Tell The Truth Tuesday

It's that time again!

Yes, it's Tuesday morning, and it's about time I turned out another Tell The Truth Tuesday. So, by the numbers:

1. Speak Out With Your Geek Out was a fun event, and I'm glad I got to take part in it. I've always tried to display my geekitude in positive ways to show that it's not as scary as some people make it out to be, and I'm glad so many others felt the same way. It was a busy week for me, though, so I didn't get to delve into as much detail as I wanted to for my three posts last week. Then again, maybe that's a good thing. I could write an entire book on my geeky life, rife with more pop culture references than any two Tarantino films.

2. Did you know I was once asked to help create a horror movie that would feature RPGs? It's true! The players of the game would have been killed off through the movie by the villain/GM, and while character death is not foreign to gaming, I was not about to help facilitate the demonizing of the gaming community by working on that kind of project. I do, however, have a script in my head for a film that would put RPGs firmly in the fantasy action/adventure category. Maybe one day I'll put it down on paper...

3. ...But first, I should finish my trilogy. I must admit, the past few months have been hard on my creativity, and the next month isn't looking too much better. Sometimes, you need to take care of business to allow that creative energy to flow freely. Once I'm back on track, then I'll be able to rededicate myself to finishing my trilogy once and for all!

4. My anthology is almost ready to be digitally released to the wild! Just as I haven't had much time lately to dedicate to my trilogy, I haven't had time to get it formatted properly or to get a decent cover to my short story collection. Rest assured, though, it's coming!

5. My readership has gone up! Thanks to my Comic Booked reviews and the "Speak Geek" event, there's been a pleasant increase of readers on my blog, and I'm very grateful for the new page hits. Welcome, new people! I hope you enjoy what you read here and stick around for a while, there's plenty to get you caught up in the archives.

6. Star Wars was re-re-rereleased (again) this past week. I have not bought it. I probably won't buy it until the DVDs I have are no longer viewable, and by then, we'll have the entire series in 3-D for a re-re-re-rerelease. Sheesh!

7. I link to some of my Comic Booked articles here, but not all of them. While I like giving you all an easy way to see what else I'm writing when I'm not on this blog, I don't know if you really want to read all of my press releases, or my write-ups of comic book movie-related sightings, or even my reviews of comic books. But then, I've never asked you, my loyal readers, what you think of that content. Do you want to see more of it, and if so, how much? Would you rather I not link to it at all here? Let your voice be heard in the comment section below!

8. On a related note to the above question, are there any writing topics you'd like me to focus on for future posts? I try to give a little of everything and pass on information that might be useful or insightful to writing and being a writer, but the worst part is writing in a vacuum. Feedback is always welcome, and greatly prized by writers of all stripes! Just put it in the comment section below!

9. I love autumn because of the Pumpkin Spice Latte. I hate autumn because the changing season screws with my head, both mentally and allergy-wise. When is Daylight Savings Time over? I can never remember...

10. I almost forgot! I have a Tumblr account now, where I put all of the geekiness that I refrain from bombarding you with here. You can check it out at the link here, but be warned, it's pretty crazy geeky!

And on that note, I think I'll call it here. Until next time, loyal followers!

My Secret Origin

On Monday, I posted about my geeky life and how awesome it is. But how did I get to that point? To answer that, I'll turn to the age-old comic book tradition of the superhero secret origin. Every hero, after all, has a great secret origin that gives meaning to their Hero's Journey. As a firm believer that we're all heroes in the midst of our own journey, it should come as no surprise that I also think we each have our own "secret origin" that gives it meaning. This is mine:

Looking back on my early life in New Orleans, it was no surprise that I turned out to be a geek. After all, my earliest memories were filled with programming my own video games, playing with my friend's Transformers, and watching Star Wars with my mom. Ghostbusters triggered my love of the supernatural, and Back to the Future led to my fascination with time travel. Sharing those interests with others was never easy for me to do as a kid, though. I was lucky in that I found a small group of kids like me in elementary school who were into Super Mario Bros. Super Show and playing "Let's Pretend" with Jedi and Sith instead of cops and robbers, but there weren't many of us. I'd wear my Ghostbusters belt to school and get made fun of for my interests. It was hard dealing with that as a kid, but at least I had my friends to geek out with after school.

Then I moved away from home to live with my mom and stepdad, leaving my geeky support group behind.

I took the loss well enough, but moving around to three different states in middle school made it hard for me to build a new circle of geek friends again. I never found friends I could geek out with in Florida, and just as I was making some good geeky friends in Indiana, we moved again to California. I understand why we moved so much, but man, it made life hard for me to start high school without knowing anyone. It's not like I was a social butterfly to begin with, and each move made it harder for me to open up to potential friends.

Fortunately, I found a good group of people to run with in high school, and I could be comfortably geeky again. I got into collectible card games and tabletop roleplaying games around this time, in addition to opening my wardrobe choices back up to geek attire. It was as though I had found myself again, and I made a vow to myself that I would never suppress who I am and what I like again. Granted, saying that's what you're going to do and actually doing it are two different things, but nothing worthwhile is ever easy.

It's been a long, long road to being comfortable in my geeky skin, but it's been a good one. I'm proud of who I am and what I like, and no one is going to convince me that my passion is wrong just because it's not mainstream.

Then again, looking at today's pop culture, it seems that geek is becoming the new mainstream more and more. I'm glad I've got a front row seat for the new geek order!

I Speak Out With My Geek Out!

I'm freestyling this one instead of writing it up in Word first, because it's late but I still wanted to get something up for Speak Out With Your Geek Out. My apologies if this is not as polished as some of my other posts here, but I hope you'll bear with me.

I won't retread any geeky ground as I revisit my path to geekdom here. I've already done my fair share of, well, sharing little peeks into that world of video games, comics and roleplaying games here, here, here, here and here. I try to keep from going geek overload on this blog, instead using my Tumblr for the kind of stuff that doesn't quite fit into a blog about writing. Still, this event focuses on writing about being a geek, and since I'm a geek who writes, I should take the time to address that huge part of my life.

As I write this, I'm surrounded by pieces of my geek life. Cloud and Tifa stand atop my computer, guarding it with a wild-eyed dragon, though my name tag from the DigitalLA panel on digital comics infiltrated one side. When I pause to take a drink and consider my words, it's from a travel mug adorned with J!NX stickers. Behind my monitor, Cap's shield peeks from behind like a rising sun, a souvenir from my coverage of a comic book store event for Comic Booked. To the left of me are boxes of comic books and my World of Warcraft hoodie. To the right, a bookcase that is patrolled vigilantly by Optimus Prime, Spike, and a trio of characters from Kingdom Hearts. Behind me lies another bookcase full of role-playing books, predominantly from White Wolf Publishing, and mostly Mage books.

My life is filled to the brim with geekiness. On Tuesday nights, my friends and I get together around a conference room table and roll dice for Game Night. On Wednesday night, I'll get together with other friends and tear it up on either Xbox or Wii. I drive to work with fuzzy d20 dice hanging from my rear-view mirror, and my rear bumper is decorated with the blood elf emblem. On my wrist is a bracelet that says GEEK. I may be dressed in a button-down shirt, but my undershirt says "U.S. Department of Gaming Affairs" on it... and I may or may not be wearing Transformers boxers. And that's only my work attire. Once I'm out of the office, I fly my geek flag proudly with a legion of geeky t-shirts that declare my dragonslaying prowess, or my love of 8-bit games, or that my d10 does indeed go up to 11.

I love my geeky life. I love that I write about comics and pop culture for Comic Booked. I love that both Star Wars and Star Trek are part of my lexicon thanks to my mom. I love that I can quote Ghostbusters or The Princess Bride and my friends will follow it up with the next line of dialogue. I love that I have friends who draw comics and create shows for the web and sing about Buffy the Vampire Slayer villains. And I love that the world is full of people just like me who live geeky lives and aren't ashamed to admit it.

I also love that my gorgeous partner Loki brought over The Crow tonight... both the graphic novel and the movie. I'll cut this short, but expect more geekiness later in the week!

Disneyland Star Tours Preview Day

NOTE: You can also view video highlights from that morning here!



I was only supposed to ride Star Tours once. By the time I left Disneyland, I’d been on it five times.

How is that possible? Let me start at the beginning.

I won’t bore you with how I woke up far earlier than anyone had any business being up in the morning, or where I met my guest so I could get someone else’s measure of the ride without all the judgment I was carrying with me, or how astoundingly long the line and the wait was that Friday morning. (But seriously, if your event check-in closes at 7:30 AM, and the event itself starts at 9 AM, what’s going on in that hour and a half in-between? At least we had good music.) I won’t wax poetical about what the park was like without people in it so early in the morning. I won’t even go into the awesome guy we met in line whose excitement for the ride was so infectious, we carried it with us through the whole day. No, this post is going to be long enough as it is, maybe even longer than my short stories. I’ll focus instead on the event itself and what it was like to be one of the first non-cast members (that’s what they call Disneyland employees) to experience what is both the most anticipated and most dreaded ride in all of Disneyland.

“Dreaded?” I can hear you thinking. “Why dreaded?” I’ll get to that in a little bit.

The Disneyland Star Tours Early Departure was promoted as a preview event, granted initially to a select 1,200 or so randomly selected contest winners and the one guest each that they were allowed to bring with them. Even if only half of the winners brought a guest like I did, you’re still looking at around 2,000 people who all wanted a sneak peek of the newly revamped ride.

The assembled participants were gathered outside the gates of the park and led in, single file, to fill in the queue outside of the new ride. Once the blast doors officially opened, under much media coverage, everyone in the queue would be able to ride Star Tours once and only once, trading in their ride wristbands for an exclusive button marking their participation in the event as “First in the Galaxy” to ride the new attraction. Then the ride would shut down until its official grand opening on June 3rd.

At least, that was the plan.

While full details of what happened are hard to come by, I was able to gather from certain employees around the ride that someone from ABC 7 News accidentally extended an open invitation for people to come down and participate in this private event. As Disneyland has a strict “truth in advertising” policy, they had no choice but to open up the preview for anyone who wanted to ride Star Tours in the afternoon. While this pretty much defeated the purpose of a private sneak peek event, it did give those of us who wanted to ride again (including myself) a chance to get right back in line for a second go. Or third. Or fifth!

“Yeah, that’s all very interesting, but what about the ride? Is it any good, or did Lucas screw up one more piece of our Star Wars childhood memories?” I’m so glad you asked!



From the moment you step into the Star Tours building, you’re faced with the antics of R2-D2 and C-3PO as they banter while performing diagnostics on the spaceship that will take you to the far-flung corners of the galaxy. This part is very familiar to those who have been on the ride before, and the only real changes made here are the new lines of dialogue referencing the all-new Star Tours videos that play on the big screen and the new color scheme. As this takes place between trilogies, the Starspeeder 1000 isn’t as stark as the original ride’s 3000 counterpart and has a paint job reminiscent of the Jedi starfighters. So far, I have no complaints.

In the next room, visitors come face to metallic face with RX-24, AKA Rex, who fans of the original Star Tours will recognize as your bumbling droid pilot. Since this takes place before the original ride, Rex is still in his shipping crate and is, in fact, marked defective for return to the factory. This status is made more apparent in his stuttering attempts to activate and recite lines of dialogue from the original ride. The pang of nostalgia for the little pilot droid is soon replaced with awe directed toward the two security droid occupants in the room, one scanning luggage and the other scanning people, both utilizing all-new special effects that really impressed me. You can see some nifty 3-D effects at work even here in the scanners and control panels, but it’s mostly subtle and adds to the atmosphere of the ride. Aside from poor Rex’s condition, I have no complaints.

The boarding area that comes up next holds my only real complaint about the ride, and why I and many other Star Wars fans initially dreaded going on it. After picking up your “flight glasses” (AKA 3-D glasses) and going through the turnstile for placement at a “departure gate,” you’re treated to the usual instructional video, this time narrated by spokesdroid Aly San San, preceded by a short bit of story featuring C-3PO and pilot droid AC-38 (Ace for short) to set up the circumstances of the ride’s adventure. While both videos do include live actors in their segments, the story video in particular seems as heavily CGI-centric as the prequels are… which is to say that the whole “Golly gee, look at how awesome our CG characters are!” approach makes the featured droids look obviously fake and detracts from the realism they’re trying to build to sell the storyline of the ride. This was my greatest fear, that the fakeness of the prequels would worm their way into my beloved ride and ruin it beyond recognition. Seriously, if you can take the time to film guys in jumpsuits as they prep your Starspeeder for take-off, can’t you get someone to put on Threepio’s suit and act out his bits? You’ve already got Anthony Daniels voicing him, you may as well put him in the suit, too. Or at least work on improving the realism of your CGI effects so they’ll hold up after multiple viewings over the years. My guest complained about the videos, too, but only because a particular hand gesture of Aly San San seemed particularly bitchy. I had to agree. At least the videos are short.

After watching the CGI spectacular, the doors opened, we took our seats inside the largely unchanged but subtly upgraded passenger cabin, and were instructed to put on our flight glasses.

I want to address the matter of the 3-D glasses separately, because it’s going to be a concern for some people who can’t stand 3-D movies or the headgear that goes with them. Personally, I love watching 3-D movies. I don’t get the headaches that some people complain about when watching them, but the glasses annoy the hell out of me. I wear eyeglasses to see any detail more than 5 feet away from me, so it’s obnoxious to put those cumbersome and ill-fitting glasses over them. The glasses for this ride, however, are incredible. They fit over my prescription glasses without a fuss and didn’t slip at all. I didn’t feel like I was wearing a fire hydrant on my face. They felt light and natural, and looked awesome, too. If I didn’t think it’d raise the prices of 3-D movies higher than they already are, I’d start a petition to have them made for movie theaters everywhere.

As for the 3-D ride itself, I won’t spoil anything in regards to the story that plays out on your journey. I doubt I could ruin everything in the ride, anyway, even if I wanted to. With 54(!) different combinations of characters and locations to experience, you could ride Star Tours every week for a year and still not see every scenario. I went on it 5 times, and each ride was different from the last. I can say, however, that I visited four of the six destinations listed on the Star Tours page (you get to see two locations every time) and saw each of the featured characters at least once. Some characters pop up that you don’t expect to see, and one character made an appearance that I had hoped to never see again. (Meesa dun wanna give it away to yousa, but I’ll bet you can figure out who it is on your own. Thankfully, his cameo is mercifully brief and SILENT.)

All that said, I’m happy to report that Lucas and co. did not, in fact, totally ruin Star Tours. Quite the opposite, they finally made the attraction I had wished for after the umpteenth time of riding through an ice crystal asteroid to attack the Death Star. Sure, there are some parts that irk me (I’m looking at you, CGI extravaganza), but the majority of the original Star Tours experience remains the same and is made even better in all the ways that really count. Truth be told, I’d really like to renew my annual pass so I can become a regular Star Tourist.

Now, how do I get a pair of those 3-D glasses so I can take them with me to the movies?

The Hero's Journey - Reward

We’re finally here! It’s been a long, hard road up to this point, but the payoff is worth it. Through all the battles fought and won, friendships forged and villains thwarted, we’ve finally arrived at the part that makes it all worthwhile – The Reward!

Joseph Campbell calls this stage Seizing the Sword, in honor of all the stories of dragons slain for their treasure. The Hero conquers the Shadow and wins his reward, which may include a magical sword, a grateful kingdom and a very pretty damsel. The exact reward can be anything – a hidden treasure, a captured princess, a secret weapon. In spy movies, it’s usually some key to saving (or, in the wrong hands, destroying) the world. In romances, it’s some hottie (guy or girl) who the Hero has been trying to woo. It can be anything from the Holy Grail to a childhood toy. The one thing they all share in common is that they were fiercely sought after by the Hero. This is also where the characters can relax for a moment and savor their victory. We won the day, so let’s party! This is where the trumpets sound, campfires are stoked, and everyone can relax around the holochess table on the Millennium Falcon while Han takes them to lightspeed.

Story-wise, the Reward stage is where your readers can breathe a huge sigh of relief. We’re not at the climax yet, but after the harrowing battle of the Ordeal, there should be a way to relieve all of that pressure with a payoff. Don’t cheapen the victory over the Ordeal! This is what the whole story has been building toward all this time, and while there could be a strong lesson to be learned in the Hero not getting everything he wants, he’d better get something to show for all his pain and suffering up to now. This is as necessary for the readers as it is for the characters. While the story isn’t over yet, there should be some time to linger in the feeling of accomplishment before launching into the next leg of the Journey.

Now, how does this apply to the ongoing tale of Rob’s Journey? His Ordeal is at an end. He’s got his first novel written – it’s time to celebrate! As the winners of National Novel Writing Month gather to share their novels and the stories behind them, he joins in the revelry, proud to have made it to the winner’s circle. It’s cathartic for him to relax with others who have just made the same marathon run for the literary finish line. For some, this is something they do every year. Others have only completed their first, same as him. And among them all, only a handful dream of having their tale published. Rob’s novel may be complete, but his story is not yet over...

Neither is ours. True, we’ve come a long way, and we’ve reached the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, but where do you go from there? Home, of course! When next we return to the Hero’s Journey, we’ll be packing up to take The Road Back.