Spooky Halloween Reads!

Last year I posted a list of Halloween gender swap books I'd written.  Some of those might be free right now.  I forget which ones.

Anyway, here are the ones for this year:

Transformed for Halloween 4:  Demon Flesh

For eight years Sam, Dean, and their cameraman Malik have explored haunted houses around the world. On Halloween night, they go to a house in northern California that was the site of an infamous triple-murder of three young women 50 years ago. As they explore the house, they find themselves transported to the night of the murder as the three young women who were killed. Will they manage to change history or are they fated to repeat it?

WARNING: Contains graphic violence and sexual situations

And there's also this:

Trick or Treat 3

35 years ago Vance Williams and his friend Cindy went into a spooky old house on Halloween--only Vance came out alive. Now Vance is back in town to sell his parents' old house. But on Halloween night he finds himself being drawn back in time, getting younger and girlier until inevitably he will be forced to relive the night his friend died.

They're each $2.99 or FREE with Kindle Unlimited

Words, They Mean Nothing...Or Do They?

A month or so ago I read this book:

I knew I probably wouldn't like it because it sounded too cozy for my taste.  And I was right about that!  Mostly I bought it because it takes place in northern Michigan and features a lighthouse and one of my hobbies has been taking pictures of lighthouses around Michigan.  If you follow me on Facebook then you've probably seen pictures like this:

That one is from somewhere by Holland.  Grand Haven?  Whatever.  Anyway, I'm not talking about lighthouses today.

In that Lighthouse Keeper book the author did one thing that really annoyed me:  she kept having characters brush back "a strand" of hair.  The problem for me was a strand of hair is ONE HAIR and it's almost impossible to brush back one solitary strand by itself.  Even more ridiculous was when she mentioned a character pulling on "a spiky strand."  A single hair can't be spiky!

Now to be fair, when I checked the dictionary like the 5th or 6th definition said a strand could also refer to a tress of hair or many hairs.  So if you want to get technical the author wasn't wrong.

The same thing for my favorite petulant writer, John Oberon.  In one sentence he says, "the creature recommenced the siege on the tree."  To me siege means blockading something to starve them out.  You know, laying siege to a castle and whatnot.  Again, though, one of the alternate definitions can mean attacking something.  So it's not technically wrong.

Still the problem is because I as the reader think of the word a certain way because I've always heard it used that way and you use it a different way, then it's kind of annoying.  I'll think you're wrong and don't know what the fuck you're talking about unless I go look it up in the dictionary.

I don't know if there's much an author can do about this.  You can't know how every single person is going to think of each word.  Still, in some cases maybe just use the most obvious word.

The Petulant Writer

A couple of months ago I wrote about some selfish critiquing from my frenemy John Oberon on his blog.  He dedicates more than half of his blog to writing advice so it's kind of funny that with his own writing he really can't take what he dishes, even with something relatively straightforward and obvious.

Here's a sentence from his kiddie torture porn novel The Unlikely Son:
“It never left me,” frowned the creature. “Can I have more?”

One of the things I corrected newer writers about on writers.net a lot was that facial expressions and such are NOT dialog tags.  Basically if it's not a synonym of "said" then it's not a dialog tag.  This was something that I also did for a while until someone corrected me and when I thought about it, it seemed obvious.  The whole point of the dialog tag is to indicate who is speaking.  That's it.  What does "frown" mean?  According to dictionary.com

verb (used without object)

1.

to contract the brow, as in displeasure or deep thought; scowl.

2.

to look displeased; have an angry look.

3.

to view with disapproval; look disapprovingly (usually followed by on or upon):

to frown upon a scheme.

verb (used with object)

4.

to express by a frown:

to frown one's displeasure.

5.

to force or shame with a disapproving frown:

to frown someone into silence.

 None of those definitions relate to speaking.  Thus "frown" is not a synonym of said and thus is not a dialog tag.  Pretty simple logic, no?
 
You can add facial expressions and such, so long as it follows said.

So if Oberon said:
“It never left me,” said the creature, who then frowned. “Can I have more?”
“It never left me,” said the creature. And then he frowned.  “Can I have more?”

That's acceptable if not all that poetic or anything.

Now this should have been an obvious correction for someone who has written for a long time and who has charged other people for editing their works.  Right?  Right?

Well, no.  Because like the Fonz on Happy Days, Oberon can't admit he was wr-wr-wr-wr-wr-wrong.

Ah, yep...that's a tag. What's wrong with it? You're thinking because you can't "frown" words, that makes it unacceptable?

[Duh.  Of course you can't frown words!]

RULE!? Did you just say RULE? Don't you always say there are no rules in writing, that plausibility doesn't matter, that you can punctuate with a comma however you like, and that pretty much anything goes so long as you like it? You've said that for years. Don't tell me you've swung to MY side. Welcome, brother! Why so late to the party?

[Smoke bomb!  He often refers to something I said on writers.net, though he always takes it out of context.  I was talking about things like commas, not elementary grammar.]

 Nah. I like it, so it's OK.

 [Oh, well, as long as the author LIKES it then they can do any damned thing they please. 😁 ]

Since when are you a fan of grammar? Have I finally rubbed off on you? By the way, you don't HAVE to read my stuff you know. I would think you'd want to avoid writing that causes you this much angst.

[Wah, go away!  Leave me alone!  Wah! 😭]

All this angst over what was a cut-and-dried mistake.  He's just mad because he knows it's a classic newbie mistake and can't admit that the great John Oberon would ever commit such a sin.  But obviously he did.  He should have simply owned up to it and made the correction.  It's a good thing he's printing this shitty book on his own because there doesn't seem any way he could possibly work with an editor at a real publisher.

It's just as well because this book is fucking awful.  The last 5 chapters or so have all been about this Christian jerk-off torturing a bratty kid.  First it was psychological torture at a McDonald's where he forces the kid to keep playing in the Playland because the kid didn't want to leave when the guy said to.  Once they get to the guy's house, he literally treats the kid like a dog by chaining him up outside, having a neighbor scream pig calls in his face, and feeding him fucking dog food all because he didn't want to wake up and do things at the guy's convenience.  I'm not going to say the kid is an angel but there is such a thing as a proportional response and chaining a kid outside and making him eat dog food is not a proportional response for refusing to get up early or make his own lunch.  It's just gross.  I doubt any sane editor or publisher would have touched it anyway.

Book Marketing That Worked...For Me!

In late August through September 8th I ran a giveaway on Goodreads for the Eric Filler novella The Comeback: Rock n Roll Gender Swap.  Besides on Goodreads I advertised the giveaway on my blog (both Eric Filler & PT Dilloway), on social media, and in the Eric Filler newsletter.  By the end I had about 400 entrants; in the last hours the number really skyrocketed as I guess people looking at the "ending soonest" took notice.  In the end all it cost me was about $13 to purchase two paperbacks and send them to the winners.

And in return the response was really good.  Much better than many recent efforts.  In the first three weeks it made over $250 just in purchases--I'm not sure how much the pages read will come out to for Kindle Unlimited readers.  So for my $13 investment I got a tremendous return.

I don't believe in shelling out hundreds of dollars for advertising on websites and such, but this was definitely a low-cost venture that paid off.  I'll probably have to try it again with something else.

You can still get it for $3.99 on Kindle or $5.99 in paperback!

Book Marketing That Worked!

For about six years I've had a Kindle Touch reader with ads on it.  It used to be they'd show ads for stuff other than books, but in the last couple of years they just show ads for books, which 99.9% of the time I ignore them.  But there is that 0.1% of the time when I do click on the ad.  So I thought I'd share a marketing success story since there aren't very many.

I kept seeing that cover in black-and-white with a tag line "Hit pause on horror and mayhem with the SciFi series about a brighter future that will make you smile."  And after like 10 or 20 times I thought, "Well, what the hell?  It's only 99 cents."

Like Deep Space Nine or Babylon 5 it mostly takes place on a space station.  The station (and most of the known universe) is overseen by highly advanced robots called the Stryx.  Fearing humanity would destroy itself the Stryx uplifted humanity by giving them advanced technology to join the many other advanced races in the universe.

For a few years Kelly Frank has been the ambassador for EarthCENT, which sounds prestigious, but it's a job with long hours and little pay, to the point she often has to sleep in her office to avoid her landlord.

The first book, Date Night on Union Station, deals with Kelly getting set up by a new automated dating service for some crappy dates.  But ultimately she finds her true love in Joe, a former mercenary who runs a junkyard with his "war dog" that's a genetically engineered pooch probably as big as a dire wolf on Game of Thrones.

The book isn't really laugh out loud funny sci-fi like Douglas Adams or Nigel Mitchell for the most part but it's amusing light sci-fi. 

I decided then to buy the second one.  And since then I've borrowed the third, fourth, and fifth ones.  They aren't great books but they're solid reads and when I borrow them they're free, so there's that.  They're mostly under 200 pages so they don't take long to read either.

I'd really like to know how the author got more than 800 reviews for this since it doesn't seem published by Big Publishing or anything.

Anyway, I guess if you can get a lot of ads on Kindles you can eventually browbeat someone into checking out your book and buying it.  Every squirrel finds a nut once in a while, right?  Huzzah!

A Real Third Party

Not since the Whig Party in the 1840s has America really had a viable party besides Democrats and Republicans.  But as we've seen lately, both parties are being torn apart by radical fringe elements:  the Tea Party /Trump on the right and Bernie Sanders and the Socialists on the left.  So on Facebook one day I thought of the perfect third party:  the Middle Party!  Or maybe you could call it the Moderate Party.  Reasonable Party?  Compromise Party?

I mean even someone who's fairly liberal like me is getting sick of things the way they are.  As much as I'd support a socialist government, many Americans wouldn't.  I think what they'd rather do is go back to the 90s when things could still get done without one party just running over the other.

So my idea is that all the moderates from both parties just throw in together, break away from the Republican and Democratic Parties to create a third party, the aforementioned Middle Party.  The benefit for moderate Republicans (if they still exist) is they don't have to follow the ever-more-radical right wing agenda anymore.  For "Blue Dog" Democrats, they don't have to worry about catering to the Sanders followers anymore.  Everything would break out into Right, Middle, and Left instead of some Right and Left trying to balance all sides.

The only problem is:  where is the money going to come from?  A new party would have to find donors to keep it afloat--thanks Supreme Court!  Obviously some people can pass the hat with GoFundMe and so forth but I'm sure plenty of business and such will want to sponsor a candidate who isn't going to bring on socialistic reforms or isn't going to blunder us into World War III. 

Because at the end of the day I think what most people really want is a status quo.  Right or Left, they just want to go about their lives without too much hassle.  Which maybe is supposed to be what the Libertarian Party is about, but obviously no one really gives a shit about them.  And the thing is, since we're talking incumbents switching sides, it'd be a lot easier than trying to start up with all new candidates as the Libertarians, Green Party, etc do.  That gives you a head start with name recognition, which might help the funding problem take care of itself.

What do you think?

Everyone Has a Story...But Most Aren't Interesting

Last March the older of my two sisters died of cancer and a few times it's occurred to me that maybe I should write a story involving that.  Sort of like therapy, though my literary hero John Irving says in A Widow For One Year not to do that, though then he did that very same thing in the later Until I Find You.  That part of it isn't really my problem.

The real problem is every time I think of something I want to add more to it.  And then it occurs to me that when you add more to it, the story starts to not be true anymore.  The sticky wicket is that there was no tragic love story or dramatic speeches or stuff like you might get from Nicholas Sparks book or a Lifetime TV movie.  It seems to me that if I do add those elements in to make it more dramatic and commercial then it's just selling the idea out, cheapening it.  That's not really something I'd want to do.

Like the title says the saying is "everyone has a story" but really most stories aren't interesting because they aren't stories in the way we think of stories.  It's why every biopic you see has to dramatize events, mush characters together, or in the case of Aaron Sorkin-penned movies just make shit up because the real story isn't all that interesting dramatically.  So in The Social Network they had to invent this "one who got away" when Zuckerberg had been dating a girl since high school.  Or in A Beautiful Mind they had to invent the whole Ed Harris government agent thing.  Or in 21 where they basically only used the core concept of a group of college card counters and made up the rest.  When I watched that movie I think I said somewhere that really the documentary on the History Channel was a lot better because it wasn't filled with a bunch of commercial cliche bullshit.  It was the real story and in that case the real story was pretty interesting, at least to me.

Another movie actually deals with this subject, the Charlie Kauffman-penned Adaptation where Nicolas Cage plays a fictionalized version of Kauffman who's trying to adapt the book The Orchid Thief into a movie.  The problem is how do you make a book about orchids interesting?  He really can't and so in the end there's all this wild, cliche stuff like a twin brother and a showdown in the Everglades and stuff like that.  The point being that sure this orchid book was a story but it wasn't really the sort of dramatic story that would do much for viewers.

But I did sneak a little therapy into the Eric Filler book The Comeback where the main character goes to visit a young fan dying of cancer in the hospital.  And when the kid dies, the main character dedicates a performance to her.  It was kind of sad and like I said a little bit of therapy I guess.  Maybe that's helpful, but probably not.

I guess when you come down to it, the point of stories is two-fold:  provide lessons and entertainment.  I just don't think there is much of a lesson and it sure as hell wasn't entertaining.  I can try to make it one or both of those things, but as I said then it just cheapens what really happened.

So I guess for now I'll just keep it confined to this blog. 

That is all.

Grumpy Bulldog Talks TV

I don't really watch a lot of live TV.  Mostly I watch movies on Netflix/Amazon or sometimes I'll stream a TV series.  But I do watch college football on Saturday night and NFL football Sunday so I end up seeing previews for shows I really don't care about.

I especially hate pretty much anything previewed on CBS.  At least this year their shows aren't all NCIS or CSI spin-offs.  Just that Big Bang Theory prequel show, which while Big Bang Theory is a traditional laugh track sitcom this for some reason seems done in the newer no laugh track style, which seems weird.  Do people really want to watch a show about a 9-year-old going to high school and getting stuffed in lockers and stuff?  Probably.  America is pretty fucking stupid.

Worst idea for a show:  Wisdom of the Crowd.  So this guy's daughter dies and he decides to create this thing where people use their cell phones to find criminals.  Which violates pretty much all civil liberties.  But it's CBS so I assume we won't bother with the ethical concerns.  These people are all bad so it's OK!  Reminds me of the Black Mirror where this woman wakes up and people are stalking her and taking pictures and video with their cameras.  Or also The Dark Knight where Batman creates a device using people's phones as sonar to track the Joker.

Another bad idea:  The Good Doctor.  It's about a brilliant doctor, but he's autistic!  Like the Affleck movie The Accountant, let's use autism as some kind of super power!  Yeah...no.

Another morally offensive idea:  The Mayor.  Seeing the previews for this I had this really bad reaction.  I thought:  OK, so now that Obama is gone I guess we can treat a black guy running a government like it's a joke.  The idea is this young black guy who really knows nothing about government is somehow elected mayor of his city.  I don't know, maybe it's fine, but our real government is so inept now do we really need this?  Would people think this idea were as funny if it were a redneck white kid into country instead of a black kid into rap?

Questionable idea:  Me, Myself, and I:  OK, so this kid grows up into a big fat guy and then somehow that big fat guy turns into John Larroquette?  I mean, did someone put him in Wonka's taffy pulling machine when he was 40?  It's an interesting concept but it's CBS so I have big doubts they'd pull it off.

Worst repeated idea:  SEALS.  CBS has SEAL Team and NBC has The Brave and they're both probably really fucking stupid.  And the thing about CBS' is:  didn't they already have that show The Unit about a Special Forces team?  Only that had the Allstate guy instead of the guy from Bones & Angel.

Worst retooling:  Kevin Can Wait.  So his previous wife or girlfriend is being killed off because the actress wanted too much money or hated Kevin James or something, so they bring in Leah Remini, who was Kevin James's wife on King of Queens for however many years.  So why not just scrap Kevin Can Wait and do a straight-up King of Queens revival?

Now let's get into two shows I actually watched:  The Orville and Star Trek Discovery.  The Orville is basically Seth MacFarlane doing his version of Star Trek:  The Next Generation.  So it's episodic with the eponymous ship and its crew as they tackle various challenges.  The first episode had them have to fight off aliens known as the Krill using a redwood seed and a time accelerator.  The second episode had the captain and first officer captured and put in a zoo that recreated their New York apartment.  The third episode featured one of the alien crew in a legal battle with his mate over forced gender surgery on their daughter.  The fourth episode was about a colony ship lost in space so long that the people inside didn't even know they were in space thanks to the religious dictatorship running the place.

Meanwhile I only watched the first episode of Discovery because the assholes at CBS are using it to justify a stupid streaming service no one needs or wants.  So it seems the whole thing boils down to the Federation fighting Klingons who look like the ones from the Abrams movie Into Darkness more than any of the TV shows.  So does that mean this is a prequel to the Abrams movies not the TV show?  I don't really know or care.  I guess it was all right.  I mean the actors are decent and the production values are good.  Kind of stupid we don't even show the eponymous ship except in the credits until what the second episode?  The third?

There was an article in Forbes I think that said the same thing I thought watching these two shows:  The Orville is more Trek than Trek!  It's hopeful, progressive attitude is far more in line with Gene Roddenberry than the grim and gritty Discovery that seems more concerned with cool battles and explosions.  At this point in time I think we need a hopeful, progressive show far more than we need a grim and gritty space war.  Not to say I don't like that because I loved DS9 and really liked Babylon 5 and Robotech and so on.  It's just not the Trek we need in our lives right now.  Things are so shitty in the world already that we need some hope things will get better, not that ugly aliens are going to try to slaughter us once we leave the solar system.

Overall I think The Orville is a good show, though as with most of these shows the cast might need some time to gel and for the writers to find the best in those characters.  For ST: TNG and DS9 this took 3-4 seasons to happen.  I don't think Fox will give the show that much time.  I mean they cancelled Firefly after 1 season and Space Above & Beyond after 2 seasons so when it comes to space-faring sci-fi they aren't the most patient.  The real flaw I think is MacFarlane casting himself in the lead role.  Just like A Million Ways to Die in the West, his limitations in live action become painfully clear when surrounded by real actors.  Since you're doing essentially ST: TNG, a funny British guy would probably have worked a lot better.  Someone with some gravitas like Patrick Stewart, only younger.  I know it's MacFarlane's baby and all, which is why he should have been unselfish enough to do what was best for the show.  I mean he's fine voicing a cartoon guy/dog/baby, or a teddy bear, or a talking gas cloud (remember Hellboy 2?), but live action is a different kettle of fish.  A voice actor trying to do live action is like a game show host trying to be president. 

At some point maybe I'll watch Discovery and think it's great, but right now it's just meh.  I never really warmed to Enterprise either.  Stop with the prequels!  I always liked the Peter David book series New Frontier about the starship Excalibur exploring an uncharted part of space.  Something like that set in either TOS or TNG/DS9/Voyager times would be a lot better.  Or between TOS and TNG where you have 80 years to operate.  I guess technically it'd be a prequel then in a way.  Whatever.

So there you go, my thoughts on TV as I wait the 18 months or so for the final season of Game of Thrones.