Yup, That's NOT My Reader...

  A couple months ago I mentioned how in a book I read I found out how you can get Amazon to expand the categories from 2 to 10.  I tried it with a recent book, Swapnado, and now I think it backfired on me with this review:

This obviously isn't someone who has much experience reading my books.  I mean, whining about referring to the girls by male references is something that my books (and most gender swap books) do a lot.  It's not really that hard to follow:  in scenes where Cam is the POV character he thinks of himself as male and his friend Shawn as female.  And in scenes where Shawn in the POV character he thinks of himself as male and his friend Cam as female.  It's a reflection of their mental process.  I mean if you turned into the opposite sex you wouldn't instantly start thinking of yourself as that sex.

I think adding the book to the LGBT action/adventure category is probably why I have some asshat here whining there's a lack of adventure.  There's action in the beginning with the tornado then the middle is largely the two characters trying to adjust to their new lives, which is something that happens a lot with gender swap books--sometimes I've had people complain that there's not enough of that!--and then there's action at the end as they try to stop a second swapnado.

But what really irks me is that title, especially "not very creative."  Oh really?  Why don't you go read one of the dozens of other gender swapping tornado books then...oh, right, there aren't any others!  And maybe I could read some of your amazingly creative writing?  Oh, right, I can't because you don't give a name, just "Amazon Customer."  Ass.

Look, I get this isn't your thing and you didn't get it, but that's a you problem.  It's not a me problem.  I have literally done this hundreds of times before and most people don't have a problem with it--or at least don't say so--thus I have to conclude it is your problem.  But then you insult me and leave a bad review and take money out of my pocket to boot--then it makes it a me problem.  Unfortunately not one I can really do anything about.  Grrrr...

I'm not sure then if I should try expanding categories again if it means I'm going to get some moron stumbling across it and then dinging me with a bad review--and returning it so I don't even get any money!

Moonbeam City Was a Show That Needed More Than 1 Season to Work Out Its Concept

I think the first (and only) season of Comedy Central's Moonbeam City came out when I still had Sling and probably could have watched it, but I never got around to it.  It was probably one of those shows they put after South Park to try to prop it up but I wasn't watching South Park by then so it just never occurred to me to watch it. 

Then I pretty much forgot about it until I saw it on Pluto TV's Comedy Central Animation channel.  But unlike Daria or Beavis & Butthead or most of the other series they show on there they don't do marathons or blocks of it; they just showed 1 episode at a time at weird times like 2am or 9:30am when I usually couldn't watch. 

So when I finally got Paramount+ I was able to actually binge all 10 episodes of the series.  And it was...OK.  There were some things going for it but I don't think it ever really latched on to a working concept.  It's the kind of show that needed another season or so to work out all the kinks--or not.  That's what happened with shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, South Park, and Beavis & Butthead; they all needed a season or two to really refine everything from the animation and voices to the stories and overall concept.  I think another season of this could have allowed it to be better.

What was the show about? Phantom Readers would ask--if Phantom Readers could ask anything at all.  The design aesthetic for the show is that the characters were drawn to look like those old 80s pictures you might see in nail salons and stuff.  Only in this case they were cops in the titular Moonbeam City who do...stuff.  The central character is Dazzle Novak (Rob Lowe), who's sort of like Sterling Archer in Archer in that he's arrogant and a complete narcissist but at the end of the day he gets things done in a half-assed fashion.  His boss is Pizazz Miller (Elizabeth Banks), who like cop bosses everywhere is not fond of his wild card shenanigans, but damn it, he gets the job done!  There's his weird Canadian rival Rad Cunningham (Will Forte) and Chrysalis (Kate Mara), the nerdy redheaded forensic cop who was instantly my favorite.

Some of the episodes are kinda weird like when Dazzle is unhappy with an Unsolved Mysteries-type reenactment of a crime he stopped so he winds up doing some big budget feature that goes way, way overbudget.  Or another one where Dazzle thinks a dolphin witnessed a crime so he has Chrysalis build a robot dolphin and winds up falling in love with the dolphin--that he later finds out is male.  One of the better ones had Rad beating Dazzle for the best parking space, so Dazzle goes to his stuntman father (voiced by Adam West) to learn to do some great trick but instead his father is killed and he and Chrysalis have to find the killer and challenge him to a "stunt-off."  The final episode has Rad using his sister as his imaginary girlfriend and then his family uses that to put on a wedding to grift the mob, which ends up getting everyone shot in the shoulder.

The one with Dazzle and his father was probably the best because there was actual character development and a real case to solve.  There was also a B-plot where Rad is trying to escape from the parking garage after losing his ticket--I've been there.  I think if they had gone on in that vein in a second season it really would have been better.

Since the design aesthetic was cheesy 80s art, maybe they should have leaned into that more and made it more of a parody of over-the-top 80s action movies/TV shows like Beverly Hills Cop or Miami Vice.  There was some of that, but probably not enough.

Anyway, I doubt there's ever going to be a revival or reboot or anything to let the show have that chance to refine itself.  I usually try to bring things back to writing and in this case the lesson is most stories need a second draft to really refine the concepts of the first draft.  Like the animated shows I mention, they all needed some time to gel and that's usually true when you're writing a story.

Star Trek Discovery Shows the Strengths & Flaws of Streaming

I intentionally watched Lower Decks and Picard before delving into Discovery because it has 3 seasons (with the 4th starting next month) of about 42 episodes.  I only watched 39 because I had already seen the first 3 on Pluto TV months ago.  Unlike most shows I talk about, I don't really need to get into the plot because I think most of my usual readers have seen the show.

One problem was that when it first debuted, CBS All Access (now Paramount+) only let you see the first episode for free.  The problem with that is the first episode kind of sucks.  It doesn't show the Discovery except in the credits or most of what would become the main cast.  That doesn't even happen until episode 3!  Which really, when Pluto TV showed the first three episodes (plus earlier a second season one for their whole Black Lives Matter/Juneteenth thing one year), I actually started getting into the show, whereas just seeing the first one with the weird Klingons and taking place on the wimpy Zhengzhou, didn't really interest me much.  It helps to actually give people a sense of your actual show with the actual setting and cast and everything.  Seems like common sense, but here we are.  CBS/Paramount got too greedy hoping people would plop down money based on half of a pilot that wasn't that great. 

Starting with Episode 3 we get to the actual ship and meet Lorca, Stamets, Tilly, and some of the others who become important and find out about the spore drive and stuff then the show starts getting more interesting.  To me the first season was still kind of bumpy but it had some good moments and even if they probably didn't need so many Mirror Universe episodes those were good.

But the end of the first season to me kinda sucked.  Getting back to their universe they somehow warp ahead 9 months to where the Federation is on the brink of collapse.  The final episode especially seems rushed as they grow a whole bunch of space mushrooms on a dead moon in the blink of an eye and make a bomb for the female Klingon to threaten to blow up Q'onos with unless the other Klingons make her the leader.  Since the spore network had taken them ahead 9 months, I kept waiting for them to use it to go back in time, but that never even seemed on the table.  I'm sure there are reasons for that...

I think season 2 was probably the best one overall.  The search for the "Red Angel" and stopping Section 31 was all pretty cool--and it's nice they used something first introduced in DS9.  I really liked Anson Mount as Christopher Pike, which makes me want to see the spin-off show.  The guy playing Spock was good too.  The "Number One" joke got stretched a bit too much when she doesn't even give a name during her debriefing with Starfleet; at some point are they going to actually give her a name or just run that joke through the ground into the center of the planet?

But one episode of season 2 really highlighted the weakness with this format.  They had hinted a couple of times that the evil Control AI was using the robotic looking Airiam on the Discovery and then in one episode she goes full rogue before dying.  This is supposed to be sad and tragic, but we know so little about most of the secondary characters that it really isn't.  I don't even know what the hell Airiam was:  a cyborg?  A basic android?  Some kind of Bionic Woman thing? 

Unlike most of the previous shows where you at least knew the whole bridge crew and had some idea of their deal, I barely knew anyone on the bridge of the Discovery besides Pike, Burnham, and Saru.  Earlier in the season they say the navigator Owo (whatever her full name is) grew up in some tech-phobic community, which was the first mention of that in any way.  When you don't define your secondary characters in like the previous 15-16 episodes I guess you can just assign them whatever backstory is convenient to the plot.  And what's the deal with her and Detmer, the pilot?  They give each other looks and hug and stuff, but is there more there?  They already have a gay relationship with Stamets and Culber, so why not a lesbian one?

Anyway, the problem is with only 13-14 episodes there's not time to focus on secondary characters the way TNG would mostly focus on Picard, Data, and Worf but sprinkle in some focusing on Riker, Troi, Dr. Crusher, LaForge, and (unfortunately) Wesley.  Or DS9 would sprinkle in a Bashir, O'Brien, Dax, and Kira episode and of course the funny Ferenghi ones.  Voyager and Enterprise were the same way.  The point being they all had 20-some episodes, so they could take time out to deal with other characters instead of just the main ones, so you at least knew a little about them before they died.  Really I've been saying this since Beast Wars in 1996:  compressed seasons just don't leave time for much besides the overall story.  It especially gets true for these shows like Archer where a "season" now is 8 episodes.

The second season did end on a real bang with a huge battle between the Discovery/Enterprise and Section 31 before Burnham as the "Red Angel" leads Discovery 930 years into the future.  I was intrigued by where this would go and then I was kind of disappointed at the end.

The first couple of episodes introduce a new dynamic more akin to Firefly or Andromeda, sort of a sci-fi Western thing where they're the new sheriff in a corrupt and nasty town.  Then they just sort of throw that aside when they find Starfleet HQ and it becomes about finding the source of "the Burn."  Did there really need to be some elaborate source of it?  Couldn't the dilithium just be gone and we have to move on?

The other disappointing thing was like Voyager there was an opportunity to make it a story of survival with the Discovery 930 years in the future, cut off from Starfleet and on its own.  But like Voyager they pretty well punted on that idea and made it too easy for them to survive.  In a few episodes they find Starfleet and get refitted with detached nacelles and new displays and everything--except uniforms.

And then they did the kind of thing comics like to do to replacement heroes like AzBats in the 90s where they sabotage Saru as the captain so they can make Burnham the captain.  First they had him almost destroy the ship to try to get to a Kelpian ship and then he's stuck on the crashed ship (as a human, which must have been nice for Doug Jones) while Burnham, Book, Tilly, and the others except Culber are off saving the galaxy from the Emerald Chain gang.  I already knew Saru was leaving the show and Burnham taking over (they kind of spoil that in the commercials for Paramount+) but it was really obvious how they were setting it up.

And then it ends with an anti-environmentalist message where in a deus ex machina they find a planet full of dilithium to mine.  Instead of figuring out how to create more spore drives or another source of propulsion, nope, the solution is just to find more non-renewable resources out there.  Drill, baby, drill!

The Discovery came to the future because it needed to hide the Sphere AI from the universe, but really not much happens with that plot in the third season.  The Sphere AI shows everyone a Buster Keaton movie and downloads into some droids and that's about it.  And what's the point of Tig Notaro's Jett Reno, who seems like she'd be much more at home on the Orville?  Other than sniping with Stamets, she never really seems to contribute much.  The spore drive that was so important to the war hasn't seen a ton of improvement.  I thought after Book was able to jump with it they'd realize they could use his people for navigators or something and that would open things up for more spore drives.  But no.  Let's just keep using the thing we've been using for 1000 years.  Awesome.

So now Burnham is the captain and I'm still not sold on her.  She's just too Mary Sue-ish.  Is there anything she can't do?  She's super smart and she can fight and all this other stuff.  Plus she's Spock's adopted sister/Sarek's adopted daughter and the Red Angel.  In the first season she was at least an outcast for "starting" the Klingon war and cold emotionally but by the end of Season 3 she's not even that.  She's perfect!  Too perfect.  That's why I liked Saru; he wasn't perfect.  And he was funny, trying to work out his catchphrase and all.  He didn't even get much of a sendoff compared to Airiam or Pike because they were in too much of a hurry at the end.

Anyway, if it sounds like I didn't like the show, I did.  The big advantages of streaming are there's a much higher budget than TOS for sets and effects and actors.  And there's less worries about cancellation than on one of the big-four networks.  But the streaming platform has some drawbacks, as I've mentioned.

We'll have to see what happens in season 4.  Unlike the previous seasons they didn't really set up much going forward.  They're just going to be UPS drivers handing out dilithium?  That sounds like a Lower Decks job.

Don't Make Your Problems Unsolvable

When I talked about Paramount+'s Picard series, I mentioned how it was one of those where the final act had a lot of the cast just standing around with their thumbs up their asses--metaphorically.  And so it got me thinking why this was the case.  My conclusion is mostly that they made the problem so big that it was pretty much unsolvable for our heroes.

The final two episodes take place on a mysterious planet in an 8-star solar system, which is something I'm sure would give Neil deGraase Tyson fits.  Picard and the misfit crew of the small ship La Sirena crash down on the planet after being attacked by weird flying orchid things.  7-of-9 in a Borg cube also crashes down.  Meanwhile a Romulan fleet of 218 warbirds is on the way to destroy them all.

And there's the problem right there:  218 warbirds?!  That's really stacking the odds so far in favor of the bad guys that it's impossible for the good guys to do much.  Picard is able to stall them with a holoprojection trick for about thirty seconds and then a Federation fleet arrives to stall the Romulans further.

Because there are so many bad guy ships, there really is nothing our heroes can do, hence no real reason to write them anything to do except stand around and wait.  Now if you made the odds a little less stacked by only having say 12 warbirds, then maybe our heroes could find some way to stop them.  Because the space orchid things could take out a chunk of the warbirds, it would leave just a few against the La Sirena.  Picard could still make his heroic sacrifice and still talk Soji down and you wouldn't need such an unbelievable number of Starfleet ships to show up.  (I mean, did they even have 200 ships at Wolf 359 or the battle in First Contact or any of those in the Dominon War on DS9?)  And a dozen warbirds would still be more than enough to blow up one settlement on a planet.  Just one warbird would be enough.  Like the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica all they need to do is drop some nukes and irradiate the whole place; one ship could easily do that.

The obvious parallel to writing:  don't make the odds so great the hero has no chance at all!  Sure you want the odds against them, but you don't want it so impossible that the only way out is to have some deus ex machina resolve everything.

What Would You Be When You Grow Up?

I'm not going to watch it but I keep seeing these commercials for the NBC show "Ordinary Joe."  The idea is there's this guy and the show kind of does a What If...? thing about three different timelines.  In one he's a doctor and in another a rock star or something and another he's a cop.  (That way we've got cop show and doctor show covered--genius!)

It got me thinking about what other jobs I might have in a similar scenario.  If I didn't go into accounting, what else might I have done?  The caveat for my little mental exercise was that I couldn't fundamentally change myself in the process.  I mean in second grade I wanted to be shortstop for the Detroit Tigers but obviously I was never going to have the fitness, size, or talent for that so I'm not going to use that one because I would literally have to be an entirely different person to make it work.

1.  Full-Time Writer:  What if one of my more mainstream books had been successfully published back in the 2000s?  I'd probably never be a big-time superstar writer like Stephen King or James Patterson but maybe I could have eked out a living writing more arty, literary books like Where You Belong or maybe less arty sci-fi books like when I first started writing.  I still wouldn't want to but if it were a TV show I'd probably move to New York in some crappy, overpriced apartment.

2.  History Teacher:  Besides English, my other favorite subject in school was History.  So if I hadn't gone to school for accounting, I probably would have gone to school for teaching and wanted to teach History.  But you know why I didn't?  Not just because teachers make shit wages.  Mostly because I knew it would get on my nerves trying to deal with dumb kids or smart alecks and going through the same shit year after year.  I'd probably end up all pissed off and bitter like Mr. DiMartino in Daria.  Kids wouldn't be getting on their desks for me like Dead Poet's Society or anything.  Or I'd just be one of those ineffective teachers who stops giving a shit and basically lets the kids do whatever they want.  Pissed off and bitter would work better for TV.

3.  Bum:  I wanted something awesome like nature photographer or something, but this seems like a more realistic outcome.  I mean in March 2016 if I hadn't gotten a job I probably would have been living in my car.  So, yeah, I could be begging and eating out of dumpsters and getting run out of coffee places when I try to steal sugar or ketchup packets or whatever.  Fun.  Not really a good one for TV unless some nice person kind of adopts me and lets me live with them.  Then we can have a wacky sitcom!

I don't know, maybe you want to come up with more fun things than mine.  What three different jobs would you have?

Picard is Another Show Where the Ending Doesn't Add Up

Of the three (to present) Star Trek shows exclusive to Paramount+, Picard was the one I was actually least interested in.  I had seen the first three episodes on Pluto TV and wasn't really that impressed with it.  Like the Disney Star Wars movies the visuals are great, but I wish it had been done about ten years earlier when Patrick Stewart was a bit more spry.

And the whole thing revolving around "synths" wasn't really that great.  It's something that had been done already in the Battlestar Galactica reboot and Blade Runner and a bunch of other things.  Especially this idea that you have an android who doesn't know she's an android just like Sean Young in Blade Runner and like the at least 6 characters in Battlestar Galactica who found out they were actually Cylons.

But I was willing to go along for the ride as Picard recruits a ragtag group to go find this android named Soji who was made with technology from Data.  They go out to a Borg cube that was abandoned in Romulan space and is being studied by a combination of former Borgs (xBs), Federation scientists, and Romulans.  Along the way they stop to recruit a Romulan samurai guy who keeps bringing a sword to a disruptor/phaser fight and rescue Dr. Bruce Maddox (a somewhat obscure reference from a second season episode of TNG I wouldn't have remembered if they didn't frequently rerun it on Pluto TV) with help of 7-of-9 who's a "Fenris Ranger" patrolling the Neutral Zone or whatever.

(On a side note like the Star Wars sequels they just throw a bunch of shit at you like the Fenris Rangers that you don't really know about and they're not going to really take a lot of time to explain, so you have to just go along with it.  Romulus had a disaster--I think tying into the Abrams reboot movie--and the Romulan Empire fell apart and now we have Fenris Rangers.  OK, sure, whatever.  Moving on...)

They get to the cube but only Picard can go aboard and with the help of former Borg Hugh (a far less obscure TNG reference) he and Soji beam over to a planet where Riker and Troi are living with a daughter.  They had a son but he died of a disease that could have been cured if androids hadn't been banned--an obvious reference to stem cell research.

Eventually everyone goes to some planet in an 8-star system where there's somehow an Earth-like planet populated by Data's creator's real son and a bunch of androids.  The Romulans have a boner to kill all synthetic life because of some apocalyptic prophecy, which like in the old Greek style they're actually bringing about by trying to kill the synths because then the synths start building a device to signal to some mysterious group of synthetic beings who will apparently come to kill all organic life for them.

Now the annoying thing to me is this fleet of 218 Romulan ships warps in and Picard steals Rios's ship to go and meet them.  Meanwhile Soji is working on this beacon thing and everyone else...is doing absolutely nothing.  They tried to blow up the beacon with a bomb disguised as a soccer ball but that didn't work so they just stand around as Picard buys a couple of minutes with some goofy trick making it seem like there are 200 of  his ship and then Riker and a fleet of Starfleet ships show up.

(Another side note:  how the fuck did Starfleet get like 200 ships together so fast?  In every Star Trek show the Enterprise or whatever ship always had to work on its own because "they were the only ship in the area."  Now all the sudden in less than a day they can amass an armada of like 200 ships and fly out to nowhere to stare down a Romulan fleet?  I guess things really are different in the future.)

In the end Picard talks Soji into destroying the beacon just as some metal Cthulhu thing is starting to come through while the Romulans turn tail and Riker and all the Starfleet ships warp away, not even leaving one behind to do the actual thing they were supposed to, which was start diplomatic relations with the android planet. 

And then Picard dies but they put his memories into an android that looks exactly like his old body and has none of the cool android superpowers.  Um...sure.  Why not?

Anyway, what pissed me off about the ending was the same thing that pissed me off about watching Titans and Doom Patrol on HBO Max:  in the end 75% of the characters didn't actually matter.  Why did we need the Borg cube or 7-of-9 or the Romulan samurai guy?  None of that shit mattered in the end.  It had no bearing on the end at all.

Maybe someone would fansplain that the cube was where Soji met the Romulan guy but what difference did it make if it was a Borg cube or a Starbucks?  None!  But the Borg cube looks a lot spiffier than a Starbucks.

The Borg cube crashes on the android planet and just sits there at the end.  While other than being a set for the catfight between 7-of-9 and the Romulan chick, it contributes nothing to the end.  For all the screen time that cube got, there really was no payoff.

And like I said, in the end you have most of your characters just standing around.  Seven at least killed the Romulan chick but Rios, Raffi, and the samurai guy are just standing around with the androids while Picard and Agnes are momentarily distracting the Romulans until help conveniently comes.

(Fun Fact:  They call the Agnes lady "Aggie" but I already got there first in the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series 10 years earlier.  Suck it, Trekkies!)

What makes this especially irksome is that the show was created and mostly written by Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.  Sloppy storytelling from a hack like me is one thing but you're a Pulitzer-winning author and in the end you have a bunch of people standing around and a bunch of characters and plots that didn't do anything except take up space.

Maybe I'm more sensitive to this because I work in accounting, so for me things need to add up, to balance.  Maybe it's OK for audiences these days if things don't add up as long as it looks cool.  But back in my day, when you got to the final act, you didn't just have most of your characters standing around with their hands in their pockets.

I was going to use Star Wars as an example but then I remembered that Leia and 3PO were just standing around on Yavin during the Death Star attack so maybe that's not the best example.  Empire was better in that while Luke was fighting Vader, Leia, Chewie, Lando, and the droids were trying to escape from the Empire on Cloud City.  And then in Return of the Jedi you had Luke standing around with the Emperor for a while but he eventually fought Vader while Han, Leia, and Chewie were deactivating the shield and Lando was up with the fleet trying to survive and then blow up the Death Star II.

Another good example is The Lion King where Simba fights Scar while Nala and the female lions fight the hyenas, as do Pumbaa, Timon, and Rafiki.  So all your main characters are into it, not just standing around with their snouts up each other's asses.

Or in Endgame you had all the Marvel heroes eventually getting into the fight.  But for some reason you have these shows where they think it's OK to just have people standing around doing nothing.  If they're doing nothing at the end, why did they need to be there at all?  Well, how else could we have strung out 10 episodes?

Really I think this show could have used to be shorter.  If they had jettisoned the filler, it could have been done in 4-5 episodes.  Maybe just a 2-2 1/2-hour movie.

The preview of the second season kinda sucked too.  I mean, going back in "the past" to our present?  Lame.  It's been done so many times in Trek before.  Hello, Star Trek IV anyone?  City on the Edge of Forever?  That one where the original crew randomly goes back to 1968 to set up an unsuccessful spinoff show?  First Contact?  The DS9 two-parter where Sisko inadvertently becomes Gabriel Bell?  The Voyager where they went back to the 90s for some reason?  Enterprise had some episode called "Carpenter Street" or something where they went back in time for some reason.

To me this idea sounds like Paramount (or whoever) decided to cut the budget for season 2 so they're going to the present day to save money on sets and props and things like that.  Maybe in that season the end will actually involve everyone and not just have people standing around with their thumbs up their assholes.

But probably not.

As Hollywood Releases Another Boring Installment of the Halloween Franchise, Grumpy Bulldog Takes a Different Tack

Today the latest installment of the Halloween franchise drops in theaters and streaming on Peacock.  If it's like the last one, it'll just be a bunch of reheated slasher movie clichés.  (Pitch for the last movie:  Michael Myers has killed like 10,000 people in the last 10 movies, but this time he's old and killing them with, get this, a knife!  Oh, wow, people will never see that coming!  Genius!)  For the upcoming Eric Filler book Swapoween, I take a different tack and instead of it just being a slasher story, it's also a romance.

The original idea was just to do a pastiche of the original Halloween movie, only Michael Myers would have been turned into a girl thanks to some drug given to him during his supposed execution.  The plan was just to follow the plot of the movie for the most part where Lori Todd is the good virgin girl babysitting a kid on Halloween while her friends are out fornicating and being murdered by Michael Myers, aka Melvin Michaels.  

Then I got one of those crazy notions.  Michaels turns into a girl Lori's age and so I had her hanging around the bus stop with Lori and her friend.  Then I had Lori really making an effort to make friends with Michaels, going by the name Myra now, despite that Myra looks crazy and doesn't talk.

A couple weeks ago I talked about how boundaries can sometimes give you more creative freedom.  In this case I needed some sex for the story.  I had originally thought the sex would come from Lori's friends.  Then I got thinking since I already had Lori and Myra together:  what if they actually fall in love?  So after Lori gives Myra a makeover to look slightly more normal, they kiss and that eventually leads to awkward teenage lesbian sex.

Besides adding sex to the story, it opens up a whole new dynamic.  Having never been in love or anything, Myra doesn't really know how to react, so she's clingy and overprotective with Lori.  And that really is why in the end Myra stabs Lori, to "protect" her while she goes to deal with Lori's friend, who's stealing the guy Lori has liked for a while.  In her sick, twisted mind it makes sense to get Lori out of the way while she kills the friend and the guy so she can then have Lori all to herself.

Even though it wound up being different than I planned and different from the movie I was pastiche-ing, I thought it worked out pretty well.  Because it does give a whole new dynamic with the characters.  It definitely winds up being a different take.

I'm not saying the movies need to do that, but it would be nice if they tried something fresh.  The last time they tried something really different was Halloween Resurrection and while some people would whine it killed the franchise or whatever, I thought it was a fun twist to have sort of a found footage aspect to it as a group of college kids are shooting a reality show in the Myers house when Myers himself starts picking them off.  

It was a different take.  I mean, Myers vs Laurie Strode has literally been done to death with the first two movies, H20, the opening sequence of Resurrection, the two Rob Zombie reboots, the 2018 movie, and this new movie.  And what's the point?  You know they can't really kill Michael off--so long as the movie makes money.  When you have a franchise that focuses on a bad guy, the bad guy is always going to keep coming back because he's the focus of it.

Anyway, I would have liked to do something like the original movie poster/box art for the cover:

But I wasn't really sure how to do that.  I thought that instead of the traditional jack o lantern I could find a pumpkin with a sexy lady cut into it but even on Google I couldn't find much that would work--almost any I could find were too sexy really.  So as you can see at the top I found a picture of a sexy lady with a jack o lantern.  Then I inserted a clip art bloody knife into it, pasting it over the stem of the pumpkin and cropping it to look like it's stabbing into the pumpkin.  So there are the same elements but also it better fits what I usually do for gender swap covers.  Maybe I should have called it "Eric Filler's Swapoween" like the graphic there. lol

What If...Sloppy Storytelling Marred Marvel's What If?

Starting in August Disney+ premiered What If...? an animated series based on the old What If? Marvel comics that postulated on things like if Captain America hadn't been frozen or the Avengers hadn't gotten together or whatever else.  As I've noted in other entries, lots of other companies have done similar things like DC recently with its Tales From the Dark Multiverse series.  I even did some of my own what ifs for Tales of the Scarlet Knight and Girl Power!  

Overall, I think this series ranged from Good to meh but nothing really great or really awful but some sloppy storytelling at the end marred the overall experience.

Episode 1 was the What If Peggy Carter took the super-soldier serum instead of Steve Rogers?  The setup being that when a Nazi tries to sabotage the experiment, Steve is shot and so Peggy takes it instead.  She becomes Captain Carter (because Captain Britain is already an actual Marvel character) and Steve joins her as a sidekick.  When they capture the Tesseract, Howard Stark builds Steve an Iron Man-type suit called the Hydrastomper.  He and Peggy work together to stop the Red Skull.  Unlike in the movie there's no plane full of Tesseract-powered bombs.  Instead there's some kind of portal with a hydra monster.  When Peggy goes into the portal to stop it, she winds up in 2011 with Nick Fury.

So this episode wasn't really a positive or negative change.  Kind of a push as basically the same stuff happens only gender swapped.  As far as an opening episode goes it was safe and didn't really try to do anything too big.  Grade:  Meh.

Episode 2 reaches out a little more to have more fun with the concept.  What if the Ravagers had kidnapped T'Challa instead of Peter Quill?  The result is that T'Challa, being much smarter and more charismatic, completely changes the cosmic Marvel Universe.  He convinces the Ravagers to do good and convinces Thanos not to go through with his plan to kill half the universe.  Instead of a joke "Star Lord" really is kind of a lord of the stars.  

The plot of the episode has the Ravagers going to Knowhere to take down the Collector, who is more of a bad ass than in the regular MCU--he has Captain America's shield, Thor's hammer, and a ship from Wakanda.  T'Challa defeats the Collector and then uses the Wakandan ship to go home to his father, who is still alive.

This was a fun episode and what really made it special is it was one of the last appearances of Chadwick Boseman before he died of cancer.  I think it would have been better if instead of just finding a Wakandan ship he would have met Shuri out there looking for him; I don't think she was even in the episode.  There were some other characters missing like Gamora, Rocket, Groot, and the Nova Corps.  Still, Boseman is so funny and charming that it really makes the episode good.

This episode was mostly a positive change except at the end where Ego the Living Planet shows up in Missouri to meet Peter Quill, who's mopping the local Dairy Queen's floor.  [ominous music...]

Sad Fact:  According to the clickbait sites there were plans to spin this episode into a whole series but Boseman's death derailed that.

Episode 3 is kind of an obscure scenario.  It's framed as a murder mystery.  Nick Fury, Black Widow, and Coulson go to see Tony Stark at a donut shop like in Iron Man 2.  But when Black Widow gives Tony a shot for his radiation poisoning, he drops dead.  A day later in Virginia, Banner turns into the Hulk but then his heart explodes and he dies.  A day later, Hawkeye is lining up an arrow on Thor when the bow goes off on its own and kills him.  This prompts Loki, Lady Sif, and a bunch of Asgardian warriors to show up.

Black Widow does some digging and before she too is murdered tells Fury "it's all about Hope."  Hope not as in the emotion but as in Hope van Dyne, Hank Pym's daughter.  The obscure scenario is that Hope joined SHIELD and died on some mission and so Hank is using the Yellowjacket suit to kill the prospective Avengers out of revenge.  With Loki's help, Fury takes Hank down, but then Loki decides to take over the planet.

This episode was a negative change as Loki takes over the world, though at the end Fury finds Captain America frozen and summons Captain Marvel.  The episode itself was meh because it was kind of an obscure scenario as I said, but afterwards I got thinking I really wish there were a follow-up.

I mean you could have a rewritten Avengers movie where Captain Marvel and Captain America team up and maybe recruit others like Peter Parker, Sam Wilson, James Rhoades, or maybe even T'Challa or some of the Netflix ones like Daredevil, Jessica Jones, or Luke Cage.  Or go the Suicide Squad route with Whiplash and Abomination, neither of whom would be dead yet.  Lady Sif could join them and maybe help convince Heimdall to take them to Asgard so Fury and the Captains or whoever could convince Odin to bring the Asgardians back.  It would actually probably work better than the random aliens in the original Avengers movie.

Episode 4 is kind of a clichéd scenario.  Instead of his hands getting damaged in a car crash, Dr. Strange's girlfriend is killed.  He becomes Sorcerer Supreme trying to find a way to save her but like Anakin Skywalker winds up being corrupted and going to the dark side to try to save her.  Each time he tries to change history, his girlfriend still dies because her death is an "Absolute Point" in time for...reasons. (Maybe it's because of what happens in Episode 9?)

Ultimately Strange's attempts save his girlfriend...for about two minutes before the whole universe collapses.  This is definitely a Tale From the Dark Multiverse kind of story.  But like I said, it's pretty cliché.  The idea of going back in time to save someone but that person dying anyway has been done in movies like 2003's The Time Machine.  I even did it in the original version of Book 2 of the Scarlet Knight series!  It wasn't really a bad episode, just meh.

A Fun Fact is that Dr. Strange is the only one in the series who can see Jeffrey Wright's The Watcher character.  He begs the Watcher to save his universe but the Watcher basically told him he made his bed, now he has to lie in it.  A lame clickbait article tried to say this was the Watcher breaking the rules for Watchers--like the Prime Directive in Starfleet, they're not supposed to do anything to interfere with the timeline--but acknowledging a guy when he sees you and talks to you and then saying you won't help him doesn't seem like interfering to me.  It seems like pretty much the opposite.

Episode 5 was one of the most anticipated.  It had already been hinted at from a couple of the action figures released--or soon-to-be-released--on Amazon and other sites.  One was a "Zombie Hunter Spider-Man" and another a Zombie Captain America.

If you don't already know, Marvel Zombies was a series originally written by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman before that series took off.  It wasn't really that great because it started after the zombie plague had already pretty much taken over the whole planet.  When it starts, "Colonel America" and some of the other zombified Avengers are hunting down Magneto.  Over the remaining issues they devour the Silver Surfer and with his power even devour Galactus!  Then the zombie Avengers take off into space to eat the rest of the universe--including Ego the Living Planet!

This episode takes a little different tack.  It starts with Bruce Banner returning to Earth like near the beginning of Infinity War.  Only now like Walking Dead or 28 Days Later, he finds the world overrun with zombies!  Like in Episode 3 it's Hank Pym's fault the world gets fucked.  This time it's because when he goes to the Quantum Realm to find his wife, she's turned into a zombie from some disease she picked up there.  Hank turns and with the shrinking tech he's able to infect a lot of others before Banner returns from space.

With help from the Wasp, Spider-Man, and Dr. Strange's cloak, Banner manages to escape and meet up with other survivors like Bucky Barnes, Sharon Carter, and Happy Hogan.  Basically a lot of sidekicks.  There's a signal coming from nearby Fort Lehigh in New Jersey so they hotwire a train from Union Station but along the way they lose people to the zombies.

At the Fort, Wasp turns giant to get them inside, where they find the Vision.  He's used his Mind Stone to pacify a lot of the zombies and even cured Ant-Man, Scott Lang, though all that's left is a head in a jar like Futurama.  And then comes the twist that the Vision has Black Panther still alive, though his leg has been cut off so he can feed it to the Scarlet Witch, who has also turned.

In the end Spider-Man, the cloak, Ant-Man's head, and Black Panther escape with the Mind Stone to fly to Wakanda, where the plague has been held back by force shields.  But meanwhile, a zombie Thanos has shown up with the rest of the Infinity Stones.  The implication being that he'll destroy the survivors in Wakanda to complete the gauntlet--or something.

It was a good episode and actually better than the comic book series.  It was neat how they used a lot of secondary characters along with Spider-Man.  They really made the scenario plausible within the confines of the MCU.  It would be great to see a sequel to it or maybe a series focusing on some of the other characters as the plague spreads.

A rare helpful Screen Rant article said in the original Marvel Zombies series it was Hank Pym who carved up Black Panther to keep himself sane long enough to find a cure.  But in a later comic I read, Marvel Universe vs The Avengers, where it's "cannibals" instead of zombies, Dr. Doom carves up Black Panther the same way.  Some people were grossed out by that or calling it racist or whatever, but I was just psyched because I actually got the reference.  

In Marvel Zombies Return, a follow-up series also written by Kirkman, it's the Wasp whose head is in a jar (or bubble really) instead of Ant-Man.  The kind of silly "cure" was basically to go cold turkey.  If a zombie just didn't eat for a while they'd regain their faculties.  The Mind Stone thing actually makes more sense.

Episode 6:  This is a really convoluted scenario.  It begins with Tony Stark's convoy in Afghanistan being attacked.  Instead of getting captured, he's saved by Killmonger from Black Panther.  This begins an elaborate series of double crosses that would make Frank Underwood in House of Cards shake his head.  Killmonger convinces Stark to build robot drones, then uses Rhodey to contact Ulysses Klaw to secure vibranium, and then creates a war between the US and Wakanda so he can become the savior of Wakanda.  In the process he kills most everyone:  Stark, T'Challa, and Ulysses Klaw among others.  In the end Shuri and Pepper Potts join forces to expose Killmonger, but it just ends there.

It's the kind of elaborate plan that really you'd need to be clairvoyant for it to work.  It would have been a lot simpler if they had just made it What If He Had Killed T'Challa in Their Duel and really put his plan into action.  That would be a lot more relevant too.  Which is maybe why they didn't want to do that.  Comic book movie fans are not the most tolerant, open-minded bunch.

Episode 7:  After four darker stories, they decide to change pace with a goofy story.  The basis for this is What If Thor Had Been an Only Child?  Instead of keeping Loki, Odin gave him back to the Frost Giants, so Thor was an only child.  He's basically an overgrown frat boy who throws killer parties--literally.  When Odin goes into the Odinsleep and Frigga goes off to somewhere else, Heimdall is left to babysit Thor.  But instead Thor easily slips him to go to Earth.  

He lands in Las Vegas and soon is throwing the biggest bash the world has ever known.  Jane Foster tracks his landing down and goes to find him before ending up in his bed.  Nick Fury tries to stop the party but is knocked out so Maria Hill takes over along with Coulson and Crossbones.  Hill calls on Captain Marvel to stop the party, but not even she can.  It's Jane Foster who figures out how to get to Asgard to get Heimdall to transport her to find Thor's mom.  Like a kid who's thrown a big party only to find out his parents are coming home early, Thor and his friends have to clean up Earth.

Besides Asgardians like Lady Sif and the Warriors Three, a lot of the cosmic Marvel characters show up like Drax, Nebula, Surtur, Jeff Goldblum and Taika Waititi's characters from Ragnarok, and Loki as a Frost Giant!  It's all pretty fun and about as serious as a Looney Tunes cartoon.  Then there's a twist at the end when Ultron studded with Infinity Stones shows up with a bunch of minions.  Even the Watcher is surprised by this, which means some bad shit's going down...

Episode 8:  So now we reveal where this Ultron came from.  It was a universe where he successfully bonded with the body with the Mind Stone that in the regular universe became Vision.  With the Mind Stone, Ultron kills almost everything on Earth.  Then Thanos shows up with the rest of the Infinity Stones and in one of those rigged one-sided fights, Ultron instantly kills him and takes the other stones.  Then he realizes that there's a whole universe out there to kill.

(If Ultron in the Vision's body could so easily beat Thanos, why didn't Vision just beat Thanos in Infinity War?  It's one of those things that doesn't make sense.  Really it's just a convenient plot device because they didn't have time for a long drawn-out battle.  Naturally the clickbait sites had thinkpieces on this and for once I agreed with them.)

The only Avengers left are Black Widow and Hawkeye, who go to Moscow and find information on Arim Zola, the former Nazi scientist who became a computer program.  A copy of him was in Camp Lehigh in Captain America: The Winter Soldier but the original is in Siberia.  So they go there to download him to put into an Ultron drone and then hopefully destroy Ultron.  But it doesn't work because Ultron is no longer in the universe.

Why?  Because he became aware of The Watcher and realizes there's a whole multiverse of organic life to destroy.  He and The Watcher battle and Ultron wins!  The Watcher takes shelter with the evil Dr. Strange from the 4th Episode.  Now they're going to raise a whole multiverse army to defeat Ultron...something DC Comics does with literally every event.  (Seriously, they're doing it right now in Infinite Frontier.)

I read on some clickbait site that What If...? is the lowest ranked Marvel series right now except for maybe that Inhumans show.  I think a lot of the problem is people thought this was an anthology series and so it's not really something that would appeal to common people.  But now that you're saying there is some big overall event story at play here.  Why didn't they hint at this from the beginning?  Maybe with some cookie scenes at the end of each episode?  That way people might have realized it was more than an anthology series.  But then some people might just be waiting for all the episodes to drop to binge it so maybe the popularity will pick up now that everything has aired.

Episode 9:  The Big Finish!  It starts with Captain Carter in a tweak of the opening to Captain America: Winter Soldier.  As she's fighting pirates, she's suddenly abducted by the Watcher.  Soon after T'Challa from Episode 2, Killmonger from Episode 6, Thor from Episode 7, and Gamora from some other dimension where she and Tony Stark killed Thanos and found a way to crush Infinity Stones are all brought to the Watcher's sanctuary with Dr. Strange from Episode 4.

In an imaginary pub they all get together and the Watcher explains he's brought them all together to stop Ultron.  They form a half-assed plan but Thor accidentally draws Ultron's attention before they're ready.  So they start their plan, focusing on destroying the Soul Stone.  T'Challa steals it from Ultron and they eventually try to crush it but that doesn't work.  They wind up in Ultron's home universe, where Black Widow has the virus arrow.  With Captain Carter's help she gets it into Ultron and he's soon taken over by Zola.

But Killmonger betrays them to take the Infinity Stones for himself.  He and Zola start an eternal tug-of-war for the Stones while the Watcher traps them in a pocket universe monitored by Dr. Strange.  And everyone goes back where they belong.

Except what's cool is since Black Widow has no one else left on her Earth, the Watcher sends her to the Earth of Episode 3--where the alternate Avengers movie I wanted is happening!  Except instead of in New York, they're fighting Asgardians on a helicarrier.  Still, I called it!  There's also a cookie scene in the credits where Black Widow tells Captain Carter the pirates founds something:  the Hydrastomper!  And there's someone inside--presumably Steve Rogers.

Other than at one point bringing in the zombie Scarlet Witch to fight Ultron, there was really nothing from Episode 5 involved.  I thought Spider-Man would be part of their team, but maybe they could only get Tom Holland for that one episode.

Then there was that whole Gamora thing.  Why didn't they actually have an episode for that?  They could have done that instead of Episode 3.  If you want to go through a clickbait article, it says the likely explanation is that Covid interfered with the production and that episode got bumped to maybe next year.  Apparently that episode would involve Tony Stark going to Sakaar (the planet from Ragnarok) and meeting Jeff Goldblum's Grandmaster and creating a suit that could transform into a car--which is why it looks like a Robotech Cyclone.  But just throwing in this reference in season 1 without the episode to support it didn't really make much sense.

I think in the end they could have done a better job of indicating there was an overall plan and bringing it to life.  It wound up seeming a bit half-assed.  Not really as good as the live action shows to date.

Use This Weird Trick to Save on Proof Copies of Paperbacks on Amazon

In August, after I sorta figured out how to do a sequel to Reunion:  Gender Swap Warriors #1, I decided to make a paperback of it.  I was at work and the mail wasn't in yet so I downloaded the HTML files of the ebook and put them in a Word file.  Then I quickly formatted a paperback by using my post from 2013 that gives advice on the margins and such.  It really is so helpful whenever I need to make a paperback.  Instead of goofing with the headers on top I just put a page number centered at the bottom.  There aren't chapters in the book so it wouldn't be much of an issue.

After saving the file as a PDF, I set up the paperback on the KDP site.  I didn't have a cover pic handy so I just used something from theirs on a template.  It took only about 30 minutes or so to throw the whole thing together.

Now here's how I saved a couple bucks on a proof copy:

If I had ordered a proof at that point, it would have cost about $2.65 plus probably another $4 shipping because they don't let you get Prime shipping on that.  And I'd have to wait days to get it to approve my proof.

Instead, I just used the online viewer and approved it.  Then I set pretty much the lowest price I could, $4.49.  The key here is to NOT select "Expanded Distribution."

I had to wait about 12 hours or so for it to publish and show up on Amazon.  But then I could order it with Prime shipping for $4.49.  So I got it for $4.49 versus about $7 if I bought a regular proof.

Then once I went through my proof copy and made changes, I reloaded it on Amazon, put in a better cover, and turned on the Expanded Distribution, which raised the price to $6.99.

Anyway, all said and done that's how you save like $2-$2.50 and probably get it faster too.  Of course that doesn't work if you don't have Amazon Prime.  

Recently Amazon started to offer hardcover books.  As far as I can tell, the same paperback file would work for the interior, so long as you keep the same size.  I did one for the special edition of A Hero's Journey and found the cover image needed some resizing to fit properly, so you might need to tweak your cover a little.  The hardcovers are more expensive, so I don't really see much use for them for me except maybe something like Where You Belong where I might want something fancier.

I have been meaning to do another version of Where You Belong for the 10th (now 12 1/2) anniversary but I never got around to it.  Doing a hardcover version might finally get me to do that.

 

Once More I Failed At Writing Comedy

 From this blog, maybe you'd think I'm a funny guy.  Or at least not a serious guy.  But for some reason I've never been great at writing comedy.  I do have one comedy book out, Chet Finley vs the Machines of Fate, but it was kind of a struggle.

Some of the Eric Filler stories I've written that were intended to be goofier stories wound up being dark instead.  And recently was the same case for a story called, Swap, Swap, & Away!  The title even might sound fun with the exclamation point and all, but the story didn't so much end up that way.

The premise came from a Spider-Man comic I read where Mary-Jane Watson goes to a support group for superhero friends or spouses and laments how she feels every time Peter puts himself in jeopardy.  Since Spider-Man is kind of a specific hero, I adapted it using Superman/Lois Lane as a basis instead.

The idea being that ace reporter Jane Jones laments her boyfriend Clyde, aka Superb Man, can't really understand what it's like to be normal.  So when the dimensional imp Mystiplex offers her a chance to swap with Clyde, she takes it, thinking that his powers will go to her.  Instead, they actually switch bodies!

Hilarity probably should have ensued then, but it really didn't.  I guess having watched Invincible this year I got thinking of the one hero who tries to use her powers to really make a difference instead of punching bad guys.  A courageous reporter like Lois Lane would seem like the type who would want to use her new powers to make a difference.  So first she murders a mob boss, but that doesn't really make things better, so she goes into space and uses an alien's ship to put out wildfires and replenish drought-stricken areas.  When her father, an army general, comes after her, she goes out to international waters to offer assistance to whoever wants it, which even includes North Korea.

Meanwhile, Clyde becomes Jane, but to get some revenge, the imp who changed them makes Clyde into the gorgeous bimbo Chloe and makes her a hooker for the mob.  After some rough anal sex with a gangster, she sprays him with bug spray and escapes before he can kill her.  She thinks she finds a friend in a coffeehouse, but the woman named Frankie is the new mob boss and handcuffs her to use as bait for Superb Man.  Then like The Boys the idea is that killing Chloe in front of Superb Man will break him.

So, yeah, not really a funny scenario when really I probably should have taken a more Greatest American Hero take and had Jane running into walls and stuff like that and Clyde getting hit on by dudes and experiencing sexism and whatnot. 

I don't know what happened, but I suppose one problem with these is they have to have sex, so I had to work that in a few places.  Or maybe it's just the world isn't very fun right now so it's hard to think of funny scenarios.  Or I just suck at comedy--probably that.

I suppose some smartass like Tony Laplume would say, "Just don't do that" but it's not like I actively decide this at the start; it's just you make one bad decision and then another and another and before long you've gone down the rabbit hole of bad ideas.  By the time you really realize it you've either got to go back and rewrite a bunch of stuff or say the hell with it--I usually opt for the latter.  I mean I don't think it's a bad story; it's just not the story I originally conceived.

I will probably be taking another shot at comedy with an XMas story.  I've done XMas stories based on A Christmas Carol, It's a Wonderful Life, a song called "Rudy," The Santa Clause, The 12 Days of Christmas, and Jack Frost--the horrible horror movie.  I was thinking what else I could do and thought of this song:

Only in this case it'd be Grandpa Got Run Over By a Reindeer...And Then Swapped.  The idea being Grandpa staggers out into the snow, gets hit by Santa's sleigh, and Santa brings him back to life, only as a hot young chick.  And then mayhem ensues that probably won't be funny.  But we'll see.  I might not even write it.

Paging Dr. Hook

I saw a commercial first on Pluto TV and then on Paramount+ for this animated show called The Harper House and every time I watch it, I think the same thing:  where is the hook?  (I looked for the commercial on YouTube but I can't find it.  Maybe Phantom Readers saw it on CBS, Pluto TV, Paramount+ or whatever.)

By that I mean there's really nothing in the ad that makes me want to watch the show.  From what I can tell it's an animated show about a family moving into some old crappy house and fixing it up.  Are there ghosts in the house?  Apparently not.  Are there wacky neighbors?  None that are evident.  Is the family a bunch of freaks or anything?  Well, I guess Mom's a drunk but otherwise, not really evident either.  On top of that at the end it uses that "Our House" song that's been used in like dozens of ads in the last 30 years.

Maybe it is a good, funny show, but the commercial just doesn't do anything for me and I really don't want to waste time watching it just to see if it can justify lame marketing.

And then that got me thinking about query letters all of us writers send out.  Those queries are like commercials for our books.  And if you want an agent's intern to notice, you need some kind of hook, right?  So if your query is as bland as that Harper House commercial, the person reading it is probably going to be thinking the same thing I am when I'm watching the commercial:  where is the hook?

If you have some great hook, you need to make sure you communicate that in your query as soon as possible.  It's not something you want to save until later.  I know when I was in writer's groups online, sometimes you'd get someone who wouldn't want to "spoil" some big plot twist in their query.  But if you don't spoil anything, you're never going to get anyone who's going to read the thing you're wanting not to spoil.

In the case of that Harper House show, from this other video on YouTube I guess it's kind of an Arrested Development/Schitt's Creek deal where the family was rich but now they're poor and moving to the other side of the tracks.  Not a great hook, but better than in the commercial they're showing on TV.

Recently on Facebook someone linked to a YouTube video showing Mike Judge's pitch video for King of the Hill back in 1996 or so and it was pretty good.  Hank Hill talks directly to the Fox execs, introducing them to his wife, who's a Spanish teacher who doesn't have a great grasp of Spanish, his son who isn't very bright, his niece who also isn't very bright, and his friends/neighbors who again are not very bright.  So besides that he already created the infamous Beavis & Butthead, it would give you an idea of what the show is about.

I suppose in 2021 it's not as great of a pitch because there are so many adult animated shows (like the one above) but in 1996 or so there was really just The Simpsons and some other failures like Capitol Critters or The Critic--the latter I like but it never caught on.  That's a whole other issue about hooks:  timing is everything.  Pitching your animated family comedy in 1996 vs 2021 there's a huge difference and in 2021 the need for a hook is more than ever before because there's so many more similar shows already on Fox, Cartoon Network, and the various streaming services.

Comparatively it's like if you pitched a vampire story in 1996 there were still quite a few but in 2021 there are far, far more of those, so if you're pitching a vampire story there needs to be some kind of hook that makes it stand out from the hundreds of other vampire books that are being queried to that same agent.  If your query is just another story about sexy sparkly vampires then the agent's intern will probably yawn and push the button for the next email.

I guess in the end that's the problem with this Harper House thing:  there's just nothing that makes it stand out from the literally dozens of other similar shows.  The only thing that did stand out is how it doesn't stand out.

 UPDATE:  The show has been cancelled by Paramount+, so nailed it!

Lower Decks is the Show We Thought The Orville Would Be

When The Orville debuted in 2017, a lot of people just assumed it was going to be a Star Trek parody because it starred Family Guy/American Dad/Ted creator Seth MacFarlane.  And then it turned out that show was really just an off-brand version of Star Trek The Next Generation with a little smartass humor mixed in.  Some people and critics, though, are still trying calling it a parody.  The Onion's AV Club, which is generally not a parody even though The Onion itself is a parody, tried to hedge its bets by referring to it as a somewhat-parody.  That's pretty weak sauce, Onion--as weak as my attempt to make a joke.

In actuality, The Orville is a pastiche, which is something made in the style of something else.  But according to Wikipedia or Dictionary.com or whatever site came up on Google:  a pastiche celebrates what it's imitating, rather than mocking it like a parody.  In the same way a lot of my gender swap stories are pastiches of comics or toys or movies or whatever because I'm imitating the style not mocking them.  Thanks to the Donald Westlake book Forever and a Death for bringing that word up.

The legit Star Trek parody is the latest (for about 24 days) Star Trek series on Paramount+, Lower Decks.  Taking its title from a well-known seventh season episode of Star Trek The Next Generation about a group of ensigns trying to make it--one of whom, a Bajoran, dies on a secret mission in Cardassian space--the show revolves around a group of ensigns on the California-class starship Cerritos, which is far, far, removed from the flagship of the fleet.  The show sets the tone in the credits by parodying the TNG/Voyager credits only having the Cerritos getting beaned by rocks, losing a warp nacelle by clipping a comet or asteroid, running from a Borg-Romulan fight, and having a giant space monster grab onto a nacelle.  It really tells you that these are not the great heroes, but the regular guys.  Then the first episode indicates the Cerritos specializes in "second contact," which is going back to planets that already made first contact to get documents signed and things like that.  Basically they're like glorified UPS or FedEx workers.

The four main characters are Mariner, a perennial screw-up and secret daughter of the captain; Boimler, the stiff-necked rule-follower who dreams of becoming a captain; Tendi, an Orion nurse who is pathologically perky; and Rutherford, an engineer who has a cyborg implant that occasionally is useful.  They don't even have quarters on the ship; they all sleep in a hallway in bunks.  A lot of what they do is the crap work the main crew doesn't have time or inclination to do.

What Lower Decks can do that The Orville can't is directly parody the Star Trek universe.  They can actually have Riker, Troi, Tom Parris, Q, Armus, Gorn, Ferenghi, Pakleds, and so on in their episodes, so it never has that feel like you're watching the equivalent of a weird action figure you got off Wish that's supposed to be something well known but really isn't:

The action figure equivalent of The Orville

To me the show feels like Archer meets Rick & Morty only set in the Star Trek universe.  I mean like Archer it is at the core kind of a workplace comedy, only the workplace is a spaceship!  And besides the animation, the show pokes fun at a lot of the sci-fi tropes (especially those used in Trek) like Rick & Morty.  Though since this is officially-licensed Trek, it's a lot more PG-13-rated than R-rated like those two shows.  There's some sexual humor, but not nearly as much, or as graphic.

There is also some heart to a lot of the episodes.  The main characters do have some kind of character development and while they are sometimes screw-ups, they are still Starfleet, trying to explore the galaxy and help people and all that stuff.  So it's not just senseless pie-throwing comedy either.

One thing I would question, is:  since this show is animated, why are the main characters still all human or humanoid-looking aliens?  Why don't they have a blobby one or a gaseous cloud or something crazy like that?  In one episode they had an ExoComp; someone more permanent like that would have been neat.  At least something with more arms and legs.  I mean, come on, even the original animated Trek did that when they replaced Chekov with Arex, who had three arms and three legs.  And that was with crappy Filmation animation in the early 70s!

In one of his reviews, Tony Laplume brought up something that didn't really ring true and that's when the Bajoran security officer Shaks comes back to life after "dying" at the end of season 1.  They make it sound like this happens all the time, but Laplume and I both couldn't really think of characters being resurrected other than Spock.  Sure, the main characters like Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, etc are always cheating death, but they don't really die for extended periods and come back.  That kind of thing is far more prevalent in comic books and soap operas.  So that bit didn't really land.

Most of the other bits do land and I think this is the kind of show that will get better as it nears (or maybe by now finishes) season 2 and maybe gets more seasons.  For those who were disappointed The Orville wasn't as funny as they thought it'd be, check this show out.

Yup, These Are My Readers

Since so few people actually write reviews, I suppose I shouldn't complain when someone does write a review.  Especially since they're 4-star reviews, not 1 star.  Still, these reviews are kind of weird.  Not just the bad grammar, but how this person often seems to rewrite the story in his/her reviews.

The first one I noticed was with Private Dick, which was in another entry.

Anyway, here was one for Private Dick that is 4 stars:

 Dick Larson was a hard boiled detective in 1930s of California was difficult enough, but things happen that is unknown enter Dixie Larson, who took over the the agency for the last few months, a woman who is a bit on androgynous looking girl, she not a ravaging beauty, but girl a who holds secrets. One night a pretty girl wearing oversized men's clothes enter the agency. She claims that she the man heir to oil fortune. Most wouldn't believe it. But Dixie did. Why or how come, strange that the cause that lead to more mystery that what happened.

The issue is mostly this line: a woman who is a bit on androgynous looking girl.  That's not true!  At the start of book 1, Dixie is a super-hot blonde with huge breasts.  The idea was to do a bit of role reversal where the Bogart-esque private eye becomes the bombshell femme fatale.  A couple of times it's mentioned she looks like Greta Garbo--this being about 1938 and all.  There is a twist in that while the visible parts of Dixie look like Greta Garbo, under her panties she's got a pretty big schlong.  But that would make her more a hermaphrodite than "androgynous."  Since this person doesn't seem to have a great grasp of English, maybe she used the wrong word.

I'm not sure where this person got this idea that she's "not a ravaging beauty" unless she's thinking of book 3 where Dixie becomes a plainer woman and then a little girl--which is why book 3 is no longer on Amazon. 

It seemed kind of weird.  I thought, "are you writing your own story now?"  Maybe they are.

Then later they wrote reviews for all 3 Gender Swap Games books, starting with Pool Hustle Swap:

JJ was a pool player, he had several rules, one never player for money if you can't paid. Two always study, the game and players, three never act than better than you are , four always practice, improve test your skill, your talent. Five trust your senses and instincts. These rules served him well.
One night a strange man in a suit and bowler hat. Offered him a change, a strange change, if he won he get 10 or 20 million dollars in gold. But what does he have that is of value, well that is strange at best, and what happens in the middle of there game was interrupted.
Well something was taken from JJ was equally important to him, well just say that life change a 180 degrees.

I'm not sure where all these "rules" came from.  The character in the story never makes up any rules like that.  I kind of wish I had.  The rest of it is more or less true.

Then was this one for Swap Poker:

There is a saying the different of gambles and card players, a card player, knows how too but the cards down, you ask why because the cards felt cold. A gamble always felt that itch that he was lucky no matter what.
He should've listened to part of him, which he to stop, but he had that streak, which he couldn't stop. So to paid them back. He had to do something, he was transformed into a girl, for reasons that are unknown to him.

I really don't understand the first paragraph.  What the hell kind of "saying" is that?

And then there's this one for Mulligan: