Sunday, January 30, 2011

Sureshot resurrection

I am hoping to resurrect the Sureshot this year. I have been brainstorming a plan to make it happen and will hopefully be able to stick with it this year. it should be easier than the past few years since with any luck we won't have a baby born this year and I will be able to devote more time to writing and trying to sell books. I have done a poor job of it in the past but still have hope for making some decent sales. This is probably it though. If I cannot get some sales done this year I suspect the book will be dead. I desperately want to sell 5000 and get the second published. It is just waiting. Sureshot the Assassin (the second book) is even better than the first, but the first is no slouch. Often I get positive feedback about it and still have people ask about the second. This needs to happen. I need to get there. It must be my top priority this year, and look, as I post this, a whole month has already passed. As part of my effort to keep Durbar alive I am going to write short stories about him that I can post here and hope to put into a news letter so I can keep interest going. It is going to be a long year. But I am confident I can get there. I also want to produce a "commercial" of sorts to post on Youtube, and might try and make some other things I can put up there. Lastly I am on the lookout for Role playing forums where people get together to role play characters and adventures. I hope to host some based on my story and Pavshia where the stories take place. Maybe all this will add up to something. I sure hope so. When Sureshot came out I gave myself 10 years to try and make a go at writing full time. That was 5 years ago. The clock is ticking. I am not down on myself because I have been very busy with family (4 kids in 6 years) but the time is now. If anyone out there has any ideas, let me know. Otherwise, look for Sureshot short stories and a Sureshot newsletter. Wish me luck.

Tuesday, January 04, 2011

Time Machine

I recently watched "Hot Tub Time Machine," which was plenty funny even while using a silly concept. It was cute, had some good dry humor, through some bare boobs in to draw the 15 year olds and so was probably not the worst movie I've ever seen. For me it reminded me of how much I hate time travel as a plot point. It is one thing if you are trying to use time travel to make some sort of philosophical point. I like Christmas Carol, and Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, both which bend the rules of time, but when you use it to correct only to get the writer out of a corner he backed his self into, it is really annoying. Star Trek did it with their recent movie and it pissed me off. In Star Trek 4 they went back in time, but it was to correct a problem in the future. They went back and then forward again, and didn't travel around randomly changing the plot and course of the story as they went as well as the characters who are affected every time a change is made. It just seems lazy to me. It doesn't allow the reader to predict what might happen and not in a good way. Readers like to anticipate the next page, and like to be fooled, but also like to believe that the plot is possible. With time travel all of that is removed. You can't predict what might happen because rime travel is not based in normal human understanding. Even for the science fiction reader the plot and characters can get too complicated to follow. So I vow to never use time travel as a literary tool. Except that I have a story that features it a bit…ok, I guess you can use it, but don't expect me to like it. And "Hot Tub Time Machine" was still funny even if the idea of traveling time in a hot tub with drunken naked men is dumb.