An Open Letter the the SyFy Channel

"Sharktopus." Really?

"Lake Placid THREE." Honestly?

Ogre. Ice Spiders. Yeti.

PLEASE stop.

Just STOP.

A third Stargate series--Starring Lou Diamond Phillips. Your star of that cinematic masterpiece of 2009 "Carny."

Lou and a Carny Freak

Oh, and you now have WWE's "Smackdown." Awesome.

I ask...no. I BEG you to go back to the days of "Farscape" and the original "Stargate: SG1."

There are a boatload of talented writers out there...I'm connected to a couple hundred of them via twitter. Get a few good writers. Create STORIES that have Science Fiction elements. Don't go for the cheap mindless entertainment. Spend the money on the ideas, the writing and the scripts. Not on Tiffany and Debbie (Sorry. DEBORAH) Gibson as headliners.

(By the way, see the two Eighties pop stars in the cat fight scene from that celluloid Emmy contender "Megapython vs. Gatoroid" HERE)

I know not every show can be like the recent "Battlestar Galactica" reboot or "Warehouse 13." I also know there is a fantastic camp-value in these movies. My partner and I watch them to make cheeky comments and laugh...something in the days of "The Great Recession"that has its own value.

But you're not even TRYING anymore.

Just saw an ad for "Mandrake" for Sunday night. Thank God football's on.

Writing Dialog

I was going through the first chapter of 'The Prodigal's Foole' this morning and I took some time to read the dialog out loud.

It was a suggestion from one of my readers (I'm looking At you Emmett! :-) ) to try this as he felt a few of the lines were a little awkward.

Picture the scene. A massive electrical storm came through at 3 AM here in Boston. Sleep was no longer an option, so I decided to work for a while. Darkness only broken by the soft glow of my MAC. Occasional flashes of lightning, cats prowling around my feet.

Me, basically talking to myself.

It was like the start of one of those wonderfully bad SyFy made for TV horror flicks (A round of applause for 'Lake Placid 2,' 'Ogre' and 'Mega Piranha').

Now I'd read about checking dialog by reading it aloud before, but--in my head--the dialog sounded fine. Through multiple edits.

But, Emmett is published and I'm not. So I took his advice and read it out loud in the dead of night and most of the dialog was fine.

But.

A few lines were a little awkward.

Damn. I hate it when I know what to do and ignore it.

Manuscript in hand, I'll be going back through all 500 pages. Out loud. Hopefully the neighbors don't notice.

Otherwise I might end up like John Schneider in 'Ogre.'