"The Strain" Review and Recap: "Night Zero"

Back when I was a weekly newspaper editor, I visited the library to cover a story and found an interesting-looking paperback called The Strain. I read the first 100 or so pages before more pressing duties called, but I always remembered the book. Now it's been adapted into a television show and going forward, I'm going to recap the episodes for you.

So here goes...

"The Strain" Season One, Episode One: "Night Zero."

The episode begins a narrator discussing hunger and thirst before we see a flight attendant making her rounds as the plane comes in for a landing. I like her--she puts the obnoxious Marilyn Manson-esque shock rocker Gabriel Bolivar in his place and deals compassionately with a young girl traveling alone. Then another flight attendant reports something moving in the cargo area. She goes to investigate and something bursts out of the hold. Soon after the control tower finds the plane dead and uncommunicative on the runway--"like a dead animal." Nice and ominous.

Cut to CDC scientist Ephraim Goodweather, who's undergoing custody counseling with his estranged wife. He self-sabotages a fair bit in the meeting. His wife Kelly comes off as more sympathetic given how Eph is never around. Eph offers to quit his job to save their marriage, but she thinks it's too late for that. She's taken up with a new fellow named Matt, whom Eph had unknowingly met sometime earlier (and exchanges cross words with later on the way out). He arrives at the airport and after some of the other public-safety people try to warn him off, he makes an excellent speech about the nature of a virus that, knowing what I know about The Strain's macro-plot, has got some major foreshadowing going on.

At the twenty minute mark we meet Dr. Abraham Sertrakian, an elderly pawnbroker. Two thugs try to sell him an obviously stolen watch and then try to steal money from him when he's not looking. He deals with them masterfully in a scene that was fun to watch. Upon seeing the news about the dead airplane, he descends into living quarters under his shop where he has an old heart in a jar. He opens the lid and cuts open his finger to drip blood into it--and a bunch of worms emerge from the heart to feed on the blood. This is an awesome introduction.

Thirty minutes into the episode we see Goodweather and Nora Martinez, another CDC scientist, suiting up to enter the plane. Here we learn that Goodweather had been unfaithful with her, but had never revealed it to his wife since she filed for divorce first. They board the plane to find everybody dead--well, almost everybody. If you want a jump scene, the revelation that not everybody on board is dead--including a young man who'd been creepily watching the flight attendants in the prologue--provides this.

Meanwhile, a tall skinny man whose eyes do some creepy stuff I can't quite describe is coming to meet with sickly billionaire Eldritch Palmer--now that's a scary name there--at the office of the Stoneheart Group. The man--named Eichhorst and obviously German--reveals that the ball is rolling to Palmer and jut before the forty-five minute mark, he drops this lovely bomb. "I miss breathing sometimes."

Back at the New York airport, 48 minutes in, the survivors of the airplane are being quarantined and a huge box carved with images of death is discovered in the cargo. It wasn't on the manifest. Somebody isn't very subtle, now are they? Our intrepid CDC investigators, who went into the plane in full biohazard gear, open the box in the street clothes. We're getting into Darwin Award territory with that one. It's full of dirt.

Native soil? Uh oh. There's a latch on the inside of the coffin too.

And at fifty minutes in, things get real. One of the lead airport personnel starts hearing voices in his head. He wanders off into another room where he finds pools of blood on the floor and something big feeding on something on the ground. When he gets close, it rises to its feet--it's taller than him, tall enough to fit in that box--and rams a proboscis into his throat. The proboscis is full of worms and we see them getting into the man's bloodstream through it. Once it feeds on him, it smashes his head to mush before retreating.

Meanwhile, we see Eichhorst conferring with some thugs, including the two who'd tried to rob Sertrakian. He orders Augustin "Gus" Elizalde to bring something out of the airport, something that has to be over the river before daybreak. He offers to fix Gus's mother's immigration status and his brother's criminal record and Gus, with much profanity and threats, agrees.

Next we see Sertrakian on the move. He infiltrates the airport--now crowded with Bolivar fans--and manages to get to Jim Kent, Eph's assistant, by faking heart trouble. Meanwhile, an unprepared Eph--his boss Everett Barnes let him think he was speaking to the passengers' families only--reveals that most of the people on the plane are dead and there are only a few survivors. One of the passengers, the father of the little girl from the prologue, is upset and slaps him.

At around an hour and eight minutes it, we see the bodies taken from the plane being dissected. They all have incisions on their necks and when they're cut open, their blood is white and foaming. Sertrakian finally encounters Eph and demands the coffin be destroyed along with the bodies of the dead and the survivors. If the coffin is still there they have a chance. Nora is interested--Sertrakian knows a lot more than he should--but Eph isn't. Sertrakian gets arrested.

At an hour and sixteen minutes we meet the worms again. They're in some soil that had come from the coffin. Eph and Nora realize that the worms are the vector for what's killed the passengers and the coffin is full of them. Security cameras reveal the coffin has been stolen--and slowing the footage down reveals it's our huge cloaked friend who's done it. Eph orders trucks, vans, anything big enough to get the coffin out of the airport be prevented from leaving. Meanwhile, Gus leaves the airport with the box. He's stopped by police, whose dogs freak out upon smelling the truck, but upon recognizes the Stoneheart insignia Gus carries, tells Gus to tell them he's through with them before letting Gus and the coffin out of the airport.

Back in the morgue, our friend the medical examiner has opened up the bodies and found they're looking rather different inside. He initially refers to them in the recording as abnormal growths, but amends his statement to call them, "New, fully functional organs." Some movement in the morgue alerts him and he finds a heart he'd removed beating in a metal box. He picks it up, only for worms to erupt from the heart and get onto his hands. One burrows into his flesh and he manages to pull it out with a metal tool--only to be set upon by the reanimated passengers from the plane, who now have proboscises of their own. He's made lunch as "Sweet Caroline" plays in the background.

At an hour and a half in, we see Sertrakian being dropped off in the holding tank at the jail. A man who's clearly been in a fight asks him if he's a librarian--I laughed--and upon seeing his Holocaust tattoo, asks what the "ink" means.  Soon afterward, back at the Stoneheart headquarters, Eichhorst is informed that an old man with a sword was arrested at the airport. He refers to Sertrakian as "the Jew" and expresses surprise he's still doing what he's doing. He then makes some comment about how New York will be purified and Palmer summons his aide to go on a walk with him. A sentimental old man, he wants to go for one last walk around the city before "the fall."

Meanwhile, Gus talks with his mother on the phone as he brings the coffin across the river in his truck. He talks to the coffin and tells it that whatever it is, it's brought him good luck.

The episode ends with Sertrakian--the narrator from the beginning--talking about the nature of love as the father who had freaked out about the possible death of his daughter returns home. He soon discovers his daughter is there and rushes to embrace her. She returns his hug, but we see that her eyes do the same creepy thing Eichorst's do.

Uh oh...

Overall, a well-done first episode to what will hopefully be an excellent series. 8 out of 10.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: The Land Before Time (1988)

As part of the Myopia: Defend Your Childhood podcast produced by the Dudeletter, I watched the Don Bluth animated classic The Land Before Timethe other night. Set during the Cretaceous period, in a time of geological upheaval and climate change, the diminishing herds of herbivores gather to seek out the possibly mythical "Great Valley" where it's still green. After being separated from the rest by an earthquake, the young sauropod Littlefoot and his friends must seek out the Great Valley on their own, all while being stalked by a homicidal Tyrannosaurus Rex that killed his mother. I saw the movie in theaters when I was four years old and hadn't seen it in probably two decades, so let's see how it held up. Podcast here.

The Good

*The battle between the Sharptooth and Littlefoot's mother is well-done. She's clearly significantly bigger and stronger, but he's a better adapted fighter. They depict the Sharptooth wounding her in such a way that it's obvious what happened (we see the shadows of flying flesh after he bites her), but it isn't explicitly bloody and can thus still be rated G. It's not 100% clear how Littlefoot's mother actually dies though--I remember reading online it was infection (similar to the now-debunked theory that someone bitten by a Komodo dragon would die from the nasty bacteria in the rotting meat between the critter's teeth), but blood loss and shock might also do it. If they're all hungry due to limited foot on their journey through the desolation, she'd be physically weakened as well.

*I liked how decisive Littlefoot got when they were attacked again by the Sharptooth. He straight-up plots to lure it into deep water and drop a boulder on it to drown it. None of the usual "the hero refuses to kill so the villain does something evil and causes their own death" nonsense that I've complained about before. It's the equivalent of a bunch of elementary schoolers taking on the non-superpowered Freddy Krueger and it is awesome.

*It makes some surprisingly thoughtful statements about religion. Littlefoot wonders how it is that his mother knows about the Great Valley even though she has never been there and she says it's something she's seen, not with her eyes, but with her heart. Later on Littlefoot has a flashback to something his mother possibly told him offscreen about how the Great Valley is beyond a distinctive rock formation and a ridge of volcanoes, so her faith is based on more than her own desires and imagination. Later on, Cera rejects Littlefoot's vision to go her own way and the other young dinosaurs follow her because it's "easier." Instead Cera leads them into a volcanic desolation (aka Hell) and it's up to Littlefoot, the one individual who had the right idea, to rescue them.

*Although the film's subtlety is lacking, it does make good statements against prejudice. Littlefoot and Cera play together at first, only for Cera's prejudiced parents to stop them and fill her head with nonsense about how three-horns only socialize with other three-horns. Even Littlefoot's kinder mother, who saves Cera as well as Littlefoot from falling into the abyss with the Sharptooth early on, tells Littlefoot that their species are different and there will be plenty of children of his own kind to play with. However, when the young dinosaurs are separated from their parents by the earthquake, they have to stick together in order to survive and it's Cera's arrogance, not Littlefoot's cosmopolitanism, that causes problems. And when the time for the confrontation with the Sharptooth comes, it takes all of them together to pull it off.

*Petri, the neurotic pterodactyl whose fear of heights keeps him from actually flying, has a character arc. We see a scene from his point of view (when they're all standing on top of each other trying to get leaves from the trees) in which heights are terrifying, but he eventually overcomes this fear. The proud and racist Cera learns humility too.

The Bad

*One of my fellow reviewers commented the film felt disjointed and said that material had been cut from the movie against Bluth's wishes. I reviewed the Wikipedia article, which references some scenes of violence being cut out to attain a G rating. It cites this article, which references the T-Rex scene as being trimmed. The area that felt the most disjointed was when Cera leads them into the dangerous volcanic area--the group is separated and we cut from Littlefoot rescuing some of the others to Cera being attacked by a group of territorial pachycephalosaurs without much explanation. I remember seeing a picture of some of them fighting each other in a storybook version I read as a kid and I'm wondering if there was a missing scene where Cera stumbled onto them fighting each other.

*Speaking of Cera, she was the most thoroughly obnoxious character in the film. I can understand the film trying to teach lessons against prejudice, but she was so unsubtle it got old really fast. I guess if you're trying to make a point to children you can't be subtle, but it was so incredibly aggravating.

*There's a completely unnecessary recap of various uplifting events from earlier in the film (Littlefoot hatching, the little dinosaurs cuddling against the cold, etc) at the end.

The Verdict

It's a good movie for children and a good film to see once if you're nostalgic. Seven out of 10. Here's the actual podcast.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Dog Soldiers (2002)

Last night I watched the film Dog Soldiers with my friend Nick for his "Myopia: Defend Your Childhood" podcast. I first saw the movie in high school (it would have been 2002-2003) and although I'd seen it again a second time somewhat later, it was still long enough ago it worked.

So began my third watching of writer-director Neil Marshall's tale of a group of footy-loving British Army soldiers on maneuvers in the Scottish Highlands and their encounter with werewolves...

The Good

One of the best things about the movie is the soundtrack, particularly the downright tribal drum sequences associated with the werewolves. It's really quite stirring. The scene where the soldiers encounter the werewolves for the first time and "shoot and scoot" through the woods with the werewolves pursuing them was such a good example of a montage I used it in my film writing class (and apparently persuaded a pretty female classmate to purchase the film) at the University of Georgia.

For a film whose budget was around $5 million, the special effects are pretty good. The werewolves are men in suits, not computer-generated imagery, but considering the atrocious quality of CGI in many low budget movies (i.e. Sharknado, which may well have been doing it on purpose), even mediocre costumed critters are better. And these aren't mediocre. I remember when the film was new (at least in the USA) and trendy a lot of discussion about the quality of the costuming.

The action scenes are well-done. It's basically the Battle of Rorke's Drift--one character even explicitly references it--with werewolves. All sorts of interesting items get deployed as weapons when ammo runs low. And believe me, when the men fire like they do, it does.

Although the characters could use a bit more elaboration--they were introduced to the viewer twice, once when they deploy from their helicopter and the second time when Cooper (Kevin McKidd) introduces them to Megan (Emma Cleasby) and it was still hard to keep track of them--I did like the characters Spoon (Darren Morfitt) and the Sarge (Sean Pertwee). The former is amusing and hyperactive (something that comes in really handy a couple times) and the latter is a delightful hard-ass. The spooky story he tells the men at night is the perfect sort of thing a long-service non-commissioned officer (he references serving in the Gulf War, which would have been ten years before the events of the film) would tell the younger men. Joe (Chris Robson), although I don't remember ever quite getting his name, died quite well when he realized a werewolf was in the car with him. And Liam Cunningham (the future Davos Seaworth of Game of Thrones) does a good turn as an extremely unpleasant Special Forces captain. When your co-viewers are demanding his death halfway through the film, you know you've got a bad man.

And although sometimes it was hard to understand them, the film had a wide variety of British accents. The "British accent" most foreigners think is the British accent is actually one of many regional ones and they're all present in the film. This being a British film, it makes sense.

The Bad

It's slow. Jesus H. Sanchez, it's slow. There are random fades to black in different places, a scene in the beginning where the soldiers are marching along to this whistling soundtrack for no reason, etc. The film would have been much better if it were tightened significantly. The second time I saw this movie was for a writing group Halloween party and it must've been edited for television because I don't remember it being that bloody slow. Although that's the film's single major flaw, well, there's is the expression "how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" Seriously, that's the most absolutely damning problem with the film.

Nick is convinced they used three cameras for the film and although two of them were quality cameras, one was not. Parts of the film look rather grainy, in a way that reminds me of a movie shot in the 1970s when camera technology wasn't as good. The opening of the film looks like a 1970s horror movie in terms of film quality. This is less noticeable later on, but it's still a problem.

The scene where the men are camped out for the night and somebody throws an eviscerated cow at them is nonsensical. The werewolves are almost certainly the ones responsible, but rather than attack the men in the open where they'd almost certainly wipe them out, it seem they just wanted to troll them. Given the explicit references to hikers disappearing in the area (that Cooper seems aware of from the get-go), it's not like the werewolves are trying to warn them away so they don't "have" to kill them. If that scene had been drastically trimmed--it can't be cut completely or we'd lose a good bit of characterization, particularly for Sarge--it would've also helped with the length.

The "rules of lycanthropy" could use a bit of clarification. There's dialogue between a character who was wounded (and healing unnaturally--bad sign) and character who was not using bathroom metaphors that sort-of explains the later revelation that a certain person who turns out to be infected was able to hold off the change for most of the night, but in that case it could have been better foreshadowed. The filmmakers did clearly remember the rule of Chekhov's Gun for a bunch of other matters and there is one scene involving the infected-character-who-does-not-change that drops a pretty darn big hint, so it's not like they couldn't have done this better.  Having this person acting sweaty and twitchy but explaining away as a response to stress or claiming to have suffered in the past from panic attacks would have been a good way to do it.

The Verdict

Good scenes, but it really needed a better editor. 5 out of 10. Interesting that this is where a lot of British actors who went on to bigger and better things (McKidd in HBO's Rome, Cunningham in Game of Thrones) got big parts.

Writing Contest Results: June 2014

For the month of June 2014, I wrote 7,400 words of fiction for my writing contest. Given how several of my friends who've been involved in various iterations of the contest have dropped out or not been able to participate fully due to real-life obligations, this might be the tail end of the contest.

Still, I got a fair bit done, including some touch-ups to The Thing in the Woods and Battle for the Wastelands. However, the single largest block of work was done on an untitled faux oral history project I've probably mentioned here and there on the blog. Right now it's at 6,118 words, probably 10 percent or so of its eventual total length.

Right now, I'm thinking that'll be my next project. Although I've got the outline of conventional novel trilogy set in this world in the idea file, it's probably a one-shot (Max Brooks hasn't written a narrative novel or novels set in his zombie world, after all) and since it's a collection of interviews in the style of The Good War or World War Z, it won't have things like character arcs and the like. It's more like a short story collection, due to its interview-based format and how I intend to pay homage to "show don't tell" by the use of extended flashback sequences.

In the event I get some agent interest in Battle or Thing, obviously I'll switch over to those projects (either editing or, if they sell, writing sequels). However, writing a second book in a series when you haven't sold the first is generally not a good idea. Once I finish this project, that's a third axis of advance on my goal toward being a professional novelist.

A Less Ridiculous "Captain Planet"

Earlier today, I came across a discussion on my alternate-history forum on how the infamously Narmish television series Captain Planet could be a critical and commercial success. For those of you not in the know, it was an environmental-themed cartoon featuring a bunch of teenagers fighting incredibly unsubtle "Eco-Villains" (I think the idea was to avoid upsetting children whose parents worked in ecologically-difficult industries like logging) with the aid of some kind of magically-summoned warrior-type being with a green mullet.

It's actually not all that difficult if you put some thought into it. Here are some suggestions I came up with:

*No "Eco-Villains." Instead, have the Planeteers respond to problems resulting from ecologically unsafe practices. Ideas include pollution-spawned mutant monsters (like the movie Prophecy with the deformed psychotic bear spawned by mercury pollution), killer mudslides caused by deforestation, loose Soviet nukes, etc. Maybe there's an antibiotic-resistant plague resulting from excessive use of antibiotics in agriculture and the Planeteers have to bring in the one effective drug and fight a bunch of criminals trying to steal it and sell it? I remember one episode features a panic about a shark leading to mass killing of sharks and a resulting plague of jellyfish, so it's not like the idea wasn't there.

*Subtler, less ridiculous portrayals of polluters. Nobody seriously wants to destroy the environment, regardless of what the show depicted. According to one of my writing books, the "polluter" character in The China Syndrome is not a bad guy--he cuts corners to cut costs to create more jobs. One CP episode featured an Indian prince who allowed a forest to be cut down to build a resort to generate jobs for his people--since this was something they did in real life, it's not like they weren't capable of subtlety.

*If there absolutely must be Eco-Villains, dial them down a notch. I had the idea for a pollution-spawned mutant messiah who thinks his kind are the next stage of evolution and wants to rule the world. It turns out there actually was such a character--Verminous Scum. Obviously he'd have a more subtle name--I suggested "Lord Vermin" as a name he gives himself to scare people. Alternatively, just buy the rights to the Skaven from Games Workshop's Warhammer Fantasy--they're not as well-known a fantasy race as Orcs, Dwarves, Elves, etc. so they'd be new and innovative. They can be depicted as a dangerous race of mutants, with some moral grayness courtesy of "good" Skaven who want to share the Earth with humans and murderous racist humans who want to kill all Skaven no matter how peaceful (some of) them are. Another idea could be to have the Planeteers prevent a bin Laden-type figure from getting his hands on unattended Soviet nuclear weapons and he swears revenge, becoming a recurring foe. A PC-type like Ted Turner isn't going to go for that, but he could still be an interesting enemy.

*Don't make Wheeler (the American character) a hothead dumbass. Seriously, do you think Americans are going to want to watch a TV series depicting them so poorly?

*More focus on non-Western environmental pollution. There was one episode where the Russian girl went home to find her hometown getting wrecked by a slipshod Soviet-era mine or something. Depict how environmentally-destructive Communist regimes have historically been. Dedicate a whole episode to the draining of the Aral Sea, for example. The "loose nukes" episode could have Linka pontificating about how horrible life under Communism was in order to put some Western environmentalist who's green on the outside and red on the inside in their place, with the Soviet regime's nuclear weapons now getting bought up by terrorists and malevolent dictators.

Here's a suggestion the board member whose handle is Admiral Hook came up with:

*Captain Planet is actually some kind of being summoned from a ecologically-devastated future back into the past to change history. When he's in the present-day, his body in the future is comatose, which could present some real problems Indian in the Cupboard-style (IIRC a WWI soldier brought into the present-day as a figurine was killed while asleep in a trench due to being summoned). If there's a parallel future storyline (perhaps involving a war on the blighted future Earth), that could be a way to build up some suspense.

Some of these ideas make an appearance in this special episode of The Geekly Oddcast, "Pitches Get Frankenstitches." They also show up in this episode of the Myopia: Defend Your Childhood in which we discuss Captain Planet.

Israel Founded Before WWI?

The other night I found a timeline on my alternate-history forum you all might find very interesting. It's called "A Mound of Spring: An Early-Developing Israel in a Late-Developing World." The user whose handle is yboxman (who wrote another timeline I've blogged about before) wanted to write a 20th Century that went the way Theodore Herzl and the other early Zionists thought it would go, with a Zionist vision to match.

The development of this world's Israel, starting with a late 19th Century colony in the northern Sinai fed by a diversion of the Nile River that could've happened in our world, is really interesting. Their solution to the problem of raiding Bedouin is really clever and effective. Yboxman explores the effective of a prosperous Jewish colony on the economy of Egypt and it's interesting. He also gets into what Judaism would look like if the Holy Land is reclaimed by Jews (the soldiers of the Egyptian colony, as allies of the British) in the pre-Holocaust era. These are some really fun aspects of the scenario.

However, on the other hand, things get really dark in the former Ottoman Empire. It's basically broken up Treaty of Sevres-style (to a point--the final disposition is rather different) with a lot of ethnic cleansing of Muslims, forced conversions, and straight-up genocide, with warlords fighting over the rump Turkish state in the interior of Anatolia in something resembling A Game of Thrones. It's a horror show.

Right now we're in the immediate aftermath of WWI with Russia--strained almost to the breaking point--experiencing a lot of civil unrest. This is going to lead to a lot of Russian and Polish Jews (including a very young Ayn Rand) emigrating to the Jewish colony in the Sinai and the British protectorate of "Canaan." There's also (probably) going to be a WWII in the future, although it's going to be rather different in this timeline.

Blast from the Past Movie Review: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990)

Awhile back I did the first "blast from the past movie review," for the 1998 Godzilla. Now it's time for a second one. I just got back from watching the 1990 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film for a friend's movie-review podcast (actual podcast link here), so I'll review that one tonight.

The movie begins with a crime wave wracking late 1980s/early 1990s New York City, with most of the criminals never even seen. Rumors spread throughout the city, in particularly that of the Japanese immigrant community, that the infamous Foot Clan of ninja thieves have come to America. Television reporter April O'Neill investigates the clan, earning the ire of the clan's deadly leader the Shredder, but finds allies in a mysterious group of green-skinned warriors.

I saw the movie in theaters when I was a little kid (I would have been five years old) and I remembered some bits very clearly for over two decades, including the Shredder's telling Splinter, "You will hang there until you die." Since Nick's podcast is basically about watching childhood movies to see how well they've aged (something I did before with The Secret of the NIMH, which I saw in kindergarten class and I remember scaring me to death), I was all for seeing this one.

The Good

*The movie is quite often hilarious. Granted, a lot of it is due to it being an incredibly goofy rather than it being deliberately funny, but it's still entertaining.

*It's a superhero story (for a certain definition of "superhero") that isn't an origin story. The recent Batman films started with Batman's origin, we've seen the birth of Spider-Man twice in the last decade-ish, and most of the recent Marvel Cinematic Universe films were origin stories (Captain America, Iron Man, the Avengers for the team as a whole, etc). Only Spider-Man is really egregious, but seeing the origins of the Turtles explained as flashbacks as part of a larger plot rather than being the plot is refreshing.

*I like the interpretation of the Foot Clan as being a martial-arts based youth street gang, with the Shredder and his henchman Tatsu as being a sort of co-Fagins a la Oliver Twist. They have a clear motive as well--stealing goods and then fencing them for profit.

*Although we first see the Shredder as a silhouetted figure ordering April be silenced, when he's first seen in the full it's incredibly well-done.

*Splinter's origin as the mutated pet of a Japanese immigrant makes a heck of a lot more sense than the various television shows' depiction of him as a human being who has somehow mutated into a humanoid rat.

The Bad

*The fight choreography hits and misses--and mostly misses. I'm not going to claim to be the greatest martial artist in the world--I did take Choi Kwong Do and Ho Shin Do for several years in elementary school and that's it--but still. The TVTrope of "Mook Chivalry" (i.e. if there's a whole bunch of bad guys present, they attack one at a time) is present in rooftop battle where the Foot Clan takes on Raphael, or at least a substantial part of it. It's most blatant in the rooftop confrontation with Shredder at the end, where the Turtles repeatedly attack one at a time and the Shredder beats them off one at a time. He then stands there allowing them to have a huddle where they discuss the situation.

*The movie does drag a fair bit in the middle, after the Foot force the Turtles, April, and vigilante Casey Jones to flee the city to an old house Jones' family owns in the country. That does make some sense given how Raphael is injured and both the Turtles' lair and April's apartment have been wrecked by the Foot, but it stretches on for far too long. And then there's the completely random astral-projection thing by Splinter.

*There's a romantic plot between Casey and April that doesn't really work. They argue a lot and at one point Casey pushes a shoulder massage on April, but as far as I can tell that's the only basis for their big dramatic kiss at the end. I might've missed some of the material given the amount of Mystery Science Theater 3000-style commentary and laughter when we were watching the movie, but still.

*Some things don't exactly make a great deal of sense. On at least one occasion April's boss Charlie comes to her house with his teenage son Danny in tow, either to discuss business or see to her welfare after she's attacked by the Foot. Does anybody in this world have telephones? It does seem rather inappropriate for a male boss to visit a female employee the way he does. It does provide a chance for the audience to see that Danny has become involved with the Foot clan, but that could have been done another way.

*The father-son plot with Charlie and Danny could've been explored more. I liked how Charlie's involvement with the Foot stemmed from his desire for a father figure (a void that the Shredder and Tatsu filled), but just why this situation exists in the first place could have been explained. A throwaway line about a divorce (we never see the mother anywhere) or Charlie not attending his son's activities to instead focus on work "Cat's in the Cradle" style would have been helpful. This is especially important given how Danny's "father hunger" plays a role in the kidnapped Splinter plot.

*Finally, the New York City police chief is just ridiculous. I would expect someone in his position to have a much thicker skin and not lose his mind just because a reporter is asking him some tough questions.

The Verdict

It drags in places and its hilarity is mostly from how bad it is, but it's entertaining. 7 out of 10.

Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire Is Here...

At long last, my collection of ten short stories--three of which have not been available anywhere before this--can be purchased on Amazon in both Kindle e-book and paperback.

Here's the cover:

And here's what you'll get. Three of the stories have been professionally published and three have never been seen before. Here are some highlights:

"Coil Gun"-Science fiction and alternate history both. On the opening night of WWIII, an American spaceport official faces off against an Afrikaner intelligence officer in a deep bunker with their fate of both their nations in the balance. This one previously appeared in Pressure Suite: Digital Science Fiction #3.

"Lord Giovanni's Daughter"-Purchased for an issue of the print magazine Flashing Swords but never published before now, this sword and sorcery adventure follows scholar and adventurer John Fiore as he vies with the fierce Talassos, prince of the serpentine Naga, to rescue the titular daughter.

"Nicor"-A teenage Danish boy on his first Viking raid encounters something fiercer than the Anglish. First published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, but now you can have it on your Kindle or in print.

"The Beast of the Bosporus"-A Lovecraftian tale set in the medieval Ottoman Empire instead of the more typical 1920s New England, this dark tale follows Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha's quest for power, a quest that brings him into contact with forces man was not meant to encounter.

"Westernmost Throne"-A young receptionist working on a politician's campaign discovers on the eve of the election that he's much more than he's been letting on...

This collection would not exist without the help of James R. Tuck, so if you could check out his work, that'd be awesome. And for those of you who buy print copies, if I at any point run into you in real life, I will sign them.

New "Beast of the Bosporus" Cover

Based on advice from James R. Tuck and J.H. Glaze, I have decided to revamp at least some of my Kindle stories' covers. In particular, Glaze said to prepare for the long run--should I have a "real" novel available for purchase, there'll suddenly be a lot more interest in my short stories and I want to be able to capitalize on that. Although I didn't want to make any investments that wouldn't pay off for a long time (I think I've only just now paid off the cover for "Illegal Alien"), the long run is the long run.

So I decided to replace the cover of "The Beast of the Bosporus," since it was one of my illustrator's first projects as a freelance artist and he's had just under two years to improve his craft. Here's the new cover:

You like? It's a lot more detailed and colorful than the original. The covers for "Melon Heads" and "I am the Wendigo" are going to stay the same, as are "Ubermensch" and "Needs Must." I might consider an upgraded cover for "Picking Up Plans in Palma," but that might not be necessary--it's still a pretty good cover and it's got the most reviews of any of my Kindle projects (and they're good ones).

And "the long run" might come sooner than you think. I'm pretty sure the collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire James is helping me with will be available sometime this month and my friend Jeff Baker said (based on something he heard at LibertyCon) that one needs many items (20-25) available on Amazon for your sales to really start feeding off each other. And The Thing In The Woods is almost ready for submission to agents...

May 2014 Writing Contest Results

Here're the results of my writing bet with my friend Robert for May 2014:

*For The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to The Thing in the Woods, 3,740 words. I imagine I wrote somewhat more, since I'd thought the bet had lapsed and wasn't careful during the first week. I ended up accounting for this by putting 2,500 words under "various." I took the prologue to my writing group that meets in Lawrenceville and got some good feedback there, including advice on how to expand the section to make it more action-packed. The expanded prologue gave me some direction on the military technology of the antagonists, so that was very helpful. I'm bringing the first chapter before the Lawrenceville group today

*For The Thing in the Woods, 3,357 words at least. The goal is to get it as close to 60,000 words as possible, since many publishers will only put out a print edition if it's that long at minimum. My friend Nick suggested that if Thing and The Atlanta Incursion were both short, they could be combined into a single print edition. There's precedent for this--the Warhammer 40,000 Space Wolf and Chaos Marine omnibuses consist of several short novels glued together into one larger one, and of course there's The Lord of the Rings. Still, if each can be a standalone print novel (albeit a shorter one), that'd be even better than two short e-books and one long print book. My plan is to have it ready for sending to agents before I start taking summer classes at Georgia State and since these classes don't start until the second week of June, that's still doable. The plan is to write three new scenes--all of which have useful character-development purposes--early this week and then send it to the first four prospective agents I've picked out.

*Nick also put together a summer writing bet with the goal of writing a short story per week. Between work on my novels and graduate school participating every single week is going to be tricky, but I used the bet to light a fire under myself to write the first new short story in months if not over a year. I was inspired by this anthology call to write a dieselpunk story, in particular one set outside the Western world. And so in around five days I wrote a 3,230-word story entitled "Man of Iron, Rising Sun" set in the aftermath of the Battle of Nanking involving diesel-fueled powered armor. Nick might want to do something with the different stories at the end of the summer and the anthology won't send out acceptances and rejections until after the August deadline. In the meantime I'll cycle the story through my writing groups and send it to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (noted for its weeklong response time).

*For The War of 2512, 1,372 words. In an earlier blog post I referenced consolidating a short story into the novel and ending up with a new POV character, so now I've got more things for him to do. I have long-run plans for the character (a very long-lived genetically-engineered starship pilot), so I've gotten him involved in a bit of political intrigue.

*The rest of the word count comprises various other projects, including one I'm rewriting from the ground up. Life lesson: Don't delete an entire project unless you're absolutely certain you won't go back to it--and then think carefully, because even if you're absolutely certain, you can change your mind. The current version has a somewhat different emphasis that makes for a better work, but I had to rewrite many scenes I'd have been better off keeping in the first place. I also made a bunch of edits to Battle for the Wastelands before sending it out to several agents over the last month, which accounted for just under 500 words.