SGU update for the week and more!

What a weekend!

Things have been very busy around here, between Friday night's excitement and yesterday's visiting future relatives and then trying to cram in writing time at the end (I was up till almost 4am) the weekend is flying by!

I have some good news to report.  Book 1 is in the final polishing stages and I've managed to get a few chapters out to some trusted readers.  I'm eagerly awaiting their feedback!  I've also started Book 2, which I'm very excited about since I've been waiting to start writing it for months now (wanted to get Book 1 to the review stage first).  This also means that it's finally time to start learning and prepping for the Query process, which I'll admit I'm taking to with both enthusiasm and a bit of nerves.  I've never felt great about having to sell myself to someone on paper, I'm much more confident in person, so this will be both an adventure in publishing and one of overcoming old obstacles.

I also just realized that I should have done an amazon.com search for the working book title I have on Book 1 before sending it out to my friends.  Seems that there is already an SG-1 book with the same title, so I'm going to have to change it.  This is going to involve once more attempting to get around my tendency to give things really cheesy names once more while trying to maintain a unique flavor.  Wish me luck!

Oh and one more item on the writing front.  I started looking at some links posted to a writing blog I belong to, and found this interesting gem.  My thanks to Claire for that one!

And now... SGU

I'm guessing by now it is safe to say that SGU's episodic pattern is set.  The writers once again took the episode down the expected path and then ended things in a slightly unexpected way.  I'm starting to think that the motif for this season is being lost and/or screwed.  The mid-season break started with the marooning of a main character, last week's episode was about the marooning of four major characters, and Friday night's was in some ways about the re-marooning of three of those four major characters.

I give the show credit for a good tease.  As the episode progressed I wasn't sure if they were going to make it or not, and they did a good job of convincing me that the one character who did get rescued in the end was the one who was totally screwed.  With three even more f'd than before, I'm once again left biting my nails for a week to find out what's going to happen next.  I even went and checked the episode schedule, looks like we'll be in new episodes on through June!  WOOT!

A final thing to mention here is how the writers of the episodes, Robert C. Cooper and Brad Wright (among others), are making excellent use of the universe.  This isn't surprising since they've been with the Stargate universe since its SG-1 days, but what is impressive is that they are truly making a different feeling universe while keeping true to the basic Stargate premises.  This episode in particular illustrated their ability to throw twists into the pre-existing cannon.   I particularly liked that Destiny and the gates she is using were constructed with more primitive technology than the gates in the Milky Way.  This has allowed the writers to tweak the rules and give this series more unique features.  Kudos to them!

One more thing:

I'm starting to think Adrien Brody must be a big sci-fi fan.  Besides the upcoming Predator movie, he's also appearing in another upcoming sci-fi film called Splice.

I have several problems with this movie, but my main issue is that the producers decided to fund this "cautionary tale" about splicing human and animal DNA together to warn us all about the dangers of such acts or some such nonsense.  Since it's sci-fi/horror, the creation ultimately turns bad and starts killing people.  What truly troubles me about this isn't so much that watching both trailers and the featurette made me think that it's a Species rip-off, though listening to the cast say how unique the film is was troubling, is that people have a tendency to believe what they see in the movies and hear from the uneducated and then do silly things like write to their congressmen on how badly we need to make "X" illegal.

If the government here in the U.S. were to really make illegal the sorts of things they are saying in the film, then we can kiss readily available diabetic insulin goodbye (yup, that's a cross-species DNA splice), along with a ton of other medicines and treatments.  The film will also likely re-invigorate the anti-stem cell people despite stem-cell research's very promising leads to curing horrible diseases.  Oh and if we follow the film's message, I guess the dream of 100% compatible organs for transplant made from the patient's own DNA is a pipe dream too...

/sigh.  I'd like to make a cautionary tale about how idiots in Hollywood with no scientific background need to stop making cautionary tales...

My other big problem with this movie, again, aside from it looking like a Species rip-off, is that it looks horribly bad.  At no point did the trailer make me want to see the film, instead, I couldn't wait to get through it but kept reminding myself that I needed to finish watching so I could write about this awful thing coming out in June.

If you're feeling particularly masochistic, the web site has both trailers and the featurette on it.  Keep an air-sickness bag handy.  I'm not going to put the trailer here because I don't want to soil the blog.

Oh and on a final note... I just had the thought, if the Predator movie is really bad, it could be evidence that Adrien Brody isn't actually a sci-fi fan but instead is trying to destroy the genre from within...

Just a thought.