Sci-Fi Should Be "Woke"

 A few weeks ago on one of the Facebook groups for self-publishers I'm part of but don't really do anything with, someone's plug for their book began, "Tired of 'woke' sci-fi?"  I didn't say anything, but my first thought was, "Gee, what a shame Gene Roddenberry was so 'woke' with Star Trek.  All that wokeness was really bringing it down."

"Woke" doesn't have to do with sleeping; in this context it's about being aware of social issues.  To me, science-fiction is mostly supposed to be "woke."  So much of it is dealing with the future, whether near-future or far-future and it's hard to write about the future without getting into any social issues.  Even writing in the present, sci-fi authors deal with technology and how that impacts society.

While there have been conservatives like Robert Heinlein who wrote futuristic sci-fi, even those weren't completely un-woke in that they weren't completely blind to societal issues.  Maybe they took a more conservative approach, but they couldn't ignore issues entirely.

But most of the best-remembered classics like Brave New World, Fahrenheit 451, 1984, Make Room! Make Room! (the Soylent Green story), and The Forever War dealt with societal issues.  They were "woke" before people even used that word in that way.

I suppose it's not requisite for every sci-fi story to be concerned with societal issues, though even Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy wasn't completely un-woke.  The Vogons destroying Earth shows what happens when rigid bureaucratic thought runs amok.  Probably even those Union Station books I read are slightly woke, though they mostly don't deal with any issues at all.

But really saying your sci-fi isn't "woke" is just code for that there won't be minorities or gay people or things like that.  Or if there are, they'll be bad guys or comic foils probably written in some cliche way.  The women will all have big boobs, no brains, and probably wear almost nothing.  I guess that's really all some people want.

Someone might say, "Well what about your books?"  I have a lot of gay relationships and transgender characters.  I try not to make women too bimbo-y--unless that's the core concept of the story.  I could probably use people of color more, but I've always thought something like, "Transformed Into a Black Girl" or something similar would be kind of tacky from a white guy.  Maybe I'm wrong.

 

Conquering the Swamp: Swapnado Lives!

Way back in 2019 I was watching the Rifftrax of Sharknado (or Sharknado 2) and thought:  Swapnado!  Wouldn't that be a brilliant Eric Filler story?  Instead of a tornado full of sharks it'd be a tornado that swaps people.  I checked and made sure no one else had already had this brilliant idea.  Then I set to work...

Except as I said in a previous entry it didn't go so well.  I had killed people off and made it all grim and gritty, which Sharknado movies aren't.  There seemed no way to salvage it except to do a complete reboot.  Which I didn't feel like doing...

Until about April 2020 when I took another stab at it. This time I didn't kill anyone to keep it lighter.  But the problem was it just kept stretching longer and longer and it seemed like it wouldn't end and with Covid raging, I really didn't want to tie myself to any long-term projects.  So I shelved it...

Then in early 2021 I finally seized upon a different setup for the story.  The first two tries I was using ordinary people who get caught on the road.  Which always seemed a little too forced.  I mean, how do you only have two or three people on a road and getting caught in this storm?  Then it hit me:  storm chasers!  People who go to storms, often in tricked-out vehicles.

It took a couple of months to clear out some other stuff I was doing to finally try it a third time.  And...it got off to a rocky start.  First I was going to use first-person but that seemed kind of limiting because I was going to have 2 main characters.  And then, while I had probably a couple of months to look shit up, I hadn't and really had no idea how storm chasers work.  So I had to look some stuff up on Wikipedia and Google to figure this stuff out.  And I tried using a location with a dam and stuff because I thought whoever was making the chemical to get sucked into the tornado would have a secret lab there, sort of like the first Transformers live action movie.  But that didn't really work out so well either...

Basically this third try needed three tries to get going.  I changed it to 3rd person and alternated scenes between the POVs of the two chasers:  Cameron and Sean.  And I didn't really try to use any cute locations.  I simplified that part of it so there's a tanker on the road that has the chemical and it gets opened by the storm and boom--Swapnado!

Having finally conquered all that it would be easy from there, right?  Noooope.  Like the second attempt, the story kept kind of dragging on and on.  I was tempted to quit a few times and do something else, but I really wanted to get through it this time, so I stuck with it.  But still, it often felt like slogging through a swamp, making slow, steady advances towards the end.

The thing is, I knew what I wanted to do in the end:  there's a second storm that threatens to turn into a Swapnado that could affect a whole bunch of people.  Our heroes use a new storm chasing vehicle to throw a bomb into the tornado to destabilize it.  Which is bullshit science-wise but that's what they do in the first two Sharknado movies so I wanted to honor that.  It was just getting to that point that was hard.

You might think:  well if you had such a hard time writing it then it must suck, right?  I don't think so.  It's just that there's all this character-driven stuff as Cam and Sean (now Shawn) adjust to their new lives as girls.  Plus I had to set up getting a new storm chasing vehicle and all that stuff.  It's a lot of stuff you have to do to get to the end point that's not as much fun but needs doing.

Finally, as the calendar turned from spring to summer, I broke through the swamp to the end I had in mind.  I only needed a couple of days to get that end done.  At last, it was finished!  It came in at just a hair under 80,000 words, so it's actually a decent-sized novel. 

There are 6 Sharknado movies but I don't think I'll be working on a sequel anytime soon.  The first one was exhausting enough.  But the moral of the story is that sometimes you just have to push through to get out of that swampy middle part and to the other side.

On a side note, I'm not thrilled with the cover.  It's a one-piece image I bought from some site but I don't really like the girl in it.  I mean, what's going on with her hands?  It looks really unnatural.  I probably should have found someone else to paste in there instead.  But the title font does pretty much look like the Sharknado font, though I couldn't find an exact duplicate.  You be the judge:

The End?

Defeating the Purpose

Wednesday I talked about revisiting the old Buck Rogers TV show from 1979-1982.  The first season of the show aligned more with the original stories (and also Star Wars) as Buck awakens in the future and helps Earth defend itself from the Draconian Empire and other threats.  But then in season 2 they decided to turn the show into an off-brand Star Trek (like The Orville with less potty humor) and not surprisingly it was canceled after 13 episodes.

Other series have tried this soft reboot approach (sometimes within a season instead of between seasons) and it almost always fails.  I was trying to think of a few examples where it might have actually worked and couldn't find a lot.  Star Trek: Discovery's season 3 turn from a prequel/midquel series to a far-future sequel series came to mind.  The Facts of Life started in a boarding school and then became about the core group and Mrs. Garrett running a bakery and then there was another turn where the core group and Cloris Leachman ran a clothes store or some damned thing; the latter was really one concept change too many.  At the moment I can't really think of any others.

And I'm not talking about when a show like MASH or Bewitched or Cheers or Night Court or ER would recast/replace characters because those shows still had the same core concept of doctors in the Korean war, a witch married to a mortal, a bar in Boston, a New York courthouse, and a Chicago emergency room respectively.  And I'm not talking about a spin-off like the original Facts of Life or Frasier or Daria or Joey because that was starting a new concept independent of the old one.  So don't mention those examples in the comments, Phantom Readers.

Anyway, I think this so rarely works for a few reasons.  First is the timing.  It's usually done because ratings are sagging and so the network wants to do something to "spice it up" and try to win back viewers.  But instead it usually causes the show to lose existing viewers who think, "Hey, WTF is this crap?  This isn't what I came to see!"  And there aren't enough new viewers to buoy the show before it gets canned.  

In the case of Buck Rogers, the change in format pretty much invalidated the whole premise of the show.  What difference did it make if he came from the 20th Century when they were seeking new life and new civilizations and boldly going where Kirk, Spock, and Bones had already gone before?  The original premise it mattered because his independence and new way of looking at things helped the Earth defenders who relied too much on computers and canned answers.  Even if the first season wasn't always faithful to that concept, it was still there most of the time.  Whereas in the second season, his being from the 20th Century doesn't really add anything.  He's just another guy on the ship.  Sure he hasn't seen the shit they see--but neither has anyone else on board!

That's the problem when you change your concept:  you usually lose what made people want to watch in the first place.  And then they're probably not going to watch anymore.

I've run into this problem a couple of times in Eric Filler series.  The first was the Gender Swap Detective series.  The basic concept was that a hard-boiled 30s PI named Dixie gets turned into a beautiful woman.  And then she has to solve gender swap mysteries.  I pretty much kept up with the concept in the first book, where a woman comes to her after being changed by a necklace that was then stolen.  But then it kind of went off the rails in the second story where Dixie goes undercover and finds out some Nazis are experimenting on cross-dressing burlesque dancers.  The problem was that I wound up getting Dixie too involved in the events themselves instead of her just investigating what happened.  So then instead of the series being about her solving gender swap mysteries, it became about her and the people around her.  I lost the thread and really couldn't get back to it.

It sort of happened again in the 24 Hour Gender Swap series.  The framing device was that someone always goes to Mrs. Vantu, a mysterious Gypsy woman who has a lot of magic potions and charms and then someone gets swapped.  The mistake I made was starting in book 6 I again made Mrs. Vantu too involved in things and the series started to become more about her and those around her than about people coming to her.  It hindered her value as a framing device.

To humblebrag a little, I think it's that it's hard for me to not develop a character I use multiple times.  I'm not really good at just maintaining the status quo; I always want to do more with characters and flesh them out.  That's what we're told to do as writers, right?  But there are times when your character isn't so much a character as a framing device or a tool and really you should keep them as that or else you wipe out the whole concept you were aiming for in the first place.

On a side note, sometimes a change in concept isn't so much by choice.  Like when John Ritter died, the whole concept of 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter had to change from focusing on the father to focusing on the family.  Or like how the NBC show Valerie became The Hogan Family in its second season because Valerie Harper left the show, thus they couldn't really call it Valerie anymore.  The same thing happened when Roseanne was fired from Roseanne and so they changed it to The Connor Family because it wouldn't make sense to name it after a character who was no longer there.  The latter two weren't exactly major concept changes but it was a different focus from really one character to more of a group.  Shows like Happy Days, Full House, and Family Matters were supposed to focus more on other characters but then the Fonz, Michelle Tanner, and Urkel became so popular that the show mostly became about them.  In that case you can't really blame producers for giving the public what it seems to want.  The Simpsons probably could have gone that way early on and made it all about Bart, but they wisely stuck to their guns and 30 years later it's still on.

Buck Rogers in the Cheese Motherlode

 Periodically I search the Tubi TV app on my Roku for Rifftrax movies because they actually have some newer ones than are on the official Rifftrax app.  Which kind of annoys me that the app I pay for has less than a free app, but I digress.  One night as I was poking around, I saw that Tubi TV had the old Buck Rogers show from the 70s and so for the hell of it I decided to watch it.

I think part of my motivation was a couple months before I'd watched the South Park where they parodied that show when Cartman freezes himself to get a Nintendo Wii and winds up in the 25th Century.  And also back in the 90s I played the Buck Rogers video game that was like the Dungeons & Dragons games like Champions of Krynn only instead of magic and swords you had laser guns and rocket launchers.  It was kind of a fun game but they don't have it on GOG.com like the D&D games.

So anyway, from reading the Wikipedia, Buck Rogers first appeared in the late 20s in a few pulp stories called Armageddon 2491 or something like that.  It inspired imitators like Flash Gordon, and about 50 years later was probably part of the inspiration for George Lucas in making Star Wars.  But after the success of Star Wars, they decided to update Buck Rogers for the 70s.  The premise for the show is given in the opening credits:  in 1987 (lol) Captain Buck Rogers is flying a probe into space when something goes wrong and he's frozen only to be revived 504 years later in the year 2491.

The opening 2-part episode has him being revived by the evil Draconian Empire, who want to use Buck as sort of a Trojan Horse to get inside Earth's defense shield and take over the planet.  So they implant something in him and send him back into space for Earth's defenders to intercept him and bring him down.  He's taken to the capital of "New Chicago" and meets its leader Dr. Huer, the commander of Earth's space fleet Colonel Wilma Deering, and a robot "drone" named Twikki that carries around a computer known as Dr. Theopolis.  And then there's the whole thing where Buck has to get used to the future, is thought to be a spy, and then proves himself in helping Deering and the rest of Earth's defenders drive off the Draconians.  Also according to the Wikipedia page, the first two-part episode was released in movie theaters and was successful enough for NBC to order a full season.

The whole thing is pretty cheesy from the clothes, hair, disco-y soundtrack, and "future" technology that looks very dated by now.  Like the original Battlestar Galactica that aired in that same time period, the models and lasers for the space battles aren't completely awful but not exactly Industrial Light & Magic caliber.  Probably the most awful thing was the theme song at the end with some terrible lounge singer caterwauling.  

For no reason except maybe boredom I watched some more episodes.  It doesn't really get much better in terms of acting, clothes, or special effects, though at least they made the end theme song an instrumental.  And yet as stupid and silly as it was, it was also kind of fun.  I think in part because the show didn't really take itself seriously with dad jokes and cartoon sound effects.  Like the old Star Trek they'd end a lot of episodes on some corny joke, freeze frame, and go to the credits.  It's almost impossible, especially by today's standards, to take it seriously.  Most of the time there was a lot more Saturday morning feeling to the writing, acting, and so on than prime time drama.

By modern standards it would be getting cancelled on social media because there are no black, Asian, or other minority main characters.  Homosexuality really isn't mentioned at all.  Other than when she's wearing her flight suit, Erin Gray is always in some shiny, tight-fitting thing when she's supposed to be a colonel and head of their defense forces.  The evil Princess Ardala wears even less than that, usually just a shiny bikini and cape.  It's definitely failing the Bechdel Test.

The second season does one of those annoying soft reboots with no warning or setup.  Suddenly Buck and Deering are on a ship called the Searcher and Dr. Huer and Dr. Theopolis are gone, replaced by a couple of guys named Asimov (lol) and Goodfellow.  And Twiki the robot has a different voice for half the season.  The whole thing is basically just an off-brand Star Trek like The Orville is off-brand Star Trek TNG.  It's pretty lame and in the next entry I'll go more into that.  

The second season ends with a pretty normal episode.  An alien fugitive is on board the Searcher and so an alien warship keeps making the temperature really hot or cold to try to make them surrender.  Ultimately Buck finds out that the aliens all wear masks because they all look the same--like a young Brad Pitt, which seems pretty awesome if you ask me.  So they don't kill the fugitive and the Searcher is let go.  Hooray!

I'm not sure why but they never really tried to hook up Buck and Wilma.  Especially in the second season you'd think maybe they'd get desperate enough to do that, but they don't.  I suppose that would really ruin Buck's discount Captain Kirk vibe of wooing all the alien women he comes across.  But why are you hitting on alien babes when you have Erin Gray in skintight jumpsuits and stuff right there all the time?  It defies logic.

Overall Gil Gerard does an OK job of playing the titular Buck given the often cheesy material and even cheesier wardrobe.  In the first season just about all of his outfits are open in the middle to show off the chest hair on his dad bod.  Fortunately in the second season he zips up a bit more.  Most of the time I thought of him as a combo of Lee Majors and Nathan Fillion, though another idea might be a beefier, hairier Luke Wilson.  His name always sounds like he should be playing for the Montreal Canadiens.  Checking the IMDB page he really didn't do anything else of note.

Fun Facts:  They had some decent guest stars including Jamie Lee Curtis, Jack Palance, Roddy MacDowall, Peter Graves, Gary Coleman, Jerry Orbach, William Sylvester of 2001, and Batman '66 villains Cesar Romero, Julie Newmar, and Frank Gorshin.  Then-unknowns Markie Post, Richard Moll, and Dennis Haysbert also appeared in episodes.  Mark Lenard, who played Spock's father Sarek in Star Trek shows and movies, plays an ambassador for a race of people who can take their robot heads off in a two-part episode.  In the first season Twiki the robot was voiced by Mel Blanc, who voiced a lot of cartoons in the old days like pretty much all the Looney Tunes and Barney Rubble.  Buster Crabbe, who played Buck Rogers in the old serials, appears in one episode as a pilot brought out of retirement to help save the day.  Tony Cox, who played the evil elf/robber in Bad Santa plays one of a group of midget aliens who wreak havoc in a second season episode.

A few times when they were at space ports there would be jokey announcements.  One announced the arrival of Adam Strange from Alpha Centauri; Adam Strange is a DC Comics character most recently in the miniseries Strange Adventures by Tom King.  Another asked Christopher Pike to report to Veteran Affairs; Pike was the original captain of the Enterprise on Star Trek who will soon be in a new Discovery spin-off series on Paramount+.  Speaking of Trek, in one episode the bad guys sabotage a matter-anti-matter reactor.  An alien whose planet was ravaged by radiation goes into the reactor to stop it from blowing up like what Spock did in Wrath of Khan a couple years later, only the alien used his ability to turn intangible to survive.

A Fun Fact I posted on Facebook already:  Buck Rogers the comic strip was published by the Dille family in the 30s and they continued to control the property until about 2020.  In the 80s, grandson Flint Dille wrote a lot of Transformers and GI JOE cartoon episodes that I watched.  The Dille family's control of the property reminded me of Harmony Gold's control of Robotech in that they jealously guarded it for decades while at the same time seeming to be too incompetent to actually DO anything with said property.  A recent court case breaking their control means that someone might finally be able to make a serious attempt to get Buck and Wilma back on big or small screens.  Not that most people (including me) would really care at this point.

Something that's probably just a weird coincidence:  The character is named Captain Buck Rogers.  Captain America is Captain Steve Rogers and his sidekick was named Bucky.  Buck Rogers was notably frozen for about 500 years and woke up a man out of time.  In the 60s (and then in 2011) Steve Rogers was frozen for decades and woke up a man out of time.  Weird, isn't it?

A Smile to Cover the Pain

After I got a stuffed Pumbaa on clearance from Build-A-Bear last year, I went and looked up his theme song from The Lion King (both versions):  "Hakuna Matada."  In both instances it's mostly an upbeat song about not sweating the small (or big) stuff.  But then there's a section of the song focusing on Pumbaa's background:

Why, when he was a young warthog
When I was a young wart-hoooog!
Very nice!
Thanks!
He found his aroma lacked a certain appeal
He could clear the Savannah after every meal
I'm a sensitive soul, though I seem thick-skinned
And it hurt that my friends never stood downwind
And oh, the shame
(He was ashamed!)
Thought of changin' my name
(Oh, what's in a name?)
And I got downhearted
(How did you feel?)
Every time that I-
Pumbaa! Not in front of the kids!
Oh... sorry

It's kind of a funny story, right?  His farts were so smelly that other animals didn't want to hang around with him.  In the live action version, baby Pumbaa's farts scare away a herd of zebra from a watering hole.  

And yet under that joke is a note of tragedy.  I mean, think about it:  Pumbaa was basically abandoned by everyone, which would probably include his mother and any siblings.  That or he'd already been separated from them.  Like Rudolph in the old Christmas special he was forced to grow up on his own for a biological problem he couldn't control.

It's pretty sad if you think about it.  But who does think about that?  Not many people.  And even Pumbaa is over it by the time he meets Simba.  After the song it's never brought up again.

To add to the tragedy of Pumbaa, do you know what his name means in Swahili?  According to Google:  “to be absentminded, careless, foolish, ignorant, lazy, stupid and negligent.”  Ouch.  That was probably some Disney writer's idea of a joke, but if you think of it in context of the character, it'd be like your mom naming you Loser or Shithead or Donald J Trump.  Poor, poor Pumbaa.

But I think there is a tendency by viewers or readers to overlook darker, more horrific things if something appears to be happy.  In the "Rebuttals" entry at the end of last month I talked about how a reviewer who frequently lamented "crappy endings" of other Eric Filler stories loved the end of Pool Hustle Swap even though it didn't entirely end Happily Ever After.  The main character found someone to love and was having a baby, but she'd lost her talent for pool in the process.  Similarly in The Comeback by Eric Filler (or the re-edited version The Last Encore, by me) the main character finds love and happiness but at the cost of losing her fame and fortune.  So they're not truly happy endings, but no one whines about a "crappy ending."

Mostly I think it's that if the affected character seems fine with it then the reader or viewer is fine with it.  If Pumbaa is fine with being abandoned, then we're fine with it too.  In those stories if the main character is content, then we're content.  But should we be?  

Marvel's M.O.D.O.K. is a Fun Diversion From the MCU

 I hadn't really heard about Marvel's M.O.D.O.K. on Hulu before the first season dropped in May.  I also didn't really know anything about the character, though I do have a cheap figure of it that I got for $2 on clearance from a Walmart many years ago.  The figure was for some Playstation thing sort of like Disney's Infinity thing where you could get figures and use them in a game.  

Anyway, M.O.D.O.K. is a comedy starring Patton Oswalt as the erstwhile villain.  M.O.D.O.K. means Mental/Mobile/Mechanical Organism Designed Only for Killing and as you can see, he's a weird looking dude.  I guess so weird that Marvel decided they'd never include him in the MCU, so why not let Patton Oswalt and the guys behind Robot Chicken and Supermansion make him the center of a comedy?

In this series M.O.D.O.K. is a supposed genius who's sort of like an adult Stewie Griffin in that he has all sorts of weird gadgets and dreams of taking over the world...but hasn't really done it yet.  He has a Latina wife and two teenaged children:  a daughter Melissa who's like him and a son Lou who's a full human.  M.O.D.O.K. runs AIM, which you might remember from Iron Man 3; in the Marvel Comics they're basically an evil company that uses science for creating weapons of mass destruction.  They all run around in these yellow biohazard-type suits that obscure their faces.  At the office, M.O.D.O.K. has a rival in Monica, who's the only other one at AIM who doesn't wear a biohazard suit thing.

Over the course of the season everything falls apart in M.O.D.O.K.'s world.  AIM goes broke and he sells it to an even eviler company, who bring in an annoying guy to micromanage everything.  His wife leaves him and becomes more successful than him with a self-help book.  Trying to win her back, he goes back in time, which causes his younger self to come forward in time to try to kill him. 

In order to survive and get back his life, M.O.D.O.K. has to learn to swallow his pride with his family and his enemies.  The season ends with a twist where we see M.O.D.O.K. in the future, having taken over the world, but only at the cost of losing his family.  He vows to find a way to bring his family to the future so he can have it all.

If you actually care about M.O.D.O.K. in the comics then you probably wouldn't like this as much.  It does mostly reduce M.O.D.O.K. to a joke.  If you're a more casual fan then it's a pretty fun show.  Being made by Stoopid Buddy Studios, there's some potty humor, though probably not as much as Robot Chicken.  There are plenty of comic book references and Easter eggs and whatnot in the 10 half-hour episodes.  It's not essential viewing compared to WandaVision or Falcon and the Winter Soldier, but it's a fun diversion from the MCU and hopefully there's more to come.

Fun Facts:  Before this, Stoopid Buddy Studios produced 3 Robot Chicken/DC Comics specials on Adult Swim and DC Comics writer/Creative Chief Geoff Johns wrote a few sketches for Robot Chicken so it's interesting they kind of switched sides now to Marvel.  One of the AIM minions, one who loses an arm early on, is named Gary, which is a reference to Gary the Stormtrooper in two of the Robot Chicken/Star Wars specials.  During the season, M.O.D.O.K.'s wife starts going out with Wonder Man, who I think because of his name was probably also deemed not worthy of being in the MCU.  But really Wonder Man should have shown up on WandaVision because in the comics I read, Wonder Man and Vision are brothers in that Vision has the memories of Wonder Man's brother.  But I suppose that wouldn't have really worked with the Vision's MCU origin in Age of Ultron.  Patton Oswalt was already in the MCU on Agents of SHIELD and recently was announced to voice a raven in the Sandman series, which is from DC Comics.

Marvel's Superman of Marvel's Justice League Demands You Not Read This Article!

The past few weeks I keep seeing these ScreenRant clickbait articles on my Facebook feed and the headlines are always written in this weird way:  Marvel's Superman Just Killed...[whoever]!  And then there was one:  Marvel's Justice League Killed the X-Men!

For the record, "Marvel's Superman" is referring to Hyperion who has mostly the same power set.  And "Marvel's Justice League" refers to the Squadron Supreme, not the Avengers like you might think.

I finally commented that this is really dumb.  Does ScreenRant just assume that its readers aren't familiar with Marvel Comics and thus need them defined in terms of DC Comics?  A reply I received made sense in a crappy way:

no they assume that people will comment on their articles driving up their engagement. It’s smart but makes them look stupid as hell.

He's probably right.  Phrasing it as "Marvel's Justice League" makes me go, "WTF?!"  Whereas if you said, Squadron Supreme Killed the X-Men! I'd say, "Oh, OK then."  It gets more attention for them, though as that person pointed out, it's the wrong kind of attention.  It does make them look really dumb.  Dumb and sleazy, which really doesn't make me trust or want to read articles from their site.

The other tactic at work here is keyword dumping.  If you just say "Squadron Supreme" it's probably not going to get as many keyword hits as "Marvel" and "Justice League" or in the case of "Hyperion," "Marvel" and "Superman."  I used to do something like this with my Eric Filler books, where after the title I'd put (Gender Swap Erotica) or (Gender Swap Age Regression) or whatever it was to help the search engines find it better.  I haven't done much of that in a while; I just assume that the keywords I put in when uploading the book will do it.  But the way I did it was factual, not misleading.  I mean if you aren't really familiar to comics you might say, "Who the fuck is Marvel's Superman?"  And then you click the article.  Score another hit or "engagement" for ScreenRant!

Really though I think this is worse than the old way they probably would have done it where they'd have said, "Someone Just Killed...[whoever]!"  Then you'd have to click the article to find out who it was, though often someone (sometimes me) would comment who it was to save people a click.  This new way adds that extra layer of sleaze by dumping more keywords into the mix and making the author sound like either he's an idiot or he thinks you're an idiot.

Overall it just seems like a new low for an already low industry.

Total Control Doesn't Equal Total Quality

 Last month there was another of those annoying clickbait articles on my Facebook feed proclaiming something like, "Army of the Dead and The Snyder Cut Prove Zack Snyder is Better Without Studio Interference!"  And in the comments there was some naive dork saying how it's always better when the creator has complete control.

Which is completely false.  We really have to look no further than Zack Snyder's own creative masterpiece Sucker Punch, which was basically a lot of misogynist action movie/video game cliches sewn together into an utterly incoherent movie.  It does have some cool visuals and plenty of sexy violence, but it was a critical and financial failure.

And then we have the Star Wars prequels, all written and directed by George Lucas.  They were financially successful but critical failures and roundly maligned by fans.  Episode VIII was written and directed by Rian Johnson and while it was a critical and financial success, it's divided fans.

Another high profile disasterpiece:  Gigli was written and directed by Martin Brest and was a huge critical and commercial failure.  But on the bright side it helped destroy "Bennifer" v1.0.

Fans of Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 are familiar with some real turkeys that were written and directed by the same person.  Plan 9 From Outer Space is probably the best known and widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made.  But there are plenty of others in its weight class like Birdemic, Star Games, Manos: The Hands of Fate, Hobgoblins, Blood Theatre, The Dark Power, Alien Outlaw, Galaxy Invader, and a lot lot more!  There was even a joke in a Rifftrax:  "Written and directed by the same guy, that usually works out well for us, doesn't it?"

The point being that for every Citizen Kane, there are probably three movies written/directed by the same person that were completely awful.  It's really difficult for someone not only to come up with a brilliant idea but to be able to successfully mold it into something great all on their own.  Usually what you get is like those movies I mentioned above where it's either hacky garbage or self-indulgent crap.

It's pretty much the same way with books.  Pretty much every great book has had someone else edit it.  In the old days especially the relationship between a writer and editor was really important to make a great book.  

Really I think the books where I had help from other people like Where You Belong, A Hero's Journey, and Chance of a Lifetime were better than ones I did all on my own.  It'd be nice if I had the time and money to have someone edit the Eric Filler books.  So often it's good to have another pair of eyes connected to another brain with its own experiences to spot things that don't work and to provide an added perspective.  It really requires a lot of hubris to think you can do everything on your own as well as a group of talented people.

Especially with non-creatives, I think there's a tendency to think great movies or books or music or whatever springs fully formed like Athena from Zeus's forehead.  In reality it takes a lot of work to hone any creative endeavor into something great.  It's really hard to do all of that work alone.

But when it comes to movies, the opposite can also be true.  If you see in the credits a movie has like 7 different people listed as writers, then it's also probably a piece of shit.  Something with so many writers usually means it's been kicked around a lot and had a bunch of different treatments done.  Is there a perfect number of writers?  Not really.  It all depends on who's doing the writing.  Still, doing everything by yourself is more often than not a recipe for disaster.

Sequelitis Part 3: Scarlet Knights

I've toyed with the idea of a sequel to the Tales of the Scarlet Knight stories but this is a different tack--maybe.

If you followed this blog from the start, then you know Tales of the Scarlet Knight is an 8-book series (plus two prequels) following Dr. Emma Earl, a brilliant young scientist who finds a suit of magic armor and becomes the titular Scarlet Knight.  At the end of Book 8, Emma is reunited with her 2-year-old daughter Louise, who was stolen at birth, and her boyfriend Jim Rizzard, aka the Sewer Rat, is returned from the dead by Merlin the wizard.  Emma also takes in Joanna, an 8-year-old girl from a parallel universe who is essentially a genetic clone of her, except Joanna has this power where she can communicate with versions of herself all across the multiverse.

The basic premise for this sequel idea would sort of follow the short-lived Birds of Prey series on the WB back in 2002-2003 that I blogged about months ago.  It's about 15 years later and Rampart City is at peace and Emma has hung up her cape.  But then a powerful new bad guy shows up and when Emma gets back in the armor to fight it, she winds up crippled.  Her daughter Louise, now about 17, takes over as the new Scarlet Knight.  

Emma then becomes like Oracle (or Bruce Wayne in Batman Beyond) in helping her daughter by providing intel and hacking computers and also being a mentor.  And Joanna gets involved too, using her power to bring back Renee Chiostro, an 18-year-old girl who was born on Emma's world but after being corrupted by Isis and using her powers for evil went to live on a different Earth.  When Renee comes back, her powers come back as well.  Her biggest power is sort of like Rogue in the X-Men where she can siphon magic from people and objects.  So the bad guy would probably have some kind of magic power or object for Renee to siphon.

Emma, Louise, and Renee have to learn to work together as a team and stop the bad guy.  They'd each have an issue to overcome.  For Emma it would be to not try to micromanage and trust her daughters and Renee.  For Louise it would be learning to rely on her mother, sister, and Renee instead of trying to do it all herself.  And for Renee since she comes back to a world she left when she was a baby, while a lot of things are the same, not everything is, like maybe on her world green lights mean stop or whatever.  After they start working together and beat the bad guy, they probably learn that bad guy was only the tip of the iceberg and so they need to keep their team together to find the Big Bad and stop him--or her.

Like the other ones there are a lot of blanks still to fill in here.  I'd have to define what happens to Jim Rizzard and some of the other players in the Scarlet Knight multiverse, though some of them might show up for other stories.  Joanna would probably go in and out of the lineup depending on what the story called for, leaving Emma, Louise, and Renee as the core.  There'd be romantic subplots and Louise and Renee dealing with regular life in high school or college or whatever.

I probably won't actually do any of these, but it's something to think about.

Sequelitis Part 2: Chance of a Lifetime...The Next Generation?!

 This was an idea that hit me a couple of weeks ago to do a sequel to the Chances Are books only focusing on a different character.  The idea is inspired by this weird Japanese manga I got free on Amazon called Futaba-Kun Change! where a boy hits puberty and whenever he gets excited, he changes into a girl.  His father then tells him everyone in his family is that way and that his "father" actually gave birth to him!  My idea would cut out some of the weirder and incesty parts.

If you don't know, the Chances Are books are Chance of a Lifetime, Second Chance, and Last Chance about a grizzled homicide detective named Steve Fischer who, while thwarting a robbery at a pharmaceutical company, is turned into an 18-year-old girl going by the name Stacey Chance.  In Chance of a Lifetime Stacey reconnects with Steve's daughter Madison and gets revenge on those who changed him.  In Second Chance, Stacey and Madison are kidnapped by a Chinese company trying to recreate the formula from the first book and end up becoming little girls--until the drug wears off and they grow up again.  And during the story Stacey and her therapist Robert fall in love--once she's grown up again.  In Last Chance, Stacey and Robert are getting married but she finds herself becoming a man again.  An old enemy of Steve's resurfaces and is able to escape authorities by using the drug that changed Steve.  Then the bad guy kidnaps Madison and Steve rescues her.  Steve is mortally wounded, but Madison gives him a shot of the formula that makes him Stacey again.  She and Robert get back together while Madison and her girlfriend Grace get married and everyone is pretty much happily ever after.

This sequel idea would be 12-13 years later, which would still be almost present day.  Stacey and Robert have a son named Max.  Max has been a fairly normal boy, but while his classmates are starting to go through puberty by getting body hair and their voices deepening and dicks growing and such, Max finds himself getting less hairy and his voice getting higher and his dick shrinking.  Then he starts developing breasts!

At some point then Stacey finally has to come clean and it's sort of like in Teen Wolf where Michael J Fox's dad tells him he's a werewolf.  Only in this case Stacey has to tell Max about how she was a man and all the stuff that happened.  And that "Aunt" Madison is really his half-sister!

Once Max is finally a complete girl, she has to go to a new school as Maxine and make new friends and probably do something akin to winning the big basketball game.  Maybe like her mom, Maxine discovers a talent for singing and saves the big dance or something.  And in the end she decides being a girl isn't so bad after all.

This would be more of a comedy than an action drama like the Chances Are books.

Sequelitis Part 1: Another Another Chance

 Back on May 28 I mentioned someone finally reviewed Another Chance on Amazon and they brought up an interesting idea about a sequel that would give Sherman, the villain of the book, some redemption.

It got me thinking of a different approach to a sequel than I had previously been thinking.  First, some background.  In Another Chance, conman Vince is changed into a young Indian woman named Vinaya and tasked by Sherman and his shadowy government agency known as CHANCE to steal a mechanical "gland" that produces nanobots allowing someone to change his/her appearance, gender, etc.  But instead of stealing it, Vinaya falls in love with its inventor and they wind up going on the run from CHANCE until ultimately Vinaya is able to stop them.  Sherman had framed Vinaya for a bank robbery and so when Sherman is captured, Vinaya gives him some of the drug he gave Vince.  Sherman also turns into a young Indian woman who looks enough like Vinaya that no one really notices the difference and so he (now she) takes the rap for Vinaya's crimes, allowing Vinaya to have a clean slate.

At the end, Vinaya is reunited with an old girlfriend who's the founder of CHANCE, who wants her help in cleaning up the organization and undoing the damage Sherman did.

So the basic idea for the sequel is that a particularly nasty former CHANCE agent has lately been causing trouble with bombings, assassinations, and whatnot.  Every time Vinaya and her compatriots get close, the agent escapes.  Finally Vinaya goes to the prison where Sherman resides and they make a deal:  in exchange for helping them nab the bad guy, Sherman gets a new face, and eventually gets to go free.  She reluctantly accepts the deal.

And then to escape Sherman is injected with some nanobots or whatever and becomes a different woman.  For a few years Sherman has been a woman, but she has never really been a normal woman as she's spent her entire female life in prison, so there are some adjustments she has to make.  And she tries to escape a couple of times, but in the end she and Vinaya catch the bad guy and maybe Sherman falls in love with someone and decides to turn over a new leaf and so on.

The Evolution of Covers

 When I first started to make covers for Eric Filler books, they were pretty primitive.  A lot of that is from September 2014-March 2015 I was living in various motels from here to Seattle to Arizona and back again, so I only had the PowerPoint on my laptop to work with.

As time has gone on, I've tried to get a little more sophisticated.  Like some graphic "artists" at publishers like Solstice Publishing, I've tried to do more layering images.  I might get a picture of a woman from a stock photo site and then eliminate the background (which can be tricky) and then put it over a background.  Something I found recently in PowerPoint is there's a "Smooth Edges" tool that can help to take some of the edges off one picture so when you paste it on a background it doesn't stick out so much.  But you have to be careful or else you can wipe out too much edge and have pictures that look unnatural or just have holes in them.

Having use of a desktop computer makes it easier to download fonts.  You can pay for fonts, but there are enough free ones that I can usually get by.  In the last few months I've tried to get a little more creative in placing the titles, like maybe off to one side instead of just centered.  One like this kind of uses all that stuff I just talked about:

On Facebook I talked about the cover for my latest release, Hitchswapper.  It's a story about a guy who picks up a hitchhiker who turns him into a woman and they go from Oklahoma to LA and fall in love and stuff.  It was a fun story in that I used a lot of my traveling experience in 2014, at least until it gets to the LA part.

So for this cover I first wanted a picture of a female hitchhiker.  I couldn't find a great one for free.  I finally settled on this one with a lady with her thumb up.  The sign she's holding was originally white but I recolored it a light brown to look more like cardboard.  And then I used a font to make it look sort of like the words were painted on.  I dug around for a background that would show a Route 66 sign because most of the story takes place on the old Route 66.  I found this one that has it painted on the road.

In the story the main character buys a 1958 Ford Thunderbird convertible for his road trip down Route 66 from Chicago to LA.  I looked around online to find a sort of classic car looking font to use on the title and author name.  The first one I found was too wide, so I went with this other one.  Since the title is only one word (not a real word) I just centered it across the cover.

This was my first draft then:

Looking at it, something really bugged me:  there was a lot of empty space on the right side.  Maybe other people wouldn't have paid much attention to it, but my eyes kept going right to it.  

So I looked around and found a picture of a 1958 T-Bird, cut out the background and it fit in really well on the pavement of the old gas station or whatever in the background.  It's probably not exactly to scale, but who really cares?  Then I moved the author name a little bit to the right and down a few lines.

Also, when I looked at the picture for this entry, I noticed that her thumb looked really skinny, like a finger.  I  had the Soft Edges thing turned up too high so it cut off a lot of her thumb.  So I turned the Soft Edges down a little and used a copy of her thumb from the original to make it look more normal size.

This is the final result:

Obviously it's not as good as if I could pay a model to go out to a Route 66 sign with a T-Bird, but considering I paid a grand total of $0 I think it's pretty good.

Here's an example of a bad cover from someone else's book:

Basically what this guy did was take the cover he'd made for the paperback and then for whatever reason use the Kindle template.  As you can see he's got the title and the author name on it twice!  It looks ridiculous.  When I pointed this out on whatever Facebook group, someone (I don't think the author) said, "It's his cover and he likes it!"  So he likes garbage?  It's no wonder he hasn't sold a copy; if he's that lazy about the cover, what about the book inside?  Hasn't he even seen a book cover before?  Also, no one puts "By" on the cover.  Yeesh.

The #FirstWorldProblems of MTV's Daria Make Me Yearn for the Good Ol Days

 Last year Pluto TV made me slightly happier when they introduced a new "Comedy Central Animation" channel that also featured a couple of old MTV series from the 90s:  Beavis and Butt-Head and its spin-off, Daria.  The former had been shown sometimes on the "Guy Code" channel but the latter had not been anywhere since Hulu stopped streaming it at some point.  I own the series on DVD but it was still nice to be able to watch random episodes.

The premise of the show is that highly intelligent cynic Daria Morgendorffer and her family move to the suburban town of Lawndale.  Daria's mother is a successful lawyer who struggles to balance work and parenting.  Daria's father is a high-strung marketing consultant who isn't extremely bright.  And Daria's younger sister Quinn is a self-absorbed freshman who's instantly popular with boys and joins a few other snooty, narcissistic girls in "The Fashion Club."

Watching the show again in 2020-2021, it became clear how pretty much all the "problems" are what we'd call #FirstWorldProblems.  A lot of the episodes revolve around Daria's not fitting in with other students and her strict moral code that causes her to butt heads with teachers, administrators, other adults, and her parents.  In the first couple of seasons there's also her crush on her friend's twentysomething loser musician brother Trent and in the last season or two she gets a boyfriend named Tom.

As a social outcast I always enjoyed the show, but when I watch it now it seems kind of quaint.  "Problems" like difficult school assignments or whether or not to get contact lenses or that old people at a nursing home don't like her voice when she reads to them or the struggle to get into the college of her choice seem pretty minor when you think of today with Covid, gun rampages, cyberbullying, and so on.  In the show the school's principal Ms. Lee is seen as paranoid for wanting metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs, but it turns out that she was just ahead of the curve.  If anything in today's world we'd probably think she's not safety-conscious enough.  Even the token black students, class president Jody and her jock boyfriend Mac, don't face open racism from other students, but there are a couple of times where Jody experiences more thinly-veiled racism from adults, like when for a class assignment she and Daria have to apply for a small business loan and she gets turned down until she mentions her wealthy father.

In that quaintness there is a nostalgia for when things were a lot simpler, when your "problems" weren't life-and-death like they are these days.  If they rebooted the show for today's audience, Daria would be crusading against the "fake news" being peddled on social media and lapped up by her dumber classmates.  Quinn and the Fashion Club would probably be trolling and fat-shaming girls online and telling girls like Daria to kill themselves.  Jody and Mac would probably get a lot more harassment from fellow students.  And Ms. Lee would have to be even more like a prison warden.  

It's kind of depressing to think about.  Anyway, that's not to say there weren't real problems for a lot of young people in the 90s, but it was easier to be a sheltered suburban or country kid than it is today.