Comic Captions 9/30/13

It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a comic book panel.  The goal of course is to make it as humorous as possible.

This week's comes from Justice #2

I'll go first

Brainiac:  Let's see what's on your mind.

Now it's your turn!

Box Office Blitz Week 12 Results!

Once again we prove the power of kid's movies.  Here's the estimated box office totals for the weekend:
Cloudy w/a Chance of Meatballs 2 $35M
Prisoners $11.3M
Rush $10.3M

And my picks were:

1. Cloudy...Meatballs 2 $40M
2. Rush $15M
3. Don Jon $10M

I get 200 for Cloudy and 100 for Rush for 300 total.  Ouch.

Rusty picked:
Cloudy 2 - $45 mil
Prisoners - $15 mil
Rush - $12 mil

That's a trifecta for 900 points.

Michael Offutt picked:
Cloudy 2 - $47 million
Rush - $13.2 million
Don Jon - $12 million

That's also 300 points.

David Walston picked:
1. Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2 $46M
2. Prisoners $13M
3. Don Jon $10

That's 200 for Cloudy and 300 for Prisoners for 500 total.

Briane Pagel picked:
Rush: $25 mil.
Cloudy 2: $20 mil.
Baggage Claim $15 mil

That's 100 for Rush and 100 for Cloudy for 200 total

Andrew Leon picked:
1. Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2: $44m
2. Rush: $14m
3. Prisoners: $11m

That's 200 for Cloudy and 100 each for Rush and Prisoners for 400 total.

Maurice Mitchell picked:
1.Cloudy 2 - $43 mil
2. Prisoners - $13 mil
3. Rush - $12 mil

That's a trifecta!  He's closer on Cloudy than Rusty so he wins the round for a total of 1200 points.

And Chris Dilloway gets 0 for turning in his late.  If you're having problems posting your picks, email me or something.

Maurice's win rockets him up into 4th place but he's still got some work to do to get into the top 3.

	Box Office Blitz
	Scoreboard
		12	Total
1	Rusty Carl	900	8200
2	David Walton	500	7000
3	Chris Dilloway	0	6800
4	Maurice Mitchell	1200	5800
5	Andrew Leon	400	5400
6	PT Dilloway	300	5200
7	Briane Pagel	200	4500
8	Michael Offutt	300	3100
		3800	46000

Box Office Blitz Week 12!

We're just about to the halfway point.  If you didn't read Tuesday's post (or all of Tuesday's post) you might not have noticed that there

was a change last week in who won the round once the final results were in.  Here now is the updated scoreboard, which helps both Dilloways as Chris takes sole possession of 2nd place and inches closer to Rusty while I remain within striking distance of fourth place.  Which really means nothing.

	Box Office Blitz
	Scoreboard
		11	Total
1	Rusty Carl	500	7300
2	Chris Dilloway	1200	6800
3	David Walton	900	6500
4	Andrew Leon	900	5000
5	PT Dilloway	500	4900
6	Maurice Mitchell	600	4600
7	Briane Pagel	300	4300
8	Michael Offutt	500	2800
		5400	42200

BTW, last week I noted there were at least 8 second movies in a series this year.  It occurs to me that this week we have "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2" while in November there's Thor 2 and Hunger Games 2, plus The Hobbit 2 later on.  Year of the deuce!

And now here's the list from my local megaplex (* denotes a new release):

• 2 Guns  
• Baggage Claim*
• Battle of the Year
• Blue Jasmine
• Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs 2*
• Don Jon*
• Elysium 
• Generation Iron
• Insidious 2 
• Instructions Not Included 
• Lee Daniels' The Butler
• One Direction: This is Us
• Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
• Prisoners
• Riddick 
• Rush*
• The Family
• The Wolverine
• The World's End
• We're the Millers

With no other kid's movies really in the theater right now I suppose I'll go with:

1. Cloudy...Meatballs 2 $40M
2. Rush $15M
3. Don Jon $10M

Now you make your picks in the comments!

Thursday Review: Agents of SHIELD

By now the whole blogosphere has probably given its opinion of the new Marvel's Agents of SHIELD show.  Here's my review:  meh.

Hurm, you might want more detail than that.  Or probably not.  Suffice it to say I was not that impressed by the show.  It was OK but it's clear to me that it's going to take some time for the show to gel.

The problem with a pilot like this (and you can make the same case for "Firefly" or ST TNG or DS9 or pretty much any show) is that you're bringing all these characters together and setting them loose on some situation that has to be resolved in 45 minutes give or take without commercials.  Except for Phil Coulson we don't really know any of these people so what we end up with are just glimpses of each character.  It's really too early to feel that strongly one way or another about anything.  Hence I say meh.  But good idea to involve Extremis in the plot considering it was shown the same day Iron Man 3 came out on DVD.  Marvel does not miss a trick, do they?  Unlike DC who seems to miss just about everything.

Anyway, as I said it can take a while for shows to come together.  Chemistry is not made overnight.  Sometimes it takes longer than others to get it going.  Really I don't think shows like ST TNG or DS9 came together until about the third season.  (And Voyager and Enterprise probably never.)  You can wait that long when you're in syndication without all the pressures of being on a big network like ABC where there are probably millions in ad revenues at play.

The thing working in Whedon's favor this time is I'm sure ABC's corporate masters at Disney aren't going to want to ax the show too soon.  I mean the whole reason for it to exist is to help sell the various Marvel superhero movies that they'll be constantly ramming down our throats over the next 3 years.  So they've probably got some time to make the concept work and craft characters we might care about.  And I wouldn't be at all surprised if during sweeps in November and February you get some of the more important Marvel characters showing up.  Would you be at all surprised if someone from Thor shows up on November 5, just 3 days before Thor 2 comes out?  If I were the sort to actually seek out rumors I might know if that's true or not.  If it's not then I will recant what I said about Marvel not missing a trick.

I probably will not be watching the next episodes live.  The baseball playoffs start next week and my Tigers should be in it.  Hopefully they'll be showing these On Demand so I can catch up.  Though really about the only reason I want to watch at present is to find out just how the hell Coulson lived.  They indicated there's more than meets the eye with that--or else I read more into that exchange between Hill and the Shepherd.  Is he a clone?  An android double?  Did they use some of Odin's magic or something?  I'm sure we'll find out more in November when sweeps come around and they pull out the big guns--and hammers, shields, robot suits, and giant green dudes.

(BTW, next week I'll be talking about the finale of Breaking Bad.  I'm sure Offutt will be stoked while Pagel not so much.  So it goes.)

September Recap

If you want a lot of views I guess just mention a whole bunch of Fortune 500 companies in your post.  Woo, selling out!!!!  Here's what
was popular this month:

1. Everyday Heroes

2. Temporary Anne Cover Reveal

3. My post on formatting paperbacks (I have 15 paperbacks for sale now...just sayin')

And now for the list of stuff I watched but am too lazy to write much of a review about.

Killer Joe:  Matthew McConaghuey is a dirty cop in Dallas who kills people for money.  Not much is made of that.  It's more about this redneck family who hires him to kill the former matriarch of the clan who has a $50,000 insurance policy.  Since the rednecks have no money they give him their spacey daughter as a "retainer" (ie sex slave).  I watched the unrated version (I guess it was originally NC-17) which features a woman's privates and some mild gore.  It was OK but there's a huge plot hole at the end involving the money.  (3/5)

Django Unchained:  Another blood-soaked history lesson from Quentin Tarantino.  I actually didn't mind this as much as the last one, in large part because it doesn't become completely absurd alternate history.  I mean at least Django doesn't free all the slaves or prevent the Civil War or anything asinine like that.  Though I'm sure there were quite a few historical inaccuracies.  (Early revolvers had 5 bullets, not six.  They sing a song mentioning peanut butter, which I'm pretty sure didn't exist in 1858.  I don't think they had repeating rifles either or else both sides probably wouldn't have been relying on muskets at the beginning.  Also it says it's 1858 and then "2 years before the Civil War."  Didn't the Civil War really start in 1861?  I guess you could say it started with the election of Lincoln but traditionally we say it went from 1861-1865.)  The last act was kind of annoying since it relies on the German guy doing something completely idiotic, which creates needless complications.  But I guess them simply paying for the girl and leaving would have been far less exciting than Django slaughtering like a hundred people. (3.5/5)

Zero Dark Thirty:  I suspect someday there will be a better movie about capturing bin Laden, but until then Zero Dark Thirty isn't too bad.  The first hour is mostly devoted to torturing some guy to get the name of bin Laden's courier but then thanks to those whiny Democrats shutting down our torturin' it takes seven years to find the guy and then bin Laden.  What annoys me is like many "fact-based" movies like "The Social Network" and "Moneyball" this plays kind of fast and loose with some facts.  For instance I read on Yahoo or HuffPo that there was actually like 3-4 women who worked together but they all end up being consolidated into Jessica Chastain.  (Not that I'd mind being consolidated into Jessica Chastain.)  Apparently she had no kind of personal life for 10 years of bin Laden hunting either.  Anyway, it was OK but not great.  (3.5/5)

Jack the Giant Slayer:  This movie might have been slightly better with some better effects.  As it was the effects were so lame I could hardly watch it.  I mean if you're going to make the giants all look like cartoons then why not just make the whole movie a cartoon?  It's the kind of movie too where you can just tell they were shooting a lot of it against a green screen.  The plot was largely predictable, so I just kind of tuned it out after a while. (2/5)

Parker:  This is basically "Payback" only with Jason Statham instead of Mel Gibson.  (Incidentally Mel Gibson's character was named Porter so there's another eerie similarity.  Oddly both are based off novels.)  He's a thief who rips off the Ohio state fair with a crew but then the crew turns on him and thinks he's dead.  Of course he's not so he swears vengeance.  The Jason Statham parts were fine, pretty much just your usual Jason Statham action movie fare.  The Jennifer Lopez parts seemed pretty pointless.  With what she actually contributes she could have just been in a couple of scenes.  Another part of the problem is Jason Statham has a loyal girlfriend named Claire, so there's really no romantic tension between him and J.Lo, which again has me questioning what the point of her was.  Especially since this movie sags in the middle and probably could have been a half-hour shorter at least.  But hell it's on Netflix Instant now so it's not like it cost me much.  (2.5/5)

Jack Reacher:  This movie was soooooo boring.  I don't think Tom Cruise has ever had less charisma, nor has his face ever looked so old; they ought to have hired someone better at the makeup.  At over 2 hours this was about an hour too long.  Even by the end I'm still not sure why Jack Reacher goes around living off the grid and beating up whoever he feels deserves it.  Is that his idea of living free?  I'd prefer to live freely somewhere that has a nice soft bed and more than one outfit from Goodwill.  Anyway, maybe Briane Pagel would know but it seems really unlikely you could have a DA be the father of a defense attorney on the case.  That seems like conflict of interest to me.  It had to be a bummer when this first came out since it features a shooting massacre and this was around the time of Newtown.  Of course thanks to our gun-obsessed culture there was conveniently another massacre just in time for me to watch this on DVD.  USA!  USA!  (2/5)

Numbers Station:  I forget who it was who blogged about it (Rusty?) but someone blogged about short wave stations that sporatically announce seemingly random numbers.  These are supposedly the codes that go to secret agents to give them the assisgnments.  Obviously Numbers Station focuses on a station that broadcasts these numbers.  When it gets compromised, only John Cusack and Malin Ackerman can save the day.  This was OK and unlike a couple movies above not too long, though I think they used the same writers and make-up people as Jack Reacher.  Really it suffers from not having a strong central villain. That sort of makes the action a bit of a letdown.  Still it's another on Netflix Instant so you're not out much. (3/5)

Midnight in Paris:  I'm not a big fan of Woody Allen movies.  This one is OK, but feels a little hacky.  I mean you can tell right away Owen Wilson's fiancee is a bitch who's all wrong for him.  The Twilight Zone did this same concept 50 years ago in a couple of episodes.  Seriously the message was the same and everything.  It's not terrible, just probably beneath Allen given his body of work.  Funny to think that back in 1920s Paris you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting some famous writer, painter, or musician. (3/5)

Arbitrage:  It's an OK thriller about a 1%-er who's fudged his books and is now desperately trying to get someone to buy a chunk of his company.  It's complicated when he accidentally kills his mistress in a car accident.  It's probably about 15 minutes too long, one of those that feels like it's ended long before it actually ends.  Tim Roth does a pretty good Columbo impression as a rumpled, annoying detective.  (3/5)

---

When I was on vacation in Ludington the crappy motel I was staying in had their TVs bolted to the wall and they didn't have any outlets where I could plug in my portable DVD player.  To get around that I went to Wal-Mart and bought a Roku so I could watch stuff not on a 7" screen, which really sucks.  Anyway, when I got home I hooked up the Roku in my bedroom since I already have one in the living room (an HD one while the one I bought in Ludington was the cheapest SD model).  So lately I've been using that to watch crappy movies on weekend nights.  There are these free channels called Crackle and Popcornflix where you can watch largely terrible movies that are free, so long as you can withstand repetitive commercials every 10 minutes.  (Seriously on the Popcornflix one they show the same fucking commercial three fucking times IN A ROW!  After 90 minutes of that you've pretty much got it memorized.)  Since pretty much all the movies on these channels I've never heard of, I just scroll back and forth for a little bit and then stop at some random point and watch whatever it comes up with.  Here are the results of that experiment.

The Collectors:   So, two guys go to New York to collect on some debts for some mob guy.  It's a little fuzzy who they're working for or why.  I guess basically they're a homeless man's version of the guys from "Pulp Fiction."  There's one guy who owes like $250K they can't collect on so they decide to rob a bank or something.  Meanwhile a hot blonde detective is after them.  It started out with promise but got increasingly lame.  (2/5)

Choke:  Don't confuse this with the adaptation of the Chuck Pahlniuk novel directed by and co-starring Agent Coulson from the Avengers.  That was actually a decent movie.  This one, not so much.  Dennis Hopper plays a dad who gets pissed at some guy dating his daughter and loudly says over the phone and in person that he's going to kill the SOB...and then proceeds to strangle him to death.  He chucks him out a window by some bushes.  His bright idea to hide the corpse is to run over to a grocery store and shoplift a garbage bag to put over like half the body.  His antics are seen by Michael Madsen, who shows up to help dispose of the body.  They elude some cops...and then I fell asleep.  In hindsight I think that was for the best.  (1/5)

Cougar Hunting:  This promised to be a raunchy comedy as three teenage doofuses head to Aspen to find some "cougars" (old women with money who date younger guys).  It disappointed though in that the only woman to get naked was the least attractive in the cast.  With a name like "Cougar Hunting" I'm expecting some nudity and sex, damn it!  The rest was boring and predictable with terrible acting and production values.  The only compliment I can give is I somehow stayed awake. (1/5)

Midnight Movie:  This is basically like an evil "Last Action Hero."  There's some kind of evil movie that ends up at some shitty theater in some shitty little town.  And somehow it sucks all these kids working at the theater into it, where they start to get hunted by this slasher with a skull mask...and then I fell asleep.  I woke up to see the end and find out who lived, which was only half-predictable.  By that I mean I knew one person would live but the other person I thought might live did not.  Anyway, a horror movie that puts you to sleep is not very good. (1/5)

Trojan War:  This either came out 10 years too late or 10 years too early.  Since it came out in 1996 it was really too late for the John Hughes era and too early for the Judd Apatow era.  It would have been more at home in the Hughes era with knock-offs like "Adventures in Babysitting" but since it's about a kid trying to get laid it could have fit the Apatow mold with a little more raunchy humor.  Anyway, it's all about a kid's quest to find a condom so he can fuck the head cheerleader while we all know he should be banging the tomboyish Jennifer Love-Hewitt.  Now if it were the Jennifer Love-Hewitt from "Ghost Whisperer" with those DD breasts I imagine that wouldn't have been a decision. (3/5)

Godzilla:  Final Wars:  This was intended to be sort of an homage for Godzilla's 50th anniversary.  I tried really, really hard to stay awake for the monster fights, but couldn't manage it.  Way too much time wasted on boring humans.  They should realize we only see Godzilla movies to see him fight giant monsters.  It's like a porno that tries to have a plot or a slasher movie that tries to interest us in the characters to be slaughtered. I put it on the next day and fast forwarded it to see what I missed.  Basically when Earth is invaded by a bunch of Japanese emo fans humans unleash Godzilla from a block of ice to save the day.  Which he does by beating down a bunch of giant monsters.  It's funny how quickly he deals with the 1998 American Godzilla, basically a whack from the tail and then incinerating him with his lightning breath.  I'm sure that was intentional as an f-you to Roland Emmerich.  It all ends with him battling a Robot Chicken with chainsaw arms and a three-headed dragon.  (2.5/5)

Two Cent Tuesday: The Female Mystery Explained

(OK, probably not the female mystery you're thinking of.  No man can ever have an answer for that.)

A month ago I watched the beginning of the Tanya Roberts movie Sheena (Queen of the Jungle) on cable and it finally occurred to me why movie studios especially are so challenged when it comes to making female superhero movies.  The problem it occurred to me is one of role reversal that leads to emasculation for the men involved.

Think of it this way, in the traditional male superhero movie the woman is always the love interest, the damsel-in-distress, and sometimes a helper, like a sidekick without a costume.  The point being that the woman is always secondary to the man.  The man still has the cool powers and gets to kick the bad guy's ass and save the world; at best the woman gets to say, "And I helped!"


At the worst the woman just whines and is used for bait by the bad guy, like in all three Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies.  Watching "Jack the Giant Slayer" it solidified in my mind that most of the time in action movies it's OK for a girl to be spunky enough to run off when her dad wants her to marry some rich douche, but when she actually runs afoul of anyone she needs some guys to bail her out.

So the problem is if we flip the script and the woman is the superhero, then what is the man?  Right, then the man is the love interest, dude in distress (what is the male version of a damsel?), and pseudo-sidekick.  The man is secondary to the woman.  If you want to see this principle in action, watch the not-very-good movie My Super Ex-Girlfriend where Luke Wilson is an ordinary schmuck whose ex-girlfriend happens to have all sorts of cool superpowers.  Luke Wilson gets so tired of her domination that he teams with her arch-enemy to strip her powers away.  You could make the case that this symbolizes us guys's greatest fears about female heroes and women in power in general.  But then you'd be way overthinking a crappy romantic comedy.

In the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series the male characters are definitely secondary.  Dan Dreyfus is pretty much just a love interest and a dupe since he never figures out what's going on with Emma.  The Sewer Rat becomes more like a sidekick and a love interest as the series goes on.  Tim Cooper gets introduced as a love interest (not for Emma) in the fourth book and in the 8th becomes more of a sidekick.  It's always Emma who's the main focus because it is Tales of the Scarlet Knight, not Tales of Guys Who Like and Sometimes Work With the Scarlet Knight.  Maybe that would sell better?

While we're a more open-minded country than 50 years ago about, we're still not that open-minded.  Especially not in Hollywood, where female directors are still about as rare as unicorns.  Has there been a big superhero movie directed by a woman yet?  I doubt it.

Especially in Hollywood, women are still generally perceived as a pair of boobs on legs.  Most actresses still don't have much of a career after age 30, when their looks start to fade and there are a bevy of other, younger girls coming in.  As they say in LA Confidential, "Who cares about this broad?  Tomorrow a dozen more just like her will come in on a bus."  Despite women's lib and all that, I don't think attitudes in Tinseltown have improved much since the 50s.  I'm sure directors are still largely casting based on cup size of an actress's talents more than her actual talent.  (Michael Bay springs to mind.)

A way to prove this is that we can have female superheroes in movies, just not as the main attraction.  Like X-Men with Storm, Rogue, Jean Grey and Mystique was OK because Wolverine was still most everyone's favorite character.  Or Fantastic Four with Sue Storm because there were still three other male heroes and most of us were just staring at Jessica Alba's breasts.  Or the Avengers where it wasn't threatening that Black Widow is a woman because the male heroes are the more important ones.  So basically as long as we still have men in equal or more-than-equal roles we can tolerate a woman's presence.

To do it otherwise emasculates the male characters and that's something that makes a lot of us uneasy.  I'm sure the last thing a lot of people (especially down south) want is a female president.  When Clinton was president people like Rush Limbaugh were always bitching that Hillary had too much power.  If Michelle Obama encourages kids to eat healthy you'd think she'd told kids to join the Communist Party or something from the uproar amongst conservatives.  Because women need to know their place is in the kitchen or the sewing room, right?  Someone linked to a game by a Republican group where Hillary gets slapped every time she speaks; that pretty much sums it all up right there.  On the news this morning they said it will take until 2058 for there to actually be pay equality between men and women.  So a woman just now entering the workforce would probably be retired before she could get the same pay as a man.  USA!  USA!

I think the only way to solve the problem is for a studio to have the guts to actually do a female superhero movie and for women especially to turn out in numbers large enough to make it a hit.  Because if there's one thing that can change attitudes in Hollywood real quick it's $$$$$.  Until then a Wonder Woman movie will be stuck in development hell and anything like a Supergirl or Batgirl movie will be completely unthinkable.  And a Scarlet Knight movie?  Yeah, right.  (But if any movie studio wants to adapt it, shoot me an email because I like money.)

NOTE:  There's a change for the Box Office Blitz winner in Week 11.  Prisoners has an actual weekend total of only $20.8M not $21.4M which means Chris Dilloway is closer by bidding $20M versus Andrew's $22M.  So he gets the 300 bonus points for winning the round.  Don't blame me, blame the studio for overinflating the numbers.  (Congrats if you paid attention up to this part.)

Comic Captions 9/23/13

It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a comic book panel.  The goal of course is to make it as humorous as possible.

This week's comes from All-Star Superman #11

I'll go first

Lex Luthor:  Lance Armstrong was on to something; PEDs are awesome!

Now it's your turn!

Box Office Blitz Week 11 Results

So has the public finally gotten its fill of dance team movies?  "Battle of the Year" flopped miserably, which points in that direction.  Meanwhile the success of "Prisoners" indicates the public has not tired of Hugh Jackman yet.  That's the kind of deep analysis you expect here.

The top 3 movies of the weekend were:
Prisoners: $21.4M
Insidious 2 $14.5M
The Family $7M

My picks were:

1. Prisoners $18M
2. Insidious 2 $9M
3. Battle of the Year $7M

That's 200 for Prisoners and 300 for Insidious for 500 total.

Rusty picked:
Prisoners - $20 mil
Insidious 2 - $15 mil
Battle of the Year - $6 mil

That's also 500

David Walston picked:
1. Prisoners $17M
2. Insidious Chapter 2 $12M
3. The Family $8M

That's a trifecta!  That's 900 points.

Michael Offutt picked:
1) Prisoners $19 Million
2) Insidious 2 $13 million
3) Battle of the Year $10 million

That's also 500 points.

Andrew Leon picked:
1. Prisoners: $22m
2. Insidious 2: $17m
3. The Family: $7m

That's a trifecta for 900 points.

Briane Pagel picked:
1. Prisoners, $20 mil
2. Battle, $10 mil
3. Insidious 2, $9 mil.

That's 200 for Prisoners and 100 for Insidious 2 for 300 total.

Maurice Mitchell picked:
1. Prisoners - $20 mil
3. Battle of the Year - $9 mil
4. The Family - $7 mil

That's 200 for Prisoners and 400 for Family for 600 total.

Chris Dilloway picked:
Prisoners - $20 mil
Insidious 2 - $15 mil
The Family - $7 mil

That's a trifecta!

For right now Andrew would be the winner.  I'll double check the official results Monday night to make sure.

Here are the preliminary results:

	Box Office Blitz
	Scoreboard
		11	Total
1	Rusty Carl	500	7300
2	David Walton	900	6500
2	Chris Dilloway	900	6500
4	Andrew Leon	1200	5300
5	PT Dilloway	500	4900
6	Maurice Mitchell	600	4600
7	Briane Pagel	300	4300
8	Michael Offutt	500	2800
		5400	42200

Box Office Blitz Week 11!

Here's a meaningless Fun Fact for you:  by my count there have been 8 movies that were the second in a series released since "summer" movie season began.  Those would be Star Trek Into Darkness, Despicable Me 2, Grown Ups 2, Insidious 2, Kick-Ass 2, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, Red 2, and Smurfs 2.  So #2 was really popular at the box office this summer.  And it would also describe the quality of a lot of movies released this summer.  Ba-zing!

And now here's the list from my local megaplex (* denotes a new release):

• 2 Guns  
• Austenland
• Battle of the Year* (aka every group dancing movie ever)
• Blue Jasmine
• Despicable Me 2
• Elysium 
• Generation Iron*
• Insidious 2 
• Instructions Not Included 
• Lee Daniels' The Butler
• Mortal Instruments:  City of Bones 
• One Direction: This is Us
• Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
• Planes 
• Prisoners*
• Riddick 
• The Colony*
• The Family
• The Smurfs 2
• The Spectacular Now 
• The Wolverine
• The World's End
• We're the Millers

I suppose I'll go with:

1. Prisoners $18M
2. Insidious 2 $9M
3. Battle of the Year $7M

Now make your picks in the comments!

Thursday Review: Money

My Amazon friend Ethan Cooper loves Martin Amis.  I am not as much of a fan.  I did read his House of Meetings, which I thought was a lot better.  Recently I read a list of 25 "asshole authors" which featured Amis as well as other luminaries like Hemingway, Joyce, and Norman Mailer.  By comparison I think Amis's sins were pretty light; ridiculing children's books isn't quite on the same level as shooting your wife for instance.

Money
by Martin Amis
(3/5 stars)

While "Money" is a highly entertaining, raunchy yarn, it suffers when read 20+ years later from being an '80s novel. Like every story about the 1980s--see "Wall Street," "Less Than Zero," or "Bonfire of the Vanities" for examples--it's about greed and excess, which is what you'd expect about a book called "Money."

Since this book was published in 1984, Amis probably got to the well before Oliver Stone, Bret Easton Ellis, or Tom Wolfe, but having read/watched those, this novel feels redundant. The only saving virtue is that Amis only focuses on the one '80s staple of greed with only a vague reference to AIDS and slight mentions of cocaine, so at least it doesn't feel, like, totally '80s.

For the obligatory plot summary, John Self is a TV commercial director, the type who would have made the notorious Paris Hilton ad for Hardee's/Carl's Jr. John is relatively content with his gold-digging girl Selina and consuming mass quantities of alcohol, pornography, and fast food. Then a rich young entrepreneur named Fielding Goodney gives John the chance to direct a movie based loosely on John's life called "Good Money." The film will put John seriously in the money, so he jets across the pond to New York City. The actors are pretty much like you'd expect--all self-centered complainers about as bright as a 10-watt bulb--and the script from a feminist writer seems completely unworkable. While trying to get this cast and script together, John consumes more booze, more pornography, more fast food, and plenty more females. He tries to clean up his act for the wealthy and sophisticated Martina, but a comeuppance is just around the corner.

On a side note, the writer John convinces to help revise the script is named Martin Amis, yes, THAT Martin Amis. I know some authors like to put themselves in their novels (cough, Philip Roth, cough) but it strikes me as just a wee bit arrogant to put yourself in your own story. Why not do like most authors and use a vaguely fictionalized version of yourself with a different name? At least then we can choose not to believe the author's casting himself into his own story.

At any rate, as I said in the beginning, the writing is entertaining as John goes from one raunchy escapade to the other. After a while all the boozing and sex got to feel a little repetitive as I wondered where the story was going. But you certainly won't be bored in reading this novel. You just might feel you've already read it.

That is all.

Everyday Heroes 9/13

This month was Labor Day so here's an article on Labor!  This lists the 20 Best Employers according to some groups.  I wish there were a little more detail about these companies to know what makes them so good.  Anyway, socialists like me love to bitch about Corporate America, so here are some corporations who may be less evil than others.  (And if you're wondering, I read an article a while back that listed Dish Network as the worst employer to work for.  Basically their CEO makes Mr. Burns on The Simpsons look like a liberal.)

It's possible to love your job and get a good salary too: You just have to work for the right company.
The first annual list of the best employers in America by PayScale and Business Insider evaluates companies by both pay and happiness.

The winner is a company you've probably never heard of: a New Jersey biopharmaceutical company called Celgene Corporation. Many of the best companies were also in the health care industry.

The famously indulgent tech industry also did well on this list, including Google (#2), Yahoo (#8), and Microsoft (#14).

Companies in the 2012 Fortune 500 were ranked using PayScale's salary and survey database. Happiness represented 57 percent of the final score and was measured through questions about satisfaction, feelings of meaningfulness, stress, and schedule flexibility. Pay represented 43 percent of the final score and was measured by looking at median pay after five years and pay compared to industry peers.

20. Dow Chemical Company

Headquartered in Midland, Mich., this chemicals company has about 50,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of flexibility (85%); high rates of satisfaction (78%) and meaningfulness (66%); and average rates of relaxation (35%).

Median pay is very high at $90,000 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.

[Grumpy Note:  I assume they're talking about white collar jobs.  My dad sure as hell didn't get no $90K a year from Dow.]

19. Booz, Allen and Hamilton

Headquartered in Tysons Corner, Va., this management consulting company has 26,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of relaxation (48%); and high rates of flexibility (83%), satisfaction (72%), and meaningfulness (61%).

Median pay is very high at $93,100 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.



18. Johnson & Johnson

Headquartered in New Brunswick, N.J., this pharmaceutical company has 117,900 employees.

Employees report very high rates of meaningfulness (73%); and high rates of relaxation (39%), flexibility (83%), and satisfaction (72%).

Median pay is very high at $92,000 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.


17. 3M Company

Matt RourkeHeadquartered in Two Harbors, Minn., this conglomerate company has 84,198 employees.

Employees report high rates of relaxation (44%), flexibility (79%), satisfaction (77%), and meaningfulness (59%).

Median pay is high at $82,400 after five years, and very high compared to industry peers.



16. The Boeing Company

Headquartered in Chicago, Ill., this aerospace and defense company has 171,700 employees.

Employees report high rates of relaxation (45%), flexibility (80%), satisfaction (76%), and meaningfulness (68%).

Median pay is high at $85,900 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.



15. Amgen Corporation

Paul SakumaHeadquartered in Thousand Oaks, Calif., this biopharmaceutical company has 17,800 employees.

Employees report very high rates of meaningfulness (81%); high rates of flexibility (78%) and satisfaction (75%); and average rates of relaxation (37%).

Median pay is very high at $98,500 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.


14. Microsoft Corporation

Headquartered in Redmond, Wash., this computer software has 94,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of flexibility (92%); high rates of relaxation (39%) and meaningfulness (60%); and average rates of satisfaction (69%).

Median pay is very high at $111,000 after five years, and very high compared to industry peers.


13. Abbott Laboratories

Headquartered in North Chicago, Ill., this pharmaceutical company has 91,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of meaningfulness (81%); and high rates of relaxation (39%), flexibility (83%), and satisfaction (77%).

Median pay is high at $88,000 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.



12. ITT Exelis

Headquartered in Tysons Corner, Va., this defense company has more than 20,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of relaxation (63%), flexibility (84%), and satisfaction (79%); and high rates of meaningfulness (58%).

Median pay is very high at $102,000 after five years, and average compared to industry peers.



11. Pfizer, Inc.

Headquartered in New York, N.Y., this pharmaceutical company has 103,700 employees.

Employees report very high rates of flexibility (84%) and meaningfulness (77%); high rates of satisfaction (73%); and average rates of relaxation (36%).

Median pay is very high at $93,200 after five years, and very high compared to industry peers.


10. Williams Companies, Inc.

Headquartered in Tulsa, Okla., this oil and gas company has 3,913 employees.

Employees report very high rates of relaxation (54%) and satisfaction (80%); and high rates of flexibility (79%) and meaningfulness (65%).

Median pay is high at $79,000 after five years, and very high compared to industry peers.



9. E.I. DuPont De Nemours & Co.

Headquartered in Wilmington, Del., this chemicals company has 70,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of flexibility (84%) and satisfaction (84%); and high rates of relaxation (43%) and meaningfulness (67%).

Median pay is high at $80,700 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.



8. Yahoo! Inc.

Headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., this internet company has 14,100 employees.

Employees report very high rates of relaxation (46%) and flexibility (88%); high rates of satisfaction (81%); and average rates of meaningfulness (55%).

Median pay is very high at $120,000 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.



7. Chevron Corporation

Headquartered in San Ramon, Calif., this oil and gas company has 62,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of satisfaction (81%) and relaxation (47%); and high rates of flexibility (80%) and meaningfulness (58%).

Median pay is very high at $102,000 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.


6. MasterCard Worldwide

Headquartered in Purchase, N.Y., this financial services company has 6,700 employees.

Employees report very high rates of satisfaction (81%), relaxation (63%) and flexibility (85%); and average rates of meaningfulness (54%).

Median pay is very high at $103,000 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.


5. Biogen Idec, Inc.

Headquartered in Weston, Mass., this biotechnology company has 4,850 employees.

Employees report very high rates of satisfaction (83%), flexibility (89%), and meaningfulness (89%); and average relaxation (33%).

Median pay is very high at $97,800 after five years, and very high compared to industry peers.



4. Qualcomm, Inc.

Headquartered in San Diego, Calif., this telecommunications company has over 20,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of satisfaction (81%) and flexibility (92%); high rates of meaningfulness (65%); and average relaxation (37%).

Median pay is very high at $106,000 after five years, and very high compared to industry peers.


3. Huntsman Corporation
Headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, this chemicals company has approximately 12,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of relaxation (50%) and flexibility (94%); high rates of meaningfulness (63%) and satisfaction (75%).

Median pay is very high at $95,600 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.



2. Google, Inc.

Mark BlinchHeadquartered in Mountain View, Calif., this internet company has more than 30,000 employees.

Employees report very high rates of satisfaction (81%); high rates of relaxation (44%), meaningfulness (61%), and flexibility (81%).

Median pay is very high at $119,000 after five years, and very high compared to industry peers.


1. Celgene Corporation

Headquartered in Summit, N.J., this biotechnology company has more than 4,500 employees.

Employees report very high rates of satisfaction (91%), meaningfulness (86%), and flexibility (91%); and high rates of relaxation (41%).

Median pay is very high at $118,000 after five years, and high compared to industry peers.

Appropriately, tomorrow is a review of a book called Money.

Two Cent Tuesday: Postage Due

Last Tuesday I finished the Sky Ghost:  Army of the Damned story, which I'd shown you the cover for previously.  It only came out at about 60,000 words, which is pretty low.  Actually on Tuesday last week I pretty much just mailed in the last chapter and epilogue to be done with it. 

I realized when I got into it that I had made a critical decision that completely changed the nature of the story.  When I started out, it was supposed to be a rugged men's adventure story about a daredevil superheroish pilot with an awesome plane that shoots down "air pirates" over an America that's overrun with zombie hordes.  Pretty awesome, eh?

It ended up turning into almost an airplane-related version of "Warm Bodies."  I mean it became more of a YA story about a girl who meets a daredevil superheroish pilot and they fight air pirates and zombies together.  The girl who was supposed to be more of a secondary character became a main character, all because I decided to start out writing it from the girl's POV.

The thinking at the time was that way I could make the Sky Ghost seem more mysterious and stuff.  Whereas if I'd focused on him from the start, it'd have been less mysterious because obviously we'd be in his head.

And then one thing leads to another and you realize about 20,000 words in that things are going completely different than how you expected.  If I were one of those goofball romantics I'd gush about how the one character took over and blah blah blah like she's a real person possessing my soul or some shit.  No, I just focused on a different character and it changed the complexion of the whole story.  That's one of those things that happens sometimes when you're writing.  It's kind of like how one little stone can change the course of an avalanche or a butterfly flaps its wings in Brazil and it rains in Michigan.

Just so you don't get the wrong idea, I don't think it's a bad story.  It's just different than how I thought it'd be when I was going into it.  You can read the whole thing free on Wattpad, though it is just a first draft.

I'm thinking what I really need to do is just run with the YA thing and rewrite it in first person.  I mean if I'm going to do it, I might as well do it right.  And it'd need a new cover too, so I whipped up a couple of possibly more YA-appropriate ones.

Though I think these first two might give you the idea the girl is the Sky Ghost.  This third one I was just goofing around:

That's the actual plane type the Sky Ghost flies.  Because I always thought the X-29 looked neat even though they never built any for military use.  Maybe I just need to find a picture of a girl kissing some hunky pilot, eh?

Anyway, I suppose since I realized I'd screwed up my handling of the story as much as Obama screwed up the handling of Syria it was easier for me to just mail in the end of it.  It's not something I'm real happy about.  Maybe at some point I'll get around to fixing it.  Or not.  I'd wager on not since I'm lazy about that stuff.

Comic Captions 9/16/13

It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a comic book panel.  The goal of course is to make it as humorous as possible.

This week's comes from Batman #677

I'll go first

Bad guy:  I've got your 'No Soliciting' sign right here, Jeeves!

Now it's your turn!

Box Office Blitz Week 10 Results!

It's been a banner year for cheap horror movies directed by James Wan and starring Patrick Wilson.  First "The Conjuring" in July and now "Insidious 2."  Though someone on Facebook said this movie was laughably bad.  I'd expect it to dropoff a lot then next week.  Meanwhile "The Family" didn't completely tank, though it has yet to make its budget while "Insidious 2" has already earned its budget several times over.  Note to studios:  don't waste money on Robert deNiro and Tommy Lee Jones when all you need is Patrick Wilson and a bunch of horror movie cliches.

The top three were:

1. Insidious 2 $41M
2. The Family $14.7M
3. Riddick $7M

(Unless they really over/underestimated these totals there should be no problems this week.)

My picks were:

1. Insidious 2 $20M
2. The Family $9M
3. Riddick $8M

I was way off on the amounts but got them in the right order, so that's a trifecta for me. 900 points.

David Walton picked:
1. Insidious 2 $24M
2. Riddick $10M
3. The Family $9M

That's 200 for Insidious and 100 each for the other two for 400 total

Briane Pagel (eventually) picked:
1. Insidious 2: $12 million.
2. The Butler: $11 Million.
3. The Family: $10 million.

That's 200 for Insidious and 100 for Family.  300 total

Michael Offutt picked:
1 Insidious 2 - $31 million
2 Riddick - $10 million
3 The Family - $8 million

That's also 400 points

Maurice Mitchell picked:
1. Insidious Chapter 2 - $32 mil
2. The Family - $11 mil
3. Riddick - $7 mil

Also a trifecta for 900 points

Andrew Leon picked:
1. Insidious 2: $30m
2. The Family: $10m
3. Riddick: $8m

Also a trifecta for 900 points

Chris Dilloway picked:
Insidious 2 - 25 mil
Family - 10 mil
Butler - 8 mil

That's 200 for Insidious and 300 for Family for 500 total

But Rusty widens his lead this week by picking:
Insidious 2 - $35 mil
The Family - $12 mil
Riddick - $8 mil

He gets the trifecta for 900 and since he outbid me, Maurice, and Andrew he gets the 300 bonus too.  Some guys have all the luck.

Here's the updated scoreboard:

	Box Office Blitz
	Scoreboard
		10	Total
1	Rusty Carl	1200	6800
2	David Walton	400	5600
2	Chris Dilloway	500	5600
4	PT Dilloway	900	4400
5	Andrew Leon	900	4100
6	Briane Pagel	300	4000
7	Maurice Mitchell	900	4000
8	Michael Offutt	400	2300
		5500	36800

Rusty has a sizable lead, David and Chris are tied for second, there's a bunch of us in the middle of the pack, and Michael is in the lead for the Sacko.  Huzzah!

Box Office Blitz Week 10

It's that time of year where our thoughts turn from blockbuster movies to the smaller screen of TV.  Monday I Tweeted there should be an award called the "Whitney" for the new show you're dreading the most based on the previews.  This stems from when I had to endure a preview of NBC's "Whitney" in a movie theater before whatever movie it was; all that preview did was convince that under no circumstances would I ever watch that show, unless they forced me Clockwork Orange style.  Except for watching sports I rarely watch network TV, so I'm not sure what new terrible shows are on the way.  Though just the idea of one starring Robin Williams gives me a cold shiver.  That "Dads" show looks pretty terrible too.  My rule of thumb is any comedy that needs a laugh track these days sucks ass.  Feel free to disagree with that assessment.  So what show are you least looking forward to seeing?

On the flip side the only show I'm even slightly interested in seeing is the SHIELD one.  At least the first episode so I can see Agent Coulson rise from the grave.  Oh, right, he wasn't really dead--he just got shot in the chest at pointblank range by a magic staff.  Apparently we're using the Last Action Hero rule that any wound to a good guy in a fictional universe is just a flesh wound no matter how terrible it would be in real life.  After the first episode I'll probably forget it's on and then wait until it's on Netflix.  (Seriously, I set an alarm for 9pm on Sundays so I don't forget Breaking Bad is on; that's how terrible I am remembering stuff like that.)

Anyway, since it's Friday the 13th there's the obligatory horror movie this week.  And not a lot else.  So probably a lot of people staying home to watch TV.  See what I did there?

Here's the list from my local megaplex (* denotes a new release):

• 2 Guns  
• Austenland*
• Blue Jasmine
• Closed Circuit
• Despicable Me 2
• Elysium 
• Grown Ups 2
• Insidious 2* 
• Instructions Not Included 
• Jobs
• Kick-Ass 2
• Lee Daniels' The Butler
• Mortal Instruments:  City of Bones 
• One Direction: This is Us
• Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters
• Planes
• Red 2
• Riddick
• The Conjuring
• The Family*
• The Grandmaster
• The Heat
• The Smurfs 2
• The Spectacular Now 
• The Ultimate Life
• The Wolverine
• The World's End
• We're the Millers
• Winnie Mandela
• You're Next

I suppose I'll have to go with the horror movie sequel.  I mean it is Friday the 13th and all.

1. Insidious 2 $20M
2. The Family $9M
3. Riddick $8M

Now make your picks in the comments!

Thursday Review: The Magician's Assistant

If you get a chance, watch "The Great Buck Howard," "The Illusionist," or "The Prestige," all of which are magician-themed movies that are better than this book.

The Magician's Assistant by Ann Patchett
June 16, 2005
(3/5 stars)

I can summarize my overall review by simply saying this book was a very slow read for me. There was nothing much to sustain the story, because Sabine pretty much finds out everything about Parsifal in the first half of the book. There was no mystery and no obstacles to her discovering the truth about her past, hence no real drama for me as the reader.

Once she gets to Nebraska, Howard Plate shoving Bertie against a wall, which required a dozen stitches, was the only real excitement. That and a trip to Wal-Mart. Mostly it was just long, tortured prose as Sabine hangs around her mother-in-law's house in Nebraska for a couple weeks. The couple lesbian kisses made the book a little more exciting near the end, but that was pretty much it. The rest of it was just a chore to plow through.

The end was also one of what I call "nonendings", which are the bane of my reading existence. Nonendings are endings that don't resolve anything or really give me any idea what direction the characters are going to take. Imagine the main character comes to a fork in the road at the end of the book. One road goes left, the other right. And that's where the book ends, before we even know where our character is going to the kinds of things he/she may find. I always find that irritating.

The book also relies entirely too much on vivid dream sequences. There are at least a half-dozen in the book where Sabine is basically communing with her dead husband's lover, Phan. The first couple I found interesting, but I think the author made a few too many trips to that well. I find lengthy dream sequences irritating as well.

The writing is sound and the characters are relatively interesting. As a Midwesterner, born and raised, I think the Nebraska people are pretty spot-on, though the town of Alliance had no personality. Other books like Richard Russo's "Empire Falls" do a much better job of bringing a small town to life.

Now you can say the point here is that Sabine finds family, except that Sabine was already close to her family. That was never a problem for her. The trip to Nebraska brings her closer to Parsifal's family, but she's not discovering the joy of family, because she already had that. So what then is the point of the book? Search me. At least she got some closure and met some interesting people.

Comics Recap 9/13

I haven't read as many comics as since last month when I did this.  Money's been tight so I've been resisting the urge to buy just anything that goes on sale.  Sometimes that can be difficult to resist.  (Like last night when I dropped $30 on a bunch of comics on DC's site.)  Anyway, here's what we got:

Ultimate Spider-Man:  I guess the "Ultimate" universe is like a different universe than the rest of Marvel comics.  In this universe Peter Parker dies fighting Electro, but conveniently a kid named Miles Morales just so happens to get bit by a spider the Green Goblin created and Miles's ne'er-do-well uncle stole.  I read the first six issues that focus on Miles getting Spidey powers and then becoming the new Spider-Man thanks to a nifty costume given to him by Nick Fury.  I found it to be pretty slow, but then I thought, wait, me of all people shouldn't be throwing stones about that since A Hero's Journey starts off pretty slow.  Hypocrite!  The only other thing that annoyed me was the way they drew the character I was never sure how old he was supposed to be.  Most of the time he looks about 10 years old, which is always a little disconcerting because little kids shouldn't be crime fighters.  Anyway, maybe he's supposed to be older.  I don't know.  (4/5)

I done this already

Justice League Dark:  I read issues #14-18 of this just because the story sounded like something I had already done a couple years earlier in Betrayal Begets Blood, Tales of the Scarlet Knight #5.  What happens is this Justice League of magic people goes through a portal to another planet and all the sudden their magic doesn't work right no more.  The one who is supposed to be immortal starts to get old and die, which I did in the Scarlet Knight book.  I'm starting to think someone from DC Comics has read all my Scarlet Knight books.  Anyway, it was OK but I think it was too short to really accomplish much.  The good thing about the Planet Hulk series was that since it ran 13 issues there was more of a chance to really show you what the planet and its people were like, whereas in only 5 issues you really only get a glimpse of what's going on.  (3.5/5)

Captain America:  The Winter Soldier:  I bought this just because it is apparently the basis for the movie coming out next year.  It was OK, but not great.  Even for a comic it's pretty implausible that the Russians could have made an advanced robot arm for the Winter Soldier in 1956.  There's a little deus ex machina in the end where Captain America uses the Cosmic Cube to basically wish the Winter Soldier's memories back.  Since they already used the cube in the movies I wonder how that's going to play out there.  I think overall more could have been done with the conflict between Cap and the Winter Soldier.  I guess I actually read just the second volume; there's a whole seven issues before this that builds up the introduction of the Winter Soldier, though really I don't think that's necessary.  (3/5)

New X-Men Vol 1:  I've read quite a bit of Grant Morrison's work for DC, so I thought I might as well sample some of his work for Marvel.  The "New" X-Men focuses on Professor X, Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Beast, and Emma Frost, all of whom have shown up in the various movies by now.  This first volume from Morrison focuses on a story called "e for Extinction" where once again someone is trying to wipe out all the mutants using a new breed of Sentinel robots.  In a sad irony the issue where millions of mutants were killed came out in September of 2001.  Kind of poor timing there.  The story is from the more normal Morrison collection, though really it's not anything you haven't seen before even if you just watched the movies.  This also included the Annual about someone trying to buy mutant organs to implant in normal humans.  The artwork by Frank Quitely is kind of ugly.  I mean just look at the cover and you can see the proportions on the characters are kind of distorted and they all look like bad caricatures of what they should look like.  (3/5)

Is that it?  Yeah, not much going on.

Two Cent Tuesday: Paperback Writer

Shiny new paperbacks!

Last month I finally started to get around to making paperbacks for some of my most recent books.  Before that the only paperbacks I'd made were for Where You Belong and The Carnival Papers.  Both were a nightmare.  Where You Belong was the first one I made, so there was a big learning curve there.  For The Carnival Papers it was difficult to pull together all these separate files since it was a book of short stories.  Then unlike some lazy people I set different headers and footers for each story.  That along with the table of contents was a real pain in the ass.

I thought this time would be easier, but there were still some hiccups.  But now that I'm done with the Scarlet Knight ones I've gotten it down to almost a science.  So I can share my wisdom with you on how to format your novel for CreateSpace.  Most of these principles would probably work on Lulu or somewhere else too.

If you're like me then the first thing you do is reread the manuscript.  Then you find 40-50 head-scratching errors that you somehow missed the other four or five times you read the manuscript previously.  Seriously, what the hell is that?  After I correct those I post a revised ebook version of each book just because I can.

Then you want to format your manuscript.  Let's assume you're using MS Word.  Now what I realized from the dong the Chances Are books is the first thing you should do is change your font and size.  The CreateSpace template uses Garamond, which is fine.  I use Palatino Linotype for mine.  That's what I used for Where You Belong, so why change?  It seems a little bigger than Times New Roman so I shrank it to 11point.  You want to do this first before you start fiddling with titles, chapter headings, drop caps and all that.

It should go without saying that your manuscript should be single-spaced, but let me say that:  Single-spaced!  Set the first line tabs for about a half-inch (I use .33").  If you have scene breaks, you can use whatever symbol you like.  I use ***, centered.  For ebooks I use underlines instead of italics but in a printed book I go back to italics because you can see them better on paper than on a screen and it looks better than an underline.  So go through and Find underlined text and Replace it with no underline, italics.  A lot of that stuff you can find in my post about formatting ebooks.

OK, now for the title I like to use 20-point font.  Subtitle I use 14-point font.  The first page is the title page and the second page is the copyright page with the ISBN numbers and anything else you want to throw in there.  The third page is either Part 1 or the start of Chapter 1 or the Prologue depending on the book.

A really, REALLY important thing is the margins.  No matter what size your book is, the margins are the same (or I assume; the two sizes I've used have the same margins).  Here's what your margins should be:

That's the screen from Word 2000.  In Word 2007 the header and footer are under the Layout tab.  Anyway, the thing that really fucked me up when I was doing the Chances Are books is I forgot to change the Paper Size.  It seems obvious but I just didn't think of it.  For the Chances Are books I used a size of 5.5" x 8.5" which matches the oversized paperbacks I have on my shelves for the most part.  So under the paper size tab I'd change the width to 5.5 and height to 8.5.  The default size is 6x9 which is what the lazy jerks who formatted A Hero's Journey used, so it looks stupid compared to other paperbacks on my shelf.  You can use that if you want; I am for the other Scarlet Knight books just for symmetry.  Again, the margins are same no matter the paper size.

The next biggest thing is formatting chapter pages.  At least if you want to do it right.  If you're lazy like some people you can just half-ass it.  What I do is I make the chapter title (Chapter 1, Chaper 2, etc.) 20 point font and then right click it and go to Paragraph.  On the Before box I change it to 36pt and on the After box I change it to 96pt.  This sets the Chapter title off from the text, which makes it look nicer.  Pro Tip:  You can go to Replace and under Format click Paragraph and set the Before and After.  Then just tell it to Find/Replace "Chapter" with the format and boom it's all done!  (Except for prologues, epilogues, or anything like that.)

Next I insert a Drop Cap.  That makes the first letter of the chapter bigger than the others.  You don't have to do that but again it makes it look nicer.  It's under Insert in Word 2007 but it's a little different for older Word versions.  Just click the Help if you can't find it on your program.

One thing you want to note is any widows or orphans on the page before the new chapter.  This means where you end up with only a line or two on a page at the end of a chapter.  It looks really bad and it costs extra to have pages with almost nothing on them.  So if you see a page with only a couple lines on it (less than a paragraph or two) then go back and maybe see about trimming some words here or there to squeeze it onto a full page.  I don't update the ebook with those changes; just consider it a Special Exclusive Version for people who buy the paperback.

Here's another thing with the chapters that's important for the headers and footers:  if you used a regular page break (which you probably did if you're like me) to separate chapters then you want to delete that and change it to a Section Break.  In Word 2007 you go to Page Layout-Breaks-Next Page.  Again it's a little different in older Word versions so use the Help if you can't find it.  This will make sure that the headers and footers don't show up on the first page of the chapter.  Again it just looks better that way.  Also use the Section Break for the title page, copyright page, Part 1/etc pages, and anything else where you don't want a header or footer to show.

Another thing about this is that if you have a Part 1, Part 2, etc. you want it to show up on an odd-numbered page so the reader can see it right away.  If it falls on an even number page then add a Section Break ahead of it.  If you want to waste more paper you can also do this for chapters, but remember that every page you add to the book adds to the cost of it, so you might want to go sparingly.  I make sure the "Also By Me" page is on an odd page.  I don't really care where the About the Author shows up.  That's just my personal preference.

Headers and Footers are a real pain in the ass and I still don't really get how it all works.  You'd think Microsoft could have made it easier after like 20 years but you'd be wrong.  It's still the same clunky way in 2007 as it is in 2000 and I'm pretty sure that holds true for 2013 as well.  It sucks, but just deal with it.

Anyway, if you got all your Section Breaks in right then this will hopefully not be too difficult.  Just go to the first page where you want the header or footer and then put in how you want it.  If you're lazy you can just put one header or footer for everything.  I like to use one header for even pages and one header for odd pages.  If you do that, make sure to check the box that says Different Even and Odd.  Here's what my headers look like:

Odd Header

Even Header

You can make them whatever size or font you want.  I use Palatino Linotype 9-point so it's a little smaller.  I like to italicize them too.  To each his own.  You can use footers if you want and generally the same thing would apply.  If the header is still showing up somewhere you don't want it to, make sure the Different First Page is checked and that should make it go away.  (Really would it be that hard for stupid Microsoft programmers to just have a button to say I want to suppress headers/footers on that particular page?  Who beta tests this shit?)

Whew, so now that your file is formatted you need to make it into a PDF.  There are utilities like PDF995 that can do that if you don't have something to save it as a PDF.

My books are in good company.

The next big thing is the cover.  Chances Are (punny!) you already have a cover if you've made an ebook, so you just need to modify it.  What was a bear for me is that CreateSpace lists the image size in INCHES and Paint Shop Pro uses PIXELS and it's really hard to convert them.  I looked it up and finally found a way to figure it out with some basic math.

Here's the formula:
Pixels = Size in inches x dpi (dots per inch)

Now to drop some basic algebra here, we know two of these variables.  The size is 5.5 x 8.5 or 6 x 9, though in reality it has to be slightly bigger.  For a 6x9 book it actually wants margins of 6.26x9.5".  And for the dpi what we want is 300dpi, otherwise CreateSpace bitches at you that it's low resolution.  (Actually it does even if you have exactly 300dpi, which makes no sense.) 

We drop those in there and we get:
6.26 x 300 = 1878
9.5 x 300 = 2850

So you want your image to be 1878 x 2850 pixels.

Now to take the math lesson a little further, let's say I want to convert the images I created in PowerPoint to be big enough.  How many inches would that be?  Well, what I found out is PowerPoint uses 96dpi (because Microsoft still thinks it's the 90s) and we want 300dpi.  So if you take 96 and divide it by 300 you get 0.32.

Now I can take my 6.26x9.5" cover and make it big enough.  All I have to do is divide and conquer!

6.26/0.32 = 19.56
9.5/0.32 = 29.69

So my presentation should be 19.56" x 29.69" (amounts rounded to 2 decimals so it might be just a slight bit off), which is pretty damned huge.  Now I get why Smashwords and the like want you to have such ginormous cover images.

On CreateSpace I used the template called "Spruce" for the Chances Are books where I only wanted to import a front cover.  For the Scarlet Knight ones I wanted to use a front and back cover image, the back having the same riveted red metal as on the front cover, only with no picture. And then I made the spine too so I could number each one at the top plus put in both the book title and series title.  (I even made a version of the first book just for myself.)  It was kind of a hassle as I made the front cover, back cover, and spine all separately in PowerPoint and then spliced them together in Paint Shop Pro.  You could probably do it easier in just a graphics program.

To find out how big the spine is (because obviously that depends on the size of the book) you have to go into CreateSpace and go to this page to calculate how big the spine will be.   As I said I made mine in PowerPoint so I had to use the math up above to calculate how big it should be in pixels.  The length should always be 9.5" or 2850 pixels but the width is what varies.

If your brain hasn't melted from all that math and stuff, the rest is pretty easy.  You go onto CreateSpace, you put in your title, description, all that good stuff.  One thing that's annoying is unless you have an ISBN number you have to save it for the thing to bring those up, then put them in your Word document on the copyright page, and then save it as a PDF to load.

If you want to pay $25 you can get the "expanded distribution" which allows you to sell the book on B&N and other non-Amazon sites.  This makes your book $4-$5 more expensive than just selling it through Amazon.  Plus it costs you $25 so if you're doing a series like me then that can really add up.  I generally charge as little as I can because no one buys my paperbacks so I figure I'm not making money off them anyway.  Generally I just round it up to X.99, so if the cost is $7.04 I charge $7.99.  It won't make me much money but as I said no one buys these.

That should be all you need to know.  Once CreateSpace approves your files you can look at the proof online.  This is good because in the past you'd have to order a physical proof and then wait around for it to show up.  Now you can look at it online, which saves time and money.  When you look at the proof, make sure to check your headers and chapter titles and all the stuff you changed.  If you have time you can read the whole book, but mostly I just look over the format and then approve them or make more changes.  Then you can buy a copy for yourself and all your friends and family!  Or to sell out of your trunk or something.  Just remember you don't get royalties for copies you buy on CreateSpace.  For someone like me that has Amazon Prime with its free shipping, it's usually not much more to wait and buy it right off Amazon rather than CreateSpace, but if you don't want to wait a couple days and save yourself 50 cents or so then you can buy it immediately off CreateSpace.

A new wrinkle is Amazon has created this thing called "Matchbook" where apparently if someone buys the print version of your book you can set it so they can get the ebook version for as little as nothing.  I went through on Amazon's Kindle site to enroll all the Chances Are and Scarlet Knight books as well as Where You Belong and The Carnival Papers.  I guess it doesn't start until October so I'm not really sure how exactly it all works.  Why would you want the ebook if you already have the print version?  Well I guess if you want to reread it without dragging the paperback around or conversely if you want a hard copy to go with the Kindle version you could buy the paperback and then get the ebook for a low cost.  I did that with a couple of CDs just because the CD was pretty much the same price as the MP3 album and if I got the MP3 album included for free, why not?  Anyway, that's just another thing to think about.

That is all.