Storming the Castle

Woohoo! It’s the fall TV season premiere week! Now, some of you are wondering, Mike, why are you writing about TV on a blog about reading? My answer is twofold: One) Shut up, it’s my blog and I’ll do as I please. Two) the TV show this post features is about a writer and therefore relevant.

I don’t have much time for TV so I only follow a few shows. I finally got my wife into The Big Bang Theory, so we’ve had fun catching up on the first four seasons of that. Last year I decided to watch the pilot for Person of Interest and was immediately hooked (“Someone with the last name of Nolan is telling a story about an eccentric billionaire crime fighting vigilante? Would it even be possible for this not to be completely awesome?” And yeah, it was pretty much awesome. There’s a reason it was the number one new drama last season). Being a military geek, I also had to tune into the pilot for Last Resort. I would have loved to be at that pitch meeting: “Think Gilligan’s Island meets Crimson Tide”. The pilot was good but I’m curious to see how they go forward from here. Though the money shot for the whole fall TV season might have been in the pilot, where a guy sits at an island tiki bar starring out at the placid lagoon, when suddenly a Trident SLBM breaks the surface, the rocket ignites, and the missile blasts off into space towards its target as the man remarks “Awww, that’s not good.” #understatementoftheyear.

But my favorite show on TV is still ABC’s Castle. For the uninitiated, it follows Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion), a phenomenally successful mystery writer a la James Patterson (who appears in the show on several occasions as himself as one of Castle’s regular poker game players). Bored with his long running series of books, he kills off his main character and struggles to create a new character when he meets the tough yet witty (and since it’s TV, obviously beautiful) Kate Beckett (Stana Katic), an NYPD homicide detective, and decides to follow her around to gather research for his new books. He ultimately creates the character of Nikki Heat, based on her, and writes a series of books based on their adventures, while becoming a vital part of her investigative team. In one of the best marketing ploys I’ve ever seen, the show runners actually publish the books he writes (presumably written by the show’s writers, though it’s the character who is credited as the author). It’s remarkable how much thought is put into these books, which could have easily been cheap, after-thought marketing tie-ins. They really read like they were written by the character, the way he would write them if he were actually a real author. They’re chock full of in-jokes and references to the show (for instance, in Heat Rises a character tells Nikki “she could be a Bond girl”, a reference to Katic’s small part at the end of Quantum of Solace), and you could tell where Castle drew the inspiration for various aspects of the story from the real cases he works with Beckett and her team.

I don’t engage in celebrity worship because they’re always bound to disappoint by running about naked after vacuuming up mountainous drifts of cocaine or some other such nonsense, but it’s nearly impossible to not like Nathan Fillion, both as an actor and as a person. His claim to fame before Castle was the lead role of Captain Malcom Reynolds in Josh Whedon’s ill-fated but beloved sci-fi western Firefly (of which I am also a fan), and Fillion frequently pays homage to the fans of that show, the ones who are largely responsible for his current success. Whether appearing at the Firefly panels every year at Comic-Con (even though Firefly went off the air 10 years ago after a 13 episode run) or the numerous Firefly references on Castle (including the Halloween episode in Season 3 where Castle dressed up as Malcom Reynolds, still the best few minutes of TV ever), Fillion is a gifted actor who seems genuinely grateful to his fans. In fact, this season will reportedly feature an entire Firefly-themed episode where Castle and Beckett investigate an actor who played the captain of a spaceship crew on a cult-hit TV show. And the producers hope for more cast reunions like last season’s episode the reunited Fillion with fellow Firefly alum Adam Baldwin. In fact, if you’re a fellow Browncoat (what die-hard Firefly fans call themselves, a reference to the failed rebellion Reynolds was part of), there’s no reason not to watch Castle. The same witty banter, mix of light-hearted fun, action, and drama, and the awesome ensemble that made Firefly great is on full display here too.

So if you’re not tuning in yet, give it a try. You’ll be glad you did.

Castle airs on ABC Monday night at 10/9C. Richard Castle’s Nikki Heat books are available wherever books are sold, and his Derrick Storm graphic novels are available at select retailers (such as Barnes and Noble) as well.   

Read, Remember, Reflect

(Author's note: This post was supposed to go up last week. Life, as it often does, had other ideas.)



“Hand….Salute!”

There are some moments that are forever burned into our memory. I remember vividly being in a lecture as a freshman at Iowa State, hearing whispers of a twin engine plane crashing into the World Trade Center. Five years later, I remember standing at attention with the rest of my NOAA Basic Officer Training Class, along with the academy midshipmen, on the parade grounds of the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy as the chaplain read a prayer and the band played a stirring rendition of “Eternal Father Strong to Save” intermixed with Taps. It was a clear, crisp fall morning, not unlike the one five years before. We could see across the East River, to the now misshapen city skyline a few miles away, where half a decade ago smoke had filled the sky. It was a powerful, emotional moment.

September 11, 2001 was a day the forever changed our nation.

Should it have?

Information might well be the most important commodity of our age. If you have a smartphone, you literally have the whole world’s collective knowledge in your pants pocket. Yet how many people are uninformed and misinformed?

I think we all felt a little fear on 9-11. Fear is a powerful, if not the most powerful, human emotion. And the only antidote to fear is information. No enemy is as frightful when we know their next move. And the more we know about them, the less scary they become. When the Soviet Union first deployed the MiG-25 Foxbat jet fighter, the western world was terrified of it. But when intelligence officials got their hands on one when the pilot defected to Japan, they found it was a paper tiger. It was made of crude materials, and even had vacuum tubes in the electronics, a woefully outdated technology even then. When we found Osama bin Laden, the man who had for so many years seemed like a James Bond-like supervillian looked like he’d be more at home in a trailer park, with his dingy t-shirt and porn stash, than in a volcano base guarded by ninjas. Sometimes the things that scare us are more worthy of ridicule than fear. Bin Laden thought by attacking us he would force us to leave Muslim lands. How’d that work out for ya, buddy?




Which brings me to my next point: Why they hate us. If you picked “because of our freedoms!”, sorry, wrong answer, but thanks for playing. The reasons are too complex to go into in a short blog post such as this. And that’s why reading is so important: The world is too complex, too complicated to be broken down into easily digestible sound bites, despite what our 24 hour news channels would like us to believe. Most of us don’t want to take the time to understand the issues. Ours is a generation of “TL;DR” (Too Long; Didn’t Read), possibly the laziest way to describe laziness ever invented. We want the news spoon-fed to us, in a way that makes complicated things simple, and presented to us from the point of view we favor. And there are lots of people out there that are more than happy to do that for us. Because if you’re not interested in being part of the solution, there’s good money to be made in prolonging the problem.




Misinformation is everywhere, and the powers that be may release it thinking you are too stupid or too lazy to question it, particularly if it reinforces what you want to believe. During the health care law debate I had a number of people tell me ridiculous things they had read about it, and since they were opposed to the new law, they were more than happy to buy into whatever negative press they read about it. When I asked them if they had actually seen it in the text of the law, all 1000+ pages of it available on the congressional website, the answer was invariably “no”. Everything you read has some kind of agenda behind it; consider that when you read it. (My agenda, for instance, is to get people to read as much as they can and think critically about what they have read.)

As a storyteller, you want a clear distinction between the hero and the villain. Yet the real world rarely allows such distinctions. Perhaps this explains our fascination with World War 2, where our enemies were kind enough to be cartoonishly evil and clearly mark themselves with sinister symbols and uniforms. The modern world is not nearly so tidy. Understanding the complexities of other cultures may offer us a path to diffuse future conflicts before they start, or at the very least mitigate damage done when they do break out. Choosing the path of ignorance can only lead to disaster.

“Your enemy is never a villain in his own eyes. Keep this in mind; it may offer a way to make him your friend. If not, you can kill him without hate — and quickly”, wrote acclaimed scifi author Robert Heinlein, and truer words have never been written. Only the truly twisted among us revel in being bad guys. And the horrors of war can quickly blur the lines between good guys and bad guys. The book I mentioned in my last post, Unbroken, detailed not only the horrific abuse that American POW’s suffered at the hands of some truly sadistic Japanese guards, but also tales of guards who were uncomfortable with the mistreatment and even some who, at great personal risk, kept the starving prisoners alive. As a writer, my favorite villains are the most morally complex ones, the ones who, at the very least, were initially trying to do what they thought was right. And even the most inhumane among us are still, on some level, human.




I shed no tears for the passing of the architect of 9-11. He and his ilk may indeed have some legitimate gripes, but there is no justification for the deliberate slaughter of so many innocent people around the world. Yet among the things they found in his personal effects, there was a letter to his children, lamenting the fact he’d spent so much time away from them, and what father hasn’t, at least at some point, ever felt that way? I can’t help but wonder, when the first shots rang out that May night, as the SEALs made their way up the stairwell, what when through his mind? He had to know it was over. There was no escape. His organization was broken and scattered, with most of its leadership dead or captured, their financial situation was dire, and most of his own people despised him. Add to that the fact his original aim, to rid the Middle East of Western military and cultural presence, had backfired catastrophically. Did he have regrets? Did he finally feel remorse, knowing that all he had ever accomplished was making the world a worse place, both for his enemies and his own children? Did he wish he would have found another way? We’ll never know.

We wonder how anyone could be convinced to fly a passenger jet full of innocent people into a building full of more innocent people. Yet, for those of us who are religious or have been religious, how many decisions are guided by that religion, and how well do we really understand why we do what we do? Our religion might dictate how we eat, how we date, who we marry, even what we wear, yet how many of us could quote a scripture verse justifying those things of the top of our heads, or the context in which the verse was written? How many of us just heard someone we trust tell us “This is God’s will” and we believed it? Can you see the inherent danger of giving someone that kind of power?

Question your faith. Question your convictions. Consider the other points of view. Your beliefs may come out stronger for having survived the challenge. If not, you may feel adrift but you’ll find your way. Understand the world around you, because it’s small and getting smaller. Ignorance may be bliss but it’s nothing to be proud of. This awareness is the debt we owe to the dead of 9/11.

Make no mistake. I’m not some hippie wondering why we all can’t just get along. There is ignorance and then there is evil, and while they are both plentiful in the world, they are two very different animals. In the animal rescue work my wife and I do, we have seen firsthand the callousness and cruelty people are capable of, behaviors that no amount of education or therapy could ever correct. Everything has its yin and yang. There are no heroes without villains, no good without evil. Yet I feel so much of the man-made suffering in the world could be avoided if we all worked harder to cast aside our fear of “other” and tried to understand them more. To paraphrase Heinlein, never attribute to malice what can be explained by ignorance. Above all, do not yield to that fear of “other”, of those who are different, for it is one that wicked men will use to try to divide people and gain power over them. As comedian Patton Oswalt recently opined, “Nothing frightens people fueled by fear more than people who aren’t”.

The Banality of Heroism

Banality: the condition of being commonplace or ordinary.

I’m currently reading a book called “Unbroken” by Laura Hillenbrand. It follows the life of Louis Zamperini, a juvenile delinquent who found a purpose in track running (eventually becoming a Gold medal Olympian) and redemption as a bomber crewman during World War II. Zamparini’s plane crashed in the Pacific in 1942 and he and the pilot survived 47 days in a life raft only to be captured by the Japanese. He endured nearly unimaginable hardship at the hands of a culture that viewed being captured by the enemy as the greatest dishonor a man could bring upon himself.  Before I started reading this book, I finished a book on the Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresss, one which focused a great deal on the experiences of the crews during the vicious air battles over Europe during World War 2. The experiences of the bomber crews are something difficult for me to imagine, the horrors and the hardships they faced.

“There was an idea, to bring together a group of remarkable people, so that when we needed them, they could fight the battles we never could.” So says Nick Fury as he brings together the Avengers, the summer’s biggest superhero movie. In my life I’ve been fortunate enough to be around a number of people we might call heroes. Yet the thing that strikes me the most about them is how unremarkable, how tremendously ordinary these people seem on the surface.

One of the most rewarding things I have done in my life is become a member of the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, the volunteer arm of the Coast Guard. I have had the chance to work side by side with active duty Coasties, and have been duly impressed by virtually all of them. But one stands above the rest in the terms of the impression they made. He was a young lieutenant, a helicopter pilot out of Clearwater, FL named Dave Sheppard. Friendly, polite, soft-spoken, he was the polar opposite of the brash Hollywood military pilot. I was particularly impressed with the respectful and supportive way he treated the junior enlisted personnel under him. Yet it wasn’t until after I’d met him that I happened to be leafing through a helicopter magazine and saw his picture, and I learned this unassuming man had just weeks prior flown into Hurricane Katrina (the actual storm, not the aftermath) to rescue the crew of a fishing vessel. He and his crew had saved three fisherman from 40 foot seas and 85 MPH winds, and had all received the Distinguished Flying Cross, the highest honor generally awarded to Coast Guard aviators during peacetime. 

In my current job I’m fortunate to have the opportunity to provide nautical training to members of Naval Special Warfare Group Four, a command comprised of Navy SEAL commandos and SWCC (Special Warfare Combatant Craft crewmen) boat drivers. As Americans, we think of our special forces as supermen, capable of feats most of us can’t even contemplate. Yet once again I’m struck by how very human these young men are. And they are, in many cases, young. Many of them I’ve taught wouldn’t look out of place at a college frat party. Yet we entrust them with some of the most important jobs in the world.

Researcher Hannah Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” in her study of the Holocaust and the German civilian population’s complicity in it, describing how ordinary people can do extraordinary evil under the proper conditions. It seems to me that the same could be said of heroism.

“There was a time when ordinary men were called on to do extraordinary things” a tagline for a WWII movie once said. And that, perhaps, perfectly sums up the “Greatest Generation”. They were all very human. We often tend to over-romanticize the past. The 1940’s were probably a great time in America, provided you were a white heterosexual Protestant man. Otherwise, probably not so much. (That was something about The Avengers movie that made me wonder: how would man who essentially time travelled from 1945, even as good-natured as Steve Rodgers, react to suddenly being given orders by a black man? Then I thought, if said black man was Samuel L. Jackson, poker face was probably a good choice.)  Yet there is no diminishing what they accomplished. They survived the Depression, and, at great cost, helped save the world from fascism and fanaticism.  

The stories of WWII bomber crew hit home for me. My middle name is William, taken from both of my grandfathers, both of whom answered when their country called. My dad’s dad enlisted in the Army Air Corps in 1942 and had applied to be a gunner aboard a bomber, but was disqualified for color blindness, and ended up serving as ground crew for a B-24 squadron based in India for the remainder of the war. My mom’s dad served as an infantryman in Army during the 1950’s.  Recently, Grandpa O’Neal was able to participate in an Honor Flight, a program where volunteers lead veterans on a trip to see the war memorials in Washington, DC. Here’s a video of the trip, my small tribute to the veterans and the volunteers who made it possible.

For more information about the Honor Flight program, please visit http://www.honorflight.org/

-Mike, out.

Why the Classics still matter: A Tale of Two (Gotham) Cities...

SPOLIER ALERT: This post contains a MASSIVE spoiler for The Dark Knight Rises. If you haven’t seen the movie yet, go see it and come back. I’ll wait.

“I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising from this abyss. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy. I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of their descendants, generations hence. It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”  This is the quote from A Tale of Two Cities that Jim Gordon reads as a eulogy to the (seemingly) dead Bruce Wayne, who appeared to have died in the nuclear fireball he had just saved Gotham from. The inclusion of this quote had more meaning than just its appropriateness. From early on in the planning stages for the follow-up to The Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan stated that Charles Dickens’ classic tale was a major inspiration for the plot of the movie. If you haven’t read the book, here are some of the highlights: A virtuous member of the aristocracy, a character who finds redemption after an ill-spent life, a violent revolution against the upper class, a prison storming, etc. Even the major themes of the book (social justice, the symbolism of water as a metaphor for the destructive and uncontrolled anger of the revolutionaries), were obvious influences on the movie.

Much has been made of Nolan’s Batman trilogy, and I could probably add little to it. I can only give my personal observations. When I first saw the trailer for Batman Begins, I thought “They’re making another Batman movie? And now he’s a ninja? This looks dumb.” This, of course, was on the heels of Batman and Robin, a movie MST3K’s Mike Nelson described as “not the worst movie ever, but in fact the worst thing ever. The single worst item we as a civilization have ever labored to produce”. Needless to say, my first impressions were very wrong. Nolan’s trilogy is a masterpiece, and he will be remembered in the same breath as Spielberg, Scorsese, and Hitchcock.

So what’s my point in all this? (You’re dangerously assuming I have one). Just this: The Dark Knight Rises is proof alone why the classics still matter, why they should not only be taught by teachers but paid attention to by students.

And I know that’s hard.

In 9^th grade we read Dickens’s Great Expectations. My impressions at the time were that there was a really good 150 page story buried somewhere in that 400 pages of impenetrably dense prose, but too many of us were turned off to the book by the fact it was so damn hard to read. And I while I didn’t think anything of it at the time, I’m not sure any other book had a greater impact on my writing style, not so much in what to emulate but in the pitfalls of making your writing inaccessible to your readers. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve made a long and lucrative career out of making myself sound smarter than I really am thanks to a wide and advanced vocabulary, but my wife took a hatchet to all those “big words” when she was editing the updated draft of my book. As much as I chaffed at it, feeling like an artist having various shades of paint taken away, I’m glad she did. It is not so much the idea being presented as how it is presented. And if those ideas aren’t accessible, it doesn’t matter how good they are.

Any idea, any piece of art or entertainment can be great. The Dark Knight is possibly one of the best crime dramas ever, certainly the best one since The Godfather, yet boiled down to its bare essentials, it’s about a man who dresses up as a flying rodent beating up a clown. Let that thought rattle around in your brain for a minute.

Reading the liner notes for The Dark Knight Rises musical score, I was struck by a story Nolan related. When he was first starting work on Batman Begins, he fretted about the music. Danny Elfman’s Batman theme was classic, but it didn’t fit the direction he wanted to take. He wanted something heroic yet original…but composer Hans Zimmer (a musical genius who I believe is our generation’s answer to Bach or Mozart) saw a different approach. He saw not a comic book hero but a damaged man whose life was shaped by pain and loss. “Why make it heroic? Why not play the tragedy and nobility of the tale, like an Elgar concerto?” Yep, there’s that classical stuff again, working its way into our modern day movies.   

So there you have it. What’s old is new again. Parents and teachers, when your kids or students ask why they have to read this or listen to that, tell them, “Because maybe, just maybe, someday you’ll be the next Dickens or Elgar. Or the next Christopher Nolan.”

-Mike, out.

Tom Hardy as John Clark in WITHOUT REMORSE? YES PLEASE.

Because nothing would make the hyperbaric chamber interrogation of the drug dealer more badass than Clark glowering at him, "Your punishment must be more severe!"

http://www.ign.com/articles/2012/08/21/is-tom-hardy-without-remorse

I for one am fairly excited about the reboot of the Jack Ryan movies, especially with Tom Clancy apparently being involved in writing the scripts. I've always been a huge fan of the Jack Ryan books (Executive Orders might be my favorite book of all, and my brother and I re-read those books to the point where most of them fell apart). I wish Alec Baldwin had stayed on as Ryan, he seemed like a perfect fit for the role, embodying Ryan's idealism without diminishing his ability to get his hands dirty when the job required it. For my money, The Hunt For Red October might be the best book-to-movie adaptation ever. The movie series just kind of sputtered out after that. Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger were alright, as far as that goes, but as much as I like Harrison Ford he was too old for the part. Sum of All Fears was a serviceable movie, but a hot mess as far as a book adaptation goes. Part of that was screwing with the timeline so bad. It sounds like Paramount's done a smart thing by going back and telling an original story with a young Jack Ryan (although Clancy's own attempt at that in RED RABBIT was kind of underwhelming). WITHOUT REMORSE was originally set during the Vietnam era, but it wouldn't be hard to update the story to modern times.
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So what makes a good book-to-movie adaptation? I think casting might be the key.The actors have to fit the roles well, probably more than anything else. Liberties can be taken with the story so long as they fit the spirit of the story. I think the climax in Red October looks better on screen the way they filmed it as opposed to the way it was in the book. I distinctly remember a few scenes added into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 that weren't in the book that I really liked, I felt like they added something to the story. Some movies fail because they try to be too faithful to the source material.

Hopefully someday there will be a movie of THE EIGHTH DAY for me to nitpick at :)

-Mike, out.

Gentlemen, Behold!

Welcome to my blog! With the pleasantries out of the way, it's now time for good news/bad news.

Well, the good news is I got the novel I wrote back in high school published a few years ago.

The bad news is it's selling like ice water at an Eskimo convention.

I have it on good authority that an author blog is crucial nowadays for building an audience. I am somewhat puzzled by this, being an avid reader and never actually visited one, but I'll bite.

My hope, though, is to accomplish much more with this blog than just build an audience and sell books (though that would also be nice). I think of how much reading and writing have enriched my life, yet I know neither activity is terribly popular among teen and pre-teen males (I'm tempted to add "these days" but the truth is that's how it was back when I was young too).

It's easy to dismiss entertainment like books (and to a greater extent the visual arts like movies, TV shows, video games, etc) as idle diversion. Yet these things can inspire us, even influence the course of our entire lives, regardless of their artistic merit. I was saddened to hear of the recent passing of director Tony Scott, for it was his magnum opus that shaped the course of my whole life:

When I was all of about 5 years old, my parents mistakenly thought I was asleep as they popped this primo piece of 80's cheese into the VHS player, and when they finished the movie they were astonished to look behind them to see their young son standing totally spellbound by what he had just seen. From then on I wanted to be Maverick, up until age 12 when I rode my first roller coaster and decided "fighter pilot" might not be the best occupation for me. None the less, let's look how I stacked up next to Maverick:

All silliness aside, books and movies do inspire us, to do great things and go on fantastic adventures. At age 14, I was in my bedroom reading about ocean explorer Dr. Robert Ballard's expeditions to find lost ships like the Titanic, the German battleship Bismark or the aircraft carrier USS Yorktown. At age 24, I was on a research vessel a hundred miles off the coast of Virgina on an expedition to find lost Nazi submarines and maybe even a ship from Sir Frances Drake's 16th century fleet. Never would have happened if my parents hadn't gotten me hooked on reading at a young age.

So I hope this blog becomes a resource for anyone who's into books that appeal to young guys, or at least equal appeal to boys and girls (I don't see a lot of guys hanging out in the "paranomal romance" shelves of the YA section at Barnes and Noble). Don't get me wrong, I think it's great so many girls are into reading, I just think it's equally important to get boys into it too. 

Contributions are welcome! If you're another YA author and want a book reviewed, send it my way! If a book inspired you to do something cool, tell me about it! And of course, while you're at it, check out my book: http://www.amazon.com/The-Eighth-Day-ebook/dp/B004URS0C4/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&qid=1345579541&sr=8-13&keywords=The+Eighth+Day#_ 

- Mike, out.