All posts by ERTorre

E. R. Torre is a writer/artist whose first major work, the mystery graphic novel The Dark Fringe, was optioned for motion picture production by Platinum Studios (Men In Black, Cowboys vs. Aliens). At DC Comics, his work appeared in role-playing game books and the 9-11 Tribute book. This later piece was eventually displayed, along with others from the 9-11 tribute books, at The Library of Congress. More recently he released Shadows at Dawn (a collection of short stories), Haze (a murder mystery novel with supernatural elements), and Cold Hemispheres (a mystery novel set in the world of The Dark Fringe). He is currently hard at work on his latest science fiction/suspense series, Corrosive Knights, which features the novels Mechanic, The Last Flight of the Argus, and Chameleon.
TV

Perry Mason

There are several “old time” TV shows I really like.  The original Star Trek series.  Mission Impossible.  The Wild, Wild, West.  Mannix.  The Twilight Zone.  The Outer Limits.

I could go on, but let me get to the heart of the matter:  This week Amazon is offering deep discounts on the DVD releases of another all time favorite TV show of mine, Perry Mason.  Unfortunately, and like far too many other series, this one was released in “half season” versions.  If you wanted all nine seasons of the show, therefore, you would have to buy 18 DVD sets.

And brother, they ain’t cheap.

The original price per half season was something like $50, which meant that to get the full series at the original prices cost you a whopping $900 for the entire run.  The prices have since gone down, varying between $30 and $45.  With Amazon’s current sale, you can buy each half season for between $10.99 to $19.99 (Sorry, the sale is now over!).

Over the years I have purchased roughly half the series and, with this sale, was certainly interested in buying the rest at more “reasonable” prices.  The first thing I ordered were seasons 8 and 9.  I was very curious about season nine, especially the second half of it, as from my understanding the folks in front of and behind the cameras knew by that point that the show was ending and decided to go out with a bang.

But before the second half of the ninth series was in the can, there was, at least for a little while, some hope for a 10th season of the series.  Given the year it was filmed -1966- and the fact that pretty much all TV shows by that time were moving toward color, the episode The Case of the Twice Told Twist proved to be a singular curiosity in the series’ 9 year run: It was the only episode filmed in color.

When I received my copies of the series, that was the one I had to see once again.  I had seen the episode a while back and remembered very little of it, other than the fact that the characters I knew so well looked so…odd…in color.  When one gets used to seeing people a certain way, to change their “look” so radically practically invites comparison.

The other thing that I realized was just how much they had all aged.  The Perry Mason TV series began in 1957 and while the main cast were already adults (some older than others) when the show began, the aging process had clearly taken much of the youth that one found in the cast in the early going (in the case of actor Ray Collins, who played the often times deliciously devious Lt. Tragg, he was 68 years old when the show began and passed away in 1965, thus not being around for the final couple of seasons).

Getting back to the color episode itself, The Case of the Twice Told Twist is essentially a riff on Oliver Twist (the episode’s title, suddenly, makes some sense, no?).  It involves an underage gang of car strippers who, natch, strip vehicles down and sell their parts.  Their leader is played by the great Victor Buono, an actor who appeared in many TV series during his lifetime, often portraying the same type of character…a well spoken bon vivant who usually had something devious going on.

While Perry gets a chance to grill Mr. Buono on the stand later in the episode, it is their individual, outside the courtroom meeting roughly half-way through the show that really zings, with Perry and Buono’s characters feeling each other out and offering double edged banter.

As I said, I recalled very little of the episode and, seeing it again, it struck me pretty obvious why: Apart from Mr. Buono and the novelty of color, the episode is pretty dull.  The other guest actors/suspects, while competent, rarely rise to the level of Mr. Buono’s and he’s a relatively small part of the story.  To add insult to injury, the murder mystery itself is curiously lacking.  Most often the show’s fun lies in how many people, including the one Perry Mason is defending, could have been involved in the murder.  In the best of the Perry Mason episodes it is a hoot seeing Mr. Mason whittle through the suspects on the stand or in private, often employing shady legal tactics.  In this case, though, the murderer and the motivation behind it appeared to come out of left field.

Weak sauce indeed.

However, in spite of it all, it is interesting to see an original run episode of Perry Mason in color.  Yeah, the principles might look a lot older and the case itself may not be as compelling as some of the best of them, but it is a curio nonetheless.

Below is that episode’s opening crawl if full color.  Unfortunately, the copy here is pretty bad.  What you get on the DVD is far, far better:

Movies

8 Things You Learned From Movies…

…That Are Actually Lies, according to Todd Van Luling for The Huffington Post:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/11/8-lies-from-movies_n_5666578.html

All are true, all are interesting, but I would like to add a couple of “lies” that I see over and over again:

First up, the human fall.

Seems simple enough, right?  In real life if you fall over a story in distance and onto hard ground, odds are you will hurt -if not kill- yourself.  Yet its something movies like to use nowadays, the hero leaping/jumping long distances, hitting the ground and either rolling or shaking off the fall and getting on with their superheroic business.

The movie Fast and Furious 6, a franchise that, granted, doesn’t always deal with “real world” physics, was spoiled, to me, in large part because of this.  In the movie’s early going, Dwayne Johnson’s character leaps from a very fast moving car, falls some three or so stories straight down and into a vehicle he and his partner were pursing.  Johnson’s character is uninjured from that fall and tries to stop the car’s driver, then falls off said vehicle (which, let me reiterate, is moving really fast) after a scuffle, and absolutely nothing happens to him.

Later, toward the film’s climax, we have Vin Diesel’s character leaping from his car, flying through the air like Superman, grabbing Michelle Rodriguez’s character while she’s leaping in the opposite direction for a hundred feet or so, then the two of them smash into another car and this somehow lessens the impact of their fall.

They too suffer no serious injuries, though I believe Vin Diesel did frown a little.

I guess my main gripe is that action movies of late (and perhaps not so late, see the 1985 movie Commando and Arnold Schwarzenneger’s escape from an airplane!) push the limits of what a falling human body can withstand.  Someone I casually knew, for example, was on a ladder working on a ceiling light or fan in his house (I’ve been to the house, the ceiling was not terribly high).  He was perhaps on the second or third step of the ladder and somehow lost his balance and fell, landing very awkwardly on his right arm.

The result?

He broke multiple bones in that arm and was rushed by ambulance to the hospital, where he underwent extensive surgery.

The breaks to his arm were so extensive that doctors later told him they almost had to amputate his arm above the elbow.  After considerable physical therapy and recovery, the arm remained very fragile and, according to him, could not withstand any other injury.  He lamented the fact that he couldn’t use it to lift anything heavy nor could it deal with any great amount of force.

This is the reality of what can happen to a human body after a fall, even from relatively small distances.

Another gripe, though one I didn’t find all that bothersome in my youth -and at least tangentially related to Fast and Furious– is what a car is capable of withstanding after it makes a long jump.

Back in the 1970’s and 80’s and shortly after the success of Bullitt (with its magnificent single car chase sequence), there came a whole host of movies featuring progressively greater amounts of car stunt work.  The floodgates really opened after the 1977 success of Smokey and The Bandit, which featured some very impressive stunt work for that time.  Ron Howard’s directorial debut, Grand Theft Auto, released only a month afterwards, was little more than a movie featuring one car crunching bit of stunt work after the other.  As a kid, I loved the hell out of that film…

But one thing I realized was that whenever a car went airborne in a jump, it always landed…badly.

Yeah, yeah, I know, I was a child savant.

Seriously though, every time you were shown one of those stunts, the camera would often follow the car through the air and, when it landed (and depending on how well covered the landing was), you couldn’t help but see a frame or two of the car hitting the ground and almost always noticed the car suffered -sometimes mightily!- from that landing.

The tires might be twisted, the front end might stick up, the body would warp, and pieces -sometimes whole chunks!- might fall off.  Yet if the stunt involved the “good guy’s” car, you could always rely on a cinematic quick cut, usually showing our heroes hootin’ and hollering at the sheer fun or outrageousness of their stunt, and the next shot would reveal that their vehicle -presto!- was completely intact.  Sometimes better than new.

The below compilation of stunts for the Dukes of Hazzard TV show provides plenty of such examples.  See how many times the General Lee looks absolutely totaled after she lands…

Anyway, it is fantasy and perhaps, like the list of 8 Things You Learned From Movies That Are Actually Lies, this sort of stunt work should be taken for what it is, fantasy.

General

What do you have in your attic?

Me?  Not much more than dust.

Yet the appeal of PBS’ Antiques Roadshow hits a cord.  It’s part history, part treasure hunt and works on the notion that anyone may have something valuable and/or historical buried away in their home.  In the following case, involving some very rare baseball cards, the result was quite eye-opening:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/08/11/antiques-roadshow-baseball_n_5669247.html

Maybe I’ll take another look up in the ol’ attic… 😉

Books/Literature

GHOST OF THE ARGUS

A few days ago (you can read it here) I made my last update regarding the fifth book in the Corrosive Knights series.

I’m proud to say that over the weekend I finished work on it, doing a few more revisions to a couple of sections but felt, as of Sunday, that the book was about as good as it was going to get.  So here, the announcement I’ve been dying to make for a very, very long time:

Ghost of the Argus, the fifth book in the Corrosive Knights series, is available via Amazon!  (Click on the picture to get to the Amazon website and order it!)

Ghost of the ArgusNow, some background information.

The Corrosive Knights series, at this moment in time, consists of five books which, taken together, form one “large” story that concludes –with a couple of cliffhangers!–in Ghost of the Argus.  Please note, just because Ghost of the Argus concludes the first major Corrosive Knights story, it does not mean the series itself is over.  In fact, I already have the skeleton framework for the next Corrosive Knights novel written out.  That novel begins almost immediately after the conclusion of Ghost of the Argus and, if all works out, should be one hell of a ride.  I also have the actual, final Corrosive Knights book in my hard drive in a very rough form!

So with Ghost of the Argus we reach the conclusion to my original larger Corrosive Knights story line, the one that came to me all those years before when I started working on Chameleon (book #3 in the series).  For those who have read the previous four Corrosive Knights books, it should come as no surprise when I say that Mechanic, The Last Flight of the Argus, and Chameleon, the first three books in the series, can be read in any order.  None of them requires you to read the previous book to understand just what the heck is going on.

When I wrote Mechanic and The Last Flight of the Argus, I set the works in the same “universe” but during far different epochs.  Mechanic takes place in a dystopian Earth some three hundred or so years into our future while The Last Flight of the Argus was set in a much, much farther space opera future.

Corrosive MACN Covers

Though these original two books were linked by that shared universe and certain terminologies, it was only when I began writing Chameleon, which takes place roughly in our “present” time, that I realized there was a larger story to be made incorporating all three of these books into it.  So, for those keeping track, it wasn’t until I reached book three in this series that I realized I was actually writing a series!

When Chameleon was done, I got to work on Nox, a novel that is a direct sequel to Mechanic but whose story is also intricately tied into the events of Chameleon.  This, the fourth book in the Corrosive Knights series, was the first one that began putting the larger story pieces together.

As I was writing Nox, I was also working out elements of what became Ghost of the Argus.  I had a general idea of where I wanted to go, but as with all stories the devil is in the details.  Because this novel was a conclusion to the first “big” Corrosive Knights story line, in my mind it had to be bigger and better than all the books that preceded it while delivering on the promise of concluding this first major story line in a rousing manner.  With that goal set and after finishing Nox, I went to work.

Did I accomplish what I wanted?

I sure hope so.

I’ve given Ghost of the Argus more attention and spent more hours working on it than I have any of my previous novels.  It usually takes me about a year to write a novel and approximately six or seven drafts before I’m satisfied all is well.  For Ghost of the Argus, its taken two years to get her done.  I’ve gone through thirteen full drafts and at least ten or more “partial” drafts.  I’ve started, I’ve stopped, I’ve changed directions and deleted dead ends or misfires, I’ve streamlined, I’ve expanded.  In the end, I have twelve pounds of paper to show for it.

Ghost of Argus DraftsIn sum, Ghost of the Argus just about killed me!

And you know what?  I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Sure, I would love for the novel to have come together all at once and with minimal effort.  But that just isn’t the way these things work.  Contrary to what is often shown on TV or in the movies, writing is not some leisurely activity one does after an eventful day traipsing around the countryside and finding the love of your life or after solving mysteries while accompanied by your very hot partner, one that you are secretly in love with.

No, writing is hard work that requires many, many hours of intense -solitary!- concentration.  At times it can be agony.

But the pleasure you feel when the work is “done” and you hold your novel in your two hands…that’s pure bliss.

I couldn’t be happier with the Corrosive Knights series.  I feel that I’ve accomplished what I’ve wanted to and delivered a group of books that should satisfy anyone looking for good, suspenseful, action packed sci-fi.

And more than anything else, I hope you all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed getting it done!

Now, off to book #6!

Books/Literature

Corrosive Knights 7/31/14 update

1 Comment

This will be short n’ sweet:

It’s been ten days since my last update (you can read it here) for the fifth book of the Corrosive Knights series.

Blur

The very good news is that I’m done with the full drafts of the novel.  Approximately 80% of the book required very minor edits and I think those parts are now good to go.

The not so good news is that there remains about 20% of the book, approximately 40 pages spread out through three or four sections, that I’d like to go over at least once more, to make sure they’re just as good as the rest.

I will be done reading the material today.  I should be done editing it by tomorrow or Saturday.

The book will be available via Kindle and barring any other problems by sometime next week.

Keep those fingers crossed! 😉

Movies

Movie Stars 10 Biggest Flops…

…according to AOL:

http://www.aol.com/article/2014/07/27/movie-stars-10-biggest-flops/20937644/

I’m familiar with pretty much all the movies mentioned, but have only seen four of them: The Marlon Brando version of The Island of Dr. Moreau, the George Clooney Batman and Robin, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero, and Denzel Washington’s The Mighty Quinn.

I felt that The Island of Dr. Moreau was close to being a good “weird” movie.  Like many, I was familiar with all the rumors of on-set problems during the film’s production, perhaps most notorious being the feud between actor Val Kilmer and replacement director John Frankenheimer (the original director, Richard Stanley, was booted from the project).  Still, I didn’t think the film was a total disaster and I felt Val Kilmer’s creepy Montgomery just about stole the show.  Lest I sound like I feel the movie is actually some “lost treasure”, I would hasten to add that this version of the H. G. Wells story is nowhere near the classic of the original deeply weird (but in a very good way) Island of Lost Souls.

Similarly, Batman and Robin, I felt, while not all that good, wasn’t all that much different from the far less criticized Batman Forever (coincidentally enough starring Val Kilmer in the title role!).  Joel Schumacher took over the Batman franchise after director Tim Burton left and, as mentioned, his first whack at it, Batman Forever, came and went without as much gnashing of the teeth as his George Clooney starring follow up.  To me, both films carry just about the same level of silliness/outrageousness.  I suppose the big difference are the “bat-nipples”, which were exclusive to the later film.  Ah well, neither of them rates all that high for me, though as with The Island of Dr. Moreau, I found Val Kilmer’s presence in the film interesting despite the at times awful dialogue his character spouts (examples can be found the trailer below).  Mr. Kilmer made for an intriguing Bruce Wayne/Batman and it would have been interesting to see him in a more “serious” version of the film.

The Last Action Hero, on the other hand, deserved every ounce of scorn it received upon its original release.  One has to understand that back in 1993 Mr. Schwarzenneger was at the very height of his popularity and it seemed he could do absolutely no wrong.  Add to this the fact that he was again pairing up with his Predator director, John McTiernan, and movie fans such as myself were absolutely dying to see what new action film they could concoct.  But leaked early pre-release word was that the film was, quite literally, a bomb, and whatever enthusiasm many felt was tempered.  In this case, the rumors proved correct. The Last Action Hero was a lame dud of a film, a supposedly funny “movie reality intruding on reality” minus any real humor mixed with action setpieces that were curiously lifeless.  Watching the trailer below, one can feel the mix just ain’t working.  Still, the movie had a pretty decent heavy metal score…

Finally, I remember very little about The Mighty Quinn.  Saw it in the theater when it was originally released in 1989 and I vaguely recall thinking it was an “ok” movie at best and could have featured a more intriguing mystery.  Apart from that, I don’t remember all that much else.

Perhaps that’s for the best?

Movies

The White Buffalo (1977) a (very) belated review

If you’ve watched as many films as I have, you’ve certainly stumbled upon some that were stranger than others.  Perhaps some of them weren’t just strange, but off-the-wall bizarre.  Usually, those type of films register on my radar for all the wrong reasons.  Bizarre usually equals “not very good”.

Usually.

There is at least one big exception to that rule, and it is the Charles Bronson starring film The White Buffalo.  Released in 1977, the film features Mr. Bronson as Wild Bill Hickok, presented as a man who is suffering mightily from bizarre, nightmarish dreams of confronting a, you guessed it, white buffalo.  Only this white buffalo seems larger than life.  Mythic, in fact.

So disturbed by the dreams is Hickok that he returns to his old stomping grounds in the far west.  This, we find, is a place where Hickok is no longer welcome.  Hoping to avoid confrontation, he adopts a fake name, James Otis, and works his way through a couple of small towns while heading to the high country where the white buffalo, he knows, awaits him.

Meanwhile, an Indian village is attacked by the white buffalo and many of its people are slaughtered.  The village’s leader, Crazy Horse (Will Sampson), cries at the loss of his daughter and, in an interest parallel with Hickock/Otis, is forced by tribe elders to renounce his name and be called “worm” until he hunts down and kills the white buffalo.

Meanwhile (part deux!), Hickok/Otis’ journey to the high country proves a somewhat difficult one.  He alternately finds deadly enemies and friends in the towns on his way out, including an old army officer, Tom Custard (I couldn’t help but think they were hinting at this actually being General George Custard, but for whatever reason they didn’t call him that), who very much wants him dead and Poker Jenny Schermerhorn (a still stunning Kim Novak), who hopes to rekindle their old fire.

Later still, Hickok meets up with Charlie Zane (played by Jack Warden), an old time tracker with a glass eye and together they confront Whistling Jack Kileen (a very menacing Clint Walker) before heading out to the high country.

It is there that Crazy Horse/Worm and Hickok/Otis eventually join forces to take on the white buffalo.  Their union isn’t an easy one.  Hickok is forced to keep his alias as he is hated by the Indians for murdering one of their most respected peacemakers years before.  It is implied in the early going that Hickok still has no love for Indians, but in working with Crazy Horse, he comes to realize the mistake of his ways.

As I said before, The White Buffalo is a damn strange film.  Coming a mere two years after the release of Jaws, it is clear the film is, at least thematically, going for a similar vibe.  The fact that the buffalo the hunters are after is white makes you think this movie also pays tribute to Moby Dick.

However, the first 2/3rds of the film are clearly meant to be a “mythic” view of the wild west, complete with dingy border towns, larger than life characters (some based on real people, some not so much), trains, Indians, gunplay, etc. etc.

When the final confrontation between our heroes and the buffalo arrives, it is, frankly, a bit of a dud.  The effects for the white buffalo aren’t terrible, but they aren’t exactly wonderful either (check the trailer below).  On the plus side that final confrontation has a wonderful, almost dreamlike element to it, which is very much in keeping with it being a manifestation of Hickok’s own dreams.

As for how this now thirty seven year old film works “today”…well, I suspect modern audiences might find it hard to sit through the movie.  While there is action and suspense, compared to the hyperkinetic action found in more modern films, this one might play too slow.

Regardless, for those who want to take a walk on the weird side, The White Buffalo has its pluses.  Where else can you find a western with such a large, recognizable cast that features a story as strange as this one?  If you’re in an adventurous mood, give it a try.  You may be surprised by what you find.

Music

Can you identify these 70’s hits…

…by their first second?  I got 10 out of 16 of them and was shocked I couldn’t identify three more (the remaining three songs/artists I couldn’t come up with weren’t on my radar all that much):

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/07/24/-70s-music-quiz-name-these-1970s-hits-by-their-first-second-audio.html

I’ll reveal the ones I didn’t know below as I don’t want to spoil the list.  Take the quiz yourself, see if you beat me!

Next up, name that 80’s hit by their first second:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/07/17/-80s-music-quiz-name-these-1980s-hits-by-their-first-second-audio.html

Did better with this quiz, getting 13 out of the 16 songs.  Of the ones I missed, two surprised me as I was quite familiar with the songs…though obviously not that familiar while the third was one I heard here and there but never paid all that much attention to so not getting it was hardly a surprise.

Before I get into the songs I missed, one more link, this one to the “Top 30 Outrageous Album Covers.”  See if you agree:

http://msnlatino.telemundo.com/entretenimiento/Premios-Tu-Mundo/photo-gallery/2014-07/top-30-most-outrageous-album-covers-ever-shakira-and-calle-13-are-of-the-most-controversial-photos

Now, the songs I missed in the two quizzes above:

The 70’s songs:

First up, the ones I missed that I found shocking:

Neil Young’s Heart of Gold.  Really?!  That’s one of my all time favorite songs, period!  Yet the strum of the guitar in that opening second wasn’t memorable enough to remind me of the rest of the song.  Weird!

Simon and Garfunkle’s Bridge Over Troubled Waters.  Another one that I couldn’t put my finger on.  Love the song, have heard it countless times, yet that opening second didn’t register.

Three Dog Night Joy to the World.  Again, a very well known song, to me, yet whose opening second wasn’t familiar enough to make me realize what it was.

The next three songs I didn’t get but wasn’t all that surprised by that fact.  In this case, the artists/songs weren’t among the ones I tended to listen to way back when, though I was at least aware of them:

Stevie Wonder, Sir Duke;  Glen Campbell, Rhinestone Cowboy;  Marvin Gaye, Let’s Get It On.

Moving on to the 1980’s music, the three I didn’t get were:

Janet Jackson Miss You Much.  Not too surprising.  I recall seeing the video more than hearing the actual song (the video was a strong mainstay on MTV back in the day and I’ll admit it looks quite good).

Olivia Newton John Physical.  I’m quite familiar with this song so it was a bit of a surprise I didn’t recognize it after its first second.  Not a terribly big fan of it, so perhaps that’s why.

Dolly Parton 9 to 5.  Another song I’m pretty familiar with yet couldn’t recognize from its first second.  As with Physical, not really my cup of tea, though it played quite a bit when it was popular.

Movies

No One Lives (2012) a (mildly) belated review

A while back, while about to watch a film on DVD, I was intrigued with one of the movie previews presented at the start.  It involved a couple (they sported British accents so I assume it was a British film) driving through very dark woods and getting lost.  This being a horror film, all hell breaks loose.  The trailer stated the film was very well received at movie festivals and several critics made note, if memory serves, of its “ingenious” and “surprising” plot.

I’m a fan of genuinely suspenseful horror films, and the trailer to this film looked to be right up my alley.  Having said this, I’m not a huge fan of the over the top “gory” horror films.  I’m old enough (*hack* *wheeze*) to recall the first wave of such “gory” features, perhaps started with The Exorcist and continued with the original The Omen (two films I like quite a bit) but rendered progressively sillier in the 1980’s with the Friday the 13th films and their like.

I know there are those out there who love gory films and revel at the “creative kills” featured within them.  That’s not me.  It’s not that I’m squeamish.  Gore in a horror film is fine, especially when it adds to the overall suspense/tension weaved by a strong story, good acting, and good direction.  However, when the gore becomes the only thing, and it seems all the film wants to do is showcase bloody special effects, I tune out.

Anyway, I have the trailer I described above in mind when I spot the description of the film No One Lives on the Netflix list:

Robbers run a couple off the road and discover a kidnapped heiress in their custody.  But they’re all about to face something even more dangerous.

While I couldn’t remember the name that belonged to that horror film trailer, this description sounded close enough to what I saw that I thought it might be it.

I was completely wrong.

To begin, this is clearly not a British film as the couple we meet at the start do not sport British accents (nor does anyone else! 😉 ).  It was pretty clear pretty quickly that I had picked out the wrong film.

Nonetheless, I gave it a try.

Long story short?  Remember what I said above, that I get bored of horror films that are essentially gore showcases?  No One Lives is pretty much a gore showcase.

Yes, there is an interesting twist at its start (this twist is almost completely given away in the brief synopsis I’ve transcribed above and most certainly given away in the trailer below), but the film’s plot is barely worth bothering with: A bunch of for the most part unpleasant cardboard characters meet their grisly end at the hands of a “super” killer (Luke Evans), who looks kinda like Errol Flynn.

There’s really not all that much more to it, unfortunately.

Perhaps one day I’ll find that film I was actually looking for.  In the meantime, I can’t recommend No One Lives to anyone but the gore hounds.

Books/Literature

Corrosive Knights 7/21/14 update

1 Comment

In my last Corrosive Knights update of 7/10/14, I stated the following:

Having finished draft 11c (of the fifth book in the Corrosive Knights series) just a few minutes ago, I am very, very optimistic about the novel now being just about done.  So much so that I intend to print the whole thing out later today and give it one more complete read through.  If all looks good, draft 12 will be the novel’s last draft.

Estimated time to get it done?  Another week to a week and a half.

Keep your fingers crossed.  You know I will!

Ok, first the bad news: Draft #12 is not the final draft, though as I predicted it took me a little less than a week and a half to finish it up (a blazing speed, considering that when the novel was in its early and very rough stages it would take me a couple of months to do a draft).

The good news?  Draft #13 (lucky number!) will be the final draft.  No ifs, ands, or buts about it.  When I went over Draft 12, I found exactly three things that needed to be fixed post-draft, and they all involved roughly one-two pages each of fixing.  The first involved explaining a certain technology.  The second involved cutting down on one of the characters explaining something that had previously been shown (repetition is my mortal enemy!).  The third involved changing some dialogue as it “fit” another character saying it much better than the one I had saying the lines.

So Saturday the 19th I finished the draft and went back and fixed those three items.  Out of an abundance of caution, I made the decision that I should print the whole thing out and give it one more read-through, just to be absolutely sure everything was good.

Last night, Sunday, while sleeping, the realization of how close I was to finishing this book finally hit me.  I woke up some time between 2-4 in the morning (I didn’t check my clock) and felt…giddy.

Happy.

Ecstatic!

Trust me, it was very hard to get back to sleep and I’m feeling a bit of a lag as I type this out.  Still, those good feelings remain.  For me writing is an at times very difficult process which requires a great deal of effort to get the work completed in a way that satisfies/pleases me.  This book, the fifth in the Corrosive Knights series, has probably taken the most effort out of me of all my previous books.  And it rightfully should have.  This book is, after all, the culmination of the first Corrosive Knights story and ties everything, and I do mean everything, together.

If you were wondering how Mechanic, The Last Flight of the Argus, and Chameleon, three novels that can be read as “stand alone” actually fit together, after reading this new book, you will wonder no more (I already had two of the books come together with Nox, the fourth book of the Corrosive Knights series).

So, if all goes well, I will be finish this new novel by later next week.  Then I’ll prepare it for release and it could well be available for everyone else to read by this time two weeks from now.

Meanwhile, here’s the cover of the book.  I’ve blurred the book’s actual title because I still want to keep it my little secret.  Nonetheless, if you look hard enough, you may just “get” it:

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