Scott Pearson's Blog, page 10

Politics and politicians...the lot of them. On notice!

"I think that all good, right thinking people in this country are sick and tired of being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being told that all good, right thinking people in this country are fed up with being sick and tired. I'm certainly not, and I'm sick and tired of being told that I am."

I love that Monty Python bit, and I am unabashedly, and without reservation, damn sick and tired. The government is broken. The high-pitched whine of shrill divisiv...

Drac is back . . . and he knows kung fu! Part I

Up next in my re-viewing of the Hammer Films Dracula movies is The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires , a kung fu/vampire mash-up. Legend is the most offbeat of the Hammer Dracula movies and works largely because it so fully embraces the conventions of the kung fu film. Before we get to the film proper, however, I have to comment on the confused chronology of the later films of the series.
Up through 1970's Scars of Dracula , the Hammer Films maintained a functional continuity, if we grant an exc...

Writing Update . . . The It's-Been-Forever Edition

It's been six months since I've posted a writing update. Although I've accomplished far too little in that time period, I have been plugging away at various things. Nevertheless, it's high time to try to reinvigorate my process by publicizing those minuscule accomplishments, generating the incentive that can only come from the mocking of my fellow writers.
Spec Submissions

I sent off my fifty-four-line sci-fi poem, "Outside the Clouds," to one of the few markets I could find for a fifty-four-l...

Dracula is back again as the Hammer series continues

Moving on in my re-viewing of all the Hammer Films Dracula movies in chronological order, we're all the way up to 1970's Scars of Dracula .
Scars opens with the strangest continuity gaff of the series, so blatant they had to have just said, "What the hell, let's just go for it." When last we saw the count, he was a pile of red dust in an abandoned church in London at the end of Taste the Blood of Dracula . Cut to Scars, where we see the pile of red dust lying atop Dracula's cape, just as in th...

Someone woke up on the wrong side of the coffin

I'm still working my way through the Hammer Films Dracula movies in chronological order. Next up is 1970's Taste the Blood of Dracula .
A lost London traveler stumbles onto a horrific scene . . . a man impaled on a metal cross. This is how Taste the Blood of Dracula opens, as we learn there was another witness to Dracula's demise at the end of Dracula Has Risen from the Grave . After Dracula's corpse has disappeared—leaving only his cape, some jewelry, and blood that turns to powder—the travel...

Drac is back, and he's pissed.

My retro viewing of the Hammer Films Dracula movies continues with 1968's Dracula Has Risen from the Grave .
At the end of Dracula: Prince of Darkness , we saw Dracula sinking beneath the icy waters surrounding his castle. After a brief prologue, Dracula Has Risen from the Grave jumps forward to a year after Dracula's watery "death." The people of Kleinberg, a nearby village, still cower with fear of the count's evil, so the monsignor compels the ineffectual village priest to accompany him to e...

Retro Viewing

I've started working my way through the classic Hammer Films Dracula movies starring
There are nine films that can be considered part of this continuity, although some are only loosely connected; they all feature either Lee or Cushing or both of them (as indicated) and are listed here in order of ...

Shore Leave 32

Last weekend I made my way to the wild suburbs of faraway Baltimore for my fifth Shore Leave convention. As usual, I had tons of fun seeing various friends and peers I haven't seen since last year at the con. Unfortunately, there were many missing faces this year as various circumstances kept amysisson and Paul Sisson, Jim ineti and Andi berkanna Johnson, bill_leisner , and others from attending. But the show must go on, more wine for us, and all that.


This year I had the honor to be a small ...

A Shout Out to the Staff of Shore Leave

This year will be my fifth Shore Leave convention. There may be two people who read this who don't know what that is, so the short answer is it's an annual Star Trek convention outside of Baltimore. Although, like any similar convention, it has a lot of guest actors from genre TV and film, unlike a lot of conventions with actor guests it also gives prominent guest status to writers of genre fiction, especially to Trek writers.

That's where I came in. Thanks to getting a few Trek stories publi...

My Battle Against Plagiarizer Frank X. Harris

Jim Kjelgaard (author of the famous Big Red and Irish Red) published the novel Fire-Hunter, the stone-age story of Hawk after he is expelled from his tribe, in 1951. It went through several paperback reprintings throughout the 1960s before going out of print. In 1991 it was republished, with the blessing of the Kjelgaard estate, in an expanded edition entitled The Hunter Returns, with new material written by David Drake. Sadly, both versions are currently out of print.

In 2004, Frank X. Harris...