First off, happy Halloween! I personally don’t celebrate it (Reformation Day rocks yo) but I know a lot of other people do, so have a happy celebration all the same! Parents, I’ll take a moment to remind you to keep a close eye on the young ones and not force your older teenaged children to go trick-or-treating when you think it’d hurt their dignity. Be responsible and safe, and have a great time.
Secondly, NaNoWriMo starts tomorrow! Starting tomorrow and continuing throughout the month of November, I’m going to be posting short daily updates and sorta use your email inboxes as a sort of e-dairy. December 1 will mark the return of new blog posts, but all other progress will be halted before then.
Sadly, this means editing my second book will no longer be an option when NaNo starts up. This sets it back a whole month when I was looking to get it published by Christmas, but I still think I can manage if I hustle. However, I have good news to accompany the bad news: the artwork for the cover of my second novel was finished up last week, and I’m please to present it before you guys now!
Pretty saucy, if I don’t say so myself. I don’t want to give out too terrible of spoilers, but similar to the cover of my last novel, this artwork features our heroes’ final destination to complete the quest of the second novel, which, if I may add, is going to be quite a bit chunkier than the previous book. So you’re definitely going to get your money’s worth out of this novel.
Also, keep your eyes peeled for any deals that might be headed your way; as soon as Praetors of Lost Magic, Book 2: Dark Vengeance goes live, you might be able to snap up a copy of Praetors of Lost Magic, Book 1: The Mage’s Gambit for free on Amazon. But if you haven’t tried out my books before, I would actually recommend you read Dark Vengeance first as I think it’s a better point for newer readers to start the series.
And finally, I watched the Tomorrow War last night. I had wanted to when it came out, but I never found the time. However, when building a floating island in Minecraft on survival mode gets a little too frustrating, you find yourself open to a lot of avenues of entertainment, such as forgotten military sci-fi films.
So yeah, I watched it. I don’t think anyone liked the movie that much, so I don’t I’ll offend anyone when I say the movie was very poorly written and the characters pretty forgettable. I did like some aspects of it (in fact, I liked the movie overall), but there were a number of pretty bad writing blunders that required fixing if this movie was going to be anything more than your average popcorn flick.
Of course, there will be some spoilers in this mini-review, so if it’s a TL;DR affair, just know that I would watch the movie if I were you. It’s a pretty entertaining mess of special effects and wild, rampant emotions that for a change doesn’t take time out of the plot and characters to tell you what an idiot society thinks you are.
The plot stars Chris Pratt as an ex-veteran biology teacher and family man in the year 2022. He’s hosting a Christmas party at his house when a group of tactically-dressed humans from the future open a wormhole right into the middle of a TV soccer game and present themselves as such, stating that they’re fighting a war against aliens in the future and losing. Hence, they need help from the past humans.
Nations of the world band together and form a worldwide draft, which inducts people at random into a future army regardless of sex, physical fitness, or military experience. Inductees must survive seven days in the future, and if they’re alive by the end of that time, a time-traveling armband will instantly teleport them back to the present.
No surprise, Chris Pratt is drafted. But apparently, it’s revealed that there’s a catch: only people who are dead thirty years in the future are allowed to be drafted. It’s revealed that Chris Pratt is going to die in seven years, and then he’s cast into the future with a bunch of untrained civilians. The whole plot revolves around developing a toxin that can kill the aliens (known as Whitespikes) and sending it into the past to kill the aliens before they can escape their underground prison, and thus prevent the war from ever happening.
The first two and obvious problems with the plot spring from the weakness of the story’s time travel theory. These people claim they are from the future and need draftees from the past to win the war. But…wait a minute. This creates two really bad plot problems: one is that if you draft a bunch of your ancestors, and they die (which is what happens to 70% of draftees) aren’t you killing off people in the future? After all, that’s how the grandfather paradox works. But the ToTT (Theory of Time Travel) is poorly executed in this movie, so we have to throw logic out the window for this one.
Even worse, why draft people at all? Why fight a war in the future that you know you can’t win? Just have the present-day humans manufacture weapons instead of sending 50-year-old women with no military experience to certain death. For human beings from the future, this sure was a dumb plan.
And if you thought it couldn’t even get worse than that, why stay in the future at all? Apparently the future humans are capable of time travel: why doesn’t everyone in the future just go to the past, where they can prepare for the alien invasion and stop it before it happens? The war is being fought for no reason.
A pet peeve of mine is that we’re supposed to feel sorry for the death of Pratt’s daughter in the future (because she’s one of the future people, surprise surprise), when in literal minutes he will return thirty years from the future to the past form of his ten-year-old daughter, who is very alive and well. Even worse, she gives him the perfected toxin before she dies, thus giving Chris Pratt an obvious way to deter the future and prevent the future version of his daughter from ever existing. That’s right; we’re supposed to feel sorry for a character who exists in a timeline that will never happen because of the hero’s efforts. The literal goal is to make it so this character never existed, yet we’re supposed to care as she’s eaten by aliens. I couldn’t bring myself to care.
There are a bunch of other pretty bad plot holes, and most of them are related to the weakness of ToTT. Let’s fix the time travel mechanism real quick: instead of making the past directly affect the future, make it so that the future that the future people are from is only a potential and isn’t guaranteed to happen. So the horrible future isn’t actually our future, it’s the future peoples’ present. It’s a potential, something like an alternate universe. This suddenly makes sense out of most of the plot holes: the future people are now painted as desperate soldiers on the run, but their goal was never to save past humanity. It was all to save themselves. So the grandfather paradox can’t exist because the future people are in a kind of alternate realm that could possibly happen in the future, so war by time travel would be logically permissible.
But basically, that’s my piece. The writing is a shapeless amalgamation held together with toothpicks and Elmer’s school glue, the characters are bland and lack the screen time they need to develop into people we care about, and the world is explained with enough info dumps to drown the nearest High Fantasy Novelist. But oddly enough, there’s enough mind-blowing action and special effects to keep you engaged and entertained. Couple that with a movie made in 2021 that doesn’t scream at you about equality and climate change. What is this? Well, I’d give it a watch if you haven’t already.
Good luck, and happy trick-or-treating!
Be sure to check out my latest novel, Book 1 in the Praetors of Lost Magic Series, and our Publications page. Plus, I mean, it wouldn’t hurt to check out the Resources tab. It’s full of super helpful material and I promise it will help you out. Until then, writers!
The Writer's Rack 