So I am doing NaNoWriMo this month. This is a peculiar form insanity which makes you attempt to write a novel of 50,000 words in a single month. To make matters more interesting we choose November, perhaps the most inconvenient of months to do said writing. I am 14,637 into that 50,000 and may make my head explode before it is all said and done.

That said of course I am going to make a few random observations related to my fields of interest.

V, the Reboot
Meh. I mean it looked pretty and I like many of the cast members. I don’t hate it. I just couldn’t find it in me to love it either. The characters are all too….fanfic Mary Sue. The story in the first episode should have taken a week of mini series to get out. We had the arrival of the ships, the revelation they are lizards, secret plots, and the human resistance in one episode. So far my favorite scene was between the Reporter and Anna the leader of the visitors. If the rest of the show had that sort of ethical challenge to it I would have been more interested.

Flash Forward
Science Fiction literature has often suffered from being more about the idea than the characters. They start with a premise usually based on some technical or scientific change and show you how those things change almost everything. Flash Forward is like that. I could care less about the former alcoholic FBI guy and his marriage problems or the closeted lesbians agents intimacy issues. The ideas these characters are used to explore do interest me, though. How would the world change if we all got a glimpse of our future? How would you live your life if you knew you were going to die in the next six months or you knew your wife was going to be with someone else in six months? How would you disprove this? How would you act against it? Would acting against it make it happen? That portion of the show is working and it is compelling enough for me to forgive the characters not being strong enough on their own.

7th son
Have you picked up your copy?

Fringe
Strangely I have grown to love this show. The first half of the first season is shaky but once I sank into this show I became addicted. If you watch the first 10 minutes of each episode you will have to stick around and see whats going on. The meta plot is really confused and not real well defined but each episode is a kind of weird I forgot I was missing.

Smallville
Yes i am still watching this show. Yes more than a few episodes have made me question why. Then they introduce Speedy or the Wonder Twins and I sit back and enjoy.

Dragon Age
I want it.

Castle
Is there nothing that Nathan Fillion can’t improve? Take a formula mystery show, add a really good cast, occasionally self aware and very clever dialog, and mix till all the lumps are out and you get a show like Castle. It is not going to blow your mind but it will make you smile.

Wire in the Blood
Just found this one on Netflix. The criminal profiler has been done before and in some cases quite well done. Millennium stands out in my mind as probably the best for managing to creepy you out with the evil that is around us. This British take on the idea is pretty standard fair story wise. The first one is a riff on Silence of the Lambs essentially. What makes the show work for me is the hero. He is terribly flawed. He takes an interest in serial killers and he maintains relationships with the ones he catches. You are never quite clear if that is because he thinks he will learn more about them or because he is messed up inside and kind of admires them, wants to be them. At least in the first season I could never peg for sure. Also he is imperfect. He fails at certain points. He is not terribly strong or even witty. He is a man with flaws and I kind of love him for them. I do occasionally get tired of perfect people always saving the day. Let my heroes be human and flawed.

That is it for now. More word count to be had tomorrow.

Originally published at McCoy's Geeky Emporium of Thought. You can comment here or there.

Sometimes there are things that walk the line of amazingly cool and surreal. Christopher Lee singing an ode to drinking booze is right there on the line.

Enjoy.

Originally published at McCoy's Geeky Emporium of Thought. You can comment here or there.

I will share one of my favorite bits of Lovecraftian humor. Elder Sign!

Originally published at McCoy's Geeky Emporium of Thought. You can comment here or there.

this was produced by a fan of XKCD and I have to say it is marvelous. Enjoy the minute of happy.

Originally published at McCoy's Geeky Emporium of Thought. You can comment here or there.

Wed. Oct. 21st at 9:30 pm eastern on stickam a story I wrote will be read live in a video stream.   It will be read by a friend and fellow podcaster, P.G. Holyfield.

So funny story.

I met PG at Dragoncon a few years back.   A bunch of podcasters were sitting around waiting for the next panel to start.  We did what podcasters do and exchanged business cards and the like advertising out podcasts. It is almost ritual like.  Anyway he reaches into his bag and hands me this cd.  On the CD is the first few chapters of the podiobook called Muder at Avedon Hill. It is this fantasy tale that starts with a murder in a lords manor.  Our heroes are a monk and his apprentice.  Both of course are more than they seem to the people around them.   It took a couple years to end but when it did this story went from murder mystery to a tale of gods at work.

After the podcast ended there was much rejoicing.   PG got a book deal with Dragon Moon press.   To celebrate he asked for some folks to submit stories set in the same world.  The anthology is called Tales of The Children.  Each story of the anthology is about the actions of the gods of this world, gods called The Children of Az.    I submitted a story which is a sort of folk tale. PG enjoyed it and said he would be glad to run it.

So if your interested please go ahead go to http://stickam.com/pgholyfield and watch the reading live tomorrow at 9:30 pm. Hopefully you will enjoy the story.   I certainly had fun writing it.

Originally published at McCoy's Geeky Emporium of Thought. You can comment here or there.

So podcasting.

It is kind of cool thing.  Some folks among my friends have embraced it.  They have made it part of their daily routine.   They might listen to NPR or maybe a fan podcast about a favorite show.  The truth is there are is a lot of content out there being made for the podcast format.   I have my own podcast which sadly I have not been attentive to, but I still plan on continuing it.   There are of course the various audio dramas all over the place, something which I have also participated in and been pleased with.   Yep, a lot of exciting things being done in the podcasting world.

Why do I bring this up?

I am glad you asked. Trust me, you were going ask.

See one of the more exciting things to come out of podcasting is the change it is making in how people get fiction.  It is bringing a new publishing model to light which has really changed the game quite a bit.  They call it a podiobook.  Cute term really.   It is giving away your novel one chapter at a time in audio format.   The idea is if you let people try out the book for free they will become a fan.  They will tell their friends about it and those people become fans.  You start to develop a community of people excited about your work even before it hits print.   Then when you do have a book in physical reality, your fans will buy it.  That is the idea anyway.

I know, I know.   It is crazy talk.

Even more wacky is it works.   Some people have leveraged their podiobook fan base into an actual publishing deal.  Scott Sigler, Mur Lafferty,  Seth Harwood and a growing list of authors have managed to get “published author” attached at the front of their names, in no small part due to their having released popular podiobooks.  Pretty cool huh.

And then there is Hutch.

J.C. Hutchins is first off a cool guy.   He is a nice guy who is kind of funny.  He is charming and upbeat.

Oh and also he can write a pretty mean tale.

See J.C. Hutchins was one of the early pioneers in this field.  He produced a podiobook when there was maybe 4 people running around doing that instead of the hundred or so doing it now.    He started out with this mammoth book called 7th son.   See he wrote this huge long techno thriller and eventually realized it needed to be broken up into a trilogy.  He decided to produce a podcast himself of the book and see if anyone liked it.  Of course, some did.   They went on to tell other people and those people told other people and slowly it grew into a mammoth success.  That was starting February of 2006.

He got people excited about the book.   He managed to get celebrities to do little bits for the podcast where they told you what had come before that episode.  We are talking people like Nathan Fillion, Ron Glass, Richard Hatch, George Romero, Robert J. Sawyer, and Joph Loeb.  People would wait for each episode wanting to see what came next.  I know this cause I was one of them.   He still gets in the neighborhood of 100,000 downloads every month.

It is a thing.

Flash forward to now.

Based on the success of the 7th Son Trilogy podcast and his throng of already existing fans Hutch got a literary agent.   This led to him writing a book called Personal Effects: Dark Art, which got more than a little praise not only for its good story but for its “transmedia” experience.   The book came with a collection of artifacts you could use to unlock other portions of the story.   Pretty cool.

It also lead to him getting a book deal for the Seventh Son trilogy.   This really popular podiobook thriller from podcasting will soon be in print.    Whats it about?   Well lets see.  It is a techno thriller about cloning, fake memories, implantable personalities, nuclear terrorism, political assassination, secret governmental programs and the oil industry.   No really, it has all of that.

Seventh Son: Descent, the first book in the series is going up for sell October 27th.

Whats that you say?   Your not sure if you want pay for this book and a 3 year old podcast may not be something you want to go download.

Wow, you are a tough sell!

Alright lets try this.   First the book is being serialized on boinggboing.net.  You know Boing Boing is one of the more popular blogs on the net, right?   Also on his website J.C. is putting up pdfs of the novel in a serialized format.   Easy bite sized pieces for you to try iut out and see if you will like it. But wait….there is more.   He also rerecording the podiobook of the novel as well.   He has more experience doing audio these days and figured why not do a redone version for easier listening.   Isn’t that pretty cool?

I mean just by going to his site you can check out 7th Son descent for free before you buy it.   Whats not to like here?  So go there and check it out.   When the book comes out at the October, go buy it.  It is a good story and you wont regret it.

and in closing…….
I comply.

Originally published at McCoy's Geeky Emporium of Thought. You can comment here or there.