Writing Wednesday: Imitiaton Is the Sincerest Form of Flattery or Ain't Life a Bitch?

As a long-time reviewer of crap on Amazon and Vine Voice(tm) and Amazon Prime member and stuff like that, I get offered free shit sometimes.  Like once a month Amazon picks out 4 of their upcoming books to offer for free on Kindle and I can download two.  I've done that a few times and the books usually suck.

Anyway, one of April's selections was called Boundary Crossed, which sounded like generic urban fantasy crap I have no interest in.  I was curious if it was about vampires or witches or angels or mermaids or what (vampires) and the first part of the description is this:

"The third time I died was early on a Monday morning, a week after Labor Day." As opening sentences go, that one is nothing less than awesome. I was hooked.

And I thought, hey that first line seems really familiar.  I've read something like that before.  I racked my brain for a couple of minutes and then went to check out a book on Amazon.  And yup, here's the opening line:

"Last night I died for the third time this week..."

That book is of course Oculus by Michael Offutt.  It was published in 2011, 4 years earlier!  I'm not saying it's plagiarism or anything, but it is a big coincidence.  And really Editor Person of the other book, I have to say Mr. Offutt's sentence is better.  It's a lot less bulky.  I mean the other sentence is a passive sentence whereas the one in Oculus is far more direct and active.  But hey, I guess that editor is blown away by passive sentences.

Anyway, did you ever see that movie Sliding Doors where Gwyneth Paltrow is racing to catch a subway train or something and they show two different outcomes, one where she makes it and one where she doesn't?  I think it's the version where she makes the train that turns out happy.  Or maybe not.  That's kind of how the writing world can work.  I mean, have you ever written something and then two weeks later you see a book or movie that's pretty much the same thing?  Like in 1995 I wrote a book called First Contact and the next year Star Trek:  First Contact comes out!

The point being two writers have two different books with similar opening sentences.  One book gets published by Amazon with all the marketing hoopla.  The other...not so much.  It's certainly not that the one book is bad and the other is good.  It's just that sometimes Fate is bullshit and you aren't at the right place at the right time.

The worst part is knowing there isn't shit you can do about it--except maybe throw more vampires in your book.

Another Year, Another Creepy Calendar!

It's Memorial Day, so who cares about blogs?  Anyway, by the time I finally got a place to live, my previous year's calendar was out of date, so eventually I decided to make a new one.  As I have for the last few years, I thought I'd go to Shutterfly and make a calendar of my Sims.

Predictably I used my Transformed series of stories as a basis for this year, with a few extras thrown in since I ordered it for 18 months (starting in May) so it'll be good for a while.  So here are the pictures:

Transformed Into a Little Girl

Transformed Into a Schoolgirl

Transformed Into a Whore

Transformed Into a Geek Girl

Transformed Into a Dominatrix

Transformed Into a Goth Girl

Transformed Into a MILF

Transformed Into a Bimbo

Transformed Into a Cougar

Transformed Into a Bride

Transformed Into a Pregnant Girl

Transformed Into a Maid

Transformed Into an Asian Girl

[Not created:  Transformed Into a Fat Girl.  I'm a jerk like that.]

A couple other ones included:

Transformed for Spring/Summer:

One Year As A Virgin:

Perfect Worlds:

Girl Power Series:

Boob panel!

Another Chance:

Another awesome year of creepy Sims!

The great thing is next year I can make a Sims 4 calendar!  Plus I get to torment you with Sims 4 pictures the rest of the year.  So far it's OK.  It's nice that it takes less time to load but I'm really pissed they took away the recolor feature on clothes, hair, etc.  Typical of EA to take away perfectly good features for no fucking reason, just as they always did with the NHL series of games when I used to play those.  Anyway, here's a first look at a Sims 4 Stacey Chance:

And here's the main character of the book I'm working on now, kind of a before-and-after:

Movies! 5/22/15

It's nice Disney gave themselves 3 weeks between "Avengers 2" and "Tomorrowland."  I mean it'd be kind of stupid for them to compete against themselves, right?

Apparently "Tomorrowland" is directed by Brad Bird who did "The Incredibles" among other things like "The Simpsons" and stars George Clooney.  The description on IMDB says, "Bound by a shared destiny, a teen bursting with scientific curiosity and a former boy-genius inventor embark on a mission to unearth the secrets of a place somewhere in time and space that exists in their collective memory."

Personally, my flop detector has been going off since I heard of this.  I mean it's about George Clooney and some kid going to find old-timey sci-fi land?  Yeah, that's going to go over real well with today's youth.  Like about as well as "John Carter."  Which if you'll recall the only reason Disney's film division didn't get wiped out in 2012 thanks to "John Carter" was "Avengers 1."  So I guess they figure with #2 having made a billion dollars already they're playing with house money as far as this goes.

America might prove me wrong, but I think it's a concept that just won't catch on with the average popcorn-shoveling 13-year-old boy who drives the movie industry.


I think the only serious threat is "Poltergeist," the remake of the 80s horror movie, though most people probably remember the "Family Guy" spoof better.  I never saw the original all the way through.  I saw the lame third one that took place in Chicago's Hancock Building.  That was pretty damned lame.  Probably as lame as this remake will be.  Yet because it's horror (and a name brand!) people might go watch it.

Do you suppose though that the House of Mouse/Ideas should be concerned that Avengers 2 dropped to #3 after three weeks?  And got its butt kicked by "Pitch Perfect 2?"  Maybe the gravy train is starting to slow down.

Writing Wednesday: Disproportionate Responses

There's that old saying that the punishment should fit the crime.  In books, TV, movies, etc that's not always the case, is it?  Think of that famous Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith where he survives a nuclear blast in a bank vault because he went down there to read so no one would give him shit about it.  Now the last man on Earth (or his neck of the woods) he finds a bunch of books and gleefully says, "There's time now!  All the books I want!"  And then his glasses fall off and the lenses break.  D'OH!  I always feel bad because really what did the poor guy do to be tortured like that?  He just wanted to read some goddamned books.

A bad review for my book My Wife Changed Me Into a Pinup Girl was titled, "he loved her, so she tortured him."  A succinct, albeit inaccurate way to describe the plot.  I described the plot in my P A to Z Challenge post.  The gist is that an old woman gets a couple of magic crystals and uses them to turn her husband into a 60s pinup girl he had been ogling in an antiques shop.

Now is being turned into a sexy young woman really a proportionate response for him checking out a hot chick on an old magazine cover?  I don't think anyone would say that it is.  Then again is going from a 70-something-year-old guy to that girl on the cover really such a punishment?  We should all be "tortured" like that.

Admittedly after that the wife lets her newfound power go to her head a bit and does a few other things to the husband to act out some naughty bedroom fantasies.  You could think of it as releasing 30 years of pent-up sexual frustration.  Still, probably not a proportionate response.

I can think of two other recent responses.  In another bad review, someone complained about my book Transformed Into a Pregnant Girl that the nasty woman who turned her boyfriend into a pregnant girl didn't show him any mercy.  To which my response would be, well he did kinda strangle her to death.  So, you know, you die and make a deal with the devil to come back to life, you might not be in the most forgiving mood either.

A more recent example would be Transformed for Mother's Day.  Every year Joe's wife gets super-duper pissed-off on Mother's Day because she can't have any babies.  So this year Joe decides he's going to sneak out for a little fishing before she can wake up.  That's when she reveals that she's a witch and decides to make Joe into her cute daughter Jo to have the perfect Mother's Day.

Does ditching your wife on Mother's Day really deserve being turned into a young girl and forced to do things like make her breakfast in bed and pictures out of macaroni and glitter?  Yeah, probably not.

But then if characters were all sane and rational, where would you get any drama?  If Burgess Meredith can just sit around reading books, then where's the message about Man's folly in destroying himself with nuclear weapons?

Sometimes you just have to go nuclear.

The Walking Dead and What It Can Teach Indie Writers

A little over a month ago I finally got around to watching The Walking Dead.  Mostly because Comcast's Watchathon Week was coming up and I had already watched all of Game of Thrones and wanted a new show to binge on.  (Then Comcast only made half a season available to kind of screw me on that score.)

The first season is OK, though it was only 6 episodes.  Things pick up in Season 2, most of which has them living on a farm, and in Season 3 when they occupy an old prison and tangle with the brutal "Governor."  After that things kind of slowed down until the tragedy of the Governor took center stage.  (And really how stupid were the people he holed up with to want to leave the apartment they had occupied after about a year when the only guy who died did so of natural causes?  I mean they were perfectly safe and then of course after they leave they die like a couple of weeks later.  Greener pastures my ass.)  Then it got kind of Game of Thrones-y with people all separated and different stories playing out until they all unite in Terminus.  I thought the Terminus thing got resolved a little too quickly.  (How about mousy abused wife Carol turning into fucking Ellen Ripley or Sarah Connor?)  After a little wandering the last season slowed when they got to the "safe haven" of Alexandria.  Really the best episode of the last season was the 9th one (the start of the second half of the season) when poor Tyreese meets his end.  By the end all they needed was the song from Gladiator to make it perfect:

On the whole I enjoyed the show and I have to say after you've binged it a few hours it's kind of weird to go outside and remember that society is pretty much intact and there are no rampaging zombies and you can't just go loot people's houses for whatever you want.  (Sometime maybe I'll try that and claim I watched too much Walking Dead beforehand.)

If there was one thing I didn't like is every time one of the main characters like Rick or Glenn or Daryl gets into some impossible situation, you know someone is going to come along to save them.  Like the whole Terminus thing where they're all caged up and then Carol the badass comes marching in to save them.  After almost 70 episodes it kind of starts to lose its impact.  But I guess that's kind of an action movie cliche.  I mean you know no matter how beat up Batman or Iron Man or John McClane gets, they aren't actually going to die.  At least not until the grosses go down.

My entry title promised a message for indie writers and here it is:  You have to stick together.  The reason Rick and company manage to survive as long as they do isn't just because of action movie cliches that bail them out; it's because they work together.  When you give in to petty in-fighting and bickering or you go rogue on your own, your chances of survival drop significantly.  You need someone watching your back and you should watch theirs in turn.  That's how you succeed.  Otherwise you're just going to be Walking Dead.

Movies! 5/15/15

The question this week is: Can Mad Max topple the Avengers?  I mean presuming the Avengers is still #1 and not "Hot Pursuit" in case we've entered some alternate reality.

Anyway, I never watched the original Mad Max movies with Mel Gibson.  I did like a Tina Turner song from one of the movies.  That's about as close as I ever got to the franchise. 

 Those were I think most notable for Mel Gibson talking with his natural Australian accent.  And a lot of souped-up cars and weird punk rock clothes and hairstyles.

I'm not sure if Mel Gibson shows up anywhere or not, but now Mad Max is Bane himself, Tom Hardy.  And um there's something called Fury Road that has nothing to do with Nick Fury of the Avengers.  I guess if you want 80s-style apocalyptic movies then you'd want to watch this.  Personally I think Avengers will kick Mad Max's ass down the Fury Road.  But that might just be me.

For teen and tween girls there's also "Pitch Perfect 2".  I'm not sure what "Pitch Perfect 1" was about.  Singing and junk maybe?  Like an extended episode of "Glee?"  I doubt anyone over 12 will be wanting to see this and probably no one with a penis.  I'm really going to feel bad for my brother in a couple of years when my nieces get old enough to want to watch this shit instead of "My Little Pony."

But of course the movie that will really bring down Tony Stark and company is "I'll See You in My Dreams" which stars the A-list duo of Blythe Danner and Sam Elliott.  IMDB says it's about "A widow and former songstress discovers that life can begin anew at any age."  I suspect this is for all the grandparents of the little girls watching "Pitch Perfect 2" and little boys watching "Avengers 2" and teenage boys watching "Mad Max Fury Road."

Give Peace a Chance

Late last night (or early this morning depending on your point of view) I wrote a really great rant about Andrew Leon and even made a clever graphic.  Then this morning I deleted it and then this evening I decided to extend the olive branch of peace.

What changed?  Well it's like an old episode of "The Simpsons" where Bart gives Mr. Burns a blood transfusion and Homer expects a big reward only to receive a card.  He dictates a really angry letter, but Marge convinces him to not send it until he's slept on the matter.  Which he does and in the night his anger ebbs and the next morning he decides not to send the letter.  (But Bart does and then mayhem ensues before everything works out in the end.)

Anyway, I felt good after I posted the rant but then this morning I didn't feel like I needed it anymore.  I got it all out of my system, so there was no need to keep it around anymore.  And then I went out and finished writing a book.

After dinner I decided on what I could do to put an end to this stupid bullshit feud.  So here's the statement I drafted and emailed:

So here's my one and only offer for peace:

I've given all of your books on Goodreads 5 stars.

I've changed all of my reviews of your books on Amazon to 5 stars

And I've given all of the books my sister rated on Amazon 5 stars to mitigate the damage.

That's the best offer you're going to get because whether you choose to believe it or not, I can't force my sister to remove or change reviews.

Or I guess you can keep ranting on your blog until even Beer in the Shower is sick of it.

It's up to you.

I forgot to write in there but I think it would also be good to adopt my brother's suggestion of agreeing from that point on to have nothing more to do with each other in any way.  That would seem common sense, wouldn't it?  That is something that has been in short supply.

I probably could have worded things a little more delicately, but I'm not Henry Kissinger.  Anyway, I think that's more than fair.  I'm not asking him to do anything except stop ranting about me on his blog.  Seems like he's getting a pretty good deal if you ask me.

I figure I should post this here before next Wednesday he says I was doing all that just to trick people into thinking I didn't give him any bad reviews.  I'm making my motivations very clear and as I said, it's up to him to decide where things go from there.

Personally I'm just sick of it.  Even unemployed people have better things to do.  You know, like trying to become employed.