Movie Review: Labyrinth (1986)

I don't call my review of Labyrinth a "blast from the past" review because I never saw it when I was a kid, except perhaps for the opening animated owl on the Disney Channel. I knew about the movie from film books (I remember reading about the special effects in a book that also shows how they did the unmasked Vader for Return of the Jedi, for example) and always found the concepts and some of the imagery rather creepy, so I actually avoided watching the film.

(I did know enough about the film to make jokes about David Bowie's excessively tight pants when I was older.)

Well, the film podcast Myopia: Defend Your Childhood is discussing the film and so here I am finding the motivation to watch the movie. Here's the podcast. And now for the review...

The Plot

Teenage Sarah Williams (Jennifer Connelly) is not taking her parents' divorce, her father's remarriage, and the presence of her baby half-brother Toby (Toby Froud) very well. She retreats into her imagination and fantasyland far more than is healthy. Required to babysit Toby one night so her father and stepmother can go on a date, she becomes so frustrated with him that she wishes the Goblin King would take him away.

Well be careful what you wish for. None other than the Goblin King Jareth (David Bowie) and various Muppet minions show up. Sarah immediately realizes the horrible mistake she's made, but Jareth requires her to solve a magical labyrinth in 13 hours or else Toby will be transformed into a goblin forever.

Sarah now has to traverse a dangerous and magical world, making friends and allies and learning life lessons along the way.

The Good

*Although TVTropes (and some of the reviews from the time) talk crap about her acting, Jennifer Connelly does a great job as Sarah. She starts out as a selfish, immature, annoying, bratty teenager. Seriously, there is a lot of flouncing and excessive drama going on here (plus her speech to Toby about how he's a selfish brat shows quite a bit of projection) and it makes her really unsympathetic. However, through the events of the film, she grows out of it. Even when she's in full brat mode she still shows some sisterly concern for Toby, and Connelly does a good job projecting her growing horror when she realizes that she did set the goblins on him. And when the Goblin King takes Toby away, she sets right to getting him back, although she takes some time to grow out of her demanding and selfish tendencies. Sarah's character arc is extraordinarily well done and much of the credit goes to Connelly.

*The character Hoggle (voiced by Brian Henson) is given real depth and is played very sympathetically. He's short, ugly, has low self-esteem, apparently never had any friends until he met Sarah, and gets abused and threatened by Jareth, but although he does some bad stuff he's not truly bad. I liked him.

*There are moments of legitimate suspense, like the intercut of real, actual goblins observing Sarah about to invoke them and her over-dramatic speech in which she makes the wish that the goblins would take Toby away. If I didn't know the general story already, I would have definitely found it more suspenseful, and if I were a little kid (i.e. the target audience), even more so. And the Junk Lady (Denise Bryer) is pretty creepy too, given what she ultimately plans on doing.

*The movie teaches good moral lessons for children, especially those who might have a new sibling they resent or are part of a blended family. Sarah learns over the course of it to be unselfish, brave, humble, ask nicely for things, not judge by appearances, persevere when things get tough, understand that things aren't always what they seem, and solve her own problems using her own intelligence. She also uses the kindness we see even in full brat mode to recruit allies.

*The movie gets off to a quick start and moves along quickly. Sarah's invocation of the Goblin King is ten minutes in and she enters the labyrinth at around fifteen.

*Although Shelley Thompson isn't in the film much as Sarah's stepmother, she does a good job with her small part. Although I can easily imagine her rubbing Sarah the wrong way, I can definitely see her point of view that Sarah isn't respectful and needs to have a more normal social life. And her and Sarah's issues are shown, not told, in one scene that was painful to watch.

*There are a lot of good subtle touches, and nothing is in the film by accident. For example, Sarah has a scrapbook with clippings of her actress mother's career and a man beside her in the image is David Bowie. To be fair I might not have noticed if I hadn't already known from others' comments on the film that Jareth is really is her mother's new boyfriend (yikes, a sexual rivalry with one's own mother?), but just because someone doesn't notice subtext doesn't mean it's not there. Another example is all the toys and fairy-tale stuff in Sarah's room. Despite being presumably 15-16 (Connelly's actual age at the time), this shows rather than tells her immaturity, as does the fact that she utterly loses it when Toby and/or her stepmother take one of the toys for him to play with. Yes, teenage girls don't want people messing with their things (as Nic pointed out in the podcast), but I was a better sharer at 3-4 (when my little brother was born/big enough to want to play with my toys) than she is at 16.

*The costumes and creature design are very well-done. Giving Bowie's Goblin King different-colored eyes makes for an unsettling introduction, besides the obvious fact that he's come in through Toby's bedroom window and is looming over a teenage girl. There's also a straight-up Goblin Mecha Muppet at one point that's pretty cool, as well as armies of goblins with what look like elderly velociraptor cavalry and machine guns.

The Bad

*The opening sequence goes on for too long with that damn owl flying around. All with the David Bowie soundtrack too. It goes on for nearly three minutes. Come on people, let's get going.

*Speaking of David Bowie, he's not that impressive as an actor. When he first appears to Sarah he's rather monotone and dull. He does manage to project his subtle contempt for Sarah well with his speech about how she should go back to her toys and forget about Toby and it seems like he really is having fun in "Magic Dance." However, I think he's mostly there for the singing, and his acting ability pales in comparison to Connelly.

*There's too much David Bowie music in the soundtrack. Yes, I know he has a major part in the movie, but the Bowie songs are jarring when the rest of the film's soundtrack is more typical of an 80s fantasy film and him actually singing in-scene (other than "Dance, Magic Dance") was even worse. A Bowie concept album based on the film (exploring themes like coming of age, sexual awakenings, parental divorce, etc) would have been an interesting idea though, just like Songs in the Key of X for The X-Files. It would have been better to save the actual Bowie songs in the opening and closing credits of the film rather than have him awkwardly bursting into song in the midst of his appearances. "Dance, Magic Dance" kind of works, but it comes off to me as what TVTropes would call a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment. Although I could imagine it's there to show that Jareth is bored lording it over a bunch of dim-witted gremlins (i.e. motivation for messing with Sarah and/or wanting to keep her and her brother as companions) and that he's more affectionate with Toby than his own sister, it just comes off like an excuse to have a Bowie number. Actual musicals integrate the numbers into the plot far better. And although one could excuse "DMD" as Jareth just being bored and having a musical performance for kicks, him bursting into song at other times really didn't work for me. "Within You" is a really blatant example.

*And as far as Big-Lipped Alligator Moments are concerned, the singing and dancing vaguely Caribbean fire creatures took too much time on-screen, event though they do serve as an additional peril for Sarah and give her a chance to demonstrate her cleverness in dealing with them. The blue-screen effects aren't very good either. I admit I do like the song though. :)

*Some of the dialogue is a little too on the nose, like Sarah's bit about how she took it for granted after Hoggle lectures her about not taking things for granted.

The Verdict

A charming children's fantasy with some flaws. 8.5 out of 10. Of, and for anybody who's interested, someone typed up the entire novelization here. It goes into a lot more detail about the psychological and family dynamics driving the plot if you're into that sort of thing.

Crossing "Gates of Vasharia" with HBO's "Rome"

A year or three ago, I brought several chapters of my unfinished novel The Gates of Vasharia to my Kennesaw writing group. The story is set in the world of Vasharia where over the course of millennia various human cultures have come in through permanent Stargate-type gates or wild tears in space-time, leading to a patchwork of different nations.

(The dominant political force is an empire founded by a lost Roman legion, while other cultures are descended from Viking expeditions or Nestorian missionary endeavors.)

The story takes place during a civil war between the Imperator Marduk Kabon and his father's former general Patrick Rassam, the latter of whom was cast into the dark spaces between worlds (inspired by the "Todash Darkness" of Stephen King's Dark Tower universe) and has returned with demonic forces from said realm. Adding to the fun is an invasion from a parallel world by a gigantic cyborg Russian despot.

The technology of this world is roughly at the level of the Persian Gulf War. However, all of the point-of-view (POV) characters (protagonist Calvin Grenville, anti-hero Patrick Rassam, the antagonistic Czar, and on-the-protagonist's-side-but-still-a-tool Marduk) who participate in battle are very high-ranking--they're either corps commanders if not outright commanders-in-chief. In a Gulf War-type setting, someone of that rank is not going to be participating in active combat unless something has gone very, very wrong.

I've tried to "hang a lampshade" on that issue by depicting Cal only participating in direct combat twice (once leading the reserve forward at a critical moment in person to inspire his men--and being chastened by Marduk for unnecessarily risking himself--and later when the Czar's army overruns his headquarters), depicting Patrick and the Czar as both being Blood Knights who simply don't give a rip, and Marduk getting caught in a Czarist raid on his headquarters rather than anything he sought out himself. However, some members of my writing group suggesting leaving the combat scenes to lower-ranking characters.

Although I was resistant to the concept because that would require rewriting much of what I've already written, I just had a realization that HBO's television program Romeoperated on the same principles. Legionaries Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus are the ones who, most of the time, are the ones getting their hands dirty. You might see someone like Mark Antony and Marcus Agrippa dusting it up, but even at that level of technology, they wouldn't be part of a shield wall like a common soldier would be.

Perhaps the revisions wouldn't be as radical as I fear. Like Rome, this can be a "buddy story" of two lower-ranking guys who keep finding themselves involved in power politics. This way I can save most of the already-written material and just add new stuff.

*GOV begins with Cal awarding medal to survivors of a failed campaign across the Inner Sea against Patrick's stronghold in the western continent of Mahonistan. One of them can be a low-ranked POV character. I can keep the first scene where Cal and his entourage are heading to the arena on a train and have the second half of the scene from the low-ranked guy's POV.

*The other low-ranked POV character can be present when the Czar invades the eastern continent of Trydonia and be among the survivors that retreat. That would require redoing about the first two-thirds of the chapter.

*At the first big battle with the Czarist forces, the two characters can get thrown together. Maybe they're part of a mishmash of survivors that are about to get curb-stomped by the Czar when suddenly Cal and the armor reserve have a Big Damn Heroes moment and kick the Czarist forces in their metaphorical groin. The chapter begins with Cal POV doing the battle-planning and high-level management stuff, then the actual combat can be from the lower-ranking guy's POV. We switch back to Cal's POV for the aftermath of the fighting and then back to the lower-ranking guy's POV for some post-battle leave.

*A major part of the story involves Marduk dispatching Cal (and his wife Eva, who has a bit of a history with Patrick) to territories under Patrick's control in hopes of negotiating an alliance against the Czar. One of them is assigned to be part of Cal's escort, while the other stays behind to fight the Czar. The one who travels can provide a lower-ranked POV (while Cal parleys with Patrick, he can see the armies building for Patrick's planned invasion of Trydonia and the reader will think Patrick will stab Marduk in the back), while the other can be part of the breakout where the bloodied Czarist forces shatter part of the Imperial army and march for the sea, toward the area Patrick's planned invasion will land.

*When Patrick's army lands and Cal returns to command of his army, the two characters are reunited. They'll be part of the counteroffensive that pushes the Czar back toward his incursion zone. They can be present when the Czar overruns Cal's headquarters and is about to personally dispatch him when he's set upon by Patrick. That particular fight would be a seven-alarm SNAFU--three corps commanders, their respective bodyguards and whatever equivalent to "household troops" would exist in this world (I'm thinking Patrick would have a force nicknamed "Rassam's Fist" in the style of the 501st Legion), and significant quantities of three armies' air power going at it in an area maybe about 1-2 square miles.

You all probably won't be seeing this anytime soon. This story deals with issues that I don't really have a lot of personal experience in, so I figured I'd set it aside and return to it once I've written some more books and have lived more.

(There's also the possibility I might simply put together the Patrick-POV parts of it into a new first-person fake-memoir entitled I, Dark Lord, but I've written some very good character moments that aren't from his POV and I'd rather not waste those.)

Hmm...if it weren't for the budget costs of Patrick's demonic henchmen, armies of tanks, etc., this might make a spiffy television series. Maybe it could be animated?

Thoughts on Animating "Coil Gun."

I'm about one-third or so through writing a screenplay based on my short story "Coil Gun," which was published in September in the third issue of Digital Science Fiction.

In order to transform a 5,000-odd word story into a 90-page (at minimum) screenplay, I'm going to have to expand the events in the story considerably.  This I've done by beginning the screenplay several hours before the story, during the lead-up to the war.

Although this will get me to the proper length and allow for additional characterization, the events depicted would make the necessary budget for the film larger.  Things include space battles in the vein of Battlestar Galactica, the depiction of submarine-launched nuclear attacks, etc.  Anything depicted on a submarine bridge, for example, necessitates an additional set, while the special effects needed to realistically depict WWIII would cost a pretty penny.

However, the thought just occurred to me that this could be donate via animation.  This would be much, much cheaper than doing it live-action, which would require Michael Bay-sized budgets for the action sequences.

The problem is, in the United States at least, animation is generally considered something for kids.  One reason the film Titan A.E. failed despite being an awesome movie is that although it was animated, it was much more adult-oriented--it starts out with the alien destruction of Earth, features the protagonist being subject to racist abuse by other aliens, lots of gun-fights and space battles, an alien getting his neck snapped, and the female lead in a towel answering the door to her cabin and asking the protagonist "in or out?"

However, the more recent Avatar was marketed as an adult science-fiction movie and is now the top-grossing movie on the planet.  Titan A.E.'s failure could be attributed to marketing--if I remember right, it was not marketed as science-fiction for adults but instead a movie for kids.

If "Coil Gun" were adapted into an animated film, I imagine it would be done using Pixar-style 3D animation rather than traditional 2D cel animation.  I much prefer the cel look visually, but apparently The Princess and the Frog (Disney's last big cel-animated project) didn't do as well as Disney expected and that contributed to future Disney projects being digital animation.  Legend of the Guardians did the 3D thing really well, so as  long as it doesn't come out looking like Toy Story or The Clone Wars, great.

And the same rationale can be applied to my earlier project, The Gates of Vasharia.  I've described that one as "Lord of the Rings with tanks" (to say nothing of an extradimensional demonic army), so adapting that one would require a Michael Bay budget as well.  Of course, with animation, it would probably end up with an Avatar-sized budget.

Just Finished "The Lost Legion" (spoilers)

Just finished The Lost Legion by H. Warner Munn.  I found the book in the Georgia PINES network in McDonough and read about a quarter to a third of it before I changed jobs.  I found it again in the Atlanta-Fulton library system and it was one of the first books I requested when I got my Atlanta-Fulton library card a few months after I got here.

(I was busy with work, Battle for the Wastelands, and other such things.)

It's a really interesting book.  Basically Emperor Caligula sends the 13th Legion and its commander, who is descended from Julius Caesar, on a suicidal mission into Inner Asia to find the descendants of Roman prisoners taken at Carrhae.  The 13th Legion, in TVTropes terms, is a whole army of Gumps--their actions set in motion significant future events.

*An Armenian prince finds a broken sword abandoned by a cowardly legionary, uses it to fend off attackers, and decides to make it his dynasty's emblem.

*The son of the legionary's commander rescues St. Paul from some bandits.

*The daughter of a Roman merchant who follows her useless boyfriend who's been press-ganged into the legion marries a Hun after her now-husband is killed.  Her son, fathered by her first husband and born after his death, is named Eitel after his stepfather--a name that sounds an awful lot like Attilla.  It's strongly implied a distant descendant will be Attilla the Hun.

*The legion's exile ultimately triggers the coup against Calilgula.

There's a sequence in the text where the author describes the long-term historical effects of the Thirteenth's passage through Asia, so I think there's more than just this.

As far as the ending goes, a Roman scouting party finds a ruined Roman-style town and when they are themselves all but wiped out by a group of Mongols, the lone survivor is taken in by Chinese who remark that he looks a lot like their grandfathers and bears weapons like their own.  The legionary eagle is taken to a temple and placed beside another legionary eagle, one taken at Carrhae.

Although the story is fictional, there is a theory in the archaeological world that Roman soldiers did end up in China.  Here're some links:

http://www.archnews.co.uk/featured/5124-a-lost-roman-legion-in-china-part-one.html

http://www.archaeology.org/9905/newsbriefs/china.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1541421/Roman-descendants-found-in-China.html

Of course, however cool this theory is, it's very hard to prove.  There are people indigenous to the area who look white and that could explain the genetic links to Europeans.  Plus the Tocharians, an Indo-European people, did migrate into Western China in ancient times.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/11/no-romans-needed-to-explain-chinese-blondes/

One of the comments in the above article mentions Buddhist art signed "Titus" being found in Asia, citing Foreign Devils on Silk Road.  One of the survivors of the Legion, an artist, is depicted as having been sold into slavery and making his way to India where he paints a mural of Buddha that features some of his companions from the journey in the painting as well.  Another "Gump" moment.

And one more fun thing.  Although The Lost Legion does not have its own TVTropes page (even though it needs one, since I can think of a few tropes off the top of my head), there's a trope called Lost Roman Legion and the novel is mentioned, complete with spoiler tags.  And there are plenty of other books about the men captured at Carrhae and what became of them.

I'll probably check some of them out.  My Gates of Vasharia novels, should I ever finish them, will someday go on this page, as they're based on the conceit that the Ninth Legion, thought lost in Britain, traveled to another world via a random hole in space-time and set up a new empire there.

Productivity Update and a Project to Ponder

Last night, I posted a new chapter to The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot for the first time since November.  To get it done faster, I lopped off the last half of the chapter and made that part the next chapter, filled in the blanks, and posted that sucker.  This chapter features a Crowning Moment of Awesome (see TVTropes) by none other than Starscream, who I'm hoping is a proper Magnificent Bastard in this story (as opposed to the actual Revenge of the Fallen movie where all he does it get beaten and verbally abused by Megatron).

Two more chapters and an epilogue left to go.  The Fallen has actually risen again and all hell is breaking loose.  Only two reviews so far and only one of them is from one of my regular readers.  I guess when you don't update for five months, people tend to lose interest.  Oh well, serves me right for ignoring my fans.

I also submitted my Vikings-and-monsters story "Nicor" to Basement Stories, a webzine specializing in character-driven speculative fiction.  "Nicor" is among my more character-driven stories--the story is "about" a Danish teen's disillusionment with war that just happens to come at the hands of a bloodthirsty man-frog rather than a mindless dismemberment festival--so hopefully they'll enjoy it.

I also had Chapter 14 of Battle for the Wastelands ready to go for my Kennesaw writing group's meeting last weekend.  Unfortunately, a last-minute work obligation came up and so I had to bow out.  This is the first chapter in awhile where Grendel is the POV character and I hope he does some things worthy of his name.

(He doesn't do things For The Evulz and is fairly quiet, unlike some of his more psychotic lieutenants.  But if he thinks something needs to be done for his own good, the good of his family, and/or the good of the realm he rules, it's going to get done, morality be damned.  My friend Jamie said that constant puppy-kicking is not good enough for a character to be a good villain--and this is after I depicted Starscream in the ROTF reboot deliberately shredding the parachutes of downed human pilots for kicks, something an Air Force officer like Jamie has every reason to hate--and after some thought, I've come to agree.)

The plan right now is to go through the completed fourteen chapters and make sure I'm using action-verbs as means of describing the world without boring the reader.  Think a sentence like "David walked down the long hallway, his image reflected in the golf leaf on the walls.  The wind from an open window tousled his dark hair."  Dean Koontz is really good at this, as a quick flip-through of my middle-school-era copy of Watchers revealed.  One of the criticisms of my story is insufficient sensory detail and Koontz's way is a way do it without blobs and blobs of boring descriptive passages.

Once that's done, it's time to start cranking out new chapters and not look back.  If I write more continuously and spend less time perfecting earlier chapters, I might be able to meet my Veterans' Day deadline.

However, now I'm starting to wonder about the wisdom of another project.  Amanda Williamson, the organizer of my Kennesaw writing group, said she liked my horror fiction (which takes place in our world) better than my alternate-world fiction because there's less worldbuilding and more characters doing things.  Another problem I've noticed is that my individual novels tend to mutate into series, which are harder to sell.  Wastelands did that, as did The Gates of Vasharia, an older series now on hiatus.

I've got an outline for a short story whose point of origin was a Lovecraftian RPG (I think it might have been Call of Cthulhu itself) commenting on how a good setting would be a formerly-rural site of blasphemous rituals to other-dimensional horrors that's been suburbanized.  Like Love Canal, the town built on a toxic-waste dump, there're horrible things just waiting to come to the surface.

I figured if I developed each "story bit" (scenes separated by ***) into a chapter, it could be a full novel.  And given how it's set in our world rather than an expansive fictional world waiting to be explored and has a very definitive ending without lots of loose ends, it's a lot less likely to mutate into a series.  And a one-shot might be easier to sell that a story that is pretty obviously the beginning of a series.

Of course, starting on new projects when old projects get left undone is why I've got all these unfinished novels, most of which aren't ever going to see publication.

I Got to Interview Don Bluth...

One of the improvements of working in North Fulton as opposed to Griffin is that there is a lot more going on.  A few weeks ago, I learned about the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival and how they would be screening An American Tail in Johns Creek, which is my primary area of responsibility.  The movie is a metaphor for the American Jewish immigrant experience (Fievel's family standing in for Jews, the cats standing in for the persecuting Cossacks), so it's appropriate.

One thing that is particularly awesome is that director Don Bluth and producer Gary Goldman would both attend the festival and would speak to those attending afterward.  I got the opportunity to sit down with Bluth and Goldman at a nearby tapas bar while the movie played and speak to them at length.

Here're the two articles I got out of it:

Don Bluth, Gary Goldman Discuss "An American Tail"

Renowned Producer, Director visit Johns Creek for Jewish Film Festival

My first experience with the films Bluth, Goldman, and others who left Disney with them produced was probably when I was around four years old and saw  The Land Before Time in the movie theater.  I remember it being awesome, but on the other hand, I was four years old and particularly interested in dinosaurs.  I also remember seeing An American Tail on VHS probably around the same time and I can still remember the cat assault on the Russian mouse village, "There Are No Cats in America," and "Somewhere Out There."  Two-odd years later, I saw The Secret of NIMH toward the end of kindergarten and found it terrifying (the scene where the escaping rats fall down the air duct and when Mrs. Brisby is captured and caged, sans clothing).  I saw it again a few months ago and it obviously wasn't scary (being 26 as opposed to six helps), but it was really well-done, especially Mrs. Brisby's voice-acting.

I never saw Anastasia or his lesser-known 1990s films like The Pebble and the Penguin, but I did see Titan A.E.  It is unfortunate the movie failed at the box office, because it was really good and its failure severely hurt traditional animation (which I prefer to the Pixar style).

I greatly admire Bluth, Goldman, and the others who left Disney when the bean-counters wouldn't let them produce quality animation because it involved actually spending money.  They decided to follow their dreams and produce quality films in the tradition of Disney himself despite the difficulties (resources and not having Disney's marketing machine), something they succeed at.  And apparently their success helped convince Disney to not shut down its animation division (something that would have been a gross insult to Walt's memory) and begin producing quality films once again, I believe starting with The Little Mermaid.

I think some of my story ideas (in particular the Gates of Vasharia novels, which I've described as "Lord of the Rings with tanks" and would be insanely expensive to produce live-action) would be quite awesome if adapted via traditional animation.  Maybe someday I'll get to work with Bluth, Goldman, and company...

"The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot" Lives Again!

Last night, I figured I would have a lot of free time today to write.  Although I have a chapter of Battle for the Wastelands I can finish up quickly, it has also been nearly three months since I updated "The Revenge of the Fallen Reboot."

(I wrote the last parts of that chapter while waiting for my friend Jamie's birthday party to start at DragonCon.)

Considering how I could finish the first draft of the Battle chapter today anyway and how it's been a long time since I've done anything for my loyal readers from the "Transformers" fandom, I decided to bang out another chapter for "Revenge."  Three to four hours and 2,131 words later, it's done.

This chapter is entitled "Then I Saw Another Beast, Coming Out of the Earth," an allusion to Revelation 13:11 in which we meet the False Prophet, who is depicted as being a ram-like beast coming out of the ground.  My story features the Fallen being entombed in Jbel Toubkal in Morocco so that he actually rises again (as the opening of the actual film implied) and I figured an appropriate Biblical allusion would make the project a bit more literary and classy.  This opposed to the crassness that made parts of Revenge of the Fallen so annoying.

(Seriously, an asexual alien robot humping Megan Fox's leg?  Giant robot balls?  Michael Bay, I loved the first film and didn't hate the second film, but this was just silly.)

In order to make the tank combat semi-realistic, I had to get into my Character Sketches file and use some of the material I had gathered while doing research for The Gates of Vasharia.  Hopefully the scenes from Lennox's perspective of the M1 loading and firing its main gun will ring true for any Armor veterans out there.

Here's the link to the new chapter.  If you haven't read the rest of it, you can always bounce back to the first chapter.

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5208263/29/
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"Escape from the Wastelands" Concept Album

When I was a wee lad (okay, when I was in middle school), I liked the TV program The X-Files a lot.  At some point, I purchased a CD entitled Songs In The Key Of X: Music From And Inspired By The X-Files, which had some good songs on it like "Unmarked Helicopters" and various versions of the theme song.

More recently, a former member of the writing group that meets in Lawrenceville got me interested in the Stephen Lawhead's "King Raven" novels, which make the claim that the story of Robin Hood was inspired by Welsh guerrillas using the longbow to fight the invading Normans. 

("Robin Hood" is a corruption of "Rhi Bran y Hud," which means "King Raven the Sorcerer," a persona the dispossessed Welsh kinglet Bran adopts in his insurgency against the Normans.)

I actually purchased a couple of songs, "Black Arrows" and "Raven Dance," off the album King Raven Vols. 1-3, a CD inspired by the books.

I had a similar concept for my "Vasharia" novels and even drew up a list of songs dealing with certain concepts in the books.

Here're the songs I'd like to include:

*"The Hunter" by Iced Earth.  It illustrates the wrath and vindictiveness of anti-hero Patrick Rassam when it's unleashed.

*"Waiting for a Star to Fall" by Boy Meets Girl-Long ago, Patrick loved Eva Stuart, who later married his close friend Calvin Grenville.  Things get awkward later...

*"Hands to Heaven" by Breathe-Calvin later becomes Imperator after Patrick kills the previous incumbent after a betrayal and declares himself Imperator instead.  Cal has to leave Eva in Cados, the Imperial capital, to do battle with Patrick.

*"All Coming Back to Me Now" by Celine Dion and "The Search is Over" by Survivor.  These songs represt Patrick's reconciliation with his former concubine Adaena Talmai, whom he eventually marries.  "All Coming Back to Me Now" is Adaena's POV and "The Search is Over" is Patrick's.

Thing is, there are some themes in the Vasharia novels that I feel I could better develop when I have more life experience (marriage, for example) and, given how the series would likely be my magnum opus, I'd also like to improve my writing skills to write it the best it can be.  The Vasharia series is now on the back-burner while I focus on the Wastelands saga, which will be easier to write.

So I figured I ought to focus my musical inclinations on Escape from the Wastelands, the first book of the saga.  Cross-promoting the book with an accompanying "concept album" means more publicity and money, although securing the rights to all the songs could be difficult.  Songs in the Key of X has songs by R.E.M., Sheryl Crow, and the Foo Fighters, but the X-Files had resources I cannot match at this stage of my career.

The thing is, I haven't thought of any songs that would go on this hypothetical album.  I'd imagined the song "Hail to Odin" by the metal band Iron Fire playing during the final battle between protagonist Andrew Sutter and the warlord Grendel, but that takes place in the fourth planned book, not the one I'm working on now.  I'd also pondered "Sarah" by Jefferson Starship due to Andrew's twin sister being named Sarah, but including that would suggest Andrew has rather un-brotherly feelings for his sister, which is wrong, wrong, WRONG.

(If the song were titled "Cassie," that would work--Cassie is the name of Andrew's hometown girlfriend who, sadly to say, does not survive to see him return to throw down Grendel and his minions.)

I figure there'll be a lot of Norse-themed music, since Grendel's origins are in a Scandinavia-like land to the northwest and Andrew himself becomes the strong man who brings down the doom on the evil, much like the hero Beowulf or the protagonist of the Manowar song "King of Kings."

Revising "Escape from the Wastelands," Self-Publishing, and a Character's Blog

I've spent the last couple of hours waffling between surfing the Internet (including an earlier update on this blog) and revising my novel Escape from the Wastelands.

At my Kennesaw writing group yesterday, in addition to pointing out some issues with the latest version of Chapter Five, one member said that my sentences tending to be long and have a lot of commas.  This slowed the reader down.  This is rather ironic, given how in both the Kennesaw writing group and especially in my Lawrenceville writing group, I regularly leave comments on manuscripts with such advice as "break up this sentence" or "this should be its own sentence," in order to make things punchier.

So I've been going over the first five chapters of Escape, practicing what I preach.  This issue is particularly bad in the earlier chapters, although it is less so in the later chapters where there's more violence and, consequently, shorter, punchier sentences.

I'll finish this process with Escape (and make the last revisions to Chapter Five) this afternoon.  I'll apply this to my other writings later on.

Also, when I was hanging out with my folks yesterday, my Dad gave me a Wall Street Journal article he'd saved about Print on Demand, self-publishing, eBooks, and other related topics.  I was already aware of this topic to some degree, since I used it as the basis for my blog post on the possible return of the pulp magazines.  However, this one had a lot of specific information on different entities like Apple and Amazon, who publish eBooks for their respective electronic platforms.  Amazon currently offers authors who publish with them 70% of the money, while Apple is going to do the same.

I'm currently working on a collection of short fiction with Daverana Enterprises, but if that project falls through, I might give Amazon or some similar service a try.  Between my own theories, the stuff my Dad gave me, and an e-mail from my friend Nick last week, this is starting to look interesting.

Here's the article:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575253132121412028.html

Also, I came across this blog I'd read a long time ago and I still think is rather cool.

http://darthside.blogspot.com/

Basically, Darth Vader is telling his life story--and, more particularly, the events of the original trilogy--via the mechanism of a blog.  It's funny in places and quite interesting in places.  For example, the entry "The Tao of Sith" is a fascinating look at Sith philosophy.

I've got another unfinished novel entitled The Gates of Vasharia.  This project is a significantly more complex than the Wastelands novels and deals with issues I don't have a lot of experience with, like marriage, the trauma of civil war, etc.  That's one reason I've decided to put it aside and finish Escape first.

As a means of viral marketing for the Vasharia novels when I finish them, I wondered if I should have a blog from the perspective of Patrick Sain Rassam, the Dux Primoris of the armies of Mahonistan (one of Vasharia's two continents), known by his supporters as the Wolf King and by his enemies as the Dark Lord.

Patrick is not a villain like Vader, but an anti-hero.  He has virtues (bravery, loyalty, honor, intelligence, martial skill, vision, and a strong sense of fairness), but many character flaws (social clutziness, holding grudges, a quick temper, a guilt complex, insecurity, pettiness, a bit of an ends-justify-the-means mentality, and a propensity to, in TVTropes terms, to Pay Evil Unto Evil) that contribute to several acts that are, how shall I put delicately, extremely ethically dubious.  The fact he surrounds himself with the trappings of supervillainy as means of dealing with his insecurity and intimidating his enemies doesn't help.

A blog from his perspective could be used as a viral marketing strategy (much like how the creators of Cloverfield created web-sites for a soft drink that plays a role in the film), provide insights into Patrick's past and mindset that aren't revealed in the books (most of the first novel is told from the perspective of Patrick's comrade-turned-enemy Dux Cal Grenville, who is the real protagonist of the story), serve as another creative outlet, and possibly even serve as the basis for another book. 

After all, Stephanie Meyer has started writing another book, telling the tale of Twilight from the perspective of Edward, as well as a novella telling the tale of one of the later books from the perspective of another character (The Short Second Life of Bree Tanner: An Eclipse Novella).  Assuming I'm successful and can generate even an eighth of the fan-base she's got, they'd love this.  And although Cal is higher on the moral food chain than Patrick is, Patrick as I envision him has got enough bad-boy appeal that I expect the project would get a lot of attention.