Hello, friends!

You call a single television series a “series”… which is also what you call two or more series.

I love English.

This morning my two-year-old sounded a little too much like a modern teenager. Here’s the conversation:

Me: Are you OK?

2: I’m cold, daddy.

Me: Well, you should put on some clothes. I’ll help you.

2: No!

Me: Stop complaining, then.

2: No! I’m cold!

Me: sighs

Hopefully that gave you a little chuckle. Younglings can be a hoot at times.

Anyway—some quick reminders. I posted some Inner Demon sample chapters, which you can find here. Also… subscribe! Keep coming back for more! I’ll share nifty odds and ends each week, updates on the next novel, and you’ll be the first to hear when events (like publication or Kickstarting) go live.

Bloggyness Review—Godspeed

Ever heard of Olan Rogers? He’s an internet funnyman that gained a minor celebrity status on YouTube. I discovered him through one of his “storytime” videos, Ghost in the Stalls:

Let me tell you, that is… That is peak early high school humor right there. Maybe even middle school. I was rolling on the floor with laughter. (Still find it amusing, actually.)

Well, one thing I didn’t know at the time about this jokester is that he had much, much larger ambitions than just doing random videos on YouTube: he wanted to craft stories. More specifically, epic, ambitious, animated series. And he got his first big break with an animated show called Final Space.

I kinda hated it.

The animation was pretty good. And I love a good sci-fi epic that’s well-rounded with elements of comedy and drama. The weird names and cat people I could live with. But the main character… Gary? I hated him. I found him such an obnoxious lead that I don’t even know if I finished the first episode. If I did, anything else I watched was excised from my mind.

But a lot of people really did like Final Space—my brother, in particular, told me it was the kind of show that you have to push through half of the first season to get to the good stuff, but then it is good stuff.

The show did well enough to get three seasons, despite major studio interference; it then got cancelled before a fourth season could finish the story, but Olan Rogers campaigned hard enough for Final Space that Warner Bros gave him a license to finish the story via graphic novel.

And then Final Space was deleted from existence so Warner Bros could have a tax write-off, made only accessible via piracy (as with so many things). Ouch.

Well, Olan Rogers has some chutzpah, apparently, because he wasn’t done—and it didn’t matter how expensive or difficult animation is, he wanted to make more sci-fi epics. So he Kickstarted an animated pilot for a series called Godspeed. And… Wow. He blew me away with this one. My experiences with his low YouTube humor and the… uh… mess that was Final Space resulted in me giving Godspeed a try solely because the animation was attractive, and because I could watch the pilot for free. I ended up… well, I’m talking about it here and highly recommending it, so you can probably get a good idea of how well-received it was.

I do not understand how animation can look this good on a limited Kickstarter budget. Granted, Rogers apparently managed to find a private investor on top of what he gathered through Kickstarter (per a Kickstarter Update), so I have no idea how much money he actually had (beyond what’s public on the original Kickstarter page), but he put it to dang good use. Godspeed is gorgeous—every frame has such attractive colors, focus, and details.

Here’s the gist of the pilot: Iris is a young woman trapped on a planet doomed to be destroyed by… something. Something big and red and sun-like in the sky. However, she decides to forgo her opportunity to escape, instead giving her literal ticket off-planet to a child. She then has to figure out first how to survive on this doomed planet, and then how to escape it.

The voice actors (and animators) really sell the characters. This pilot has a lot of heavy, heavy emotion in it, and it comes through in expressions and vocal ticks that hit just right. The clear emotional and thematic through-line—don’t let us be forgotten, expressed in a variety of ways by so many people in this abandoned world—hits you in the gut whenever a character starts sharing personal experiences.

The pilot also does an excellent job at doing exactly what a pilot should do, which is clearly set the tone for the series, introduce and define the characters, and make it clear where everyone is and what their goals are (and what resources they have). Not all of these items need be done in great detail, but you at least need an idea of each one, which Godspeed more than succeeds on. (This is assuming, of course, the rest of the eventual series doesn’t go off in a wildly different direction—which, per Kickstarter update again, Olan has found a studio willing to go do-or-die with this series; thus, it seems likely that there will be an entire season one. Or, as likely as anything gets in the entertainment world.)

Bravo, Olan! I look forward to the rest of the series when it comes out.

That’s not to say that the pilot is perfect. There are a few items that I could nitpick, but really only exist as problems to me because this is a standalone. (Small spoilers ahead, this paragraph and the following two.) For example, I don’t get why almost every person on this planet was abandoned in this slow-burning apocalypse—since two years pass, why weren’t any ships sent back to pick up more people? Well, that’s an example of a question that probably would clutter up the pilot unnecessarily if answered, but I do expect it to get answered eventually if there’s an entire season.

Another example is a character who does not need to die, but chooses to die anyway. You’ll know who I’m talking about if you watch the pilot. It makes for a pretty meaningful moment temporarily, but thinking about it after the fact made me scratch my head, at least without more insight into the character herself. Which… who knows? Maybe we’ll get that! In which case this isn’t an issue.

Here’s a real nitpick, though: the storm activity on this planet is wildly inconsistent. The storm is shown to rapidly rust and destroy a metal can, yet it has no effect on the metal of a truck; rain drops in this storm are shown to strike hard enough to crack said truck’s windshield, yet a regular human doesn’t take any injury so long as she wears a poncho. (Covering the truck in canvas also protects it from being destroyed.) Since I’m given reason at the end of the episode to believe this storm will never be relevant again… well, I’m always going to wonder if this was inconsistent writing or if there are explanations, I’ll just never get them within the show itself.

So that’s what I got on Godspeed. Once again, I’m happy to share with you something that is not only excellent, but free, and I highly recommend it.

Discussions—Mockingbird Lane

Very tangential off the above (specifically, tangenting off of “pilots that are still worth watching on their own whether or not the rest of the series ever gets made”), have you seen Mockingbird Lane? It was a reimagining of the old sitcom The Munsters, with a little darker tone and more macabre humor—but still aimed at families(?). I’d say the show was perfect for families with teens, particularly if such families didn’t mind a little blood in their television shows. It’s a 2010s tragedy that NBC cancelled the series after filming the pilot.

I highly, highly, highly recommend Mockingbird Lane. Unfortunately, it’s nearly impossible to get your hands on… Doing some quick searching as I type, I only managed to find it on Google Play, and I’m not really sure it can be watched there anymore, despite being listed.

Writing Updates

Another milestone! Hazel Halfwhisker is at about 148,000 words—a 5,000-word increase from last week, pretty average pace, but most importantly I finally finished part 2. On to part 3!

Send-Off

Have yourself an excellent week!