Strong Characters

I’ve been thinking about the movie John Carter (Disney) a fair amount the last few days. I happened upon it on television the other night and decided to watch it again. I was immediately reminded of how much I liked the movie and how I generally loved Edgar Rice Burroughs John Carter series. As a youth I probably read the entire series ten or more times. Having loved the written stories so much I remember being excited and a little worried when I heard the movie was coming out. Now, let me assure you, I am well aware of the reviews for the movie…and I don’t care what they were. I knew the story pretty thoroughly and I think the […]

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Distancing your work from someone else’s work

In June I released my book, Scouts of the Apocalypse. Scouts is a book that started as a campfire story probably six years ago and has been one that I’ve long wanted to see in print. As you might imagine, I was pretty happy to have it finally available. It was only a couple weeks later that I got my first email from a friend asking me if I had seen the news about a movie with a similar title: Scouts Guide to the Zombie Apocalypse. That was followed by the question, “Was it based on my book?” I hadn’t and it wasn’t. I must confess, I was pretty disappointed at first. And then I started to realize how different […]

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Creating Worlds

One of the things I truly love, whether it is in books, movies, comic books or whatever, is when the property hits a certain tipping point and stops being a collection of material and becomes a living breathing entity. Several such properties come to mind (and might make what I’m talking about easier to envision): Star Wars; Star Trek; Discworld; Wizarding World of Harry Potter; Pern; Asterix and Obelix; Narnia. This is just a very small list; there are many MANY other examples out there. In each case, the original work has grown well beyond what was first conceived, gaining a life of its own. Hmm…now that I think of it, perhaps the word, “Conceived” is very appropriate. What makes […]

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