Falling Skies

Tonight, hubby and I watched the 2-hour premiere of Falling Skies on TBS. What can I say, I'm a Noah Wyle fan and there's a real dearth of entertainment on tv these days.

Overall, I was disappointed. I expected more from Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks but this was nothing but a knockoff of The War of the Worlds with a plot that is too familiar and tired. Noah Wyle is still playing his Librarian character, the brainy professor who is a warrior. Like Tom Cruise in WOTW, he has children he's dragging around with him while running from and battling aliens who've taken over earth. He belongs to a group of survivors who call themselves the Massachusetts Resistance. Toss in a pediatrician love interest (though this has yet to develop)--who treats all wounds and is the voice of reason--add to that a counter movement led by a long-haired bad boy (think Sawyer in Lost), two hot militant blondes, an overbearing ex military man who heads up the resistance, the requisite African-American and Asian secondary characters, and the old, wise couple and you've pretty much got the entire cast.

There's nothing new here. Same old aliens and their robot counterparts roaming around looking for humans to kill while the mother ships hover over all majorly populated cities. I don't look for this one to last long because there aren't even any interesting cast members or characters like there were in Battlestar Galactica. For myself, I'll give it a couple more weeks to get interesting before I completely give up on it. Only because of Noah.

Devon

Game Plan

For the past two weeks I've been stewing about goals. As a result, I've decided it's time to set different bars. The fact is, western historical romance is a hard sell, even to readers. For quite a while, the talk has been that they're making a comeback. But I still see the same publishers (Harlequin, Kensington, Dorchester, etc.) putting out their usual quotas of western romances. Point me to one of the big unreachables (Bantam, St. Martin's, et.al.) who has published a western historical lately and then I'll believe they're making a comeback. It's just a fact--as much as I wish it weren't so--that western historicals aren't big with readers. I intend to keep writing my westerns, but I'm going to a different word length. After all these years I've decided to look at the market realistically and I intend to adjust accordingly.

Meanwhile, the market for FF&P remains strong, with no signs of flagging in the near future. It's the times we live in. This is the sci-fi and fantasy generation. So I've decided not to concentrate solely on one nearly dead genre and give equal time to finishing up the fantasy and paranormals I have started. I've been in a rut anyway, so why not.

Speaking of Sci-fi, did anyone besides me watch the recent Battlestar Galactica series? For a while, it was the best show on tv, until it started going downhill. Which was inevitable, I suppose. They always do, at some point. I had a feeling it was going to end badly, and it certainly did. I was very put out with them. Not to mention the fact that they never did explain the Jimi Hendrix "All Along the Watchtower" connection.

Devon