Michael Lauck's Blog, page 9

Books Delivered!

If you were one of the lucky winners in The Grand Tournament giveaway, the Post Office says that your book has been delivered!

I hope you enjoy it and congratulations.

Book Giveaway Over (New Book Soon)

I have just finished signing copies and writing notes to the five people who won The Grand Tournament on Goodreads. It was really overwhelming to see how many people wanted a copy of my crazy little martial arts novel and I want to thank everyone who entered. It really does mean a  great deal to a first time author; I was seriously scared that I would be giving away five books to four people! Let me invite all of you (and anyone else reading who did not enter) to send me a friend request on Goodreads. 

I am deep into the next book. I do not want to talk about it yet, but it is very different from The Grand Tournament. Don’t worry, though, there is still plenty of action. I will be offering some new free stories, soon, too! Stay tuned here or visit SwordsAndRayguns.com to keep up with the crazy world of Michael Lauck.

And once again, thank you to everyone who entered the giveaway and everyone who has bought The Grand Tournament or read it through Kindle Prime or the Kindle Library. I hope you have all enjoyed it. And congratulations to Dan, Alexia, Jim, Danielle and Ofelia I am literally go to mail your books as soon as I hit POST.

I Know The One Way TWD’s Glenn Can Survive

I am not going to drag this out and tease you. I will tell you the one and only way Glenn from The Walking Dead can survive in just a second. First, though, I want to make it clear that I am just a fan like you. I have no secret knowledge or inside information and what I am about to say is simply my opinion (but I am right).

Here it is: Glenn can survive the onslaught of zombies on top of him if he simply jumps up, gets on his motorcycle and jumps a giant tank of sharks.

If Glenn survives then The Walking Dead is ruined. That is just the way it is… Yeah, it sucks that Glenn is dead. You loved Glenn and so did I. He was solid and believable. He was not suddenly Rambo just because the world ended. Better yet, he was not some terrible stereotype; you know, a martial arts master or super scientist just because he is Asian. But as much as we all love him, he has to go. it isn’t that anything was wrong with Glenn, but now that the producers (and by that I mean all the folks behind the show, not just those with the producer title) have put him under a giant rugby scrum of zombies, he has to die because there is no believable way out.

The thing is that there is no way to save him at this point without compromising the show. Saving him would be the ultimate bit of fan service, and if the show starts bending to the will of the viewers, well, Hell, we are weeks away from a Daryl and Carol hook up, Eugene curing zombie-ism and everyone living happily ever after. If Glenn survives then The Walking Dead stops being the edgy, gut wrenching drama that we love and becomes a bad action movie. You know what the problem with something like Predator is? When a bunch of dudes walk into the jungle with Schwarzenegger and find an alien you know that the only guy coming out at the end is Arnold. That can be fun for a couple of hours, but it doesn’t work as a weekly series. How apocalyptic is the zombie apocalypse if it only affects people without their name in the credits? All of a sudden The Walking Dead is going to be The A Team with walkers. The whole reason that The Walking Dead works is that the world it has created is believably dangerous.

Glenn: I bid you farewell. In the context of the story, your death was sad and pointless. In the context of the show, however, your death keeps The Walking Dead scary, unpredictable and heart-breaking. Your death keeps The Walking Dead compelling. Your death was important because we already have enough bad zombie shows… like Z-Nation and Fear The Walking Dead.

TV of Terror

Here’s a surprise: I love Halloween. Halloween bring out all kinds of cool stuff like horror movies and candy. I am not much for modern horror films, although I will not say they are all terrible. Personally, give me an old Universal black and white film or a Hammer movie and I am happy. Don’t get me wrong, there are other horror movies I like… every Halloween I watch the Japanese insane zombie flick Versus, for example, and I think I might expand the tradition to include the Blind Dead films (what are those? Spanish? Italian?). It is just that I find that you can almost never miss with the classic monsters of Universal or the blood (and boobs) of Hammer. I am also a sucker for anything with a good horror host, too!

Growing up in St. Louis in the late 1970s/early ‘80s, we did not have a local horror movie host. There may have been a brief flirtation with Elvira, but that was about it. When we would visit family, though, and could see Kansas City television stations, they had a weekend hosted horror movie show. I do not even remember who it was although I am guessing after a quick Internet search that it was Uncle Ed, but I remember being fascinated by the show as a kid (and getting the hell scared out of me by the original Willard). I was hooked.

In the mid 1980s, again not sure when, I discovered something wonderful on USA: a Saturday afternoon weird horror movie program called Commander USA’s Groovy Movies. This was back in the day when USA still played a good deal of sports and things like Night Flight and Up All Night. Instead of being a mad scientist or vampire, the host of this show was a retired superhero who hung out in his old secret headquarters under the mall and watched movies with his sidekick Lefty (which was a face drawn on his hand with cigar ashes). Commander USA would play mainly horror films, but would throw in the odd kung fu movie, Mexican wrestling film or bad sci-fi flick for good measure. It was as if it was tailor made of me!

Eventually, thanks to an expansion our cable package, Joe Bob Briggs came into my life with his Drive In Cinema. Say what you will about Joe Bob, his unique movie rating system (blood, beasts and boobs) neatly sums up about any horror film. I subscribed to his newsletter for years but I think I lost them all in a dog-urine related incident… Still have an autographed book from him, though, that I believe my uncle (whose syndicate serious movie review column sometimes was paired with Joe Bob’s column) secured for me. Then a few years later came along Mystery Science Theater 3000, which was just the logical extension of the goofy old “creature feature” shows.

Even though I am “grown up” (which I think really just means “pays bills”), I still love a good horror movie show. A great Saturday night for me can easily involve the rest of the family gone or in bed early while I watch Svengoolie on ME-TV and the dog snores away on the couch beside me. One of the highlights of my annual trip to the Lake of the Ozarks this year was discovering Uncle Gregory to Springfield television. The whole impetus for this post was my accidental discovery of a new show just a few minutes ago. According to the TV listings Retro TV, one of my favorite channels thanks to its showings of classic Doctor Who and announcement that they will start airing Johnny Carson’s classic late night talk show in January, is now showing something called Halloween Harvey on Saturday afternoons. I won’t be around, but the DVR is set! I know nothing about your show, but I have high hopes for you Harvey!

Anyway, that is it for me… enough mad ramblings spurred by a TV listing. I should really get to bed. If you get a chance, though, flip on Halloween Harvey or Svengoolie. If you do not have access to either in your town, search out Uncle Gregory on the web. Get a soda, some candy  and settle in for some good, clean, honest and maybe even spooky fun.

And Jim Hendricks, if you are out there somewhere, I would just like to thank you for all of the great times. I still hold out hope for the day that the Commander will once again take to the airwaves.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

So maybe some of y’all out there on the other side of the Internet know that I am a big movie fan. For a couple of years I did a web-series video blog thing with my buddy Jeff called Flying DVDs Of Death. Every week(it) we took a look at at we called “the cinema of ass-kicking.” Mainly, that meant martial arts movies but we covered westerns, sci-fi, superhero flicks, zombie movies… We even talked about Home Alone once for Christmas. You know it was just a kiddy version of Death Wish, right? It was fun and all but Jeff and I had other stuff to do, it was expensive to maintain the hosting for a weekly 30 minute series and I was pretty sick back then (before my celiac diagnosis; I’m cool now) so it just kind of slipped away. You can probably catch some clips on YouTube. I think we left some mini-episodes and bloopers up. I am probably pretty annoying in most of them because I tended to drink throughout the shoots and we shot four or five shows at a time. 

Anyway, all that is just to explain that I love movies and will probably share many opinions about films on the ol’Swords And Rayguns blog. Most of them will be out of DVD or on Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime/satellite (’cause I got them all) because I really do not go out to the movies much. I spent years working in movie theaters, even managing them, and I just can’t stand paying a huge chunk of money to sit in an uncleaned theater with a dirty screen and mis-adjusted sound. I will go to the drive-in, of course, but that is just a whole different animal. Sadly, life is working against me this year and I have not made it to any of the three drive-ins within on hour or so of me all summer. Sometimes I think my priorities are all wrong…

Which leads me to tonight. The kids are gone, my wife is not feeling well so she went to bed early and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was tempting me on the TV. I have been a Turtles fan for a long time. In fact, and this is the truth, just a few feet from where I am sitting there is a square bound collection of the first few issues of the comic leaning against The Complete Illustrated Shakespeare… kind of sums up my life. I like the old cartoon, I like the new cartoon, I like the cartoons that came in the middle, I don’t hate the live action show where they added a girl turtle, I like all three of the original films and really liked the computer animated TMNT. I have always had mixed feelings about the new movie based on the commercials. I wanted to like it but something about the trailers told me a would not.

So, yeah. This was terrible. Terrible. How do you take a great franchise with beloved characters and crank out such a subpar film? So many things went wrong that I am not sure where to start.  Actually, you know what? I think I do.

Turtles made the same mistake that I see in several superhero movies. There is no character development in the film. I can forgive this since there really does not need to be; the characters are firmly established and well known to the audience. Do we really want to see some major change or growth over the course of the movie? No. We don’t want to see Raphael work through his issues or Michelangelo mature. We just want to see the guys whipping up on the Foot. The thing I do not get is why the filmmakers assume you know the characters on the one hand and then turn around and feel the need to re-tell their origin story. Even crazier? They changed the origin yet again! For some reason the people behind this movie felt like they could have it both ways.

Really, that is the problem with this whole version of the Turtles. The film wants to have everything both ways… First, they go out of their way to make strange, hulking, more serious and realistic mutant turtles but then they borrow elements from the cartoon (like April being a reporter). The bad guys are the Foot Clan, led by evil martial artist Shredder but they are basically paramilitary terrorists. It is all a jumble that tries to make the most realistic version of the Turtles in some ways while grabbing the goofiest elements of the cartoons. The result is clumsy and uneven. 

There were other questionable decisions along the way, too. The new origin story completely removed any reason for Splinter to know ninjitsu (so he learned it from a book). They also made Raphael the lead brother, at least in terms of story. None of that helped the already flawed movie.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles is frankly just plain not very good. If you want a Turtle fix, I suggest that you start watching the current incarnation on Nickelodeon. It is a very good interpretation of the Turtle story; in fact, it is probably the best Turtle adaptation to date. 

Thank You... But No Thank You

There is something you should probably know about me. I love Star Trek. I am not using “love” in a throw away kind of way like people use “good” or “great” or say “I love that commercial.” I seriously love Star Trek; it has been a definite force in my life for as long as I can remember. Hell, this is my second blog and my second time to talk about Star Trek.

If you asked me about my dreams, particularly when it comes to dreams and goals as a writer, penning a Star Trek novel is right there near the top of the list. It is hard to imagine anything more epic than to contribute, even in a small way. to the wonderful and inspirational multi-verse that Gene Roddenberry created. Deep Space Nine, Next Generation or even some type of literary adaptation of the Animated Series… bring it on and even if everyone hated it and I spent the rest of my life being attacked by angry dorks in Vulcan ears, I could die happy.

Except there is one Star Trek book I am glad I did not get asked to write. Yesterday, The Autobiography Of James T. Kirk was released. Obviously, Captain Kirk did not actually write it and (thankfully) the shepherds of the Trek brand have too much respect for their fans to pretend as if this fictional character authored the book. David A. Goodman took on the task and what a daunting task it must have been!

Star Trek fans are special case in science fiction fandom because they basically invented modern fandom. Unlike most science fiction up until that point, Gene Roddenberry created a universe that was not merely a setting for fantastic adventures but a universe that viewers really wanted to experience. Don’t get me wrong, it was a setting for fantastic adventures but by and large the space-time of the Federation is something inspirational. They were not under the cruel thumb of some intergalactic dictator like Flash Gordon or in the war ravaged environs of Buck Rogers. They would fight if that had to but they strove to find common ground with even their most bitter enemies (and eventually they did). The Federation was something we could (and should) aspire to become in our real future. 

That made for some seriously dedicated fans. They pretty much built the science fiction convention industry. You could make a really strong argument that Star Trek fans created cosplay. Star Trek fans freaking learn to speak the fictitious alien languages presented in the movies (and to be fair, this is partially because Star Trek didn’t just let actors spit out gibberish but instead created a complete synthetic language). The fans dedicated themselves to studying the show.

That has to make writing Kirk’s autobiography an incredibly scary undertaking. It probably had to be fact checked. Seriously, they probably had to fact check a fake life! Writing Captain Kirk’s story has to put a lump in your throat just like the one you get if you are a North Korean author who gets tapped to ghostwrite the bad-ass adventures of Kim Jong-Un. Actually, I might have just stumbled across my meal ticket… The Bad Ass Adventures Of Kim Jong-Un has a real ring to it. It is got to be at least a trilogy.

I want to tell stories. I want to entertain and hopefully even inspire people. I want to give my readers heroes… heroes like Captain Kirk. Still, I do not think I would ever tackle a project like his autobiography. Hats off to you, David A. Goodman.

Next time I promise the blog will be Star Trek free. It may be a few days, though, because I have some bad ass adventures to write and I need to brush up on my Korean.

The Grand Tournament Is Now Out!

Woohoo! You can now buy my first novel on Amazon. As of today (Labor Day 2015) it is only available as an ebook, but the print version will be available soon, too. The Grand Tournament is a fantasy novel inspired by Chinese wuxia literature… it is like a kung fu movie you can read! But I have blabbed about it plenty elsewhere (like SwordsAndRayguns.com)… I promise this blog will not just be to shamelessly promote my books. Sure, I’ll tell you when I have new stuff out, especially free stuff on my website, but this is also where I will talk about the stuff I am reading, watching, listening to and such. 

For example, right now I am watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Sure, I have it on Blu-Ray but I just stumbled across it on satellite and simply had to watch it. Why? Why, really? I know lots of people like to dump on ST:TMP but I still love it. There is something about Kirk returning to the Enterprise, the great music and the cool effects (which really stand up pretty well after like 35 years) that gets me every single time I watch it. All of a sudden, I am seven years old again and so damn excited that I can barely sit still. I distinctly remember going to see ST:TMP when it was released. We even got to go to McDonalds (a rarity at the time) to get Star Trek Happy Meals! I can’t remember the toy, it may have been iron ons, but I remember the box and my brother kicking his feet in his chair as he ate. I just wanted him to hurry the F up so we could get to the movie.

It is a little sad, though, to watch Star Trek: The Motion Picture now that so many cast members have died. This is probably the first time I have watched it since Leonard Nimoy passed away and, to be honest, as I watch him launch his thruster suit into the maw of V’ger there is a lump in my throat. Next time I watch Wrath Of Khan (which will be soon… Star Trek movies are like Pringles, you can’t watch just one) there will probably be a full fledged tear or two.