Hello my survivor friends.
It’s been a long, strange trip from that first vision of the old man by the river to here at the end of season five! Five years we’ve been working on the After the Apocalypse series.
And you!
Yeah You!
I see you churlishly binge listening through five years of our blood sweat and tears in a week! It’s going to end up close to 40 hours of content I’d guess, because I’m too lazy to do the math.
Or for my commonwealth listeners – “The maths.” We could solve that disconnect by going back to an old Germanic version like “Mathen” for the plural, and then we could even create some tenses, like moth, math, muth.
But I digress…
I got a notice that the Tee Public merchandise store was acquired or merged with Dashery – so, I know I don’t mention it a lot, but there is a place you can buy shirts and stuff with our ATA logos on them. Let me know if you’re partial to any of the graphics, I can add more.
Also we have patches, which I’ll throw in to any hardcopy of the season one book, if you want to reach out to me directly, at my e-mail address cyktrussell at Gmail. $20 bucks I’ll ship you a signed copy and a couple patches.
I’ll tell you a story from last weekend, because I hear you like stories.
I was at the post-race party with my running club after our annual big event The Groton Road Race. There were probably 30 people there from my club. We’ve been putting on this race for 30+ years, 10 of which I was race director for, but that’s not the story.
One of the ladies had purchased a couple hard copies of the book from BookLocker and this she wanted me to sign them.
It was fun for me to see the look of amazement in some of the newer members who don’t know me that well. It was like “You did this?” And, I don’t like to be ‘that guy’, but yeah it was fun to get that feedback and make me realize how big an achievement all this has been.
That’s the good news. The bad news is I haven’t made much progress on book 2. But, we’ll keep hacking away at it. I just need to get motivated and find some time.
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So – remember I told you last episode that I had read a pretty good alien apocalypse YA novel called the 5th Wave by Rick Yancey? Well, I watched the movie version, which is available on YouTube. And it struck me that they didn’t take advantage of most of the good character and plot points. The movie managed to dumb-down the book and refocus it on action and the female lead.
While it is not unexpected that Hollywood would gut the source material, I thought about it some more and I think they were trying to copy movies Hunger Games and Maze Runner and take advantage of a wave of successful teen sci-fi films.
The timing works. This movie was optioned from the novel in 2014 at the height of hunger games popularity. It makes sense. Some producer said “YA science fiction is hot! Go find me a script with a girl in it!”
It is free on YouTube and worth every penny. Ron Livingston couldn’t save it.
If you’re interested in actual good movies – I have a podcast tip for you. The latest episode of Talking Pictures from TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz is really good. It’s a live interview of director Eli Roth at the TCM Classic Film Festival. Roth gave you such gems as Hostel and Thanksgiving and was the Bear Jew in Inglorious Bastards. It’s a lot of name dropping and Hollywood inside baseball but what really struck me is how deeply these guys love the art and how serious they take it.
It is on the Talking Pictures podcast feed and YouTube.
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That’s it survivors. Hope you are all doing well. I am grateful for your support and attention.
If you have any ideas on what we should do next, let me know.
