Writing is Hard: Author websites

This is mostly a bookmark because I've found myself going back to a couple of articles that literary agent Rachel Vater posted earlier this year about author websites. The first is a collection of her thoughts on the subject; the second is her responses to reader questions about it.

So far, I think mine's doing okay - especially at this stage of my career - but Vater's thoughts are a good reminder of what an author website is supposed to be for. That's why I'll keep going back and rereading them.

Action Girls: The Women of Lonesome Dove, Part Two – Clara Forsythe

Like David Arquette before him in Dead Man’s Walk, Steve Zahn looks like he’s imitating Robert Duvall in Comanche Moon more than he is acting. But he does such a good job of it that you don’t care.

And like Jonny Lee Miller, Karl Urban doesn’t try to imitate Tommy Lee Jones, but just plays the character. It feels like Urban’s got a lot more to work with than Miller did though. I don’t know how much time is supposed to have lapsed between the two mini-series, but Urban’s Woodrow Call is a lot more grim than Miller’s was. Some of that is undoubtedly Urban’s natural broodiness versus Miller’s gentler appearance. Miller did a fine job, but let’s face it: Urban is perfect for the role.

The story is more interesting than Dead Man’s Walk, but it still tends to ramble. The first two acts are mostly about the capture and rescue of Captain Scull (Val Kilmer), who leads the Rangers. Before his capture though, we see a lot of the Rangers coming and going in and out of Austin, much like they did in Dead Man’s Walk. Gus and Clara (played this time by Linda Cardellini, aka Velma from the live-action Scooby Doo movies) are still in love, but are also still struggling to commit to each other. Gus’ job takes him away from Clara far too often for her liking and she’s not going to marry him until he can quit Rangering and settle down. Which he won’t do.

Buffalo Hump, the villain from Dead Man’s Walk, is played by Wes Studi this time and is a lot more settled down. Apart from one notable exception, he pretty much stays in camp and criticizes his son Blue Duck, who’s the real troublemaker of the mini-series. So, we mostly get a lot of slice-of-life episodes of Ranger life, punctuated by important events like Scull’s capture at the hands of an old enemy and the Rangers’ attempts to first ransom him, and when that fails, rescue him.

During the ransoming attempt, the Rangers go down to a little town on the Rio Grande called Lonesome Dove where a wealthy rancher has set up shop. They try to persuade the rancher to donate cattle for the ransom, but he refuses. It’s a fruitless side-trip meant only to get Gus and Call to Lonesome Dove so they can talk about maybe retiring there one day. The mini-series is full of that kind of stuff: meandering side-trips that don’t progress the story, but are only there to hit particular beats and move the characters closer to where they’re supposed to be in Lonesome Dove.

That’s not to say it's boring though. The production values of Comanche Moon are a lot more engaging than Dead Man’s Walk was. I don’t know if it’s the use of music or the camera angles or a lot of stuff mixed together, but I stayed entertained throughout Comanche Moon and that’s something that I can’t say about its predecessor.

Val Kilmer, for example, absolutely immerses himself in the role of Captain Scull. Scull is a charismatic leader who uses a combination of humor and spunk to prevail in the harsh, Texas wilderness. He’s as much fun to watch as Gus and Call.

Also fun is Scull’s vain, horny wife Inez who loves having so many of her husband’s handsome, young Rangers living nearby. She’s fun because we hate her, but she’s still fun.

Much less fun is her conquest at the beginning of the story, a young Ranger named Jake Spoon. Jake’s easily manipulated and has terrible judgment. This will, of course, make him much more interesting when he’s given some power (and charisma) and played by Robert Urich in Lonesome Dove, but here – at least starting out – he’s just a pawn in Inez’s game. He does one, attention-grabbing thing the entire mini-series and that’s to hit a prostitute. But as soon as he’s done it he pretty much quits being a player in the story. He’s still around, but he fades into the background. I’ll explain.

The prostitute he hits is the girl Call exchanges looks with at the end of Dead Man’s Walk. Her name is Maggie Tilton, which is really unfortunate because it sounds so similar to Matty, the prostitute in Call’s life during most of the first mini-series. In fact, with so much recasting being done between the two mini-series, it took me a while to figure out that Maggie and Matty were two separate characters. And even then it was because someone finally mentioned that Matty had moved further West and was doing pretty good for herself.

It’s too bad because I like Matty a lot more than Maggie. We don’t learn much about Maggie other than that she’s a prostitute and that she seems to have a crush on Call. He seems to like her too, but he’s careful about it and obviously doesn’t see a future for the two of them. You never get a real clear understanding of why. She's sweet as can be, she's beautiful, and she obviously dotes on Call. There's a lot to like about her.

By the time Jake hits Maggie, it’s obvious that things are going nowhere for her with Call, so she ends up letting Jake stick around. I sort of hated her for that, but she makes a convincing argument at one point that she needs a man around and she’d rather have Jake than no one. She’s no Action Girl, that Maggie. She’s a good woman, and supportive of her friends, but dang I hate that she let Jake stay.

Jake’s presence in Maggie’s life keeps him in the story after that, but just barely. It’s more the idea of him that makes him important than it is anything he does. When Maggie becomes pregnant, she claims that Call is the father, but Call doesn’t believe her. The baby could very well be Jake’s. Maggie insists that it’s Call’s, but really, we don’t have any more reason to believe her than Call does. We’re supposed to accept that “a woman knows these things.” In Lonesome Dove, everyone believes the baby is Call’s except for Call. I don’t know how that happened from the flimsy evidence presented in Comanche Moon.

There’s other stuff that doesn’t match up between Comanche Moon and Lonesome Dove too. Lonesome Dove describes Maggie as spending her days watching a saloon door waiting for Call. In Comanche Moon, Maggie works out of her house, not a saloon. In fact, she doesn’t set foot in a saloon at all during the entire mini-series. Lonesome Dove also says that Maggie dies in the town of Lonesome Dove, not Austin as she does in Comanche Moon. Sloppy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The last third of Comanche Moon takes place seven years after the first two thirds. That’s to give Maggie’s son Newt time to grow up enough that he can become a sort of mascot to the Rangers. There’s not much more reason for it than that. Like I said before, they’re obviously just hitting the beats and showing the important pieces of the backstory.

We hear that Jake’s real good to Newt and Maggie, but we never see it. Jake’s pretty much been written out of the story by now. He’s just another excuse for Call to stay distant from Maggie. Call does try to get close a couple of times, but his refusal to accept Newt as his son gets in the way and Maggie eventually breaks things off with him. Another major difference from the way Lonesome Dove suggests things happened.

And then there’s Clara. In Lonesome Dove we’re told that Clara and Gus never got their act together because they couldn’t commit to each other, and that’s mostly how it was portrayed in Dead Man’s Walk. But in Comanche Moon, it’s obvious for a while that they love each other so much that eventually they will commit and get married. It takes the meddling of Inez Scull – who wants Gus for herself, at least for a while – to break them up for good. While Clara’s out of town, Inez tells Gus that Clara’s married another suitor, a young rancher named Bob Allen. That emotionally frees Gus to start sleeping with Inez and when Clara finds out about it, that ends things.

It’s lame because Gus never questions Inez’s story. He knows her to be manipulative, but he just sort of takes her word for it and jumps into bed (although grieving over Clara while he’s at it).

Clara comes out looking pretty good though. Her parents die during Comanche Moon and she bravely takes over their business. Unlike Maggie with Jake, Clara hooks up with Bob Allen (and eventually does marry him) because he genuinely loves her and she sees that she could be happy with him in ways that she can’t with Gus. Especially since Gus is so stupid and gullible (something that he definitely was not in Lonesome Dove). We never feel like Clara needs a man, but she’d definitely be happier with one and Bob’s a good guy.

I liked Clara a lot in Comanche Moon. You can see elements of both the capricious girl from Dead Man’s Walk and the unwavering frontier woman of Lonesome Dove. That’s hard to pull off, but they sure did it. Comanche Moon has a lot of problems, but it succeeds in two things: being entertaining and moving Clara’s story forward. I finished Comanche Moon eager to see more of her.

Three out of five snake-eating madmen.

Action Girl News: Faerie Kin, Runaways, Cave Girl, Kelly Sue, Gail Simone, Wonder Woman, and Futura

Good Neighbors Review



I reviewed Kin, the first volume of Holly Black (The Spiderwick Chronicles) and Ted Naifeh's (Polly and the Pirates) graphic novel series The Good Neighbors, at Newsarama. It features a promising, young Action Girl named Rue. And it's very good.

Runaways



Humberto Ramos reminds me why I'm buying Runaways again when he starts drawing it. It's partly because he's Awesome anyway, but mostly because his version of Molly makes me remember how much I miss her.

Cave Girl



The Fortress of Fortitude has a complete Cave Girl story for your politically incorrect reading enjoyment.

Kelly Sue loves women (and mythology)



The Capital Kelly Sue DeConnick contributes to the Newsarama blog's summertime "I (Heart) Comics" feature by focusing on her love for female characters and mythology. It's a great essay, but I especially love this part where she talks about her attraction to female characters, regardless of how feminist they are:

Here’s the thing, I’m not going to say powerful women, or smart women or whatever because… well, that’s not always the case. Politics is politics but the heart wants what it wants and, in my case anyway, has no use for reason.

I love Kelly Sue for a lot of reasons, but her honesty is the best of them.

She mentions Wonder Woman, naturally, and introduces that fantastic panel above, but she also reminds me that I've been meaning to try Lady Snowblood.

Gail Simone talking about Wonder Woman

I never get tired of hearing Simone talk about Wonder Woman. I stay far, far away from the DC Message Boards these days, but Mujer Maravilla was cool enough to repost a message Simone wrote there. Among other things, Simone talks about how she thinks we're missing out by not having a Joss Whedon-written Wonder Woman movie. Based on the little I've heard about Whedon's take, I've been of the opposite opinion, but Simone's lamenting it makes me wonder if Whedon had something that I was missing. It's a moot point now, obviously, but still...

Futura



Sleestak's been posting a lot more Futura stuff since I first discovered what he was doing. Thanks, Sleestak!

Action Girls: The Women of Lonesome Dove, Part One – Matty Roberts

Man, that’s an unwieldy title. Sorry.

Many years ago, I worked third shift with an older guy named Les who loved movies as much as I did. Because we had a lot of downtime, we were able to bring in movies to watch, so we started broadening each other’s cinematic horizons. I’d keep Les up to date on the best of the new releases and he’d turn me on to quality older films like The Manchurian Candidate and Five Easy Pieces.

One of the ones he brought in was the Lonesome Dove mini-series starring Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones. As with all of his picks, it was as good as he’d said it would be and I’ve been curious ever since to check out the other stories in the saga. I couldn’t imagine any of them rivaling the original, but I love me a saga, so it’s always been back there in my head to try them out. Last winter, Comanche Moon was on TV and completed the televised adaptations of the series. When the Comanche Moon DVD was released, I figured it was as good a time as any to finally marathon the whole thing.

I wasn’t going to blog about it, because I really couldn’t think of a way to tie it in to my subject matter. But then I watched Return to Lonesome Dove and met Agostina Vega. She’s a perfect example of an Action Girl, and she made me realize that there were also other – though less-obvious – examples all throughout the saga. As I’m exploring them though, keep in mind that I haven’t read any of Larry McMurtry’s original novels. I’m basing all of this on the TV interpretations of them.

I chose to watch the series in the chronological order of when the stories take place. That means I started with Dead Man’s Walk starring David Arquette as Gus McCrae and Jonny Lee Miller as Woodrow Call. Even though it had been a long time since I’d seen Lonesome Dove (long enough that all I remembered was the basic, cattle-drive plot and the fate of Robert Urich’s character), I could tell that Arquette was trying to imitate Duvall more than he was trying to play the character. He did a good job of it though.

Jonny Lee Miller, in contrast, left the Tommy Lee Jones impressions alone and did a nice job just portraying the serious Call. He doesn’t start out all that serious in Dead Man’s Walk, but there are hints at the perfectionism that later defines the character. And the incidents in the mini-series contribute to making him more serious and explain why Gus never succeeded in lightening him up any.

Dead Man’s Walk is about a group of Texas Rangers who eventually end up riding under the command of a former pirate (played by F. Murray Abraham) to take control of Mexican-held Santa Fe. I say “eventually” because it takes forever to get them to that point and a large part of the story is spent just covering the random wanderings of the Rangers as they fight a nasty Comanche warrior named Buffalo Hump. The meandering story and uninspired direction make it a difficult story to get through. In fact, if I hadn’t kept the re-watching of Lonesome Dove as a carrot in front of me, I’m not sure I would’ve bothered to stick with Dead Man’s Walk.

Even Edward James Olmos as a Mexican captain wasn’t as cool as he usually is. He plays a character who should’ve generated a lot of pathos, but doesn’t. I just never cared about him, or any of the other characters really. I thought some of them were pretty cool, but there was almost never any real emotional investment. The one exception was Patricia Childress as Matty Roberts, a prostitute who travels with the Rangers.

Matty’s the first person we see. She’s in a river, in her skivvies, and she’s carrying a large snapping turtle that she then uses to teach a lesson to a couple of customers who haven’t paid her in a while. Right there, you know Matty’s pretty cool. Her nickname “The Big Western” makes her even cooler, and we eventually learn that she’s got a great backstory too.

When bad things happen to Call, it’s Matty who takes care of him. She’s got an enormous heart and as tough as Call is, there wouldn’t be any more to his and Gus’ story without Matty. She’s unbelievably heroic in the face of everything she’s been through and has to go through in Dead Man’s Walk. She doesn’t think she is, but she is.

The other main female character in Dead Man’s Walk is Clara Forsythe (Jennifer Garner). Her father owns the general store in Austin where the Rangers are based. Gus immediately falls for her, but it’s not all that easy to see why. She’s pretty, but she teases him relentlessly and endlessly tries to flirt with an uninterested Call. It’s all to make Gus jealous and keep him on his toes, we figure, but it doesn’t make her an attractive character. Still, I suppose it’s believable that this young, wild woman will eventually become the more restrained, but equally strong version we meet later in the saga. And her tactics, cruel as they seem, do appear to work on Gus. We learn early on that he’s a philanderer, but Clara’s able to calm him down some and give him focus.

There’s one more woman in Dead Man’s Walk who deserves a mention, even though she’s on screen for all of about five seconds. At the very end of the mini-series, Call’s heading into the general store just as a gorgeous young woman (Gretchen Mol from 3:10 to Yuma) is coming out. They exchange looks, but don’t talk, and it’s obvious that we’re supposed to know who she is from having already read or seen the sequels. I couldn’t remember her from Lonesome Dove, but I figured I’d learn more about her in Comanche Moon. I was right (though even then it was confusing, as I’ll explain next time), but having Call exchange glances with an unknown character without any follow-up was a strange way to end the mini-series.

Dead Man's Walk gets two out of five turtle-wielding whores.

Adventureblog Theater: Animated Wonder Woman trailer

I posted a crappy pirated version of this earlier, but the real one's out now and it's worth another look.

Kill All Monsters!

How 'bout a sneaky peek at page one of Kill All Monsters. For those of you who saw the first version, we're obviously getting to the robot vs. monsters action a lot faster in the new draft.

Monster Attack Network: The Movie

Good news for giant monster fans. Especially for fans of giant monsters who live on South Pacific islands. Marc Bernardin, Adam Freeman, and Nima Sorat's Monster Attack Network has been bought by Disney for development into a feature film.

Kind of puts me in the mood to share some giant monsters of my (and Jason Copland's) own...

The Atlantis Journal: Pirate dinner, sea shows, Bioshock movie, and the Phantom on TV

Pirates Dinner Adventure



Pirate-themed, interactive dinner theater. Sure beats watching The Music Man while you eat.

Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea



Christopher Mills has the review. Makes me want to see how Netflix is stocked on that, Man from Atlantis, and SeaQuest. (Pretty well, it turns out, except for Man from Atlantis.)

What other underwater shows do I need to revisit? Don't say Flipper.

Bioshock movie



While looking over Hollywood's slate of upcoming steampunk movies, i09 ranks the Bioshock one pretty high on the excitement meter, mentioning a Jules Verne influence and an underwater city.

Because I'd do nothing else if I played video games, I try to stay away from them, so I don't know much about Bioshock except that I'm tired of hearing ignorant fans cry "rip off" every time they a deep sea diving suit somewhere else. But "Verne" and "underwater city" certainly get my attention.

New Phantom TV show



Daniel Knauf (Carnivale) and his son Charles have pitched a four-hour Phantom TV movie to the Sci Fi Channel in hopes that it'll eventually become a TV series. A Phantom TV show from the creator of Carnivale sounds pretty good to me in concept, but I'm skeptical about their decision to update the character.

They sound like they're keeping enough of my favorite elements (the skull rings, the guns, the Jungle Patrol) that I don't entirely dispair. But making him an orphan who discovers his Phantom lineage and turning the Singh Brotherhood into corporate bad guys conjures up bad memories of Sci Fi's horrible Flash Gordon series. And with no mention in the article of the horse or the wolf... well, I'm nervous.

Adventureblog Gallery: Sea Monsters vs. Superheroes

Hellboy vs. Octopus



By Dan Boyd.

Seaweed Monster



By this guy.

Gualagon



By Ralph Lorenz and others.

"Caught" mermaid



By Harold McCauley.

Aquaman (and friend) vs. Black Manta



By Ben Jones (maybe?). I so can't wait for the Brave and the Bold cartoon.

The Sea Monster

I've seen a couple of other people do this and I think it's a cool idea. So, here, using Wordle, is my novel so far. Working title is The Sea Monster.

The plan will be to update this weekly until I'm finished and see how it changes.

Action Girl News: Burn Notice, Underburbs, Keira of Oz, and the usuals

Burn Notice interview



We're a couple of episodes into the Burn Notice season, but this is still a good interview with Jeffrey Donovan and Bruce Campbell about the show and where this season is headed.

Not much about Fiona unfortunately, except to expect that her relationship with Mike will "go left, right and all around, and it’ll be exciting." Donovan also says, "Some of the episodes I actually don’t read until I get on the day just so I can see what crazy thing she’s going to do to me that day."

Sounds about right. I love Fiona and she's continuing to show this season that she's a strong character, not just in kickbuttability, but also in the way she's growing emotionally. She's still psychotic though, which is so cool.

Alan Moore on Sexism in Comics

This is an ancient series of articles and doesn't shed any new light on the subject, but it's written by Alan Moore which means that it's thoughtful as well as entertaining as all get out.

New Black Canary writer

So, it's true. Green Arrow/Black Canary does have a new writer as of issue #15. Andrew Kreisberg is one of the writers on Eli Stone, which bodes well since I really, really like that show. He also wrote that Helen Killer comic that Chris Sims likes so much, so there's that too.

Still, I can't help but be skeptical. I've really loved the globe-trotting adventures that Judd Winick's been writing and I'll be sorry to see Dinah and Ollie go home to Star City to focus on their marriage and the new bad guys Kreisberg's creating. Still, there's no reason that the series can't continue to be awesome under those circumstances. Hopefully, it will be.

Now here's a Black Canary doll the Christian Voice can get behind.

From Tonner. Very snazzy.

Black Canary on Batman: The Brave and the Bold

Two things I noticed from this San Diego report on the upcoming Batman cartoon, which already looks awesome.

1. Black Canary will be appearing in an episode.
2. Oswald's playing Batman.

Oh. Wonder Woman's dressing up too.

Also from Tonner.

Animated Wonder Woman movie

Here's some more info on the animated Wonder Woman movie. It'll be released in February (on the 9th, according to BuzzFocus, who also reports it will have a "very dark storyline") and in addition to the already announced cast, will also star Oliver Platt as Hades.

Here's some footage of the trailer that someone nicked at San Diego.



She-Hulk toy

I really hate the look of Hasbro's Marvel Super Hero Squad. Especially the happy-as-pie Hulk and the disturbing and creepy Thing. It works pretty well on She-Hulk though, so I may have to pick up this two-pack. Anyone want a disturbing and creepy Thing toy?

(Incidentally, there's also a Marvel Super Hero Squad version of Shang Chi, and I'll definitely want that one. Shang Chi toys are too hard to come by to be picky.)

Underburbs



Over at Newsarama, I reviewed TJ Dort and Joe Haley's excellent Underburbs comics. It's about a swell, little girl named Angela who has to save the world from a not-so-swell vampire girl named Winifred. Really fun, cool stuff.

Keira of Oz



Annie Leibovitz is at it again, this time shooting Keira Knightley in Wizard of Oz scenes. Thank you, Annie Leibovitz.