Back in the 1980's my best friend (Duke Ernsberger) and I came up with a movie script that was, more or less, a parody of the old science fiction movie "The Day The Earth Stood Still", which starred Michael Rennie and contained the immortal line "Klatuu barada nickto".
The script was basically a plotline to hang endless jokes on.
But then I lost the only copy of the finished script.
So now I'm attempting to complete it in a narrative form, and I've realized that there's actually a lot more...
FRIDAY & SATURDAY, JULY 11 & 12!
I just had a new cover done for my most popular novel, “In The Land of My Enemy”, and am offering the Kindle edition for FREE this coming Friday, July 11th, and Saturday, July 12.
Just follow this link…
I’ve finally published the fourth volume of my “epic fantasy trilogy” about the land of Paxia, which is now available in either Kindle or paperback editions.
Wait. The fourth of a trilogy? Huh?
Actually the saga was originally intended to be a single volume, but as sometimes happens I once again found myself realizing halfway through the initial story that there was considerably more to explore than I’d anticipated before I started.
In the case of this latest series, “The Chronicles of Paxia”...
Everyone knows that George Lucas lifted what turned out to be “Chapter Four: A New Hope” directly from the structure of classic myth as outlined by academic Joseph Campbell in his book “Hero With A Thousand Faces”.
And he already had the base concept of the hero’s fight against the evil Empire more or less fixed. So he applied the hero structure to it to create what he initially assumed would be a “one off” single film, originally titled “Star Wars”.
But when it grabbed a universal appeal and...
More often than not a story can survive having a lousy ending than a lousy beginning. If your story begins awkwardly or doesn’t have something to “hook” the reader/viewer, they never become engaged in either the basic concept, or the characters or the imagery that they first see when it opens. The result of that is they get bored and switch off, dismissing the story as uninteresting enough to pursue.
And there are many cases, in this age of sequels, where multiple stories form a single “saga”...
In the past I had three of my novels done in audiobook form:
“Mama Kodo”
“Blue Planet”
“Class Fives: Origins”
And the process to have them narrated by a professional voice talent is both lengthy and expensive (for good reason).
But now I have been selected to try out the beta testing version of the new Amazon virtual voice audiobook system, and I’m in the process of converting the majority of my 31 current novels to this format.
Why?
I’m one of those people who love being emersed in stories, but...
I’m not only an author, I’m also an avid consumer of certain types of fantasy stories in particular genre.
I was a Star Trek fan. I was a Star Wars fan. I am a rabid aficionado of Dr. Who, not to mention the Marvel universe (in both comic book and cinematic forms).
And like a great many such followers I went beyond merely avidly awaiting the release of the next official story, I even sought out the ancillary aspects of those universes in the form of other fans (or the controllers of the...
NEXT FREE BOOK FRIDAY, APRIL 11:
SOMETHING UNUSUAL
The next FREE Kindle edition I will be offering on Amazon next Friday, April 11 and Saturday, April 12 will be a bit different.
"OFFICER JOHN SUNDOWN: CHICAGO P.D."
What makes it unusual is that I wrote the entire seven books of this series completely out of order. I wrote the sixth one first, then the fourth, then the second, the first, the third and the fifth.
They more or less constitute the entire career of Chicago Private Detective/Sioux...
Like every author I am constantly checking the opinions my work generates, watching each upward (or downward) tick of the cumulative numerical ratings each story garners and craving to find some new review to dissect for clues as to how any particular work was generally received.
Yes, that may be somewhat masochistic but I find it to the a pretty useful alternative view to my own image of something I’ve written, helping to ground my own opinion of what I’ve created.
So far I’ve written thirty...
I am running a promotion this Friday and Saturday, March 28/29 for:
CLASS FIVES: ORIGINS
You can grab a FREE Kindle edition from the Amazon website on those two days.
Just look up "Jon H Thompson" and scroll to the entry for "Class Fives: Origins" and download.
Enjoy!
I very seldom spend time watching what could be called “traditional television”, preferring the kinds of brief and often informative programs featured on various YouTube channels.
And since my primary interest is storytelling, I’ve been viewing a lot of “Top Ten” type videos related to characters in various saga-sized epic universes, such as ranking every single Marvel Cinematic Universe villain from worth to best.
That got me thinking about those larger stories/series I’ve written myself in...
One of the major parts of any story is dialogue (when characters communicate with one another verbally).
Dialogue serves a number of purposes. It is a simple way of communicating information to the reader while also communicating that same information to other characters in the story. That means it can save having to first present the information as the author directly to the reader in the form of description of circumstances or events by having one character convey it to another while engaged...