Sunday 21 January 2018

Star Wars Movies That Would've Been Better Than Rogue One


A lot of people liked Rogue One.

We don't know why they liked it, but they did. I've seen them talking about it. A lot.

In my opinion, it's the worst Star Wars film, or at least tied for last with Phantom Menace. I know it's popular to hate on Phantom Menace, but whatever, I'm jumping on the bandwagon. The best, IMO, is The Force Awakens.

Rogue One, though? Rogue One is just...I mean, it's Pompeii in space. Minus Kit Harrington's abs. Which is always a great disadvantage to start at.

I haven't seen The Last Jedi, because I'm poor. AKA I'll be waiting the entire sixth months until it arrives on Netflix. I've heard it's a hot mess, though.

I'll reserve judgement until I see it, but I have seen Rogue One. I mean, I've seen parts of it. Like the first hour, I think. I can't power through your movie when a cgi robot has more charisma than your entire human cast, people. I'm sorry, I just can't.

Especially when the script gives less of a fuck about these characters than I do.

So, I thought I would come up with some ideas for better Star Wars Anthology films that they should have made instead. And still should make. Hire me, LucasFilm. I will be good to you.

NIGHTSISTERS: a movie about one of the Dathomirian Nightsisters Talzin hired out as an assassin; the journey she goes on, significant kills, maybe she goes rogue (¬‿¬) & disobeys orders so they could still get that rebellious vibe they wanted? 

FORCE PRIESTESS: we deserve a movie about the Force Priestesses and their planet, which, let's be honest, is the SW version of the Garden of Eden. It also has that Journey To The Center of the Earth vibe going for it. We could also just get a movie about a human character travelling to find said planet & immortal women.

ESCAPEE CLONES: set during the clone wars; two clones fall in love (mildly incestuous since they're all cloned from the same guy I guess, but whatever) and run away. Adventures follow. There are so many directions an escapee clone story could go down it's mind-blowing.

STRANDED: a Twi'lek pilot crashlands on a mysterious planet and is hunted by large, scary, ravenous beasts. Definite Alien vibes with this one. A horror survival film set in the EU. It's what we need.

FORCE RIVALRY: in which two siblings, maybe twins, awaken their force-sensitivity at the same time and each drift to different sides. Each of them has a romance, it's epic in scale and culminates in them going to war and fighting to the death. Maybe the twin who's fallen to the dark side wins but are filled with such remorse for killing their sibling that they revert to the light somehow?

ICARII: An Icarii traveler and explorer who survives the genocide of their people vows revenge on the Empire, joining the war in some fashion. Or maybe it's set before they were wiped out, and it's a political drama about Selestrine's rise to power? Either way.

BASTILA'S DAD: He was a charming treasure hunter. Indiana Jones in space is way better than Pompeii in space, right? Wake up, people! Raiding tombs on ancient, uninhabited planets? Sounds like my cup of tea.

EARTH: a group of idealist humans, maybe some form of escapee prisoners set out to leave their war-torn, corrupt corner of the galaxy and colonize a planet far, far away (¬‿¬) and end up going through a wormhole or some shit, at which point they reach a new, crystal green-and-blue planet, Character A asks what they'll name it & character B says 'Earth' ... cut to black. Yeah, it's corny as fuck. I miss when movies were allowed to be corny.


I could do this for days. I could go on and on.

In fact, after I see Last Jedi and Black Diamond, I probably will make a longer list of potential EU stories. Because I miss my middle school fanfiction days, if I'm being upfront. I skipped school to read gay Harry Potter fanfiction, and now I'm skipping my deadline to write this sloppy ass blog post for you.

Feel free to post links to the worst Star Wars fanfic you can find in the comments! That's all, folks!



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Gotham City Sirens, Now, Please



They made a Suicide Squad movie before a Gotham City Sirens film. How much of a jackass do you have to be to do that? Dozens of people had to approve this at various levels, right? Can we fire them?

Gotham City Sirens will be better than Suicide Squad, AKA, A 2-Hour Commercial. Mark my words. Nothing will ever be as iconic.

Nothing.

I mean, Margot Robbie doing that elevator run in heels in Suicide Squad without a stunt double kinda rivals it. But only that.

I'm also really excited for Marvel's Runaways. I haven't started it yet, because I want to binge.

Also because I'm not willing to pay for Hulu.

I mean, I really feel like Hulu used to have a free, ad-supported version, did they not? I might be hallucinating. Or they might've just removed it. The only reason I was ever interested in Hulu before was for the Delirium movie, but that sucked.*

*Sorry Emma Roberts. You just didn't do the thing, sis.

There's also Black Lightning and The Gifted. I think those are the only other superhero shows I'm interested in right now. Those and Jessica Jones, of course. She's in a league of her own though.

I think this is all on my mind because I'm writing a story from a villains' point of view right now. Or outlining it, at least. And it's going to be fantastic. And diabolical. But I can't talk about it until I've written it, so I'm gonna go do that.


***

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A Song For You

Here's a song, just for you. Yeah, you. And it's a bop. You're welcome.



Tuesday 16 January 2018

You Can Have This

You guys can have this... It's a link to my Medium!

I'm posting there now, and I love it. I'll be cross-posting stuff from this blog there, but it will also contain original content and posts you can only find on that site. :)

If you're wondering when new material is coming out... SOON!

Right now it's time to update my old ebooks, publish new editions with new formatting and updated social media links, and then, THEN, I have two stories in a new series called Island of Gods coming out as my first releases of 2018.

If you like creepy, Lovecraftian tales full of body hair, eerie vibes, and tentative self-discovery & unraveling...my new stuff will be right up your alley.

Saturday 6 January 2018

Fury & Rage Repackage



As you can see, Rage & Frenzy are getting makeovers! This will be the new look of the Unbroken anthology series from now on! I'm in love with these designs and I think they fit the books much more than the old ones.

That's honestly all the news I have. Pretty covers. I'm sure you're all getting sick of that, because it's just covers and not new stories...which is why I'm hard at work on new material. And I'm gonna get back to that now. 

I'll post links in the next few days when these are live!

Monday 1 January 2018

New Year, New Theme

Things are looking pretty different around here. Obviously. And I like it. The New Year is a time for change, and all that...

Honestly I was just starting to get bored of the old one.

I only posted 34 times last year, which isn't half as much as I wanted to. That's like, one month's worth of post. In a year. I'm going to try to be a lot more active in that regard in 2018. Plus, with a flashy new theme, I'll want to hang out here more. It is really simple (I even kept the default colours) but I like it.

In fact, I think it might be my favorite blog theme yet.

So, there's that.

My other main goal for the year is to put out more full length novels. I put out a bunch of novellas and short stories in 2017, but for the first year in like four or so years I didn't put out a single full-length novel. I could've buckled down and written Riot of Souls, but I never did, so now I'm in this boat and I have to start bailing out water.

Yup, 2018 is my year to buckle down and put out a bunch of books. My goal is five or six. Plus some novellas and shorts in there for good measure.

In that vein, here's the paperback cover for Blood of Midnight:


It's really pretty and text-free and simple and it's gonna look fantastic in person. Now I just need Amazon to stop fucking around and accept the formatting for it, which they've refused to do twice in a row. Hopefully the third pdf is the charm?

Something Pretty...

Remember the new edition of Fierce Powers I mentioned in my last post? It's a thing now. And it's really pretty.


I'm in love with this cover, for obvious reasons. I hope it will turn more heads than the old one, which didn't really suit the book and was kind of bland.

I just published this so I'm hoping the new version will be live in a few hours. I'll post when it is!

The Dru Frost Chronicles

Happy New Year everyone! I'm definitely ready to start a fresh year and wipe the slate clean; it's been a really long, distrestting, bleak year. I was stressed and didn't really confront my problems head-on the way I should have. Honestly I spent most of the last half of the year in a hibernation state. I feel a little like a zombie.

In 2018 I'm going to be much more goal-oriented and really throw everything back into my books. I wanna start working to get more titles out. I think if I publish five or six more books I'll finally get to a point where I can sit back and take a breath. My portfolio just doesn't feel big enough, and a few more full-length novels to pad out my catalogue would be nice.

Even though I've got plenty of books out, it feels as if I haven't shown off my true range or abilities as an author. I've been slacking for months so I'm taking the new year as an opportunity to cut it out.

In that vein, I'll be republishing Blood of Midnight with a new cover! The Evernight Falling Series is also being renamed The Dru Frost Chronicles. I feel like it suits the series better.

Here's the new cover:


I'm kinda in love with it! I know it's risky to publish a cover with no words, but I've seen it before and I like the vibes, even if it seems a little rebellious... (Besides, Dru would approve.)

I've been trying to redirect some excitement and attention in the direction of this series, because as much as I love Blood of Midnight, it's been the biggest flop out of all my full-length novels. I don't know if it's due to the lack of strong marketing presence, the presentation, the lack of reviews, or allo of the above. Probably all of the above.

Mostly I think it's because vampire books are so saturated.

It probably doesn't help that I wrote a kind of unconventional plot with an open-ending and that I stomped on the corpses of a bunch of popular genre tropes. Whatever... :)

Which is why I felt like it needed another makeover and the new series name. I'll be writing and publishing the second book soon--in Tears of Sunrise Dru will be a YouTube medium who spends her time offline exorcising evil spirits--and I wanted to really try and give the books a better online presence so that book two will have a warmer reception.

I'll be looking into sending BoM to a couple book bloggers in the next few weeks, but in the meantime if anyone would like a review copy of the beautiful new edition, copy below and I'll send you an ebook! :)

I'm also going to work to get paperbacks of this and all my other titles out before the halfway mark of the year. I've been slack with paperbacks because the formatting is such a pain, but I'll be fighting my way through it in the next few months!

I haven't really been doing much except sitting around getting stoned and listening to pop music for the last few weeks, which sounds like a dream but has honestly been really boring. Christmas vacation felt like purgatory, complete with really bad writers block I kept trying and failing to break through. I also got the flu a week before Christmas and spent days and days in pure hell. I got bronchitis during my bout of the flu so I couldn't breathe and I was bed-bound for days and days.

That experience was agony. Honestly, I got so restless. Sneezing so much also gives you a headache. I couldn't smoke any weed since I had the flu and bronchitis, obviously, and I couldn't drink coffee since caffeine aggravates the flu, so I was going into withdrawal and cravings from both because I'm so unused to not having them (seriously, my diet is 90% caffeine and smoke) that I started losing my mind.

At one point I had the worst migraines I've ever experienced, remembered caffeine withdrawal exists, and drank a small glass of Pepsi to stave off the symptoms. I felt like I was drinking a healing potion in a video game, I kid you not. The Pepsi saved me. (The Pepsi saved me may just be the most poignant thing I'll ever write, sorry not sorry.) I'm fully recovered now, but it still sucked.

In more positive news, Shadows of Ourselves has been rising more and more on Wattpad. It just broke 12k reads over there, which is the best X-mas gift I could ask for. I'm really proud of that book and the fact that it's my most popular feels really validating!

Aside from that, my only real publishing news is that I'll be slapping a new cover on my anthology Fierce Powers. I don't know how to market it because it's such a weird mix and match of stories, but it should at least look pretty, right?

I'm really only excited about the new Winchester movie (who doesn't love weird giant haunted houses?) and all the cool new music coming out in 2018...

Kimbra has a new album coming out, Ariana Grande has an album coming out, Melanie Martinez has an album coming out (which, despite the controversy surrounding her will still be full of bops) you know Troye Sivan won't put off his second album another year...it's just going to be a really good year for music. In all truth I hope Trisha Paytas puts out a couple new EPS this year.

We won't get any new Game of Thrones until next year, but you win some, you lose some. At least we still get the Tomb Raider movie, right?

A Duke Won't Do by Jessie Clever (Book Review)

"Let me make one thing perfectly clear," he growled right before his mouth came down on hers. The perfect cozy, wholesome romance ...

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