Fall TV? Already?

This must have been an interesting season of television in order for things to have gone so very, very strange. Usually, I don't get commercials for the new fall shows kicking around until August. That includes the mid-season replacements.



And while I liked more than a few shows this season -- and I'll review those a little later -- some of these look like fun. And between Arrow, Flash, Gotham, and Constantine, DC looks like it's going to go toe-to-toe with Marvel on television. You want to place money on who's going to win?

Coming this Fall.

THE FLASH  (The CW)





Oh, all right. Then there's the extended version.









GOTHAM (Fox)



This makes up for the poor, Smallville marketing Fox has subjected us to, lately.





GRACEPOINT (Fox)



It seems that Fox has decided to follow up on limited run series, after the 13-episode run of Sleepy Hollow. I'm only in it for David Tenant.





TRANSPORTER



I could never get into the series. And while I like Statham well enough, I was never his biggest fan. The tv show looks like fun though.







THE LIBRARIANS

This is a "Winter" release.... Yes, I liked the original tv films.  Yes, I'm such a nerd.

Suffer, Jim Butcher, Suffer

Author Jim Butcher, creator of The Dresden Files, is a fan of making his characters suffer.  His hero, Harry Dresden, is usually being beaten up, or having his home / office / car destroyed, and we won't even touch his love life. In fact, when a panel he was on at DragonCon was asked about making characters suffer, he leapt for the microphone, he was so eager to answer that.



When The Dresden Files was turned into a half-assed tv show starring Paul Blackthorne, it was a train wreck -- casting issues, scripting issues, money issues, and the issue that it looked nothing like the novels.



When something similar happened with author Clive Cussler's book Raise the Titanic! when it had been turned into a film, he later went to see Raiders of the Lost Ark, and wept, because that's what his movie should have been like.



And then this happened.







Somewhere, I think Jim Butcher might be crying a little inside....or going into complete homicidal rage. Either one....

The American Journal and Radio Interviews

I was a little lazy last week, in that I didn't post....anything, really.



Okay, I kinda did, just not here.  I was recruited for a news site that wanted people who had no problem taking news columns and commenting on them. The commentary includes sarcasm set to kill, and common sense.



It's also the part where I reveal either my inner nerd, or my inner radical.



I've discussed my politics on this site before. I'm either right-wing or left-wing depending on who you ask, and where the jury is sitting. A Pius Man was such that I've had good reviews on both sides, so the book came off as being fairly neutral. It may help that I'm sort of libertarian....in that I really don't give a crap as to what you do, believe, think or say, as long as you're not screwing around with anyone else. I really don't. I'm too freaking tired to play politics.



Granted, my general attitude is that the gene pool needs a good healthy dose of chlorine. Heck I've got a friend who agrees with my every belief in politics, and I still want to deck him every time he opens his mouth about it.



But, yeah, if you really to see my general frustration with politics, politicians, and the stupidity of the universe, go check out The American Journal.  Today I should have a whole list article on Arrow vs. Agents of SHIELD.



Also, last week included an interview with Daria Anne DiGiovanni, which you can tune into below. You might remember her from previous interviews.



Just to clear up any confusion, the atheist I refer to in the interview is not Matt, the artist who has contributed to the blog. I come across a  lot of people. Train wrecks happen a lot in my life.

Online Writing Radio at Blog Talk Radio with Writestream on BlogTalkRadio

Honor At Stake, and publishing

Cedar Sanderson

Last week, I announced the news: I've been picked up by a real, honest-to-God publisher. Notice I didn't say much about it. I'm not exactly excited about it. I'm not gushing about it.



Imagine if you just finished moving furniture for a whole day.  Are you going to go out to a party to celebrate by dancing, and getting more sweaty, or are you going to plop down on the couch and take a nap?



I've been moving this particular piece of furniture for ten years. And I tripped over it. That was it. Dumb luck, and an acquisition editor with a high reading speed and an empty in-box.



Do I regret the self publishing? Hell no. In fact, if I weren't trying to be social online, I wouldn't have tripped over this, so, saying that God works in mysterious ways isn't exactly true. Mildly annoying ways, sometimes, but not much on the mystery.



The book is a vampire novel entitled Honor At Stake, and it's going to be include all the usual vulnerabilities you ever read in a copy of Dracula, because removing the religious defenses against vampires is just bull. It allows vampires to be your standard overpowered enemies, and we only survive based on their good graces.



And, second, REAL VAMPIRES DON'T SPARKLE. Period.



Now that I'm going to be working with a "real publisher," who will help me market my book, pay for an artist to cover my book, get me into actual bookstores, what does that mean for The Pius Trilogy?



Well, the publisher, Damnation Books, part of Eternal Press .... yes, I now work for Eternal Damnation, Inc ... will not touch self published novels with a ten-foot pole. They might take the sequel to Codename: Winterborn, mostly because it won't be so tied to the sequel that you can't read one without the other.



If you've read A Pius Legacy, you realize that book three, A Pius Stand, isn't going to be that easy to read without the other two books.  So, yes, A Pius Stand will come to an Amazon shelf in short order.



Will I party that day? No. But I'll flop on the couch and take a nap.



But Declan, you ask, what does that have to do with the cute redhead on your page?



The cute redhead is Cedar Sanderson, a fellow author. This coming Saturday, her book, Trickster Noir, is coming out as a freebie on e-book


Cedar Sanderson is interesting. She's half-way through a degree in microbiology, "just getting to the interesting bits." A former military brat, she grew up in Alaska (when the family became nailed down to one place). She grew up learning to hunt, fish, trap, garden, forage wild edibles, prospect for gold and gems, survive in the wilderness, camp, can, butcher, cook, bake, paint, research, and blow stuff up along the way. After Alaska, her adult life, was spent in New Hampshire, before moving to Ohio.

So, she's got a colorful little background....AND she's a cute redhead.  Yes, I have a thing for smart women. And cute redheads. Shut up.



The book is described as follows.

Book two in the Pixie for Hire series,
Trickster Noir picks up where Pixie Noir ended. Lom, the little pixie
with the tough-guy mentality, has proposed to Bella. All should be
well, but their happily-ever-after is in grave danger. Threats from
both Underhill and the human realms are closing in on them, and the
fairy princess raised Alaskan redneck has to learn on the job, and
fast!   

So, while you're waiting on A Pius Stand, you might want to check out her stuff.  Seriously, you can't beat free, now can you?

Reasons to check spam

Have you ever had one of those days?



Few years back, I did a novel that was basically "Catholic vampires," where I kicked the mythos into compliance with standard theology, and then did a little rewrite of history since 1789, and....



Anyway, one of my Facebook groups wanted something "Dark." A fellow member was an acquisitions editor, and had nothing in her email.  So, I sent in my book, and well....



Nothing happened. At all.  No word, no nothing. I got a reply at 1pm the next day saying that it was received.



That evening, I was cleaning out my spam folder.  There was a response 6pm, that very day.



Anyway, I got a contract in the mail today from Damnation Books. They want my novel Honor At Stake.



And this is why you check your spam folder.....



MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA



Anyway...



Thought I'd share the joy.



Don't worry, if you're interested in A Pius Stand, I will publish book three no matter what.



Happy Easter......

The Winter Soldier Bigfoots Agents of SHIELD. It Gets Better.

Yay.  Marvel's Agents of SHIELD has finally gotten really interesting. And I don't mean an individual episode, I mean the entire series, several of the characters who weren't before, and the writing in general.



How did we get here? And better yet, where do we go from here?



SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER AND AGENTS OF SHIELD



So, I was talking with Matt Bowman, the Novel Ninja, and he noted.

Matt: Agents finally woke up and realized "hey, we've had most of a season without real character growth. What up wit dat?"


Me: I think it was "Hey, we can't do anything really because Cap2 is going to come in and step on us like Godzilla. Let's do NOTHING until Cap2 comes out. Hail Hydra"  [Best use of Gary Schandling ever]


Matt: I need to write a blog post on it and then link to your argument on the subject. 


It then occurred to me that I should probably have an argument on the subject.

Obviously, you know where parts of this is going. After an initial start that I felt was kinda positive, they had a steady downward slide, especially when compared to other shows. What was the excuse for Agents of SHIELD's piss poor performance?



"We didn't want to have a Marvel movie tie in series. It needed to build up to that."



And yet, nothing happened until last week's episode, which was a direct tie-in with the new Captain America film. Nothing.  No character development, no character, nothing.  The best episode before that?  THE TIE-IN WITH THOR: THE DARK WORLD! The episode that happened the week after the DVD came out!

And they were "building up to" Hydra as the primary villain? Really? Hydra came out of NOWHERE on this show.  There was no buildup, no hint, no whisper, nothing that indicated that it had survived WW2. The closest they got to Hydra was episode two, where they found a Hydra weapon in Brazil, ripping off a 1970s novel and film, The Boys from Brazil. And it was such a throwaway episode that I found it painful.



Ooooo, but this was the plllaaannnn.



No, Jeph Loeb, head of Marvel television, you don't get to pretend you had any idea what was going on. Chekov's gun says that you have to show a hint of a plot point before you can fire it, and you didn't show us anything aside from some crappy tinker toys. I have been told that they knew about Hydra since Day Two.





Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to tell you exactly what goes down over the remaining five or so episodes. Ready?  Almost everything that you've seen over the course of this season will make a brief appearance. The Hydra ray-gun from Brazil, the ice-machine guy from the academy, a few lab experiments from "centipede" (which was obviously not-AIM, but now they're going to be Hydra), will all be whipped-out of the Hydra toolkit. The writers and creators will point to these things and say "See! See! We said we had a plan! Really we did!"



Fertilizer! Biofuel! And other variations of crap! Standard Marvel doomsday weapons do not require a whole origin story. That is not a plan! That is not any kind of a plan. That's padding, and hoping that they accept it as a plan.

If there were a real "plan," someone would have invested us in making Agent tall dark and wooden (Ward) a likable person, so when he turned traitor, we would have cared. Instead, they gave him a creepy sex-buddy status with a woman old enough to be his mother, and gave him completely inappropriate feelings towards the woman he's mentoring (teacher-student relationships don't work that way), and somehow we're supposed to care when he exhibits something like feelings towards her? (It's hard to tell, he doesn't emote well... or at all).



For the record, I've had people tell me that they can reverse Ward turning traitor. No, they really can't. He just stone-cold murdered the highest-ranking member of SHIELD. There's no way to spin that unless Victoria Hand faked her death too, and it makes no sense to do that, and it's officially overused at this point.



The original maxim of Chekov's gun is that if you show a gun in act one, you have to fire it by act three; conversely, if you fire a gun in act three, you must show it in act one.  You want to bet that they're going to just take that literally, and it's the gun from episode two? That's where my money is. There has not been a hint of Hydra outside of that lousy gun.



Like I said, this isn't a plan.  At best, it's padding.



The closest they had to advanced planning has been writing in an obvious replacement for Ward -- who is, of course, a young hip black fellow, in an obvious attempt to answer the critics who said that Agents of SHIELD was too white. The only reason that works thus far is because the character, Triplett, is a fun, charming, likable guy who has more personality than any two of the series regulars put together.



At the end of the day, I'm finally encouraged by and looking forward to episodes of Agents of SHIELD. I'm even semi-enthused about season two.



Oh, you didn't realize they were renewed? Yup. They are. And, now that Heroes is being rebooted, maybe Jeph Loeb will go back to NBC, Joss Whedon will finish Avengers 2 and actually do something for Agents of SHIELD.



I can see it now. Save the cheerleader, save Agents of SHIELD.

Review: Captain America: The Winter Soldier

We spent a lot of time on Captain America: The Winter Soldier last week. At the end of the day, how did it turn out?

Pretty darned good, really.





I'm pretty much in accord with the Novel Ninja, or Howard Taylor.  However, I disagree that while the villain is simple, I don't even think we need to have his motivations. It's a long story, but self-explanatory when you see the spoilers below.



Some things not mentioned in either review.  There is the return of Peggy Carter -- yes, the British love interested from the first Captain America. And it is possibly one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the entire film. And that was from the first twenty minutes. I seriously hadn't expected tears from a Marvel film. Really, I hadn't.



I'd like to know how much money did they pay Gary Sinese to be the narrator for a Captain America exhibit at the Smithsonian.



If you thought that Nick Fury didn't have much to do in the other films, or wasn't all that much of a badass, this is the movie where you get to see just how many people it takes to get the drop on Nick Fury. Answer: more people than the bad guys have at their disposal.



Also, they had a GREAT setup for Avengers 2, as well as Cap 3, while maintaining its own self-contained main plot. There might also be a Black Widow spinoff, and maybe one other.



And the Falcon? Totally awesome. He steals every scene he's in, and might have been able to steal the movie. I also loved how he knew what Steve Rogers was thinking solely on the basis that they'd both been in war zones.



Also, Agents of SHIELD is screwed.



SPOILERS AND CONFIRMATION OF SPECULATION.



How much did I get right last week?



Nick Fury doesn't stay dead. Color us all shocked. In fact, I think this film might be a setup for a Nick Fury movie, where Sam Jackson can say the line "Screw you, David Hasselhoff."



Black Widow kissing Captain America is about surveillance. Check.



Robert Redford as bad guy? Check. Is he the Red Skull? Nope. He is HYDRA, however. Because this is Captain America. Like Hellboy, there are always Nazis.  Yes, he is talking to the Winter Soldier in the trailers.



There was NO Red Skull in this movie. At all. But Dr. Zola does make an appearance, and that was interesting.



We have a little bit more of Black Widow's backstory in this film, but not a lot. The movie continuity still has Natasha as a member of the KGB, but ScarJo is 28. When the USSR fell, she was SIX. I felt I was stretching it when Manana Shushurin was involved with them at age ten.



Yes, Agent 13, who is only identified as "Sharon," has a part to play in this movie. Though it's not as big a reveal as I thought it would be. Seriously, I expected it to be a surprise twist, and not so much.