I might just end up trashing it all and leaving the series at three books. I will not put out a story that I do not love, that I do not believe in, that much you can count on.

So that’s the exciting new news for me! I will keep you all updated if the story continues to progress. In the meantime, you can find my previous works in the hyperlinks above, either my self-published zombie-pocalypse novels or my Ethan Chase adventure series published through Evolved Publishing. And as always, thank you for reading!

Movie Review: Oppenheimer

/ Peter Martuneac / 8 Comments

On Saturday, I spent a little over 3 hours at the movie theater with a friend, finally watching the widely-acclaimed Oppenheimer. It did not disappoint.

Okay, well, it disappointed a little. The beginning was very much a mess, in my opinion. Flashbacks of flashbacks, changing from color to black-and-white, moving from young Oppenheimer to an old, and there was precious little thread holding these scenes together. The infamous apple scene, in which Oppenheimer attempts to poison a mean professor but eventually thwarts his own plan after guilt overwhelms him, felt forced. I believed the director was trying to demonstrate the depths of Oppenheimer’s chaotic personality (by using an even that those close to the man claim never happened), but it came just a few minutes into the movie, after just one interaction with the intended victim, so it didn’t carry any weight.

The plot twist toward the end was also a little messy. There were so many major characters involved with names barely used that when the antagonist mentioned a couple by name as conspirators, I couldn’t quite remember who he was even talking about.

But aside from those grips and a couple other petty ones, I really enjoyed the film. Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer and Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Straus were simply brilliant. Emily Blunt also gave a masterful performance of Oppenheimer’s wife. None of these characters are very sympathetic, as they are all deeply flawed and selfish individuals, but the actors still did a tremendous job bringing them to life.

The scene of the Trinity test was one of my favorites, as Christopher Nolan did a tremendous job building up the pressure, including the actual countdown for the atomic blast. A little later, following the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is a scene where a deeply conflicted Oppenheimer delivers a congratulatory speech for the scientists who worked in the Manhattan Project where Nolan’s artistic vision was once again on full display with the combination of sounds and lighting.

I highly recommend this one for anyone with a taste for history. It doesn’t feel like a full 3 hours, and the resulting performance is well worth the time and money anyway. It wasn’t quite the cinematic coup de grace I was hoping, but I still give it a solid 4.5 out of 5 stars. Easily the best movie I’ve seen all year.

Book Review: “A Promised Land” by Barack Obama

/ Peter Martuneac / 5 Comments

I know I’m in the minority on this, but I really don’t care for audiobooks that much. I prefer to see the written words and to read books myself. Plus, if I’m going to listen to an audiobook, I need to be doing something where I can work and listen at the same time. I can’t do that much at work, my commute is very short, and I’m usually doing other things at home.

But Audible offered me a free audiobook of my choice if I accepted their free trial, and I’d been meaning to read former president Barack Obama’s memoir, so I downloaded it to my phone. This was almost a year ago, and I’m just now finishing it (I wasn’t lying when I said I can’t listen to audiobooks very much).

This is the third presidential memoir I’ve read, the other two being the works of Ulysses S. Grant and George W. Bush. The structure of this one’s mirrored Grant’s in that it followed a linear timeline from birth and moving forward. Bush’s was the same until he reached the point in his life when he won the White House, then it changes. In ‘Decision Points’, each chapter of his presidency is devoted to a major policy issue (the economy, the war in Iraq, Katrina, etc) and it follows that issue from the start of his time in office to the end. I actually think I liked that kind of structure better.

Anyway, returning to Obama, this was a massive undertaking, a 29-hour audiobook (768 pages in hardcover). Obama spares few details and also gives far more personal anecdotes than I’ve read in other memoirs, but it’s easy to listen to because Obama himself narrates the book; say what you want about the man, he’s an eloquent speaker.

One thing I noticed about this book that was slightly annoying was this barely detectable undercurrent of destiny. Sometimes, it seemed Obama projected a bit of hindsight into his thoughts and musings years ago, giving his past self a sense of assurance that all was going according to plan that perhaps did not in fact exist at that time. Obviously, that’s pure conjecture on my part but it was what I took away from the book at certain points.

I was most interested in his recounting of the war in Afghanistan, and America’s successful assassination of Osama bin Laden. As you may know, I was a United States Marine for 4 years, serving as an infantryman and deploying twice to Afghanistan. Because of that, I feel like I have an odd, distant connection to Obama. He was my Commander-in-Chief, after all, which made his chapters on these affairs feel much more personal to me, like he was talking directly to me. When he described the aftermath of the death of bin Laden, he praised the efforts of not just the Navy SEAL’s who carried out the mission, but everyone involved, and even everyone who’d ever deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during that time. I’m not ashamed to say I teared up a little; pride, nostalgia, and memories of the fallen rushed back all at once to create a maelstrom of emotions in me.

It’s hard to review presidential memoirs because of their propagandic nature, and I don’t mean that in a bad way. No president writes a memoir to document what a bad job he did and how incompetent he was, he will always be the good guy of the story. Case in point, Grant did not even make a passing reference to his infamous General Orders No. 11 in his memoirs. So it’s hard to say it was good or bad, except in terms of just how much one believes reality is being obscured by the author, and I didn’t get that sense much.

I did enjoy seeing things through Obama’s eyes, especially since I have vast disagreements with him. I’ve never been a Democrat and never will be (I’m also not a Republican either, and that’s about as political as I’ll get here on my blog), but I feel like I understand Obama and his policies much better now. Whatever my disagreements with him, I believe that he acted only for what he truly believed was best for the United States of America, and that’s worthy of my respect.

I didn’t know this going in, but apparently this was just part one of a two-part series, so it ends with the death of bin Laden. I’ll have to buy part two when that comes out to finish the rest of his administration (thanks, Obama!). I do recommend this to anyone with an interest in American history and current events. If you liked Obama, you’ll enjoy this closer look at his life. If you didn’t, maybe you’ll at least come away with an appreciation for his viewpoint of things.

Movie Review: “F.U.B.A.R.” on Netflix

/ Peter Martuneac / 4 Comments

I hate how much this will sound like the ‘old man yells at clouds’ meme, but I generally don’t enjoy most of the movies or TV shows coming out these days. But I was searching for something new to watch and I’m a big fan of Arnold Schwarzenegger, so when his face appeared on Netflix with a new show called F.U.B.A.R., I decided to give it a try.

The premise is pretty simple: Arnold is a badass CIA agent on the verge of retirement, only to be pulled back in when he discovers his daughter is also a badass CIA agent currently working a dangerous undercover mission. Through eight 57-minute episodes, the father-daughter duo hunt down a violent arms dealer trying to steal and sell a nuclear suitcase.

Actually, one of my first thoughts as I watched the show was that it felt like a parody of Zach and Abby in an alternate universe, one where zombies had not risen from the dead and where the father-daughter team could have led happy, fulfilling lives.

That bemusing comparison kept me roped in during the first couple of episodes, when I still wasn’t too sure what to make of the show. The daughter has a lot of problems with Arnold’s character, who was largely an absent father because of his job, and at first it seemed like the entire show would be her just dumping on her dad over and over, leaving Arnold as the constant sap and butt of the joke. That’s not the kind of show I have any desire to watch.

Fortunately, as the show progresses, each character gets their turn to be the wise old owl, the one who is right and who everyone else should have listened to at the beginning of the episode. Every character also plays the goat at least once, the one whose shortcomings create chaos and makes everyone else have to work harder to finish the mission and get back home in one piece.

I will say that I’m not a fan of the way it ended. There is clearly going to be a second season based on the events of the final episode in Season 1, but that to me feels like too much. The way this mostly delightful action-comedy progressed, it felt like one season was the best fit for it. But I understand that dollars drive projects more than storytelling.

Overall, I can say that I recommend this show to anyone with a Netflix account and who doesn’t mind quite a bit of cursing. There’s no nudity and though there is violence there’s nothing terribly gruesome. So check it out! But before you do, I must conclude the review with a quote from the show’s final episode, spoken by Arnold in his gruff, Austrian voice. It was a great line, no two ways about that, but I’m also purely including this for the benefit (detriment?) of one Berthold Gambrel:

“I’ll be fine. I’m just going to kick back, and drink some beers with Napoleon, Thomas Dewey, the Buffalo Bills, and all the other great losers in history.”