Scene-Of-The-Month: “Dragon Stones”

The votes are in and the readers’ choice for this week’s scene of the month is Dragon Stones. Randomly flipping through the book, I stopped here, towards the end, where the dragon has finally cut loose on her enemies. Burn, baby, burn!

Review: “Sunshine”

A few weeks ago we rented the movie “Sunshine“, in which a group of astronauts embark on a mission to fire a gigantic bomb into the sun (which is suffering from diminished output) to reignite it, and thus rescue Earth from the grip of an endless winter. (Sounds like one of Dennis’s missions, doesn’t it?) There seems to be a lot of carping about the physics of this, as the sun isn’t scheduled to start dying for quite some time; in the back-story, which is not explained in the film, it is revealed that this is because the sun has captured a Q-Ball which is acting as a damper. I read the explanation and still don’t understand exactly what a Q-Ball is, so I’ve decided it’s something that Q uses when he’s shooting pool. But I digress.

Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part IV

So it seemed as if things were progressing nicely with Eclipse Comics … I was writing “Night Watchman” stories, my artist was drawing panels, and my editor was getting married and moving away.  Good times for all concerned!  Sadly, good times never seem to last …

Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part III

When we last left off with the Eclipse Saga Part II, I was getting good feedback from the editor at Eclipse Comics about “Night Watchman”. So, while I continued to work on that, I started sending him proposals for all the other series ideas I had. I don’t have the scripts for all of them, but they included several that eventually became novels, as well as others that remain on the shelf in my mind gathering dust.

Scene-Of-The-Month: “The Wolf”

The votes are in and the readers’ choice for the next scene of the month is — wait for it — The Wolf. There really is a werewolf in this book, honest — just not yet.

Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part II

So after getting those encouraging letters from the editor at Eclipse, I had to actually produce the scripts. Fortunately that wasn’t a problem; I was pretty prolific back in the day. However, formatting was an issue. From reading reference books (in 1993, you couldn’t just hop on the Internet to find examples of comic book script layouts), I was aware that when submitting comic book scripts as a writer, you have to format them similarly to a movie script, with the action divided into panels. You have to supply POVs, camera angles, etc., and each line of dialogue is numbered; this is all so the artist will know how to arrange everything on the page.

As you can see from the Eclipse editor’s copious notes, in this early Night Watchman draft, I wasn’t very good at any of that yet.

Random Rejection: The Eclipse Comics Saga Part I

So this week I pulled something really juicy out of my pile of rejections. I may have mentioned before that a number of my books, including Night Watchman and Dragon Stones, started out as comic book series proposals. I was working with an editor at the now-defunct Eclipse Comics on developing several of these. Unfortunately I’m not a particularly good artist, so I was submitting them as scripts that would be illustrated by others. How did it all work out in the end? Well, let’s just say I’ve lived in the San Diego area for eight years now and have yet to attend a Comic-Con.

The Early Years: The Ultimate Reality Show Contestant Lineup?

Twoview: “Avatar” and “Food Inc.”

So in the last week we saw two movies, “Avatar” and “Food Inc.“. I decided to do capsule reviews of them together because they turn out to have a philosophy in common.

Scene-Of-The-Month: Dragon Stones

The votes are in and the readers’ choice for the next scene of the month is Dragon Stones. Flipping randomly through the pages, I stopped at this scene, in which the kidnapped oracle Tolaria makes good her escape.