Car Wreck, NaNo, Invasion Tips, Awards!

Car Wreck, NaNo, Invasion Tips, Awards!

This post is just a catch-all of random things that have been going on lately. Treat it like a newsletter I suppose.

Wife Survives Highway Rollover!

She's doing fine, but the car is totaled. Apparently she hit some debris in the road, the car skidded off the road and up a steep hill, then rolled over down the hill. It's a complete loss. She only suffered some minor bruises from the whole thing, but it could have been a lot worse. Kudos to Subaru for building a car that can withstand this, but wag of the finger for losing control when a tire bursts. So now we're in the market for a brand new used car. We want a roomy AWD car with lowish miles and airbags.

NaNoWriMo Update!

I'm currently right on track for my goal of 90K. I know I'm taking at least one day off from writing, so I actually need to build up some margin. I'm finding several advantages of plotting vs pantsing, the main one being short-term goals. With pantsing, I know how the story starts, and I know about where it ends, but I have no idea how it happens. With Plotting, I know each major plot point, so I only need to focus on getting the characters to each point, which makes it a little easier to judge progress. However...the first week of NaNoWriMo always goes well so I'll be better able to judge this in a week. Look for my Week Two tips on Monday!

Blog Awards!

I received not one but two blog awards this week:
Erica from Laugh. Write. Play. gave me my second excellent Kreativ Blogger Award!

Thank you very much!

And  quillfeather from W.M.MORRELL gave me the coveted Honest Scrap Blogger Award!

Thanks! I don't know what Honest Scrap is, but it sounds great!

Apparently there are some conditions with these awards which I will pretty much ignore, but I will tell you a few things you might not know about me:

1. My father was a professional synchronized swimmer.
2. My mother performed Burlesque shows on Navy ships.
3. I used to drive the NASCAR circuit before I was caught taking steroids.
4. My daughter breeds champion muskrats and competes all over the world.
5. My son has a rare genetic disorder which gives him superhuman strength and agility. We're discussing options with the CIA.
6. Our dog once foiled a terrorist plot by chasing the terrorists into a deep well.
7. None of these is true...so they're still things you don't know about me!

Disagree With Me!

Nobody disagreed with my post Crossing the Threshold. Turns out I made a big mistake. It’s Crossing the First Threshold. Oops. See anything you disagree with? You could win.

Tips for Knowing the Aliens have Bad Intent!

Did anyone catch the series premiere of V? No one seemed distressed by the aliens, but they should have been:

1. They came with no warning. And when they knocked down a few planes they said "oops."
2. Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. 'Nuf said.
3. They were far too sexy. Disguise is the first clue of deceit.
4. They were using Mankind's Greatest Invention against us: Marketing. Have you ever met someone in Marketing you can trust?
5. Has ANYONE ever watched or read Independence Day (ID4), War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, or Star Trek: First Contact? When giant space ships hover over major cities, it's BAD, m'kay? Heck, they even mentioned ID4 in the episode! WAKE UP!

The “Evil Twin” Meme Sucks

The “Evil Twin” Meme Sucks

Meme: A postulated unit or element of cultural ideas, symbols or practices transmitted from one mind to another through speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena.* (Wikipedia)

You’ve all seen it or read it. The main character is somehow “split” into a good and evil part. Or a long lost twin reappears for an episode or chapter, and is nothing like the original character. Ever since TV and movie directors discovered that they can overlay the same actor twice in the same frame, they’ve explored in nauseating repetition every possible angle and variation of the Evil Twin Meme. It all started full steam with the “Evil Kirk” ST:TOS episode “Mirror, Mirror”. This Wikipedia entry has more details.

The latest series to fall victim to this craptastically unoriginal concept is Warehouse 13. In the latest episode (stop reading if you haven’t seen it and want to), Myka Bering (Joanne Kelly) is trapped in a mirror and an evil, possessed version of herself emerges. Our hero Pete Lattimer (Eddie McLintock) supposedly discovers the switcheroo when they kiss. “She would never kiss me, even if the fate of the world was at stake.” Hey, guess what Pete? Maybe your clue should have come from the stinky derivative writing! At least she didn’t have a goatee like Evil Obama over there. Ever notice that Evil Twins of women are sexier than the original? Why is that? At least they got this meme over with early in the series (Or have they??).

Are all the good ideas gone? Is there nothing new? I’ve complained about this before. I know that when you have to crank out a 13- or 26- week episodic series, you need to use whatever ideas are out there.

Moving right along, I have a confession to make. I have a concept for a novel or short story where a person lives in two universes inhabited with the same cast in different roles. One is a “light, happy” universe, the other is “dark, deadly”. You know, Utopia vs. Dystopia. So, like my concept with Dawn’s Rise where I include as many disasters as I can into a disaster novel, maybe in this case I’m going to do the Evil Twin meme to death, the ultimate Evil Twin novel to end all Evil Twin novels. Maybe the Evil Twins will have Evil Twins. Yes, that’s it! Evil Quadruplets! Start lining up the publishers!

Taking this even further, I can’t wait to come up with a Paranormal concept. I will find every repetitive and overused meme in the genre and overdo it completely. I’ll have vampires, ghosts, werewolves, zombies, skeletons, monsters, demons, witches, spirits, angels, devils, sprites, fairies, and haunted houses up the wazoo. It will be frickin’ Halloween on every page. And of course I’ll have to make it an urban romance as well, because apparently you can’t sell fiction unless it’s a romance nowadays. Another meme I’d like to kill. Well, you gotta write to the audience. Paranormal urban disaster evil twin romance market, here I come!

*Forgive me for using the LOLcat meme. And note the new category “Random Rants.”

100th Post!!

100th Post!

Woot!

It's a party! OK to be fair, a lot these posts are part of my NaNoWriMo blogvel but still...

Now to follow up on a couple topics from yesterday's post:

This weeks BSG had a kind of surprise ending (spoiler if you haven't seen it):

They reach Earth... and "surprise" it's a post-apocalyptic dead zone. It appears that Earth has been destroyed far worse than Caprica was. Now was this really a surprise? No not really.

What would have been surprising?
Well I can think of a few things:

• Earth was the home of the "advanced" Cylons. Or some super-advanced cylons that leave the current ones in the dust.
• BSG meets the Federation. Or the Borg.
• WALL-E world!

Anyways, predictability = bad m'kay?

Okay so now that my rant is out of the way, how would everyone like some delicious Ten Fidy Imperial Stout...the best beer to ever come out of a can.

Go on, help yourself, just crash here if you start getting loopy. :)

Review of Bionic Woman from a writer's perspective

Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan)

My initial impression of Bionic Woman is that is seems pretty cookie-cutter and unimaginative. Like my other post about SF vs Fantasy, this show seemed to gloss over the technical details of how they actually fixed her up. To me it seemed like they tried to fit 120 minutes of story in to 48 minutes of prime time drama. So now she's magically fixed in literally a day, with magic strength and healing powers, and seemingly invulnerable. Not only that, the guy she likes totally screws up her life and she's concerned about that for about a minute. She's lost a baby, her legs, her arm, her body is invaded by some kind of nanites, and the next day she's back in the bar like nothing happened.

So what I'm saying is that this is all pretty fantastical and doesn't deal in reality or reactions. I think a 2-hour premiere could have filled in all these pieces. Now it looks like it will just turn into some kind of cop/secret agent show. And she doesn't even have the appeal of Jennifer Garner in Alias. I hate when I watch something and say, "I could have done that better."


I'll probably watch a few more episodes. If they want to go the fantasy route, then I hope they really ham it up with some fun villains and weird scenes.

Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner)

The new TV season...

is killing my productivity. I'd forgotten how much crap I watch.

Current shows I watch in order of preference:

---

1. Jericho (not running yet)
2. Prison Break
3. Heroes
4. Supernatural (starts Oct 4)
5. House
6. Smallville
7. Ghost Whisperer
8. Battlestar Galactica (not running yet)
9. Boston Legal
10. Bones

New shows that I'll probably watch:

---

1. Reaper
2. Bionic Woman
3. Moonlight
4. Chuck
5. Journeyman

plus random Baseball Playoffs, NFL games, other specials here and there. And this is just weekday shows. I watch a lot of crap on the weekends too. And I play volleyball one night a week. So when am I gonna write anything??