Zounds! It's Two Cent Tuesdays: Nice Rejection!

I used to go to Writers.net a lot when I was learning how to write queries and stuff back in the mid-2000s.  Then there were too many trolls during the 2008 election spouting hateful crap and the site started to develop technical glitches and I dropped out for a while.  I came back on a limited basis last year just to say "buy my book!"--not that anyone did.  Mostly because it's pretty much a ghost town.


Anyway, last month I checked in and saw someone crowing about this "personal" rejection they got on a query:

Thank you for sending us ****** and for giving us the opportunity to consider your work. Apologies for the delay in responding.

While we enjoyed reading your work, which stood out from the many we receive, we couldn't find an agent here who felt strongly enough to take it further and therefore we are afraid we are not able to offer you representation for this project.

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your material and we wish you every success with your writing. 

She was super-psyched they said it "stood out" from the others.  Wow, what a great rejection!  Of course since I'm a Grumpy Bulldog I had to tell her that this is still just a form rejection.  You can tell because they never say anything personal about her or the book.  The title and author's name can be merged in easily enough.  Otherwise it's all just vague stuff.

She was of course not happy with me and decried my negativism, as it seems many people do anymore if you don't immediately heap praise upon them.  Which incidentally is why I think letters like this one exist.  Saying you "stood out" makes you feel good, even if you're being rejected.  It's like if your significant other said, "You're the best fuck I ever had!" and then says, "BTW, I'm dumping you."  Well so what, I'm the best fuck you ever had, woo hoo!!!

Anyway, if you want to see just how insidious these "personal" responses can be, check this out.  The first is a response from 3/12/07:

Thanks for sending along the opening pages of Forever Young.  Truth be told, though,  I'm afraid they didn't draw me in as much as I had hoped.  I'm pressed for time these days and, what with my reservations about the project, I suspect I wouldn't be the best fit. Thanks so much for contacting me, though, and for giving me this  opportunity. It's much appreciated, and I'm sorry to be passing. I wish you the very best of luck in your search for representation.

And you might say, well that's a really nice letter.  She's really apologetic and actually critiqued the story (somewhat).  We can build on this!

Not so fast, sport.  Here's a rejection from the same agent 4 years later on 4/12/11:

Thanks for sending along the pages of your manuscript, A Hero's Journey. Truth be told, though, I'm afraid these pages just didn't draw me in as much as I had hoped. I'm pressed for time these days and, what with my reservations about the project, I suspect I wouldn't be the best fit. Thanks so much for contacting me and for giving me this opportunity. It's much appreciated, and I'm sorry to be passing. I wish you the very best of luck in your search for representation. 

As you can see, it's the EXACT same letter.  The same "critique" and everything.  So yeah, this is what this agent says to everyone.  Wah-wah-waaaaaah.

When it comes to these letters, agents are pretty evil about them.  Thanks to mail merge, cut and paste, and intern slaves it's pretty easy to come up with forms that seem like natural human responses and send them out by the hundreds.

So really unless that letter is handwritten or uses very specific details about the story and characters, then just take it as a given that it's a form and move on with your life.  Don't sit around obsessing over it or worse yet, take it as some kind of actual advice.

Yea Verily It's Comic Captions 4/29/13

It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a comic book panel.  The goal of course is to make it as humorous as possible.

This week's comes from Legends #2

I'll go first
Darkseid:  This is my new doggy.  I call him Spot.
Now it's your turn!

Box Office Blitz Week 16

Slightly updated Stacey!

The good thing is this is the last movie weekend of "spring."  Next week "summer" movie season begins!  According to reports Iron Man 3 has already raked in $195M overseas, so keep that in mind next week.  In the meantime, it looks like my reign at the top was short-lived as Tom Cruise's Oblivion is quickly headed to oblivion.  And congrats to Michael Bay for hitting #1 with a movie not featuring CGI robots--just flesh ones, ie Marky Mark.

And if you want to know the real story behind the movie, visit this link Maurice Mitchell posted.  It's a real eye-opener!
http://www.chasingthefrog.com/reelfaces/pain-and-gain.php


 The top three movies were:

1. Pain & Gain $20M
2. Oblivion $17.4M
3. 42 $10.7M

My crappy guesses were:

1. Oblivion $25M
2. Pain & Gain $20M
3. 42 $10M

That's 50 Oblivion, 50 for Pain & Gain, and 100 for 42 for 200 total.

Offutt guessed:
1 Pain & Gain 30 M
2 Oblivion 15 M
3 42 9.5 million

That's a trifecta!  300 plus 100 for taking my survey.

Pagel guessed:
1. Oblivion $20 mil.
2. Pain & Gain $19 mil.
3. Mud $15 million.

That's 50 for the first two, 0 for the last or 100 total plus another 100 for the survey.

Leon guessed:
1. Oblivion -- $20m
2. Pain & Gain -- $18m
3. 42 -- $15m

200 for him plus 100 for the survey.

Rusty guessed:

Oblivion - $22 mil
Pain and Gain - $20 mil
42 - $13 mil

That's 200 for him as well and 100 for the survey'

Hayes guessed:
#1 Oblivion $19 mil.
#2 42 $$13 mil.
#3 Pain and Gain $12 mil.

That's 50 for each or 150 plus 100 for the survey

Laplume guessed:
1. Pain & Gain ($22 mil)
2. Oblivion ($20 mil)
3. 42 ($12 mil)

That's a trifecta for him.  Plus 100 for the survey.

But the winner this week is Maurice Mitchell!
1. Pain and Gain - $21
2. Oblivion $20M
3. 42 $12M

His $21M guess for Pain and Gain was closest to actual retail price.  He gets 300 for the trifecta and the 500 bonus.  But he did not answer the survey.  That may hurt him later on, eh?

As for the bonus question, I asked whether the #5 movie would make MORE or LESS than last week's at $5.76M.  Everyone guessed LESS but The Croods came in 5th with $6.6M so the answer was MORE.  Andrew Leon did (I presume jokingly) change his to MORE and since he got screwed a couple weeks ago on the week when two movies were tied, I'll allow him to have the bonus this week.  Huzzah!

Here are the updated standings:

	Box Office Blitz
	Scoreboard
		16	Total
1	Tony Laplume	400	6900
2	Andrew Leon	400	5350
3	PT Dilloway	200	4450
4	Rusty Carl	300	3850
5	Maurice Mitchell	800	3100
6	Michael Offutt	400	2700
7	Briane Pagel	200	2650
8	Stephen Hayes	250	1050
9	Cindy Borgne	0	200
10	David P King	0	200
11	Donna Hole	0	200
		2950	30650

X is for Xperts and Xistential Philosophy

I'm sure much of my audience doesn't follow sports, but here's something I want to vent about.  Thursday the NFL Draft began, a pretty dull affair that in recent years like everything related to the NFL has become a big business--even the day schedules are announced has become a big deal!  What's sad to me is that so-called "experts" like Mel Kiper and Todd McShay get paid probably hundreds of thousands a year to write columns and appear on TV to predict the draft and yet every single year they're WRONG.

This was especially on display this year in what was a really bizarre draft because only one quarterback was taken, no running backs, and only two wide receivers I think.  Those are the sexy positions in football, the real high-profile positions and yet most of the draft picks concentrated on offensive and defensive linemen.  So if you actually sat there for four hours watching the coverage it was more boring than a Rand Paul filibuster on CSPAN.

To really emphasize the incompetence of so-called "draft experts" two of the supposed star players were not taken in the first round at all.  For the last couple of months everyone was getting hot and bothered about West Virginia quarterback Geno Smith, with some predicting he could go first overall.  Yet all 32 teams passed on him.  And then there was linebacker Manti Te'o of Notre Dame, infamously involved with an online girlfriend who turned out to be a guy playing him for a sap.  Still, it was expected he would go at least in the last third of the first round.  Nope.  Again, all 32 teams passed on him.

As I Tweeted, this proves that a lot of "experts" don't know shit.  If Kiper and McShay get anything right at all it's because A) It's so blindingly obvious anyone who watches 15 minutes of SportsCenter can figure it out or B) Because they make 10,000 mock drafts per year, right up until the afternoon of the draft, they're bound to get SOMETHING right along the way.  I mean I probably couldn't sink a half-court 3-point shot in basketball but if you give me 10,000 tries the laws of probability favor me to get at least one to go in.

These people pretend to have inside knowledge, but as ESPN's DJ Gallo pointed out, if you're the front office of a football team, why would you tell someone on TV what you're really going to do?  Why give 31 other teams (especially those higher up than you in draft order) a look at your cards?  It makes much more sense to feed Kiper and McShay a steady stream of bullshit.  Instead of saying, "Oh yeah we love that offensive lineman from CMU." you say you're really interested in Geno Smith.  Then your competition gets worried they might have missed something in their scouting or if they've been after Smith, maybe they trade with you to make sure they can get him and so on.  And let's face it, a lot of these "sources" they claim to have are probably interns or the guy who cleans the toilets at the team facility, not really privy to the actual high-end discussions.

That's something that was often noted in the Tuesday Morning Quarterback column I used to read on ESPN.  Those who claim to have insider knowledge are usually full of crap.  It's like all those infomercials you see on TV.  I mean if there really was some wonderdrug that could instantly take inches from your belly or make you look 10 years younger, don't you think some huge conglomerate would have it locked up and not let some shyster hawk it on TV for $10 a bottle?

So yeah it annoys me these people get paid probably five times what I do to do their jobs badly.  Really, if I'm a penny off something at my job I get reamed out by the Boss and yet these guys are wrong all the freaking time and they still get to go on the air to spout nonsense.  It's ridiculous.

The other example that comes to mind are weathermen (and weatherwomen or weatherpeople).  Every winter there's those days where they say, "Oh it'll be fine this week."  And then a couple days later we have six inches of snow.  Or conversely they say, "Batten down the hatches!  It's the storm of the century!"  And then we get a dusting.  They're wrong all the fucking time and yet no one calls them on it, not really.  Sometimes an anchor will jokingly give them the business and they just laugh and shrug it off.

But really it's one of those things that's wrong with America where people who do their jobs badly (draft "experts," weathermen, CEOs of bankrupt companies, presidents, Congress, etc.) get rewarded financially for it while other people have to work their butts off to high standards and get far far less.

Sigh, a lot of the time this world sucks.  Like when some idiot decides they have to ruin a fun marathon by planting bombs at the finish line or that they want to go shoot up a school or a movie theater or otherwise ruin life for those around them.
The best way then to shake off those blues?  It's not praying.  It's not even family.  (Actually family usually exacerbates the blues...)  No, the best thing is to get out into nature.  Away from all the stupid bullshit in the world.  Most of the time I don't need to take a long hike or anything like that.  Just getting in the car and seeing a lake or some fields or something will help restore my inner balance and remind me that it's not the world that sucks; it's the people in the world who suck.

A lot of problems could probably be solved if people just got up out of their houses, put down the phones and iPads and all that stuff and take a nice walk or a drive in the country--or my favorite, sit on a rock in Lake Huron--to fully appreciate what's around us and just how small we are compared to it.  Maybe then we'd stop obsessing about this childish bullshit about whose Invisible Man in the Sky is better or who called dibs on what piece of dirt or what color someone's skin is or what someone does with their genitalia.  You know, all this petty bullshit we like to make a big deal about that in the grand scheme of things isn't important at all.  Maybe we could see how special this whole planet is and realize maybe we should stop trying to blow it up or sterilize it in a nuclear holocaust.

It's a worth a shot, right?

Here's your moment of Zen:

Grand Canyon

More Grand Canyon

Grand Canyon in sepia

Also Grand Canyon in sepia

Yet More Grand Canyon

Still More Grand Canyon

Camelback Mt, Phoenix

Also Camelback Mt, Phoenix

Arizona sunset

The same Arizona sunset

Sunset Traverse Bay

Also used as a cover for my novel "Virgin Territory"

Same sunset...

Muskegon lighthouse

Baby raccoon on Muskegon pier

Muskegon lighthouses

Fall colors in New Hudson, MI

Weird silhouette thing in New Hudson...

More fall colors (late fall colors so they aren't great)

Close up fall colors

And when all else fails there are cute bulldog pictures!

Or there's fat Becky:

Of course I'm not the first one to advocate this philosophy.  There was Henry David Thoreau in Walden, Herman Hesse in Siddhartha, and Bill Shatner in "The Transformed Man" plus probably others.  It's still something good to remember.

Who's Ready for Box Office Blitz Week 16?

Almost everyone got a trifecta on last week's, so I guess the pressure is really on now.  Though this week seems like one of those more difficult weeks.  Do you think Tom Cruise's Oblivion will remain at #1?  Will something new take over the top spot?  Will something old reclaim #1?  I really don't know.  The good thing about next week is the #1 movie is pretty freaking obvious.  It'll just be picking #2 and #3 that will determine who wins the round.

If you still don't know the rules of the game, you pick the top three movies at the box office and how much they will make.  For each one you get right you get 50 points.  If you get it in the right position you get another 50 points.  If you win the round you win 500 extra points.  Pretty simple, until it's not when you get movies that tie and such nonsense.

Here's the list from my local megaplex (* denotes a new release)

• 42
• Admission
• Arthur Newman*
• Evil Dead
• GI Joe:  Retaliation
• Identity Thief
• Jurassic Park 3D
• Mud*
• Numbers Station*
• Oblivion
• Olympus Has Fallen
• Oz the Great & Powerful
• Pain and Gain*
• Quartet
• Scary Movie 5
• Silver Linings Playbook
• The Big Wedding*
• The Company You Keep*
• The Call
• The Croods
• The Host 
• The Place Behind the Pines 
• The Sapphires
• Tyler Perry's Temptation

(Honestly I haven't heard of any of those new ones except Pain & Gain.  I am so out of touch with the indie scene.)

 As I said, it's kind of a tough call here.  I'll go with:

1. Oblivion $25M
2. Pain & Gain $20M
3. 42 $10M

And now a bonus question worth 100 points.  Include your answer with your picks in the comments for a chance to win.  (The winner of the round is not eligible to win.)  Here's the question:

Last week's #5 movie GI Joe: Retaliation made $5.76M.  Will this week's #5 make MORE or LESS or the SAME? (Same seems unlikely.  I'm just saying.)

And now for a BONUS bonus question.  Hardly anyone responds to me on Twitter, so when I posited a question, I'm not surprised I didn't get an answer.  Which is lucky for you people.  Anyone to participate in this poll gets 100 bonus points.  Even the winner of the round.  OK, here it is:

I recently got a new used computer and downloaded the Sims 3 to see if it's any better than the Sims 2 I like to make characters on.  So, which Stacey Chance looks better?  The one on the left or the one on the right?  

The results should post Sunday afternoon.

Voracious Readers Like Thursday Review: Cryptozoica

I was inspired yesterday to group all of my indie book reviews into one place, so they can be more easily found.  Also there are a lot of crummy book review sites out there where people climb all over themselves to give someone free books, so I figure, why shouldn't I be into that racket?  I write book reviews and I like free stuff.

So if you have an indie book you'd like reviewed, contact me and hook me up with a free copy and I'll review it.  And spread the word!  Thanks.


Here's one of the books featured on that new blog:

This is one of my less sincere reviews I wrote for a former Facebook "friend."  I say former because I eventually realized it was all a one-way "friendship" and decided to purge him.  A lot of you people don't understand the Corleone-like system I use wherein when I scratch your back, I expect mine to be scratched in return.  If I give you a charity review (and purchase) and you do shit for me, well then fuck you.


Cryptozoica
By Mark Ellis
(5/5 stars)

A perennial hot button issue in science and religion is on the origin of life. Were humans created by God--in which case, whose God?--or by evolution or by something else entirely? In "Cryptozoica," Mark Ellis adds fuel to the fire by offering another theory on the origin of man that involves dinosaurs and some very special goo.

Like "The Da Vinci Code," the story also involves secret societies. In this case it's the School of Night, an ultra-secret club of scholars that included Charles Darwin himself. In the book's prologue, we learn that Darwin and the crew of the Beagle ran across the Tamtung islands, which were home to some very weird creatures. They didn't really know what to call them since the word "dinosaur" hadn't been invented yet.

Skip forward to the present. "Tombstone" Jack Kavanaugh is living on Little Tamtung along with his friend Crowe. They, along with an eccentric billionaire, tried to start a sort of Jurassic Park/dinosaur safari on Big Tamtung, but the venture was shut down after three people died. Now the School of Night is getting involved, along with some Asian gangsters who helped bankroll the original venture. This means that Jack, Crowe, and some new and old friends all have to return to Big Tamtung and unlock its secrets.

What secrets are those? You'll just have to read to find out.

"Cryptozoica" is a taut and engaging pulp adventure. If I have one complaint, it's that there wasn't enough of a body count. I wanted the dinos to munch a few more people. Still, this is a fun, exciting read with some great illustrations too that should bring to mind old school adventure stories like "The Lost World" while adding a little modern science and conspiracy theory to the mix to freshen it up.

That is all.

Tomorrow Box Office Blitz Continues!

Unleash the April Recap!

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Two-Cent Tuesdays: Amazon is Your Frenemy

Available on Amazon!

Here was an article I read early last month and this time I actually remembered to save the link.  The positive stuff is all the same old boring crap about building networks, give stuff away, blah blah blah.  What I found more interesting is the part about tags and KDP Select.  It helps shed some light on something that had already occurred to me, which is the title of your post:  when it comes to publishing, Amazon is your frenemy, not your friend.

The idea is that Amazon wants you to put your books up through their KDP service, especially the KDP Select so they can lock it in for 3 months.  At the same time, though, Amazon doesn't want your book to succeed too much, or else they'll have to pay a bunch of royalties to you.  In that article you can see some of the stuff Amazon does relatively covertly to try and make sure you can't get too successful too easily.  As the article notes, when authors started to trade "tags" for their books to each other, Amazon began degrading that feature.  When people were using the giveaways on KDP Select to help sell more books, Amazon degraded the ranking features so free books would have a harder time floating to the top.  Recently the "like" button on books has become spotty, oftentimes nonexistent.  Again this was after authors were trading "likes" to each other to help gain notoriety.  (My "publisher" of A Hero's Journey encouraged this practice incidentally.)

Then after the "Pay for reviews" scandal they've seemed to have a haphazard approach to reviews.  Some get taken down, some don't.  (Unfortunately a lot of idiotic ones remain.)  There's talk about how they might not let you review books in the genre you read the most or things like that.  I'm not sure how much of that is fact and how much is fiction or whether that will change in the future.  I haven't seen a difference yet but maybe it helps I write my Amazon reviews under a different name.  (Incidentally when people bitch about that I say I've been using that name since 2001, so I see no reason to change it now.)

And while I suppose it's good to keep paid reviews out (though really if you got the money, why not?  It's not like there's much integrity in non-paid reviews.) it's still all part of a system that's designed not to make it easy for you to get ahead.  Which highlights the problem of when your publisher is also your bookstore.  And as just another wrinkle Amazon has its own publishing labels now, which means all these self-pubbed novels are competing with their own titles.  Do you think they really want to make it easy for my novels to sell more than theirs?

Another thing is their policy about royalties.  It's great you can get 70%...but only on books $2.99 or more.  And in countries like India or Brazil you won't get that unless it's in KDP Select, not that you'll probably sell much in those countries unless you translate it to Hindi or Portuguese.  The hitch is that not as many books will sell at $2.99 most likely.  So again while you might get more royalties for that 1 copy, you might not sell as many as if it were 99 cents or even $1.99.  Also I heard on Writer Beware that if you try to sell it for more than $9.99 it goes back down to 35%.  Just another way they try to keep their royalty payments in check.

Anyway, I love buying stuff on Amazon, but I can't pretend they're my best friend.

While I'm bitching about Amazon, the last few months I've bought less stuff off Amazon and it's Amazon's fault.  For instance, they used put an album on sale for $2-$4 every day.  Then they stopped doing that.  So while before I might buy a couple of albums a week from Amazon, this year I've bought maybe a half-dozen total.  And through the Amazon Local (their version of Groupon) they would offer vouchers for X amount off a book or album or maybe buy an album or Kindle book for $1.99 or something.  Now if they do that it's only for ones THEY select, which almost always are crap or stuff I already have.  The Vine newsletter where you can get free products in exchange for writing reviews has really gone downhill too.  I mean the last one I got on Thursday only had a couple of books and MS Office 2013 (which was great but they only had a few copies so that ran out fast) whereas before they'd offer a wider variety of stuff.

I'm not sure if Amazon has just decided they've stomped the competition to the point they don't need to entice people with deals anymore or if internally they decided it was losing money.  But really 95% of the more impulse type purchases I make there are because the item is on sale.  No sale = no buying, not from me.  I mean if they think I'm going to spend $10 on an album or $13 on an ebook they got another thing coming.  I ain't made of money.

So they might want to reconsider these restrictive policies before it's too late.  Because inevitably something else will come along, whether it's a site that already exists or something new, something will rise to take advantage if Amazon gets too complacent, as has happened to many a company, the Big Three automakers for instance.  Don't be General Motors, Amazon!

See This Comic Captions 4/22/13

It's time for another Comic Captions, where your job is to recaption a comic book panel.  The goal of course is to make it as humorous as possible.

This week's comes from Infinite Crisis #1

I'll go first

Superman:  To the early bird special!

Now it's your turn!

Box Office Blitz: Week 15

Well I guess like Tom Cruise this week, I'm back on top, or almost.  I think it's going to get a little complicated again this week to determine the winner.

This week's top 3 at the box office were:

1. Oblivion $38.2
2. 42 $18M
3. Croods $9.5M

My picks were:

1. Oblivion $40M
2. 42 $18M
3. Croods $15M

Which is a trifecta!  Is that good enough to win the round?  Maybe not.

In the meantime, Michael Offutt picked:

Oblivion $33 million
42 $20 million
The Croods $9 million

That's also a trifecta for him.

Stephen Hayes picked:

#1 Oblivion $29 mil.
#2 The Place Under the Pines $18 mil.
#3Scary Movie 5 $11 million.

That's 100 for Oblivion and 0 for the other two.

Andrew Leon picked:

1. Oblivion -- $42m
2. 42 -- $21m
3. Croods -- $9m

Also a trifecta.  (Dang everyone copying me this week!)

Rusty Webb picked:

Oblivion - $50mil

42 - $20 mil
Croods $10 mil

Yup, another trifecta.  We're all winners!  (almost)

Maurice Mitchell guessed:

1.Oblivion - $36 mil
2. 42 - $20.1 mil
3. The Croods - $8.5 mil

Another trifecta

And Tony Laplume picked:

1. Oblivion ($40 mil)
2. 42 ($20 mil)
3. The Croods ($10 mil)

Also a trifecta.

Now then, who wins the round?  The fact Oblivion was listed as $38.2 is important.  That means Maurice Mitchell is $2.2M off the mark.  Whereas Tony and I are $1.8M off the mark.  Which narrows it down to us.  And since we both picked $40M we go to the #2 movie to settle it.  Tony picked 42 at $20M which is $2M off the mark, whereas I bullseyed it at $18M.

Which means I WIN!  For the first time since week 4.  So I shouldn't get too cocky I guess.

As for the bonus question, I asked whether there would be more, less or the same number of players than last week, which was 8.  The obvious answer is less.  4 people picked that.  Random.org picked #4 which is Maurice Mitchell, so he gets the bonus 200 points.  Huzzah!

Now the updated standings:

Box Office Blitz
Scoreboard
	15	Total
Tony Laplume	300	6500
Andrew Leon	300	4950
PT Dilloway	800	4250
Rusty Carl	300	3550
Briane Pagel	0	2450
Maurice Mitchell	500	2300
Michael Offutt	300	2300
Stephen Hayes	100	800
Cindy Borgne	0	200
David P King	0	200
Donna Hole	0	200
	2600	27700

Ready for More Arts and Crafts?

As promised, here's the pictures of the Hope Summers X-Men figure I turned into a Scarlet Knight, Mark II figure:

The Mark II version of the Scarlet Knight mostly replaces the gold cape/boots/gloves with silver.  There are some other differences that can't really be captured as well.  Incidentally, this is the smaller version with a converted Dana Sterling Robotech figure and Black Widow Avengers head:

Which one is better?

Anyway, I learned something important during the process, which is that the Hope Summers figure's head can pop right off!  That made it a lot easier to paint around her head because I could just masking tape off her neck and keep her head far away from the paint so I didn't have to worry it would get anything on it.  Plus then I didn't have to cut the cape off of her.

As I hoped, the silver paint went on a lot easier than the yellow paint on the original one.  It went on a lot better than the red paint really.  I could paint the whole cape in just one coat and it dried without a problem.  It went on just as smoothly for her hands and feet too.  Now I should get a third Hope Summers figure and paint the whole thing silver to represent the Silver Seraph in "The Night's Legacy."  Or not.

Sisters, sisters...however that goes...

Here you can see all three Scarlet Knight figures.  The red on the Mark II Hope Summers is a little bit lighter because I used a different brand of paint.  There was a problem with it in that whenever I move her joints the paint starts to flake off.  So the paint on the original one worked better.

The only thing I wish I had for my Scarlet Knight figures was a sword.  I'm sure that would be all but impossible to find, especially one that could fit in her hand.  Of course I could always try to glue it in her hand if I found one.  There is a Katana figure coming out in August with the right type of sword and probably the same size as my Hope Summers figure.  Very interesting...

Quiet Please for Box Office Blitz Week 15!

As we go into Week 15 of Box Office Blitz, things have gotten back to more or less the status quo with Tony Laplume taking the top spot both weeks, though one week should have an asterisk by it.  But there's still plenty of time for things to change.

Anyway, just to remind you of the rules, you guess which three movies will rule the box office this weekend.  For each one you guess right you get 50 points.  If you get it in the right position you get 50 bonus points.  And if you win the round you get 500 bonus points.

Now then, here's the list from my local megaplex (* indicates a new release): 

• 42
• Admission
• Evil Dead
• GI Joe:  Retaliation
• Identity Thief
• Jack the Giant Slayer
• Jurassic Park 3D
• Oblivion*
• Olympus Has Fallen
• Oz the Great & Powerful
• Quartet
• Safe Haven 
• The Sapphires*
• Scary Movie 5
• Silver Linings Playbook
• The Call
• The Croods
• The Host 
• The Place Behind the Pines (This appears to be opening wider than last week now, so keep that in mind)
• Trance
• Tyler Perry's Temptation

Despite my misgivings about Tom Cruise movies, I will guess:

1. Oblivion $40M
2. 42 $18M
3. Croods $15M

Here's a bonus question worth 200 points this week.  Last week there were 8 players of Box Office Blitz (not counting myself).  Will there be MORE, LESS, or the SAME number of players (not counting myself) this week?  Answer in the comments along with your picks for a chance to win!

Good luck!