A Rant & A Meme

Initiate Grumpy Bulldog rant!!!

First up, the rant.  I've been annoyed at the seemingly tepid response to some entries lately.  I mean it seems like no one's really cared about the last Two-Fer Tuesdays.  I'll probably have to get rid of that segment, though I have them all scheduled through the end of the year so that will give me until 2013 to come up with something new.  Wednesday's it took hours before anyone seemed to notice it, and then stupid Blogger marked that comment as "Spam".  Argh.  Even the trivia questions, where I'm literally paying you to answer them can take like a half-hour for anyone to answer.  This despite that I clearly announce the exact freaking time when it's going to be posted and in some cases I post days ahead of time to remind you when it will be posted.  That's why I had to have a poll to let people decide when they wanted the question to post so maybe I can drum up a little interest.

If I can't even get you people to take free money (or virtually free money) from me then I must really be doing something wrong here.  And while occasionally there are some different people who respond, it's mostly the same 4-5 people responding to everything.  On top of that I've only gotten one new "follower" in about three months.  Though part of that might be people just don't use that widget anymore.  I still see it as a prestige thing and wonder why so many other blogs (even ones that barely post) have hundreds of "followers" and I can't even get over 100.  Incidentally my Grumpy Bulldog blog still has more "followers" than this one and I haven't posted a new entry there since March 31!

I try to remind myself to be patient.  These things take time.  Maybe if the book ever gets released that will help drive more people to this site.  But I am not a patient man about most things.  Like most of America, I want it NOW!!!!

Then I wonder:  what do I have to do?  As the Joker said through Anthony Michael Hall in The Dark Knight, "What do I have to do to get you people off of the bench and into the game?"   I mean, what do you people want to see?  At this point I should just start screaming like Maximus in Gladiator, "ARE YOU NOT ENTERTAINED??!!!"

My philosophy was that I didn't want this to be another boring author's blog.  I didn't want to post a bunch of phony baloney writing tips about "show versus tell" and "cures for writer's block" and all that other crap.  I mean if you want that I think there are plenty of other blogs doing that and it seemed to me there was no sense in going along with the herd.  So I've been trying to do different things, especially with the rotating Wednesday posts.  With some like the Comic Captions and the Superhero Trivia I try to be more interactive so people can feel like they're involved with the blog, but as I said even that doesn't seem to rouse a lot of interest.

Anyway, if you want writing tips I can do that.  If you want me to talk about TV shows maybe I can start watching those.  Or maybe you want more personal stuff like vacation stories and such?  I can't promise those would be very interesting.  Do you want more rambling, sleep-deprived rants like this?

And I keep harping on this, but I keep these Fridays and Mondays open if you want to do a guest post.  You can post whatever the hell you want so long as you keep it clean.  I mean if you want to pimp your book or reveal your cover or any of that stuff you're more than free to do so.  Though if you want to write a love letter about Mitt Romney or extoll the virtues of the Tea Party I'd probably tell you to take a hike.  Otherwise all you have to do is Contact Me by Email or Twitter or just a freaking blog comment and I can set something.  I really don't get why more people don't take advantage of that, just like why no one ever asks ME to beta read their book or any of that; are you that intimidated by my awesomeness?  (Little joke.)

One thing I'm pretty sure of is you don't want me talking about old Batman comics, so I'm not going to do that for a while.  Anything else you want, just let me know because I'm not writing this blog to entertain myself.  It's supposed to be to entertain you so you think I'm all cool and witty and want to buy my book.  Cha-ching!

Or I can rip off more cute bulldog pictures:

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Maybe you want me to do more of these stupid "awards" or memes and crap.  I find chain letters annoying but people just can't seem to get enough of them.  So here you go, here's this "Be Inspired" one I got from Michael Offutt on Wednesday.  (There's nothing more inspiring than answering a bunch of questions everyone else is answering!)

I think you're supposed to talk about a book you're writing but I'm sort of between books right now so I'll just make it about the one that should (fingers crossed) be released next month.

1. What is the name of your book? A Hero's Journey (see that badge on the right with the cover and saying Coming in September 2012!?)
2. Where did the idea for your book come from?  This is a long story that began in 2002, though I had tried my hand at other superhero stories back in the 90s without much luck.  Anyway, I was actually trying to write a literary story about a TV show focused on a superhero, so I needed to come up with a character and for whatever reason I used The Scarlet Knight.  Though in that incarnation the Scarlet Knight was a man (Percival Graves) who I use in the current book as the previous Scarlet Knight.  No one of course wanted my wonderful literary novel but I reused the character in a dark, gritty novella that was kind of a modern Don Quixote, something Hollywood has now copied ad nauseum.  That also didn't do anything but I kept plugging away and wrote the short story Heart of A Hero in 2008.  That was when Emma Earl was introduced, though if you read that story in the Special Features section (did you even know there was a Special Features tab?  There is!) you'll see some differences.  Really that was more of a Saturday morning cartoon kind of story, at least at the beginning and then it goes all Quantum Leap.  Anyway, after my opus Where You Belong, I decided I needed a break from serious stuff and so I reread the Heart of A Hero story and thought, why not make it a novel?  Boom!
3. In what genre would you classify your book? Speculative Fiction/Urban Fantasy
4. Who would you pick to play your characters in a movie adaptation? No idea at this point. I'm not really sure who the "it" girl of the moment is who could do it.  Jennifer Lawrence?  But she's got all those Hunger Games movies (that they'll probably split now into 7 separate movies each) and other stuff so she might be too busy.  As a second choice and because I saw her name earlier I thought of Mia Wasikowska, who was in that Alice in Wonderland movie a couple years ago and also in "Lawless" that's out this weekend.  She could probably play a pasty nerd who is still tough enough to beat the shit out of some bad guys when called upon.  Though really this kind of question reminds me of "Free Enterprise" where Bill Shatner is discussing who to cast as Calpurnia in his epic six-hour musical of Julius Caesar and he's like "If we can't get Julia Roberts to do it then maybe we could get Sharon Stone (who was still a big deal then).  Or maybe Heather Locklear.  I know Heather, she's great!"  The thing is there has to be a book first and then that book has to be successful enough to sell movie rights and then they have to have enough money to cast any decent actors and in any case I will have absolutely no input on that decision.
5. Give us a one sentence synopsis of your book? A young woman finds a suit of magic armor and has to save the world.
6. Is your book already published? In theory it should be soon.  In theory.
7. How long did it take you to write this book? So picking up from question 2, I wrote the first draft in 2009 in like six weeks.  And it SUCKED.  There were a lot of plot holes it seemed to me.  So I regrouped and decided on how I could plug those holes.  The second draft then I wrote a few weeks later, and again it probably took six weeks or so.  The second draft is narrated by Marlin the ghost, which was fun but had some drawbacks, like how does Marlin know all this other shit going down?  It got to be cumbersome.  That didn't stop me from plowing ahead with 2 sequels!  Then I guess in the winter of 2010 sometime I adapted that into a graphic novel script.  That turned out to be pretty long so I cut it down and really if anyone's interested, that's still out there.  All I need is someone to draw it.  Anyway, about November 2010 I had finished the last of eight books in the series plus a prequel.  Then I thought I really ought to go back and redo the first one.  So by the end of the year I'd finished what would essentially be the fourth first draft of the story.  In spring 2011 I edited it and started sending it out first to agents (who were not interested because she doesn't sparkle or get raped up the ass by some hot guy or whatever).  Well I did have one agent ask for a full, which necessitated a lot of last second paring because to try and draw more interest I'd lied and said it was only 85,000 words when it was really 105,000.  See the Deleted Scenes to see a lot of what got cut.  Anyway, she said it was too weird and passed.  So I sent it out to small publishers.  I didn't hear anything until January 2012 when the people who are in theory publishing the book accepted it.  Then in March I had to turn it in for edits, which I didn't hear anything until May.  So I had to make their edits plus I had Mr. Offutt read it and he gave me some stuff to edit.  Long story short by the end of June I turned it in.  I heard they're having a "proofreader" looking it over before it goes online, so let's hope that person doesn't fuck it up too much.  Was that more than you ever wanted to know?  Probably.
8. What other books in your genre would you compare it to? I've read a couple of superhero-related books.  It's not quite like Soon I Will Be Invincible in that there's only one superhero and I'm not trying to parody all the comic book tropes and such.  I think it's better than this After the Golden Age book I read where the main character (the daughter of a couple of superheroes) gets kidnapped like six times by the villains in the book.  I mean I like to think Emma is a lot smarter than that.  But anyway, it would fit somewhere in that genre.  Of course I'd love to compare it to the recent Batman movies except my book involves magic armor, ghosts, witches, and a guy who lives in the sewers and talks to rats so there's not that much realism.
9. Which authors inspired you to write this book? I think reading Michael Chabon's "Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" is what made me want to do the literary book in 2002 that led in a circuitous way to this book, so there you go.  I think I should note I was not an avid comic book fan so I think that's about the only reason I ever got interested in this subject.
10. Tell us anything that might pique our interest in your book.  Sex!  Wait, there isn't any.  Damn it.  How about that the Scarlet Knight has lots of neat powers?  She can turn invisible, bullets can't hurt her, she can jump really high with her boots, and climb walls with her gloves.  And she's got an awesome samurai-type sword that glows and can be remotely controlled by her mind!  The Black Dragoon, her mortal foe, is no slouch either.  He's got these bad-ass Freddy Krueger claws, except he can shoot them like darts!  Or he can make them grow really long to use as a spear.  Doesn't that sound totally bad-ass?

I'm supposed to inflict this chain letter on other people, but I'm sure everyone else has already done it because I'm the last to do any of these stupid things.

Anyway, just to let you know (not that you people seem to pay attention) there might be a Labor Day guest post.  If not then there will be another Two-Fer Tuesday whether you want there to be or not.