Falling Skies tried to pull off Inception and didn't quite succeed

Tom Mason just prior to jumping off a balcony and miraculously escaping
the alien overlords who tried to extract information from his subconscious mind.
The escape seemed daring at first, but far too easy. Why in the hell didn't they
chase after him? Maybe he's still dreaming. It seems possible.

So Sunday's episode of Falling Skies really had me thinking "you writers at TNT watched Inception, didn't you?" Only in the case of Falling Skies, it was not as well done as Christopher Nolan's brilliant film simply because they didn't employ the use of the totems (totems are a good thing for the audience because it keeps us from getting frustrated).

For those of you who haven't seen Christopher Nolan's Inception, a totem is a thing that you construct. You don't let anyone touch it because only you should know the balance and the weight. Ariadne's was a chess piece, Cobb's was a spinning top, and Arthur's was a weighted dice. The purpose of the totem was to implant this idea (when you saw it in action): your world is not real.

In the Falling Skies episode entitled "Strange Brew", Tom Mason is once again the guest of the alien overlords (having been caught in last week's episode during the last five seconds). Now to be fair, Tom has been a house guest of the alien overlords before. Last time they talked with him and ended up planting a bug or something inside him. So this time around, it had to be different, right? Plus the stakes are much higher due to interference from another alien race called the Volm.

Karen is like the Darth Vader of this show.

We have Karen (she's the main bad guy that replaced the alien overlord from last season) and she wants to find out which of four cities is going to be struck by the resistance. Is it going to be Jacksonville, Boston, New York, or Chicago? Rather than resort to torture which Karen says she knows Tom can resist (he is a college professor after all), they decide to try and extract it from his subconscious. Think dream within a dream within a dream only unlike Inception, I kind of got lost.

Part of the fun of an Inception-style plot is figuring out if the reality you are being shown is real or not. Sometimes it's blatantly obvious. For example, Tom Mason shot Karen in the head. This led me to say "There's no way they'd off Karen that easily. She's like the Darth Vader of this show and for them to just shoot her and be done...not buying it." And sure enough, it turned out to be a dream.

I'm really not sure if the whole "Inception" thing really worked out well for Falling Skies. It made for some awesome flashbacks and for us as an audience to become emotionally connected to Tom's first wife, but it also distanced us from Tom's second wife and his baby daughter in a weird way. We also saw Anne Glass and his daughter Alexi murdered off camera by the alien overlords. In fact, we didn't even get a good look at them at all. This makes me think that Tom is just in another dream. But is he? Because it sure as heck seems that (at the end of the episode) he's not really dreaming. I mean he got away from the alien overlords by simply jumping off a balcony. They didn't even chase him down. Who does that?

If this is really how they are going to play things, i.e. off Anne and Alexi like they were nothing and then just let Tom get away by jumping off a balcony, I'm very disappointed. There are only two episodes left in Falling Skies this season, and I'm hoping to get some clarity on the things we saw in "Strange Brew" that left me full of questions. That's the danger, I think, whenever someone wants to channel Christopher Nolan and the Inception plot. To clarify further, the idea of layering dreams on top of each other can be aggravating to the audience if not anchored and explained well. Hence, Falling Skies should have used totems.

Either that, or they should never have tried to duplicate Inception in a forty minute episode. It just doesn't work.

How will you be affected if Barnes & Noble closes its doors?

Barnes & Noble at one time was huge. In April of 2006 its stock traded for $46.25 a share on the New York Stock exchange. Its stock price today is $17.97. For those of you who don't know, stock is how a company raises the money it needs to expand. When it falls like this, it means that investors are fleeing in droves, and that's bad.

As a writer who once fancied that it would be nice to see my books on a Barnes & Noble bookshelf, I think that fantasy will always remain a "fiction." I say that not because I don't feel I have the talent to get into one of those stores as a published author. I say that because their company is in SERIOUS trouble. As an amateur investor in stock, I'd have to say I wouldn't give them a penny. It's the "should I catch a falling knife?" syndrome. For those of you who don't invest, the analogy is pretty obvious. If someone throws a knife from a two story window, do you want to be the one that tries to catch it? Not me. I'm gonna let it hit the pavement and get destroyed. That's just the way things are sometimes; that's capitalism.

There are many problems that have plagued Barnes & Noble. For one, they decided to try and get into the ebook game to repeat Amazon's success. The only problem is that this particular strategy runs against their business model. They own brick and mortar stores that feature books, calendars, magazines, a cafe, some wi-fi for a person to use their laptop on, a dvd section, etc. But by selling the Nook, they were telling their customers: stay home and download books. And that's what they did (I live across the street from a Barnes & Noble and in five years, I've probably been inside maybe ten times). That's kind of sad. Without people like me going in, they lost the chance to pitch books from tables, to collect side sales like cookies and lattes from their cafe, and countless other things that I might have bought because the packaging caught my eye.

However, I suppose that the biggest problem is that not enough people want to buy books in retail outlets anymore. That's just a fact. Now, just to be clear, the brick and mortar portion of Barnes & Noble is still profitable by a tiny margin. Analysts on Wall Street believe that it should remain so for the next few years. But it's questionable if the company can survive the absolute hemorrhaging of money that's occurred thus far in 2013. Here's a rundown of the B&N holocaust.

On June 25th of this year, B&N (with regard to its brick and mortar stores) reported a 7.4% drop in revenues and a $122 million dollar loss for the fourth quarter of its fiscal year. For the full year, B&N earned a mere $10 million, compared to $177 million just one year prior.

It gets worse. The Nook division is an unmitigated disaster. It saw a stunning 17% drop in Nook revenues and a staggering $475 million loss thus far this year. Can you imagine losing almost $500 million?

Wow. Just...wow.

So yeah, I think if you're a writer who wanted their books in a Barnes & Noble, or if you are one of those people that thought, "Man...those naysayers will be eating crow when my book is on the shelf at the local B&N, and I'm signing books to adoring fans" you should probably go and take a picture of your B&N because that business is in its death throes.

I wish it weren't true. But it's possible that the only place you will see paper books anymore is through independents or on that aisle in the grocery store. It makes me wonder how the Big Five publishers will deal with the mom & pop stores. So if B&N is tanking, what company is raking it in? The answer is obvious: Amazon.

Here's food for thought: In just ten years, Amazon's stock has surged 2000%. If you had invested a thousand dollars in them in Y2K you'd have 2 million dollars in the bank. Interesting, eh? Amazon will probably get so big within ten more years that it will just buy out Random House, Penguin, Knopf, and all the others with pocket change.

So what do you think? Will Barnes & Noble survive for another ten years? Do you think they can salvage their operation? Can big-style agented New York publishing survive without Barnes & Noble? And finally, how will you be affected if Barnes & Noble closes its doors? I think it would suck to go through all the trouble to get an agent, get your book sold to a publisher, then see B&N implode and shutter all its stores, resulting in you being told that your book is now slated for digital only and then thrown on kindle with all the millions of self-pubs because they have no way to market the paperback version of your book. I wonder how some egotistical writers will react when the "glitz" of a Barnes & Noble is gone, leaving behind a slew of used bookstores filled with cobwebs, yellowing pages, and hippies smokin' weed behind a stack of books propped up on end tables surrounding a flea ridden couch.

I can hear the conversation in my head. "Sue Grafton...over here. What's up my woman? You write some serious mystery." Puts cigarette out in ashtray. "We had five customers yesterday, but with you in da house we prolly get seven or eight. Saweeet!"

It may be a tad bit early but I'm gonna say it anyway. R.I.P. B&N. May the future prove me wrong.

Hemlock Grove's atmosphere is great and its writing interesting but it needs more nudity.

So I started watching Hemlock Grove (the quintessential werewolf series) on Netflix (I'm presently three episodes in) and am enjoying it. The eye-candy is great, however, there are a few things that are bugging me about it (just to be clear, these nitpicks are NOT enough to make me stop watching by any means):

This is your werewolf ladies! Landon Liboiron plays Peter in "Hemlock Grove"
only he has more facial hair. He's a wolf after all. You previously saw him in
the failed science fiction show "Terra Nova." I'm glad he's made a comeback.

1) Not enough nudity. Come on. This cast is gorgeous with exception of the "freaks" like Roman's sister. All the guys have 6% body fat and the girls are all thin with perky smiles and firm everything (it's like they all have their own anti-gravity machines levitating their boobs). They've had plenty of opportunities for some serious nudity (trust me on this if you haven't seen it), but the only naked parts I've seen by the third episode is Landon's butt  (I'm not complaining just we coulda seen more) and a dead chick's torso.

2) It channels LOST way too much. Remember sitting down and watching Lost and then seeing a mystery and then another mystery and then another question? You hoped that in the end, everything would be explained but the mysteries kept compounding until all you had was a show full of questions. Well...that's a little of how Hemlock Grove seems to be going. I hope they explain some of the things I'm seeing, like 1) why is Roman Godfrey's sister so big? Why is one of her eyes all strange? How can Roman hypnotize people and make them do what he wants them to do? How did everyone know Peter was a werewolf as soon as he rolled into town? What's with the glowing trail of fire that lit up Roman's sister's face when he touched her? And on and on and on.

3) Blatant iPhone marketing is obvious to the point of it being annoying. Everyone has one. It's almost like Apple paid for this entire series.

Now there are also things I LOVE about this series (aside from the eye-candy):

1) The production values are great. The sets look awesome, and the dialogue is interesting. The atmosphere and feel of the Netflix series pulls me right in. I realize it takes place in modern times, but I'm constantly reminded of the gothic through visceral details that splash in full color on my high definition screen.

2) The special effects blow me away. Take a look at this video of the werewolf transformation that Landon has to go through (character name is Peter, and for the record, he's a nice werewolf and not a mean one). It's frickin' incredible. THIS is none other than the creative genius of Eli Roth (the man behind Goretorium in Las Vegas). I especially love how the wolf walks up and eats the discarded human skin. It's horrific, yet I can't pull my eyes away.

3) They have Famke Janssen (from X-Men) and Kandyse McClure (from Jeremiah and Battlestar Galactica). These two ladies can pack in some powerful performances.

I'd say more, but I have another episode of Hemlock Grove I need to watch. Have a great Thursday. :)

Talking Murder, Madness, and Love with author Yolanda Renee

Yolanda Renee is stopping by my blog today to answer a few questions. I hope you find her answers as interesting as I do. Oh and she answered the questions in "bloody" ink. Isn't that awesome?

1) Murder, Madness, and Love was previously self-published. Why did you change your mind and go with a publisher?

In the beginning I wanted to go the traditional route, and after numerous (over 100) rejections, I decided to self-publish because I wanted to give books to the family as Christmas presents. However, once I started the process, my husband convinced me I should go the full route. But self-publishing never gave me the exposure I needed for success. The books were not available in bookstores, except locally, Kindle did not support self-publishing in 2008, and I wanted national attention.

I set a goal, and I have this bad habit of needing to achieve goals. I'm very competitive. I hate being told I can't, or I'm not good enough—challenge me, I dare you.

2) You have previously spoken of three locations in the two books you have coming out. Which locations are used in Murder, Madness, and Love? Which are used in the sequel Memories of Murder? Had you been to any of these places, and why did you choose them?

Murder, Madness & Love is set in Anchorage, Alaska, Seattle, and the coast of Washington State. Memories of Murder takes place in Alaska, Washington, and a few scenes in Paris, France. The third book in the trilogy, From Obsession to Murder, is almost exclusively set in Alaska, this time I use the entire state, from Deadhorse to the Aleutian Islands.

I chose Alaska because I found it awe inspiring. I lived there 4 years and then Washington State for 17. I've never been to France, but I hope that changes soon! Research and loads of wonderful pictures took me to Dijon and Paris. I chose Alaska because my main character Detective Steven Quaid is Tlingit Indian / Irish, he's lead detective in Anchorage, and this is his story.

3) Tell us about the first sentence of Murder, Madness, and Love. How long did it take you to come up with it?

"Debra pulled up the collar of her jacket and stared out at the arctic gale battering the city."

This is the fourth first sentence. I have gone round and round with this first chapter, because it involves the first killing. One of my first critics said there was not enough action. The second said, never use the weather to begin your story, (this is also a pet peeve of agents), and the third thought I spent too many words on a character that died in the first few paragraphs. They were all right – this new sentence, says it all. Of all the chapters the first, is always the hardest to get right.

4) Did you always intend for there to be a sequel? Were there any frustrations you experienced in writing the second book?

I had no plans for a sequel, not when I wrote the first draft. When I first sent out queries to publishers, one called to say she was interested, and asked if I would consider doing a sequel. Of course, I said yes, and immediately started to formulate one. I never heard back from that publisher and was sorely disappointed; I go over and over that conversation in my mind and still don't know where I screwed it up.

That disappointment was a few years before I decided to self-publish. Once I knew where I wanted to take the story, I wrote books 2 and 3 in a matter of months, four to be exact (the first draft). And there were frustrations a plenty, especially trying to make book two as good as if not better than the first book. From the early reviews, I've done it, and now it’s a challenge to make book three even better. To have the entire trilogy published, will be a dream come true!

Thank you, Mike, for this wonderful opportunity to share my work.

Murder, Madness & Love by Yolanda Renée

To be Re-released August 19th, 2013

Tagline:

After a gritty detective becomes involved with a beautiful widow suspected of murder, slander and obsession obstruct his quest for justice.

Synopsis:

A killer plays cat and mouse with a young widow against the snowy backdrop of an Alaskan winter. Branded a black widow after the suspicious death of her millionaire husband, Sarah Palmer flees Seattle for Anchorage. But the peace and quiet she hoped to enjoy in her hometown is soon shattered. The killer is murdering Sarah look-alikes on the 14th of each month, taunting Sarah with a valentine of evidence.

After her experiences in Seattle, Sarah is slow to go to the police. When she finally does, she finds Detective Steven Quaid. Called on to protect the beautiful widow from a stalker intent on her destruction, Steven is convinced he can solve Michael Palmer's murder and arrest the stalker. However, crime is never simple, and before long Sarah has Steven wound up tighter than barbed wire. Is Sarah a victim or a very skilled manipulator? With a killer on the loose and a climbing body count, Steven cannot afford to hedge his bets-or his life.

The Newsroom makes me wish I lived in New York City and was a part of something so much bigger than the banality of my very common life

Jeff Daniels as Will McAvoy. He's basically the "Brian Williams" of this
show. One of my friends said she can't watch this show because she
associates Jeff with his role in "Dumb and Dumber." I wish she could get
past that because the two characters could not be more different, and it
shows Jeff's strength as a high-caliber actor.

I enjoyed the first season of The Newsroom even though critics seemed to distance themselves choosing to be either 1) offended 2) confused or 3) disinterested. The "offense" was intentional as Will McAvoy at the center of this show believed in an America that was still great, but in his eye had lost its luster because politics had become both extreme and corrupt. He branded himself as a Republican, but there's no question that a lot of what he said in the show came out as "anti-conservative" especially when he compared the T.E.A. Party to the "American Taliban." That kind of analogy sounds as awful as it is, and I'm pleased that the waves from his statement (just like there would be in real life) are making things difficult for the little news network that could (meaning that they want to return the U.S. to a time where journalists were respected and not reviled by the public at large).

They changed the opening credits. Do you think it signifies a change in the writing?

I honestly love the music to the opening credits. It's one of my favorites. If you 

haven't seen it, you should watch it.

I think the reason I like Aaron Sorkin's take on the news is because he cleverly sets up the season within the first episode. Last season, it was Will McAvoy's rant that set up everything he said and who he was as a person for the viewers that tuned in faithfully every Sunday night.

This time Aaron is playing with the events that unfolded in the wake of the Arab Spring in our country: the idea that Americans wanted a revolution and staged Occupy Wall Street to draw attention to income equality. Whether or not Occupy Wall Street actually accomplished anything I suppose is not the point. But talking about why bankers who made hundreds of millions of dollars while tax payers lost billions of dollars is worth looking at, and I think this is going to be one of several themes for this season. Or maybe to make this even simpler, the show is going to talk about inequality and how (as Americans) we actually encourage it...perhaps (dare I say) even revel in it?

In the premiere episode of season two called "First thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" we have repercussions from the insult uttered by Will McAvoy when we see ACN ostracized during congressional hearings on SOPA (remember this one?). ACN wasn't even allowed to enter the building.

We see Jim (in the role of reporter) turned away from a ride on the Romney press bus, so he has to spend his own gas to cover the early stages of the presidential campaign.

And we see the whispers of a story that (according to previews) will blow up in the face of The Newsroom and provide the kind of drama we'd associate with these very real characters.

Yes, I find these points interesting because despite our culture's readiness to push for change, what usually ends up happening is change means that someone is going to come up with the short end of the stick. However, I have to say that what continues to draw me back to The Newsroom is how every single character can stand alone. They are very human. And just like I can relate to the single picture of the eyeball in the opening credits (as the person owning that eyeball contemplates the day's events), I can relate to the human struggles that these fictional characters undertake with admiration, bringing us the news with the same vigor as firefighters putting out flames and saving lives.

It's fascinating, heroic, and even tragic at times. There's a part of me that hopes I can breathe this kind of life into characters via whip smart dialogue (which is a trademark of Sorkin) and real life issues that transcend the material things to which we all cling. And there's a part of me that wishes I could live in New York City and be a part of something so much bigger than the banalities of my very common life.

Are you watching The Newsroom? If so, what did you think of Sunday night's premiere?

True Blood's Warlow is the most interesting vampire to come along since Eric Northman and yes, I only watch True Blood for the PLOT!

Okay True Blood, as of last night's episode, I'm totally engrossed in you. But there are days when I feel we are in a Bad Romance....

That's Warlow on top. And that's Sookie's "slay any vampire" power she's
holding to his head. If that isn't the best way to kill a vampire, I don't know
what is. And it's one of many reasons I like Warlow so much.

This season of True Blood started out with me doing much head shaking. I didn't see the need for the "Billith cam" (where we got introduced to the way Billith sees the world) unless it was for priceless gifs like Sookie Stackhouse saying the word "Fuuucck" in slow motion. Last season wasn't that great either, so my expectations were maybe a wee bit low. We had the oldest fairy in the world who loved Ke$ha, we had five hundred characters, we had Sam and Luna running around naked in every episode, and there was hardly any Lafayette (and I love me some Lafayette), but this season has somehow pulled itself up by the bootstraps and given us some real interesting characters.

Okay, this gif really is amazing. You should download it to your phone and
text it to anyone that messages you. It's funny as hell to get their reaction.

Now I'm freely admitting that I was deeply skeptical when I heard of Warlow. For those of you who don't know who Warlow is because you aren't watching the show (well I have no idea why you're even reading this if you aren't watching the show) but just to explain: Warlow is the vampire that killed Sookie's parents, and he's supposed to be very old and very powerful.

He killed Sookie's parents! But doesn't he have a nice smile? I guess if he
had a good reason to kill Sookie's parents it can't be all bad, right?

Warlow's the reason why Jason Stackhouse completely lost it and said "Knowing my parents were killed by a vampire is the worst thing that's ever happened to me." And that's a pretty big statement since in one season of True Blood, a pard of were-panthers spent at least six episodes gang raping him over and over. So either Jason has a gift for ignoring anything that has to do with sex, is stupid, or he just really didn't like hearing that his parents had been killed by a vampire. I'm actually not sure which of those three applies, but it's True Blood so it's not like any of their problems get so bad that they just can't hump their way through them, right?

In a world filled with super-powered freaks, Jason Stackhouse's super-power
is the ability to hump his way through any problem that arises. Damn. I think
I'm jealous of that.

Anyway, with regard to Warlow, I thought they were going for another kind of Russel Edgington-type character and I thought, "how unoriginal." But they aren't. Warlow is way more complex, and I love where this is going. And they're employing the same kinds of techniques that make Bill, Eric, and Pam interesting vampires, i.e. the flashback.

Now I know I just heard all you writers out there groaning, but the flashback really works in television (maybe not so much in writing). Last season with Eric, we flashed back to the time where he made Pam (think gas lamps and Victorian England and you've got the time perfectly). And with Bill, it's not been so much flashbacks as it's been surreal conversations with Lilith (the vampire goddess and perhaps the first vampire?) while being surrounded by bloody naked women strutting vagina first into the sun. And well...if you've got a nice body and are a feminist, I honestly can't blame you for strutting vagina first into the sun. It just might be the greatest meme ever.

Censorship courtesy of io9 :) Ladies, do you feel empowered yet?

So we get introduced to Warlow who is a fairy that's crossed with a vampire and who's basically almost as old as Lilith. She made him in fact (and we're talking about prehistoric times here). The first flashback we got from Warlow read "3500 years ago..." That's pretty damn impressive. But it also turns out, he's not really a bad guy. He was a good husband that got turned into a vampire by Lilith while putting water in a jug by the river for his family. And now 3500 years later, he's come to marry Sookie Stackhouse, and it turns out he loves her and actually saved her from her parents who tried to kill her. Yeah...in a seance with Lafayette, Sookie found out her "loving parents" really didn't love her all that much. They feared her, thought she was weird, and pretty much just wanted to get rid of her. Warlow stopped all that.

In another season, Lafayette said, "I am not gmail for all you dead bitches." But for Sookie,
he IS gmail...and for the record, I love the way Lafayette says "bitch." It's more entertaining
than when Jesse Pinkman says "bitch!" and that means a lot. Don't believe me? Here are
my scientific findings to back up my hypothesis:

Verdict: Lafayette wins!

Warlow can walk in daylight, saved her brother, and sure...he's done some bad things like destroy an entire nightclub of fairies that worked as strippers and then stuck Sookie's grandfather "the King of the fairies" into the dimension he had to live in and survive for a long time, but Sookie's grandfather was weird anyway.

There's that word again..."weird" and I've used it multiple times here. Is "weird" really something that I should use to describe True Blood? Don't answer that, or the universe may possibly explode. Maybe my whole point to this utterly pointless post is this: Warlow is hawt, and I'm weird because I watch True Blood.

So yeah, I think True Blood's Warlow is the most interesting vampire to come along since Eric Northman. Anyone else agree?

If you haven't been paying attention to the Treyvon Martin case you should because the outcome could affect your life

Yesterday, the defense team of George Zimmerman made their closing arguments in the Treyvon Martin case and it's expected that the jury will begin deliberations as soon as Friday afternoon. I've been following this case (as has most of the nation) for a while now and the one thing that troubles me has to do with this thought:

If an aggressor goes out of their way to antagonize a defendant (who is doing no wrong) and a fight breaks out that goes badly for the aggressor to the point where they feel their life is in danger, do they actually have the right to kill that defendant and get off with no punishment?

To put it another way, is it okay to antagonize someone into a fight and if it gets out of hand, claim self defense and kill the other person? Because that's exactly what's going on in this Florida case. That's what the defense is arguing is "lawful," and depending on how this verdict goes down, I'm a little worried about what it means for the rest of us.

In states that support a self-defense law, it will be okay for enemies to stalk you and antagonize you into a fight in the hopes that they can justify that they "feared for their life" and had to put a bullet in your heart to stop you from killing them. Does anyone else have a problem with this? Does anyone else believe that it's wrong that an aggressor pay no legal penalty for setting deadly events in motion?

I don't think that this trial is just about what happened that fateful night in Florida. Nor is it about what you or I believe what happened and whether or not Treyvon was in the wrong and Zimmerman conversely in the right. The bigger picture is about how we can grant some citizens the right to kill on fear while systematically denying that right to others.

If you haven't been paying attention to the Treyvon Martin case, you should be. The ruling could very well be a matter of life and death for any one of us in the future if aggressors are emboldened by the knowledge they can face no legal punishment as long as they can claim self-defense, even if they started the fight.

***** 

I will be skipping my post tomorrow to enjoy a Pacific Rim weekend. I'm seeing it tonight, tomorrow, and Saturday. If you wonder where I'm at, just think "watching monsters and robots slug it out on the big screen."

Have a good weekend. I look forward to reading your comments on what I've said here and whether or not this thought occurred to you about the trial.