Guardians

My latest book - can you believe it? I mean, I had them all written already, years ago, but actually getting them published and out there is such a wondrous concept for me. I really can't explain it. I've devoured these kinds of books since I was a kid, but I never really thought I'd be writing any. And when my son gave me that old laptop way back when, I didn't really know what else to do with it. We didn't have any internet at the time, and what do you do with a glorified typewriter. Oh yeah, and it had Paint and I had an Encarta encyclopedia on it too. Couple that with the desire to read something I hadn't already read and this is what you get, I guess. Well now - I got four more to go and then I'm down to a large fistful of short stories. I guess we'll be talking about those somewhere along the line.

Anyway - I digress - my apologies

Guardians is my second (so far) science fiction story. Idea elements came from the video game, Final Fantasy VIII, which gave me my first soldier, Reed, the dark haired guy, and all his abilities. Like in the game, I needed an enemy, but the enemy in the game was too ambiguous, so I turned to my favorite movie for that idea. Starship Troopers had the perfect enemy for me, but I needed them to be just a little more believable so they aren't exact, and of course they had to be different in other ways too.

During the course of writing this book, the enemy evolved. Being space-faring, they had to be highly intelligent, but running up against humans proved to be more than they expected. I'm going to assume that somewhere in their distant past, roaches somewhere gave them fits so they took on the bug form and it served them quite well for a very long time, but against humans, it wasn't good enough; they were being pushed back, and they couldn't have that. The next logical step (I love logic) would be to create one of their own.

Enter my second character. Reed found him at the age of maybe two way down in the bug hive and named him Adam. He was human in every way except his DNA. Reed raised him like his own, right along with his family, and he was normal in every way right up until his magic developed.

Born with an ability that could not be genetically transmitted from parent to child in any way, he had to learn how to use it, and he had to keep it quiet - he wasn't entirely successful, but he never found himself under some dissection knife. He had too many friends in powerful places. He could, however, fly the pants off anything with wings, and was a well-known in all the simulator hangers. After he joined the Air Force, he became a force to be reckoned with in his own right.

I know that all sounds so peachy, but no journey through life is easy. It seems a family relative wanted him. She tried to get her claws on him when he was a kid, but that didn't succeed. By the time she found him again, he was essentially untouchable, but there were other ways. There's no knowing all of her reasoning, or if her reasoning was even rational, but they do eventually meet, much to her dismay.

Read it - leave a review.

I gotta go work on the document some before I can put it up as an eBook, because Kindle doesn't recognize the symbols I used to mark gaps - I need to turn them into pictures and see if that works. Sigh - Too bad pdf doesn't work for kindle publishing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Movie Remakes

We've all seen remakes of one sort or another, well I just got done watching this one. I have the original with Arnold Schwarzenegger too.

The original one was about a man who had his memory wiped and a new one implanted. I'm not exactly sure why they would do that, but if they just killed the guy, there wouldn't be any story. Anyway, his day job is boring him to the max and he wants a little excitement in his life so he goes to a place called Recall. This is a place where they give you some kind of canned memory at a much more affordable price than going on a vacation, plus you can choose something exotic like go to Mars.

Now the remake is a lot the same. The big difference is that Mars might be a possible memory destination but that's all. In this one, it's not a Mars colony they're trying to save, nor is it the lack of air they need to rescue them from. In this version we've cut travel from London to Australia to fifteen minutes by going through the core and Australia is the colony in need of rescuing. In this version, Australia is the slave labor force and the powers that be would like to replace all that man power with robot power.

With the significant story-line change, they should have given it the chance it deserved by giving the movie its own title, character names, and dialogue. Instead, they tried to follow the same line of events, sticking in identical dialogue here and there. Now, if you'd never seen the first one, you wouldn't know the difference; it's just fine all by itself. Full of action, adventure, and even love, not to mention the awesome future world setting. It's great. But if you're at all familiar with the first edition... Well, it's just kind of sad that so many things are identical.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~