That’s really just a guy in a monkey mask.

While working this afternoon (working on what, you ask? A tuna sandwich), I caught a bit of the original version of Conan: The Barbarian. When I was a kid, I didn’t understand the hatred that movie’s sequel engendered. Now, I kinda get it.

It wasn’t so much that the movie wasn’t great — I mean, it wasn’t, but that criticism could be leveled at hundreds of 80s movies. It was the letdown from the first film. When your first entry in a series is as good as Conan: The Barbarian, your second entry better blow eveyone’s mind. Conan: The Destroyer didn’t do that. And it was missing several elements that would have helped.

Element One: Pimp.

The first film had extremely well-drawn characters. Subotai and Valeria were integral to the story, less sidekicks than teammates of the main character. When you get to Destroyer, most of the “team” are simply cartoon-character versions of sidekicks, even The Wizard character.

It also had James Earl Jones playing a terrifying, layered villain. Who was the villain in the second film? The wizard in the monkey mask? Olivia D’abo’s mom? Wilt Chamberlain? The film couldn’t decide.

I guess the point here is that you can’t rest on your laurels. If you’re working on a series, you have to make sure to do something interesting, something as good as or better than the first. How do you do that?

Hell if I know.

So, what series has just beefed it on the second entry? And how was the new Conan? I still need to see that.

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Pssst. Hey, you. It’s contest time. Facebook contests, Twitter contests, and free Kindle Fires up for grabs. Go here: http://bit.ly/IOjPPB

But Morgan Freeman said…

So, every once in a while, I stumble across something in the course of my Internet wanderings (really, I’m just like a mid-50s drifter floating around the Internet, picking up jobs at diners and getting in fights with 40-year-old teenagers [deep cut, that]) that I find really cool and want to share with y’all.

So there’s this. It’s a film called Quantum Theory, and it looks like it’s going to be pretty damn great.

There’s nothing new about wanting to do a film, and crowdsourcing the funding on the Internet. But there is something new in putting together an inventive, fascinating story, then doing an ambitious film outside of the studio system. And that’s what’s going on above. (Watch the video at the link, by the way. I laughed plenty.)

Here’s the thing — novelists get to be ambitious all the damn time. I can write a tactical nuclear strike on a lab that my characters have just driven straight through in an armored assault vehicle, because I don’t have to worry about making it happen. I don’t have to figure out how we’re going to shoot that, because there is no shooting. It’s theater of the mind — you watch it in your head, but think about all the work that it would take to make that happen for the big screen — that one chapter in 47 Echo would cost about four million dollars, as written.

So when films are ambitious — and they don’t have the funding in place from a major studio — that’s something I want to see. When someone decides to do a twenty million dollar movie for twenty thousand, they get creative out of necessity. I gushed about the movie Lunopolis for similar reasons, but that was a movie I stumbled across years after it was made.

This one, I have a chance to watch from the beginning.

I’ve talked before about how movies, publishing, TV, all of these things are changing, and this illustrates my point perfectly. These folks are going to make a film that a studio would cut up, change, and mold to hit as many quadrants as possible. But on their own, with help from the Internet, they’ll get to make the film the way they want to make it… and we get to see it without the studio interference, which just might turn it into a remake of Back to the Future.

Go check out their web site at 8sidedfilms.com. Check out The Starmind Record, the series they’ve already done… then tell me you don’t want to give them all the moneys.

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Re-commencify the Kindelosity! (Now with Fire)

Big day today.

First, the 47echo.com site has been redesigned. It’s a skeleton of what I’m eventually planning for it, but at least it’s not so green anymore. Check it out, won’t you?

Second — and probably more interesting — it’s time to give away some stuff and things! As you know, the sequel to 47 Echo, Supercritical, is going to be released in a month. And as you know, I gave away a couple of Kindles last time. Carina Press, my awesome publisher, is digital-first, which means the initial release will be an ebook you can get on your Kindle, Nook, Kobo (anyone still have one of these?), Reader, iPad, or what have you.

But wait! you say. I don’t have a Kindle, Nook, Kobo, Reader, iPad, or what have you! What kind of monster are you, sir?! (To which I might suggest you look into decaf.)

But worry no longer about your ereader-less-ness — I’m here with a pair of contests that’ll (possibly) fix that right up for you:

The Facebook Contest

Simple, this one. All you have to do is “Like” the 47 Echo Facebook Page. The catch is a magic number: 1000. Once the page reaches 1000 total people who Like it, I’ll run the ol’ random number generator, and that person wins. (Of course, it goes without saying that you can’t win if you’re related to me.)

How do we accomplish 1000 likes? Well, if you already like the page, share it. Suggest it to friends. Electro-pimp away!

The Twitter Contest

This one’s easy, too. Follow @Tweet_Book on Twitter, and retweet the daily message it asks you to retweet. The first 100 unique retweets of the day are entered to win — on June 25 (two weeks after release day), ol’ Randomy The Number Generator gets kicked again and picks a winner. Simpler even than the Facebook one — but the odds aren’t as good, as @Tweet_Book already has about 3,100 followers. (You can’t be related to me for this one, either. Sorry.)

Fine, Fine. What Do I Win?

Each winner will receive, from me, a shiny, brand-spankin’ new Kindle Fire. More than just an ereader, the Kindle fire is a functioning tablet — I watch a lot of Netflix and Amazon Prime video on mine (as well as, you know, reading books). I’ll also include an Amazon gift card for the purchase of Supercritical and 47 Echo (and a couple of other books, too).

So there you have it, folks. Enter now — Twitter, Facebook, or both — and get stuff from me!

Oh, and question for the gallery, just to keep the theme going — what’s the best sci-fi book you’ve read this year?

The Back Office

So proud and majestic.

Here’s a little glimpse behind the scenes of a midlist-to-lower-midlist author:

A few years back, I bought a completely thrashed 1994 Ford Thunderbird for $500. It had belonged to a teenage girl before I bought it, and she’d beaten the hell out of it. The thing was lucky to go five miles without overheating and evacuating its coolant all over the pavement. The transmission seemed to be missing a gear or four, and the inside looked like it had been firebombed.

I could have paid someone to fix it up, I suppose. Instead, I embarked on expeditions to the local salvage yard. I was lucky, as it seemed the mid-90s Mercury Cougar (which had the same 4.8-liter V8 as my Thunderbird) was a very popular car to wreck in the city where I lived, so I wasn’t at a shortage for parts. I rebuilt the transmission, replaced the cams, lifters, fuel rails, and a bunch of other little stuff that went wrong with the car. When I bought it, it was lucky to make it back to my house (I had to stop it twice to keep it from overheating). I drove that car without much of an incident for the next year and a half, fixing little things along the way, though I really had no training or expertise in automotive repair.

This ties back in to the author thing, I promise.

I’m currently working on a redesign for the 47 Echo site, which will hopefully launch tomorrow (as well as this year’s new, big, insane contest for the Supercritical release). Working on this site reminds me of the Thunderbird — I often have no idea what I’m doing, and I guess I could pay someone to do it, but…

Yep. When you’re a middle-of-the-road author like me, you end up doing a lot of things for yourself. And that’s fun, actually. I dig learning new things.

So, what skills have you picked up out of necessity? How have they helped you in your day-to-day life, even if it’s something you never saw yourself doing?

Supercritical: A Link In The Chain

Book Two — who will survive, and what will be left of them?

For someone with a book coming out in just over a month, I realize I haven’t talked a whole lot about Supercritical. It’s an odd thing, as the books I’ve written for the past three years have mostly been out there in public, thanks to the Twitter Novel Project. Supercritical was written almost in secret by comparison — I didn’t talk too much about it while I was writing it, didn’t post excerpts or bits of the work in progress. It was like The Dark Knight, where very little information leaked during production.

I read one of the first reviews yesterday, and they commented that “the ending was quite a surprise.” (You can find the review in the June 2012 edition of RT Book Reviews, on newsstands now, or you can wait two months for the review to be posted online.) Of course, the ending wasn’t a surprise to me, but I was glad it had that effect on a reviewer. It’s way better than “the ending was quite as expected.”

But reading this review made me realize that I have no idea how Supercritical is going to be received. I think it’s a better book than 47 Echo — but I also expected the ending. So here’s a question: if you read the first book, what kind of things do you want to see more of in the second? And if you’ve gotten a review copy of the second book already, where do you think the story is headed for the third?

Yep. Pretty self-centered post. But my name is on the shingle, so I get one of those every once in a while.

Signs point to “yes.”

Supercritical has yet to hit NetGalley (your one-stop shop for digital ARCs [advance review copies]), yet I’ve already seen a couple of the early reviews. Sigh of relief time — they’re good.

The first one — which popped up on Goodreads — was a five-star. Not a bad way to start.

For one review, I actually had to go out into the world and buy a print magazine. OK, I didn’t have to, as the review would eventually post to the Internet, but I was curious. This magazine didn’t have a whole lot of love for the last book, so all I was looking for was an improvement. Another half-star, or even some kinder words for this book, would have totally done it for me.

Instead, I got another full star, which punched it up to “a pleasant read.” I’ll take it.

In my long rant about reviews the other day, I mentioned that I feel bad reviews are totally valid, and that’s true. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like good reviews. My writer’s ego sees those, sits back in its high-backed leather chair, and strokes its white Persian cat while cackling over the fate of a British super-spy.

And while this review is solidly middle-of-the-road, the important thing is it’s an improvement. I went from someone not much liking my first book to mildly digging the second. It’s not a slam-dunk, but at least I made the free throw.

So, a question for all my writer pals in the audience — how important are reviews to you? Do you read them, or ignore them?