Author Archives: Bob Evans

The Soul Crushing Exercise of Querying

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Once you have a completed, edited, and polished manuscript the next step if you are not self-publishing is to find a publisher and or an agent. This is done by sending out letter asking them to review your work and possibly take you on as a client. Those letters are queries and for many people, me included, it is painful frustrating process.

First there is the search for the right sort of agent. You have to find one that represents the sort of writing you do. It’s a waste of everyone’s time to query an agent that specializes in historical romances with your far-flung space opera. You have to find agents that are open to queries. There are so many writers aspiring to a traditional publishing contract that the agents are overwhelmed by the flood of queries. Most only open are specific times and for limited durations.

Once you have gathered a list of potential agents you start sending out those queries, paying particular attention to each agents preference in how that query should be submitted. Do they want a synopsis, something many writers dread crafting. Do you they want sample pages? How many? 5, 10, a chapter or 3 chapters?

Following each agents guidelines you send off the query and wait.

A growing number of agents will let you know in their guidelines that if they are not interested that they simply will not respond. So, you will get absolutely nothing in reply. The vast majority utilize form rejection templates. You know that they are not interested but you can’t be sure of why. Was the writing not good enough? Do they have too many clients with similar stories? Did this story just not ignite a love for it? Did you just catch them on a bad day? You can’t know and you will never know, all you have is the form rejection with your name and the book’s title filled in.

If an agent actually likes the prospect of your book they may ask for the entire manuscript. When you submit that it is more waiting, more uncertainty and still the most likely outcome is another rejection.

With this exhausting and demoralizing process, it is easy to see why so many authors in this day and age prefer to self-publish. it is not a statement about quality but for those of use with talents in graphic design and numerous other skill that make for a good physical book the traditional publication path with tis soul-crushing machinery remains the path we must walk.

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Movie Review: The First Omen

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Saturday night, after getting my taxes completed and filed, and despite the late showtime I finally managed to get out and see The First Omen a prequel to the 1976 horror film The Omen.

20th Century Studios

Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) a young American Nun is transferred to a Catholic orphanage in Rome. There she discovers that the orphanage conceals a dark and terrible secret concerning the coming of the antichrist.

I am a fan of the original film The Omen just as I am a fan of The Exorcist despite being a non-believer myself. And just as with The Exorcist the squeal to The Omen have had little attraction to me most often possessing intercepting ideas that are not quite executed well enough being secondary to shock and jump scares. Sadly, The First Omen, in addition to violating canon, something that was evident in the trailers, fails to commit itself to either the nihilism of the original or shake itself free of aping sequences from its classic progenitor.

In The Omen, while it stands on shaky theological ground, the focus of its theme was clear, a clear acceptance of Christian theology in particular the Book of Revelations and the ending of the world. The writers of The First Omen seem to shy away from such concrete convictions. Instead that place into the mouths of their devote characters prosaic and petty motivations for their conspiracy. This has the double effect of making their goals far less threatening and undercutting the ultimate stakes at play.

The First Omen is competently crafted, and Arkasha Stevenson’s direction is quite well executed. The cast which includes Charles Dance and Bill Nighy are all very good and turn in credible performances. I was distracted by Mark Kroven’s score which neither paid sufficient homage to Jerry Goldsmith’s outstanding original score nor did it stand on its own enough to be compelling in its own right.

While this review may seem harsh it is because I had hoped for better. The First Omen is simply a middling film, not as terrible as some of the sequels that preceded it or as brainless as many horror films but neither did it achieve anything nor seem to have anything interesting to say. Immaculate is the far better evil nuns and church conspiracy film this year.

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Well, That Was a Day

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Yesterday, April 9th, was not the best day of my life nor was it was worst, but it was certainly more painful that I had anticipated.

With a scheduled dental appointment to get a crown, the final step in the dental implant replacing one of my molars, I had taken the day off. The procedure I expected would be fairly pain free and I could use some of the time off to see The First Omen at a matinee screening.

Sadly, I awoke with a headache. Well, that has happened before and they usually dissipate on their own. Without much concern I went to my early morning dental procedure and listened to podcast while the doctor and her assistant took care of my troublesome lack of a molar.

The headache grew worse. Enough for the doctor to notice and inquire about it. I made it home and realized that this headache was inf act a migraine.

It had been months since I had one and needed to take my prescription. Luckily, I still had several tablets and doses myself. Unluckily the migraine had grown so large and so intense that it would not be easily dislodge from my skull.

I did not make it out to the movies. Instead, I stayed home, trie3d to distract myself with Call of Duty and YouTube videos as I waited for the medicine to achieve its victory over my agony.

Late afternoon, just before my sweetie-wife return home the pain finally began to ebb and while the evening wasn’t totally back to normal, I was at least exiting the dark migraine forest.

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Movie Review: Enigma Rosso AKA The Red Ring of Fear

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Released in 1979 as the Italian giallo genre began to die off at the box office Enigma Rosso (American Title The Red Ring of Fear) is a terrible movie with nothing to recommend it. Part of a sub-genre of giallo dealing with schoolgirls in trouble, often sexual trouble, these films often abandoned the stylish look giallo for blatant and crass sexualization. Enigma Rosso took this lesson to heart and at nearly ever turn when the six writers and the direct feared that the audience may have become bores quickly switched to some gratuitous feminine nudity.

The plot, as incomprehensible as it is, runs thusly. A young high school girl is found in the river, dead and wrapped in plastic sheeting. (Yes, both me and my Sweetie-wife had the same flashback to a much better piece of media.) Chief Inspector Di Salvo leaves the bed of his tea-thieving girlfriends and begins investigating. More girls die or are nearly killed by the mysterious murdered while the first victims little sister provides Di Salvo with vital clues from her own investigations. (Really that want us to take the 9-year-old Scooby-doo plot quite seriously.) The movie presents unestablished plot twists and even feature Di Salvo interrogating a suspect while riding a roller coaster in a supposedly threatening manner.

In the film final act murders are revealed though nothing has been laid out to the audience as hinting in any way that this was the twist, and the final revelation is simply beyond any definition of the word ‘credible.’

The cast sleepwalks through this movie and the gratuitous nudity are all the film makers have to even try and hold a person’s attention.

Avoid Enigma Rosso.

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Movie Review: Immaculate

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A little later than I had originally planned I finally got out and watched Immaculate.

Black Bear Pictures

A young American nun Cecilia (Sydney Sweeney) arrives in Italy to join a convent follow their recruitment invitation. The convent is dedicated to hospice care for aging and dying nuns and as Sister Cecilia is advised death is daily there. She is befriended Sister Gwen who religious devotion is suspect and seeming without provocation gains the enmity Sister Isabella who is harsh and demanding. Following disturbing nightmares Sister Cecilia is visited upon by a seeming minacious event.  As events turn darker Cecilia grows suspicious and becomes the convent’s venerated prisoners as their true nature and intent for her become clear.

Immaculate is a sharp, smart, atmospheric horror film that trusts its audience to understand without spoon feeding laborious exposition. The film opens with a pre-title prolog that discloses nothing of the plot or backstory but rather gives the audience the film’s tone, dark, suspenseful and with flashes of graphic blood violence.

Screenwriter Andrew Lobel and director Michael Mohan have crafted a horror film that relies on character, mystery, and insidious plans rather than an unstoppable killer and body counts. Cinematographer Elisha Christian’s photography is both lush and deeply disturbing. Fearless enough to play scenes in darkness as black, trapping the audience as helplessly as the characters as they stumble about the convent’s catacombs.

Immaculate also leaves the film’s ultimate interpretation up to the audience. It is possible to view all the events of the story as grounded reality without magic or mysticism. It is equally valid to see this as a film that has subtle supernatural elements. Which interpretation the viewer takes with them greatly effects Cecilia’s final actions and determines if they are horrendous, blasphemous, and heroic. Lobel and Mohan do not tell you which it is or how you should feel that they leave to you. I do not doubt that this ambiguity will sit poorly with some. This is a movie I quite enjoyed and left me, even as a non-believer, thinking deeply upon its character and potential meaning.

Immaculate is currently playing and theaters and well worth the time.

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One Day I’ll Stop Coughing

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Back in January 2024 After dodging the damned virus for nearly 4 years, I contracted COVID-19. Because I has stayed up to date on my vacations, to quote the Operative from Serenity “I am not a moron,” the case was quite mild and even less so because I took the Paxlovid therapy.

That said the week following my illness I developed a deep chest cough. No material came up with this hacking, but it was intense and fairly constant.

The docs gave me inhalers and pills and ‘pearls’ to deal with the cough, but nothing has really worked. Prednisone kills the cough but only while I am taking the medication. Once I stop a couple of days later its back.

I am not sick. There is no fever, no body aches, no congestion, just a cough that make any sort of extended conversation impossible. This has forced me to put my Tabletop Role Playing game of Space Opera on hiatus.

We have done chest X-rays, and nothing abby normal has shown on them. There have been lung function tests and those do not indicate any loss of function or impairment. Next week there will be CT scans, but I expect them to come back clean.

Now, this is just the lingering, and honestly fairly mild, repercussions following the COVID infection. There are people, some who I know, that are suffering the debilitating effects of ‘long COVID,’ so I am not crying for sympathy here.

My life is mostly unaffected, it is just forking annoying.

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The Word ‘Enemy’ is Dangerous

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A friend retweeted a Twitter posting where a conservative supposedly defined ‘woke.’ The tweet contained nothing that any linguist would consider a ‘definition’ but rather a word-salad screed about what they considered the dangerous aspects of ‘woke’ including unsupported assertions of ‘death cult’ and the like. My friend commented in his retweeting that it is was important to know ‘the enemy.’

Now, I am not going to get into the futile and unproductive argument over what is ‘woke.’ In my opinion that term is used as carelessly as ‘fascist’ was deployed by many for decades prior to our current social political crisis.

What I am fascinated with is the term ‘enemy.’ An enemy is someone or faction that you cannot reasonably work with without degrading or corrupting your own standards. The overuse of ‘enemy’ in domestic political terms leads to a breakdown of governance.

If you want to tax high income people at a greater rate than others, that doesn’t make you an enemy. Policy, in general, isn’t the basis for enmity but rather disagreement. It is possible to have serious, vigorous, and even heated debates and arguments over policy without being enemies.

However, when you describe your political opponents as wanting to ‘destroy civilization’ and ‘end the nation’ then you make it impossible to work with them. Your very language has placed them beyond the pale of acceptability and that chains your own actions.

Look at the war in Europe. Many people on both the left and the right see the vital importance in assisting a democratic and free nation in defending itself against a brutal, savage war launched by its dictatorial neighbor. And yet that assistance to held captive and withheld because to actually do the work to get it out requires working with the ‘enemy.’

On a less critical issue, keeping an insurrectionist out of the presidency, political aid is coming from those who served with the insurrection in his previous administration. I have no love for Pence. I know that given the chance he would harm those I care about with his deluded sense of morality, but I will not label him an ‘enemy’ making it impossible to work with him.  I will accept his assistance but never forget what it is he is and what he would want to achieve.

The word ‘enemy’ is dangerous and should be applied quite carefully.

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Unreasonably Interested in The First Omen

20th Century Studios

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It is my contention that aside from The Omen released in 1976 there hasn’t been a good film in the franchise. Despite this I am interested in seeing the newest film in that continuing horror series the prequel The First Omen.

Despite not being any sort of believer in Christian theology The Omen, along with the Exorcistremains among some of my favorite horror films. Omen II almost was a good film but just missed the mark in the scripting stage, Omen III turned out so bland that even though I have seen it twice I can’t recall a single scene from that feature. I haven’t seen Omen IV, and 2006’s remake of the original proves how vital important the original stars and direct were to that film’s lasting quality.

So, with that sort of personal track record of responses why am I interested in a prequel that from the trailers looks to violate established canon?

I do not know.

I can say that I am fascinated by Ralph Ineson as Father Brennan. He strikes me as the perfect modern casting to follow Patrick Troughton, but one or two actors are not usually enough to pull me into a theater. neither the director nor the team of writers are familiar to me and as such created no draw and yet I am going to see this movie this weekend. It’s a gut feeling, a sense, that perhaps, just maybe, this one will work.

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A Giallo and Horror Weekend

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This weekend my sweetie-wife and I enjoyed a couple of Italian movies on Blu-ray disc that she had checked out of the library. Remember, your local library can be more than just great books to read.

First up is Mario Bava’s 1966 horror movie Kill Baby, Kill.

A doctor is summoned to a remote Carpathian to assist a detective investigating a series of bizarre deaths that the locals believe to be the result of a murderous ghost. With the aid of a local woman who has just return from college the doctor quickly find himself in a world of ghosts, mediums, and witchcraft, all swirling around a young girl’s mysterious death years earlier.

Bava, a director with flair even when his budgets are slashed, is in full form and glory with Kill Baby, Kill. His characteristic use of colored lighting that has no diegetic source adds depth to the frames and mood the scenes. Available on Blu-ray disc with its original Italian dialog track, this movie speeds along quickly wasting hardly a frame of its brief running time. I was most pleased that the resolution was not some hand-waving Scooby Doo gimmick but that this was rather an actual supernatural propelled piece of horror. While sedate and decidedly not explicit compared to modern movies Kill Baby, Kill remains an effective, atmospheric film worth seeking out.

We followed that up with a giallo. Gialli are Italian crime films of the 70s that feature particularly lurid sensationalized convoluted plots with often a saturated color pallet.

The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail is about a woman who collects on a million-dollar life insurance policy after her estranged husband dies in a mysterious air disaster. Suspicious of events the insurance firm dispatches an investigator to ferret out if the woman is responsible for the crash. When people associated with the incident are viciously murdered the press, the police, and even Interpol become involved. As with many classic giallo this story has lots of twits and reveals, both in plot and in female skin, until the resolution of the mystery with the final and largest twist. Some movies of this genre try too hard and create final solutions to the mystery that do not follow logically but The Case of The Scorpion’s Tail works out quite logical even if some of the information is withheld from the audience. After all, with giallo it is not about solving the mystery but experiencing it. Along with Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace this film would make an excellent introduction to giallo.

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Re-Reading Dune Messiah

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More than 30 years ago I read Dune Messiah, the first sequel to Frank Herbert’s novel Dune.The continuing storyline did not quite capture my attention and I did not proceed down the course of the following novels. Now with the release of Dune part 2 completing Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of the novel and its box office and critical success I decided to re-read Dune Messiah and see if I had a different reaction to it this time around.

The first thing I noticed was that in the passing decades I had forgotten nearly everything about the sequel novel. Vague aspects of the story’s final ending floated in my memory but of the actual plot and events, nothing.

Dune Messiah picks up a dozen or so years after the ending of Dune. Paul Atreides’ Jihad has swept the galaxy and the fanatical legions of Fremen have slaughter billions and destroyed hundreds of worlds for their Messiah. The vast powerful forces of the galaxy spanning human imperium, economic, political, and religious have crafted a plot to eliminate Paul and reclaim control of the empire. Paul, plagued by prescience, knows some aspects of the plotters plans but also sees that any misstep and error will lead to even more slaughtering and death than he has already unleashed on the galaxy.

With even more mind-bending concepts, Face-Dancers, people with such utter control over their muscles that they can assume the appearance of any person, and people reanimated after death and imposed with brain washing conditioning, Herbert’s sequel is challenging to read and even more challenging to adapt to a visual medium that the first novel in this classic series. The book makes more explicit Herbert’s premise that charismatic leaders are a danger to everyone, their enemies and their followers. While the reader may sympathize with Paul who never intended to do evil it remains clear that evil is the product of his actions no matter his intent.

With the most recent adaptation fresh in my mind, it was easy to ‘hear’ the voices of the actors playing in my head as I read the book and adding a few new member’s to the cast. I expect that should Villeneuve adapt this to the screen that Peter Dinklage will once again become part of a fan favorite franchise.

I can say that this time around I enjoyed the novel more than I had in the late 80’s when I first read it. Partly because of Villeneuve’s adaptation and partly because I have become more aware of the social and cultural antecedents that Herbert drew upon for his inspiration. I do not feel that this go around I wasted my time.

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