Is HBO the Last Bastion of Real Journalism in America?

Over the last year that I've had an HBO subscription (something I still don't really understand...and now I have Showtime and Cinemax  too for...reasons) I've been able to catch up on some of thier shows.  More than Game of Thrones or Silicon Valley or Ballers I enjoy watching their most political shows:  Last Week Tonight with John Oliver and Real Time with Bill Maher.  The latter is more of a talking heads show, but they do usually include one conservative on the panel to make it more "fair and balanced" than Fox "News."

Last Week Tonight is a news magazine show that puts a funny spin on a lot of really scary shit.  The expose on Donald Drumpf, er, Trump was a thing of beauty, not that it really affected him in the polls much.  Some of the stunts they pull are hilarious too, like setting up their own phony church that was real according to IRS rules and giving cheap "premium" tickets to Yankee Stadium so ordinary people could freak out the rich people by dressing like Ninja Turtles or Left Shark.

What was really funny to me was one morning on CBS's morning show they announced a 60 Minutes expose on Congressional fundraising and pulling back the curtain on their call center.  Which was great...except it had already been featured on Last Week Tonight a few weeks earlier.  It is hilarious and sad to think a British comedian on HBO scooped the most venerable news magazine on TV.

Not long after that I was watching Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel and they had a story on Trump's golf course in Scotland and all the broken promises he made.  In his usual fashion he promised it would be the best golf course ever with a bunch of condos and such.  Eight years later there's a golf course but nothing else that was promised.  And the people of Scotland hate him so much they tried to get the UK parliament to ban him from ever entering the country.  I guess they didn't take it so well when he sued the whole freaking country for wanting to put wind turbines in the water near his precious golf course.

Immediately following that was Vice, which talked about another Trump golf course in Dubai.  This one did get the condos and such built...with essentially slave labor.  The reporter showed the awful conditions workers have to live in while they work for peanuts, much of which goes for bullshit passport and license fees and such.  I mean there's 15-20 guys stuffed into tiny rat-infested dorm rooms.  As if that's not enough, guys take shifts so it's not even just those 15-20 guys living there, it's more like 50-100!  The workers are brought in from other countries in the area--as far as Pakistan--with promises of high wages, 8 hour days, and overtime, but once they get there...not so much.  And if they want to strike for better conditions?  The police show up to beat the crap out of them.  The Trump Empire's response?  It's not our problem.  We just put Trump's name on the place.  You know, like Michael Jordan sneakers.

Not just to bag on Trump, the next story on that episode was about how China is basically colonizing most of Africa.  They start by "giving" poor countries like the Congo a soccer stadium.  Then they make contracts for buildings, railroads, and so forth that have extremely unfavorable terms for the African country.  Meanwhile they're also gobbling up the abundant natural resources of those countries to make our iPhones and cheap Wal-Mart shit.  While the US, Russia, and Europe have pretty much forgotten most of Africa, China has indebted the continent to them.

In another episode they went to Pakistan, where polio has had a resurgence in large part thanks to the hunt for bin Laden.  Someone posed as a doctor giving out vaccinations to get intel that helped locate bin Laden.  Now that and paranoid theories that the vaccination is actually sterilize people have people in Pakistan refusing to take polio vaccines and even murdering the people (mostly women) who are trying to give them out.  The result is that polio, which is mostly extinct in the rest of the world, is becoming rampant there.  It's heartbreaking when a guy who refused to let his family get vaccinated takes his granddaughter to the doctor and finds out she has polio now thanks to that paranoia and fear.  Equally heartbreaking is to think women who are trying to protect kids like that are being murdered with impunity.  Yet they bravely keep doing it; they ought to get a Nobel Peace Prize.  They're far more deserving than Obama was.

Watching all that while CNN, Fox "News," and the big three lamestream networks just endlessly talk about the same boring election shit makes me think HBO has surpassed them when it comes to actual journalism that matters.

But maybe you disagree.

Superhero Beatdowns: Raising the Stakes

Back in March I saw Batman v Superman, which was a real mess of a film.  Yesterday I finally got around to watching Avengers 2.5:  Civil War (ostensibly a Captain America film).  It was better than the second Avengers movie and certainly much better than BvS.

One area in particular was better:  the setup for the fight between the main heroes.  When Batman and Superman fought, there was really little point to it other than to echo The Dark Knight Returns.  There was really no reason for it other than Luthor kidnapped Superman's mommy and Batman had such a hard-on to kill Superman he fell right into the trap.  The resolution of the fight was pretty stupid too, though it did bring to light that strange coincidence their mommies have the same name.

In Civil War the setup is a little shaky in that how did Zemo know Falcon (or anyone else) would give up where Cap and Bucky were going to bring Iron Man there?  But once there, Iron Man learns that Bucky killed his parents as the Winter Soldier and that Cap found out about it after he got unthawed.  So when they get into an epic fight, there's actually some reason for them to fight, to have some hatred of each other.  And it doesn't end as stupidly as BvS; basically Cap and Bucky beat Iron Man and leave him.

In writing there's a lot of talk about establishing conflict.  The difference between these two movies is establishing conflict that means something, as opposed to just having two dudes fight for the hell of it.  For viewers to really care instead of just gawk at the screen, there has to be a convincing reason for them to be fighting.  Even if you're not having superheroes fight, you need a convincing reason for any conflict in your story to happen.  Unlike real life, things in novels can't just happen randomly or readers will get annoyed.  At the same time, it can't be so contrived that it's implausible.  Like if you have a character who's an alcoholic he can't just decide one day to get clean; there has to be an inciting event that causes him to hit rock bottom and change his ways.  Or if you have a character who's being abused, she can't just decide one day to not take it anymore.  And if you have a semi-retired superhero, he can't just decide to kill another superhero because that guy might one day, possibly do something bad.  That just doesn't make sense.

While comparing the two movies, Civil War did a better job of inserting its new characters.  The Spider-Man addition was a little forced, but some of that was probably that the movie was already under production when Marvel got the character back.  Black Panther was inserted far better.  Both were much more smoothly than the Flash and Aquaman in BvS.  Oh, hey, it's Aquaman and the Flash for absolutely no reason!  And they contribute nothing to the plot.  At least Spider-Man does stuff.

And of course far less obvious plot holes in Civil War.  Though I did wonder why German special forces were in Bucharest, Romania.  Germany didn't annex Romania, did they?

For all those reasons and more, Marvel still owns DC as far as cinematic universes go.

How Not to Write Good: Six Swings & A Miss

My frenemy John Oberon likes to poach a message board for his website so today I'm poaching one of his posts.

FROM MISSING TREES

Hi
I’m struggling a bit with my first paragraph, and having received some good advice, decided to post some options here. I’ve love to know which is preferred, and what makes the difference.
Thank you in advance!

Option 1 (original)
Lights off, Derek’s tyres crunched the gravel as he manoeuvred his van toward the twisted wooden railings. The moonlight barely touched the objects in its ambit; the struts on the swing seemed to randomly obscure. Now you see it, now you don’t. He imagined a scene from a black and white movie; a white van, spattered with muck, remnants of grit and salt from the slushy weather camouflaging its whiteness. A grubby man watching a young girl on the swing, waiting.

Option 2
Parked nose to twisted wooden railings, Derek killed the van’s engine and the lights. The moonlight’s ambit, confined by murky clouds, barely touched the objects in the park. He imagined a scene from a black and white movie. A van, it’s whiteness camouflaged by spattered muck and remnants of grit and salt from the slushy weather, concealed the diry man watching a young girl on the swing. Thinking. Waiting. Watching.

Option 3
Derek’s tyres crunched the gravel as he manoeuvred his van. He parked nose to twisted wooden railings and killed the lights. The moonlight’s ambit confined by murky clouds, concealing the objects in the park. The struts on the swing seemed to randomly obscure. Now you see it, now you don’t. He imagined a scene from a black and white movie; a white van, spattered with muck, remnants of grit and salt from the slushy weather camouflaging its whiteness and concealing the diry man as he watched a young girl on the swing.

Option 4
Derek imagined a scene from a black and white movie. A van, it’s whiteness camouflaged by spattered muck and remnants of grit and salt from the slushy weather, concealed the diry man watching a young girl on the swing. Tyres crunched the gravel as Derek manoeuvred his van until its nose touched the twisted wooden railings and then killed the lights. The moonlight’s ambit, confined by murky clouds, barely touched the objects in the park. The struts on the swing seemed to randomly obscure. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Option 5
Tyres crunched the gravel as Derek manoeuvred his van to the twisted wooden railings, and then killed the engine and the lights. The moonlight’s ambit, confined by murky clouds, barely touched the objects in the park. He imagined a scene from a black and white movie. A van, it’s whiteness camouflaged by spattered muck and remnants of grit and salt from the slushy weather, concealed the diry man watching a young girl on the swing. Thinking. Waiting. Watching.

Option 6
Derek’s tyres crunched the gravel as he manoeuvred his van. He parked nose to twisted wooden railings and killed the lights. The moonlight barely touched the objects in the park; the struts on the swing seemed to randomly obscure. Now you see it, now you don’t. He imagined a scene from a black and white movie; a white van, spattered with muck, remnants of grit and salt from the slushy weather camouflaging its whiteness and concealing the diry man as he watched the young girl on the swing.

RESPONSE

Well, I believe in saying what you want to say in as few words as possible, so here’s my go:
The gravel crunched as Derek parked his van by the twisted wood railings and killed the engine and lights. A moon couched in dark clouds bathed the park in an eerie glow, and he imagined a scene from an old film noir: a white van darkened by winter road spatter concealed a dirty man watching a young girl on the swing. Watching…thinking…waiting.

MISSING TREES

Don’t you trust hate it when someone writes your idea better than you did? LOL! Thank you John!! I’m still learning.

RESPONSE

Well, I didn’t mean to write it for you. I was just showing where you can prune and gain some efficiency in language. You could do something similar using your own words.

I read all of these and didn't really like any of them, including Oberon's.  The first thing is no matter which version I read it wasn't exactly clear to me whether Derek was the guy watching the young girl or if he was a guy watching the guy watching the girl.  Because really the way he thinks of the man as "grubby" or "dirty" isn't something the man would think of himself unless he has really shitty self-esteem.  It seems to put him outside himself, creating distance that makes it almost omniscient narration.

Assuming Derek is the peeper, what I think you want to do is focus on his watching the girl to show his obsession.  Get inside his head to let us know what he's seeing and thinking about as he's watching her.  Crunchy gravel, moonlight, and so forth isn't really important.  None of it helps to establish the character or the story.  I know that goes against Dwight Swain, but I think it'd make for a better opening for the reader.

Oberon might have noticed this himself if he weren't so focused on just pruning trees.  There's a time for pruning and a time for replanting.  This is the latter.

Amazon's Bizarre Giveaway System is an Epic Fail

For at least six or seven years Goodreads has had a giveaway widget you can use to create contests for paperback copies of your books.  I've used it a couple of times, though it hasn't really done much for me in terms of sales or reviews.  Mostly I think it's just costed me money.

Anyway, maybe since Amazon bought Goodreads a while back they decided to create their own giveaway widget.  I only found out when they emailed me about it.  So I tried it on a newer book.  I set up the giveaway without knowing much about it.  I literally forgot to promote it anywhere, except maybe I Tweeted the link once.

And then a few weeks later I got the results:  137 people entered, 0 won.  WTF?  What's the point of a giveaway if you don't give the fucking product away?  That's the whole basic function of a giveaway!

Well of course the problem is Amazon can't do anything simply.  Goodreads does it pretty easily:  up until a certain date/time you can enter the giveaway.  After the deadline it randomly selects however many people for the number of books being given away.  So if you have 1 copy to give away it picks one person.  If you have 10 copies, it picks 10 winners.

What does Amazon do?  They have three options, all equally dumb:

1. You assign odds from 10 to 2000, so each entrant has a 1:10 to 1:2000 chance to win.
2. You can pick a number so that every nth person wins (like every 3rd person)
3. You can pick the first however many people like those radio contests.

Each option has a downside.  The first I found out with mine.  I had it set at 2000 and that's probably why no one won, because it calculates each person individually, not collectively.  The second and third are both pretty lame unless you have tons of copies to give away, which would cost you an arm and a leg since you have to buy the copies of your book that you give away.  So if I want to give away 1 copy that wouldn't work for the third option because the first person to enter would win, thus defeating the ulterior motive of the giveaway, which is to bring attention to your book.  The second option I could set it as ever 100th person to enter wins, but that seems pretty unfair, don't you think?

Really, just adopt the Goodreads model, Amazon.  It's much simpler instead of needlessly complicated.  I don't think I'll be using it much in the future.  Mostly because Amazon's model sucks and also because as I said, giveaways don't do much.

Grumpy Bulldog + the Machine

Last month I got around to watching Trumbo, the biopic on screenwriter Dalton Trumbo.  During the "red scare" of the late 40s-early 50s he was jailed for refusing to answer questions from Congress.  After he got out of jail, he couldn't get a screenwriting job from any of the major studios, who were all too chickenshit to hire blacklisted writers or actors.

So Trumbo latched onto a way to get around the system.  He went to pretty much the shittiest non-porno studio in town and offered to bang out screenplays in a matter of days for about $1200 per.  After he impressed them with his initial efforts, he hit onto a way to make it pay even bigger:  he roped in all his friends who were also blacklisted and had them take on assignments for him.  Then he'd do any rewriting necessary.  The idea was even if he wasn't being paid as much, the volume could make up for it.

There was an obvious drop in quality in large part because the studio didn't have a lot of money and didn't really give a shit about making arty pictures.  At one point the John Goodman character says they bought a gorilla suit and they need to use it, so Trumbo assigns one of his writers to write a gorilla story.  The whole thing was basically what James Frey did years later according to one of Offutt's posts.  Kind of an assembly line writing machine.

At least according to the movie, Trumbo pretty much spent every waking hour on this.  He would often sit in the bathtub for hours outlining stories with a table and easel mounted over the tub.  (Which is something you might want to consider if you're not too fat to fit in a standard tub.)  He even had his kids helping to answer phones and drop scripts off with various directors.

Not all of his friends took to this new arrangement as well as he did.  One with cancer (played by Louis CK in the movie) got fed up and complained that he wanted to write something that wasn't shit.  Ultimately Trumbo felt the same way, which was when he wrote The Brave One, which won an Oscar--under an assumed name until 1975.

I could see some parallels to what I had been doing the last 18 months or so, only on a much, much smaller scale.  If I could have gotten $1200 for every book I wrote that would have been awesome.  Some of them I might have made $12 on.  It was the same principal though in cranking out one after another and only somewhat caring about the quality of it.  Even if each book didn't make a lot, the volume was more important.  Plus it was something to do.

When I was unemployed, usually I'd do some writing every day just to do something for a few hours.  After I started working again, even if it wasn't full-time, I stopped writing as much.  While before I might have had a new book done every week--or sometimes less--now it's more like two weeks or more for each novelette or whatever they would be called in the 10,000-40,000 range.  I honestly don't think it hurts the book sales all that much since there doesn't seem to be a correlation between releasing a new book and a rise in book sales.

Another thing is I have to almost make a conscious effort to throw a sex scene in the ones that are erotica.  I don't really care much about the sex and like with new books, there's no real correlation between the amount of sex and how it sells.  The ones that are more provocative like Transformed Into a Dominatrix lag behind other ones for whatever reason.  I've never really cared that much about the sex; like my frenemy John Oberon says, it pretty much stops a story dead.  Really I wish I could do like baseball or wrestling and bring someone else in like a relief pitcher or tag team to write the sex crap for me so I can just focus on stories.

Thinking about it, publishers like Solstice Publishing, who originally put out A Hero's Journey, kind of use the same method.  They gobble up a bunch of stories, put a minimum amount of effort into editing, covers, etc., and hope the volume of titles makes up for the lower number of units sold.  If you're the one making 60% it does work out a lot better.

Like Trumbo and his friend, sometimes I'd like to do something more literary.  But as in the past anytime I think that I wonder, "Who the hell would read it?"  Only if I gave it away for free.  In which case, what's the point?  I'm long past the point where I think The New Yorker or whatever other magazines that still publish stories would ever publish mine.  Or that I could ever win a Pulitzer or National Book Award or something--not that I ever really did seriously entertain such notions.

Last year I did like Trumbo with The Brave One and worked in some time to do some non-gender swap stories.  One has sold some copies--in the UK.  The other hasn't hardly sold anything, even though it's a zombie story.  Apparently people can't get enough of zombie stories--unless I write one.  That's not much motivation to deviate from the usual.

It does suck being typecast sometimes.  It'd be nice to have a little more creative freedom, though I've found the subject to be pretty fertile, so long as you're creative.  Or maybe I should just try to recruit a few other writers to do the rough drafts and I can do any rewrites and take a cut of the profits.  Then I get money without having to do as much work.  It is a genius idea.

What's the Best Prequel? A Prequel That's Not Written Like a Prequel!

A long while back I bought the omnibus of the Han Solo Adventures, three books from 1979-1980.  I remember my dad had originals of them but I hadn't ever read them.  I finally got around to it this year.  The books are not written all that well and obviously there's not a lot of continuity because only one movie existed at the time.  Still, they were enjoyable books about Han and Chewie and the Millennium Falcon before they ever went to Tatooine.

What was really great to me is these were technically prequels but they weren't written like prequels.  By that I mean they weren't written with the purpose of trying to give Han Solo some grandiose origin.  They weren't written to hide a lot of "Easter Eggs" for fans.  They were just Han and Chewie flying around doing shit--and that was perfectly fine with me.

There's going to be a Han Solo prequel movie and I'm sure it's going to do all the lame prequel stuff like tell us about Han's childhood and give him some wonderful destiny and settle important questions like where Han's vest came from.  I'm sure Boba Fett, Jabba the Hutt, Greedo, and maybe even Lando (if someone at Lucasfilm decides to remember he exists) will show up.  They'll probably go into how Han met Chewie and got hold of the Falcon.  There will probably be references to Darth Vader and Princess Leia and all that.

These three books don't deal with any of that (because most of it didn't exist yet) and I didn't miss it at all.  Because I really don't give a shit about where Han Solo came from any more than I care about where Wolverine (and his jacket) came from or where Darth Vader came from.

It's the kind of thing I wish they'd done with the new Star Trek movies instead of that lame, implausible origin story in the first one.  Or if Better Call Saul instead of trying to give him some pathetic origin had just focused on some outlandish cases he might have done before getting involved with Walter White.

I think I've said before that the problem with prequels is they're always trying to add significance to things that don't need it (Wolverine's jacket) and give every character some "tragic" whiny backstory to explain why they are who they are.  But I don't know, would you rather know where Han Solo's vest came from or watch him pull some con job and escape some Imperials in the Falcon?

So like I said in the title, the best prequel is one that isn't written like it's supposed to be a prequel.  In other words, a story that's written to show the character in action instead of trying to explain a familiar character.  Take note, Hollywood!

Shutting Down the Haters

It seems every other day there's an article in my Facebook feed about JK Rowling "shutting down haters" on Twitter.  Seems like there's a double standard there as the hugely famous author gets lauded for responding to critics while the rest of us are told to STFU.  Not that I ever follow that advice because I really don't give a shit.

Recently someone on Smashwords "reviewed" Chance of a Lifetime and it really bugged me.  Not just because of the 1-star rating.  Mostly because of the many, many factual errors.  If you're going to hate on a book, at least get your goddamned facts straight!  Some of the things he said were so outlandishly untrue that it really, really pisses me off Smashwords doesn't let you respond to reviews or that I can't email this jackass to tell him all the shit he got wrong.

Okay, in reading Fiction there is an an agreement to accept the paradigms on which the author does base the plot While in "Escaping Earth" from the same author (the title has been changed to "Sea Sheperd" in the meantime) there are a provocative lot of nonsense like, the backside of the moon is always dark and there is no gravity on the moon, only on the planets, it's okay for me that in "Chance of a lifetime" one injection of DNA can change a dead, mid-aged policeman into a very lively girlie of 18, even though I always believed DNA will form the next generation, not the actual specimen.
The implementation at first resulted in a sweet story. You can not help grinning when the girl, Ex-Policeman, frequently is on the brink of breaking out in tears, develops a strong urge to purchase shoes and always worries about her weight.
But to keep the interest of the reader and the suspense, the author takes refuge to lots of sex scenes, which I think are not needed to form a picture of the characters (who somehow are all alike anyhow. the policemen reborn as 18yo girl; the daughter of the policeman; the daughter of the other policeman; the gangsters who differ from each other mostly by the time of their demise etc.). and, worse, to ever more violence.
Still worse, the book ends in mid-action, as was the case with "Escaping Earth". There the last page was that the cruel space monsters were under way to kill all beings on Earth, in "Chance of a lifetime" the scientists find a way to reconvert the hero from a young girl to an adult man and then the story stops. I have downloaded a lot of books from smashwords and purchased some follow-ups from the good authors and interesting series but all of them were faire enough to write a completed novel, not leaving all open ends so the reader should spend the money to find out how the story ends.

Yeah, so here's all the stuff wrong:

• Escaping Earth was just a working title.  It was changed to STAR Shepherd.  Because it takes place in space, not underwater.  Duh.
• The stuff injected into Steve Fischer isn't just DNA.  That would make no sense.  It's described as "a combination of hormone treatments, gene therapy, and stem cells to reverse the aging process."  Just some vaguely scientific stuff.  If I wanted to get more scientific I could throw in a "retrovirus."  Because yes an injection of DNA wouldn't do shit.  Which is why it's not.
• A lot of sex scenes?  I think there are three at most.
• "the daughter of the other policeman" is dead.  That's mentioned a number of times.  There are whole paragraphs about how it's affected the other policeman and his wife.  Duh.

The one I take the most umbrage with is this whole "ends in mid-action" and "the scientists find a way to reconvert the hero from a young girl to an adult man and then the story stops."  That isn't even remotely true.  This is the end of the book:

.  I hurry outside, to stand opposite a couple of smokers by the front doors.  “Does this mean you have good news?”

“Not as good as I’d like,” Dr. Palmer says.  “I’ve looked over the formula Luther gave us and Dr. Nath’s notes.”

“They’re good?”

“The formula matches what we took from your blood.  It’s definitely FY-1978.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”

“It is.  And Dr. Nath’s notes seem to be legitimate.”

“Are they helpful?”

“They should be.  Gita was nothing if not thorough.  A lot of what she did, she documented in these files.”  Dr. Palmer sighs.  “Maybe she knew they were coming after her.”

“Maybe,” I say.  “Maybe she’s just thorough, like you said.”

The doctor sighs again.  “Anyway, I think we’ll have our first batch ready to test in a couple of months.”

“That’s great.  Isn’t it?”  When it comes to this biology stuff I still don’t understand most of what Dr. Palmer says.  I figure I’ll take a couple of college classes in that area.

“Yes.  But there’s still a long way to go before we can try it on humans.  Years of testing on animals.”

It’s my turn to sigh.  Though I’ve been a woman for a month now, I still check the mirror every morning to make sure there’s no change.  I’ll have to do that for years to come.  “I guess we already knew that, didn’t we?”

“Right, but look on the bright side:  it shouldn’t take us as long now.”

“Fifteen years instead of twenty?”

“Maybe.  Don’t lose hope, Stacey.  We can beat this thing.”

“I know.”  I smile a little and think of how many times the doctors said that to Jenny.  She did beat it for three years, but eventually the disease won.  Maybe that’s how this will be.  Maybe by the time Dr. Palmer finds a cure there won’t be anything left to cure.

Then I look inside.  Through the doors of the mall I can see Maddy and Grace at our table.  Maddy sees me and waves.  I wave back to her.  Things could be a lot worse.  This isn’t the end for me; it’s a new beginning.  Like Dr. Palmer said, it’s a chance to start over again.  Maybe this time I’ll get it right.

“Thanks for letting me know, Doctor,” I say.  “And good luck.”

“You too.”

I hang up the phone.  Then I go inside to rejoin my friends.

I don't know what the dude is on to think that stops the story "in mid-action" or that the scientists have found a cure.  It says right there it would take YEARS of testing on animals and 15 years instead of 20.  I'm not sure how much clearer that can be. I'm not sure how it's not a "completed novel" just because every single thing isn't wrapped up.  Jeez they didn't destroy Darth Vader and the Empire in the first Star Wars.  That's how you have a series.

After this "review" I'm not sure how many books this guy has read, but I bet they had a lot of pictures.

While I'm shutting down haters, someone wrote this "review" of my book Army of the Damned:

Remake of the Wingman series with zombies

Well, yes, that's the core concept.  Why do you think the cover is designed to look like a book of that series?  Why do you think the main character's name is a reversal of the main character of the Wingman books?  Even the "Sky Ghost" is a reference to the last few Wingman books.  Yeesh, how much more obvious could I make it?

Someone did this same kind of thing with my Girl Power book, whining that the main characters are like Superman, Batman, the Flash, and Aquaman.  And it's like, yes, that's the core concept.  Congratulations on figuring out the obvious!  I mean the book starts in the Batcave with a rich guy and his butler.  The super strong character works at a newspaper with a female reporter.  The aquatic guy is king of an underwater kingdom.  I mean, could I make it more obvious?  Yeesh.

But if you want to actually "review" something, you need to do more than just identify the concept.  You need to actually express why that's a good thing or bad thing. Though since the same person gave the book just 2 stars on Goodreads, I suppose he couldn't think of anything intelligent to say, though on Amazon you don't need to use words; you can just write 10/10 or 1/10 like someone in England did with a couple of my books.  That's peak laziness right there; it's the least you can do besides nothing.  Though in those case nothing would be better.

New Releases! Or New to You Anyway...

Back in November 2012 me, Neil Vogler, and Sean Craven published a book of a bunch of flash fiction stories that was called We Are Now through a new outfit called December House.  I found out last month from Mr. Vogler that the publisher has since folded.  He took the opportunity to fold his stories into a collection called Crash Bang Money, which is available now!

I decided to rip off his idea, though I spent far less time and effort on it.  I mean I literally spent less than a half-hour formatting the file and making a cover for what's called Last Dance & Other Stories.  There are 23 flash fiction stories that are a wide variety of literary, sci-fi, and fantasy.  I operated under the philosophy of just doing whatever the hell I wanted instead of working a particular theme or anything.  Plus I saw my role in the project as providing some filler for the better stuff the other guys were doing.  All of the stories are less than 1000 words.

If you did buy We Are Now so long ago (or read them on the website) the file I used is the original I sent to the publisher.  It includes a few stories they didn't include because I guess some of them were just too weird like the first story about the chef at an intergalactic all-you-can-eat buffet.

The titular story is about a soldier in World War II who dies but is given the chance to go back for a last dance with his sweetheart.  I think that was one people liked more.

There was a second year of flash fiction from December House.  The theme that year was the seven sins.  I was lazy and decided to write mine as all part of one story.  The stories tangentially involve my superhero character the Scarlet Knight, though like comic book series like Astro City, the real focus isn't on the hero but a security guard at a bank who gets overshadowed by the Scarlet Knight during a robbery attempt.  He develops an unhealthy obsession with her and ultimately finds someone who helps him to take his revenge--or try to.  It's called Mortal Sins because it's about sins and the idea is he wants to make the seemingly invincible hero mortal.

I think the stories are supposed to take place between books 4-5 of the series.  Or maybe 1-2.  Or maybe 2-3.  I don't really remember anymore and it's not that important.  You don't need to know anything about the series to read the stories.

They're 99 cents each or free if you have Kindle Unlimited or Amazon Prime and want to borrow it.

Stuff I Watched: April Edition

So what all did I watch during the A to Z Challenge?  Find out now!  By popular demand, I'm organizing the reviews by rating.

5 Stars (Awesome!):
Only the Dead Have Seen the End of War:  A gut-wrenching documentary by Australian journalist Michael Ware who spent 7 years in Iraq.  A lot of it focuses on the heaviest fighting from 2004-2006.  So much of it is just absolutely brutal and disturbing.  It's better than any movie Hollywood has put out for the sole reason that it's real footage with real people, truly capturing the horror of a war taking place mostly on the streets.  It's only 85 minutes on HBO and while in some ways I don't want it to be longer, not much of the last few years of Ware's time there is documented.  But let's hope there's not a sequel anytime soon. (5/5)
4 Stars (Really Good):
The Big Short:  Remember when the housing market tanked in 2007 and 2008?  A group of guys were betting on it to fail almost 3 years earlier.  They didn't really know each other but through various ways they all hit onto the same thing:  the mortgage market was a steaming cesspool rife with corruption and greed.  The film shows a lot of the greedy idiots like realtors and bankers who were so completely oblivious to what was going on, thinking the good times would last forever.  And we see some of the poor schmucks who ended up getting sucked into the abyss and being completely screwed.  The film manages to maintain a light tone through much of it by breaking the 4th wall and simplifying financial concepts by having hot girls explain things like what the fuck a CDO is.  It does get to be a little long and what's depressing is to know that absolutely nothing has changed except that they call a CDO something else.  So I guess get ready for The Big Short 2 in a few years. (4/5)
Trumbo:  Who is Trumbo?  I had only heard of a Trumbo who played for the Anaheim Angels, but the one dealt with in this movie is Dalton Trumbo, a popular screenwriter until the "red scare" of the late 40s, early 50s.  By refusing to answer questions in Congress he's sent to prison and comes out to write under assumed names.  Ultimately he won Oscars for Roman Holiday, The Brave One, and Spartacus while penning many, many other movies.  The movie's a bit too long, but the point is a good one with the Trumps of the world seemingly poised to bring back "Un-American" committees. (4/5)
3 Stars (Good):
Spotlight:  Since according to the Academy this was the best picture of the year, I should probably give it more stars, but this is I think a case of naming the most important picture more than the "best" picture.  The title comes from the elite Spotlight investigative team at the Boston Globe.  In 2001 a new editor (a Jew from Miami) comes to the paper and asks about Catholic priests supposedly molesting kids and so the Spotlight team gets to work.  The movie is interesting and obviously it's an important subject and the cast is stellar, but none of the characters have much depth, other than being tenacious reporters.  And it's obviously not the most entertaining movie out there, especially with as long as it is.  But still you should probably see it at least once. (3.5/5)
Blood Sucking Bastards:  This is like Office Space--With Vampires!  A couple of office drones find their friends disappearing and coming back pale and surprisingly productive.  A pretty funny indie comedy-horror movie, especially if you've worked in an office. (3/5)
Frequently Asked Questions About Time Travel:  Shaun of the Dead meets Back to the Future II in this indie comedy.  Three British mates are at their favorite pub when they find out there's a "time leak" in the bathroom that transports them to different intervals of the future.  In one version they find out they've become legendary figures, in another there's been an apocalypse of giant ants running amok, and another everyone in the pub is dead.  The key McGuffin is a piece of paper on which the guys wrote...something.  It's a little confusing (like most time travel movies) how all the future bits are supposed to fit together.  And they didn't have money for great special effects, but otherwise it's fun and funny, especially if you like more British humor. (3/5)
Creed:  This spin-off from the Rocky franchise focuses on Apollo Creed's illegitimate son Adonis.  (Apollo, Adonis...get it?)  It basically uses the same formula as Rocky only with Adonis as Rocky and Rocky as the wise old trainer (Burgess Meredith in the original) and you can pretty much predict how it's all going to go down.  Not that it's a bad movie.  It's a good spin-off. Point down though for not including Bill Conti's iconic "Gonna Fly Now" in the training montage.  It'd be like watching a Star Wars movie and not having John Williams's main theme. (3/5)
Daredevil Season 2:  Now that Daredvil has taken down the Kingpin, he's set to bring peace and order to Hell's Kitchen.  But then the Punisher starts mowing down gangs and Daredevil's old girlfriend Elektra shows up with ninjas on her heels.  The mystical pot that can bring people back to life was a little too unrealistic for the otherwise fairly grounded stuff.  A few references are made to Jessica Jones and Luke Cage but still no overbearing crossover setups yet. Anyway, while the Punisher was good and Elektra was OK, the Kingpin is still the badass villain of the series, so let's hope he's out of prison for Season 3.  (3/5)
The Legend of Jimmy the Greek:  ESPN documentary on Jim Snyder, aka Jimmy the Greek, a gambling expert who made it big as part of CBS's NFL Today show from the mid-70s to early 80s, until some comments about black athletes being "bred" to be superior to white ones were caught on TV and ended his career.  Unlike some of these 30 for 30 shows it actually gave you a fairly complete look at his life. (3/5)
Fantastic Lies:  ESPN documentary on rape allegations against the Duke lacrosse team in 2006.  A stripper accused the team of inviting her to a house for a party and then raping her.  In a bizarre turn the accused went free and the prosecutor went to jail (for a day) for manipulating evidence. The only part that confused me was whether there was a party that night with strippers and booze.  Because even if there wasn't rape, I'm pretty sure the players weren't all 21 and over.  This is one of those that doesn't use a narrator; it just strings the interviews together to present the narrative.  I usually prefer someone to put all the dots together for me because I'm lazy that way. (3/5) (Fun Fact:  At the end they go through all the main parties in the text and the only one who agreed to be interviewed was the stripper--except she's doing 14-18 years for murder now and the prison didn't let her be interviewed.)
Tim Richmond: To the Limit:  I don't like NASCAR but this ESPN documentary isn't really about NASCAR.  Tim Richmond was a rich kid who in the 80s joined the race circuit and became a huge success.  But in a foreshadowing of Magic Johnson and the NBA, Richmond's party boy lifestyle led to him contracting AIDS and the ostracizing after that because of the fear and stupidity concerning that disease in the 80s.  He never actually said he had the disease publicly, but it a dirty little secret.  Between the disease itself and rigged NASCAR drug tests, Richmond never raced again from 1987 until his death in 1989.  Just to understand how bad things were then, the hospital charged his family $100 more to handle his dead body.  So even if you're not a race fan, this has a poignant message. (3/5)
Once Brothers:  This ESPN documentary deals with Vlade Divac and Drazan Petrovic, two basketball players from the former Yugoslavia.  The former was Serbian and the latter Croatian, which didn't really matter growing up, but around 1992 Yugoslavia broke up and all the sudden that stuff became important.  Their friendship broke up when  Divac shut down a guy storming a court during basketball world championships with a Croatian flag.  Petrovic took that personally and then died in a car accident in Germany before they could make up.  Of course to Americans the whole Yugoslav civil war seems pretty stupid.  At least our civil war we could pin on slavery as a cause.  These guys were fighting about religion and even less than that.  It'd be like Michigan and Ohio fighting to the death for almost a decade over Toledo instead of not really fighting and having a settlement negotiated by the Federal government after a few weeks.  Anyway, this helps to put a face to all the terrible things going on over there. (3/5)

2.5 Stars (OK):
Big Eyes:  I hadn't really heard of these weird paintings of kids with really big eyes before, (they look kind of like anime/manga characters) but apparently they were a big deal back in the early 60s.  In what's basically a real-life sitcom plot, Margaret Keane's new husband takes credit for her paintings, initially claiming that no one would take her seriously and then later that it's better not to rock the boat. Eventually the truth comes out when a judge issues a paint-off in the courtroom.  It's a fun movie even if it is tackling some serious issues. (2.5/5)
Betrayed:  Debra Winger infiltrates a white supremacist group but within minutes falls in love and starts banging one of the head guys, Tom Berenger.  There really should have been more of a lead-up to them falling in love and sleeping together.  What's funny is the supremacists around the country all communicate with like newsgroup boards, which in 1988 were cutting edge technology. (2.5/5)
Gravy:  In this black comedy, a Mexican restaurant is taken over on Halloween by three psychotic cannibals. Their plan is to eat the restaurant's staff while playing sadistic games with them.  Though it doesn't take long for them to get sloppy.  It's as odd as it sounds, but fun too. (2.5/5)
Grilled:  Ray Romano and Kevin James are meat salesmen (like Omaha Steaks, not butchers) who run afoul of the mob.  It was pretty good since Romano and James are not exactly known as comic geniuses.  Not embarrassingly bad like Paul Blart at least. (2.5/5)
Child 44:  Tom Hardy is a soldier in the USSR in 1953 who starts to investigate the murder of his friend's child.  But when he asks too many questions, he and his wife are sent to some much-crappier place and he finds the one murder is just the tip of the iceberg.  Though the actual killer is less important than the government cover-up. (2.5/5)
Ash vs. Evil Dead:  I didn't really like the first two Evil Dead movies, but for just the heck of it I watched the first season of the Starz series on demand.   This ignores Army of Darkness, the third movie featuring Ash (Bruce Campbell) who years ago went to a cabin in the woods and spent two movies being under attack by monsters known as "Deadites."  This takes place 30 years later when Ash gets high and reads from the book known as the Neconomicon or Book of the Dead.  This brings the Deadites back and with a couple of co-workers he has to try to stop them.  The series is as goofy and cheesy as the movies, with copious amounts of fake blood.  The ending is unsatisfying.  It's supposed to set up a second season, but I'm sure there was a better way to do it, like the old-fashioned they think they've killed all the bad guys but one manages to escape. (2.5/5) (Fun Fact:  New Zealand stands in for Michigan, which makes perfect sense, right?)
Spring Broke:  A history of spring break in Daytona Beach and Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.  Like a lot of things it started organically back in the 60s and then started to get increasingly commercial in the 70s and 80s, first thanks to Hawaiian Tropic (which was invented by a local in Ft. Lauderdale) and then it was taken over by MTV in the mid-80s until the locals ran them out of town in the early 90s.  Though they don't outright say it, a lot of the reason locals probably wanted spring break to stop in spite of the money it made was when MTV started bringing in more rap and hip-hop artists.  Seeing all those black people around town probably fired up the good ol' boys.  Since then spring break has moved to other places.  Back in the 80s my family visited my great-grandma in Panama City Beach a couple of times and there wasn't really anything going on, but in the 90s it became one of the big places, so I guess we dodged a bullet.  (2.5/5)  (Fun Fact: The documentary is narrated by Robin Leach, just in case you thought he was dead.)
Run Ricky Run:  Ricky Williams won the Heisman Trophy in 1998 and New Orleans traded all their draft that year to get him.  But injuries kept him from making an impact there.  Just as he was making an impact in Miami in 2004 he was suspended for pot. Like many twentysomethings he went on to try to find himself before making a comeback in 2009.  I'm not sure if even he believes all the shit he says. (2.5/5)
Rand University:  Speaking of controversial, pot-smoking NFL players from the late 90s and 2000s, this ESPN documentary focuses on Randy Moss's early years.  It's actually a pretty familiar story:  black kid with no father and a mother who works all the time and is big into church, gets into trouble around town, and makes it big as an athlete.  The titular "Rand University" is the 7/11 where those guys not so lucky to be freakishly talented hang out and drink cheap beer.  (2.5/5)

2 Stars (Meh):
Kiss the Girls:  Ashley Judd is kidnapped but escapes and helps Morgan Freeman find the serial kidnapper/murderer.  I didn't peg who it was so I guess I should give it props for that. (2/5)
Wish I Was Here:  This is the movie Zach Braff suckered the world into Kickstarting by saying it was a sequel to his only successful movie Garden State (which wasn't really that successful even).  It turns out to be a bit of bait-and-switch and it's not actually a sequel to Garden State.  It's a "spiritual sequel" in that it's sort of the same, but different characters.  Mostly it's a dreary slog as Zach Braff deals with his father dying and kids getting kicked out of Jewish school.  There are a few good parts, but it really lacks Natalie Portman's energy that propelled Garden State.  Makes me glad I didn't contribute to the Kickstarter.  (2/5)
The Danish Girl:  In Denmark (where everyone talks with an English accent for some reason) in 1926 a semi-famous painter starts dressing as a girl for...reasons.  Honestly there wasn't much context to why he suddenly wanted to go around as a woman; One of the Guys had a better setup for the sex change.  This obviously puts strain on his marriage to another painter.  Then he foolishly tries to get a sex change.  In 1926.  I mean come on, they didn't even have penicillin yet and you're trying to carve out a vagina?  That's not going to end well.  Anyway, a well-made but slow movie.  At the end in text they mentioned that he had written these diaries as a woman and was some great symbol to the transgender movement; the diaries would have been helpful to include because really the movie doesn't capture much of the internal struggle. (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  Since the movie edition of this book came out, it's been steadily number 1 on Amazon's transgender list, boxing out books like mine.  I always decry it as a ringer.)
Taking a Life:  Anjelina Jolie is a profiler trying to find a killer who was thought to have died 20 years ago.  Then she inadvertently gets knocked up by the killer.  Awkward! (2/5)
Fear the Walking Dead:  I watched the first season and second season premiere one day when I was ill.  I fell asleep a couple of times.  The first episode introduces the dysfunctional family the series mostly focuses on.  Eventually they go to a government-run "safe zone" which anyone who has seen a zombie movie before knows will be overrun at some point.  At the start of season 2 they get on a boat, finally using an idea I thought of like 6 years ago.  I hope they introduce pirates in the second season.  Arr, matey!  Anyway, this wasn't all that interesting.  Maybe because I kept tuning out that I had trouble of keeping track of the characters. (2/5)
Need for Speed:  It's Fast & Furious meets Cannonball Run when the kid from Breaking Bad joins a street race to win a bunch of cars and avenge his dead friend.  It's a pretty stupid movie and the final race isn't even all that epic.  Mostly I appreciated it ironically because a few months ago I got Need for Speed Most Wanted free and a lot of the cars in the movie are also in the game, like the Koeningsegg Agera he drives in the final race.  If you've never played the game it's probably pretty lame.  (2/5)  (Fun Fact:  At one point they seem to drive from Michigan to Arizona in one night.  If only I had known it was that easy back in 2014.)
Pixels:  Like Fantastic Four, I hated this a lot less than other people.  I didn't really like it either.  The plot makes no sense, starting with Kevin James as president.  But as someone who had an Atari 2600 back in the day I enjoyed the old video game references. (2/5)
1 Star (Crap):
Waterworld:  It's as bad as you've ever heard.  While it was the most expensive movie of its time the effects still aren't great, there's a lot of hammy acting, and the chosen kid is almost as annoying as Jake Lloyd in Phantom Menace. (1/5) (Fun Fact:  Despite the colossal failure of this, someone let Kevin Costner make another big budget post-apocalyptic sci-fi movie just a couple of years later.  And it didn't do much better.)
The Story of Minecraft:  One time in a store I asked my brother what the hell Minecraft was and he didn't know either, so when I saw this on Crackle I thought maybe it'd clear that up for me.  Except it's not really the story of Minecraft.  That would mean actually detailing the inception and creation and rollout of the game.  Maybe actually talking to the people who created it.  Instead this just interviews random people who play the game, mostly YouTube "celebrities" who post about it.  So 90 minutes later I'm still not all that sure what the fuck Minecraft is. (1/5)
Todd Margaret:  I watched The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret a few years ago on Netflix.  It's a British series about a dumbass played by Arrested Development's David Cross who goes to England to sell an energy drink and as the title suggests makes increasingly poor decisions that lead pretty much to Armageddon or something.  For some reason IFC decided to do a reboot or whatever where that series was a dream or hallucination or something.  And the "real" Todd Margaret is pretty much the opposite--he even has hair instead of being bald.  And that's pretty much the whole first episode, him going to England and seeing some of the same people and doing everything the opposite as before.  And none of it is funny.  At all.  I honestly ought to give it 0 stars. (1/5)

Share the Darkness

When Batman v Superman came out in March, there were plenty of critics (and average people, I suppose too) who complained that it was too dark and gloomy, unlike Marvel movies.  Superhero movies should be light and fluffy!  From a pure profit motive that might have been a good idea for DC/WB.  I mean leading up to the film's release they were talking about how there could be an R-rated cut, which signaled pretty well that it wasn't family friendly.  That kind of limited how many kids parents would let go to see it.

About the same time, I got a two-star review on my pseudonym's book Transformed for Thanksgiving, which said:

Well written story. The characters I found to be very sad. The wife has 38 years to learn how selfish her husband is. Yet when changed she becomes as useless as he ever was. So nothing to enjoy reading . Most of us live with unhappiness, thus reading about it is no fun. 

[As a side note, the "reviewer" was apparently under the impression the main character got married the moment she was born.]

The story was one of those that originally I thought would be kind of funny.  At Thanksgiving a woman is tired of her husband just sitting around watching football and stuff.  She makes a wish on the wishbone and finds herself transported to an alternate universe or whatever where her husband is a shy hippie girl and she's the stronger, more dominant one.  It doesn't take long before her new power goes to her head.  In the course of one day she cheats on her husband and just about rapes him in bed.  So, yeah, it got a bit darker than I thought.  If you were looking for a lighthearted, heartwarming tale that wasn't really it.  But then why are you reading erotica in the first place?  If you want light and fluffy get one of those cozy cat mystery books.

Honestly I don't think just saying "this was sad" or "this was dark" is a valid criticism.  Shakespeare wrote comedies and tragedies because there's a time when you want Taming of the Shrew and there's a time when you want Romeo & Juliet.  It's like with music:  if I'm in a down mood I might listen to Everybody Hurts by REM or if I'm in a good mood I'll listen to Shiny Happy People, also by REM.  Even simpler, not many people can eat the same thing every single day.  You need variety or else it gets to be a drag.

So when you bitch that a story is dark or sad and that's your only criticism, you're denying something basic, which is that people need choices. So yeah all superhero movies don't have to be like The Avengers and all gender swap stories don't have to be light and fluffy either.

That being said, the criticism I hear the most among pretty much all my names is that so-and-so didn't like it not ending Happily Ever After.  Sometimes I just want to say, "What are you, six?"  If you're a grown up, you should be able to handle that not everything will end Happily Ever After all the time--just like real life!  And as the writer I don't really want to make every story end happy because then there's not much fun or surprise in it for me or the reader, which is especially true when you write as many stories as I have.