Thursday, February 26, 2004

Someone had this "Haunted Front" idea already for a Role Playing Game:  Weird War Two  Dave:  The Haunted Tank is a comic book I used to read: 9:23:39 PM    comment []

Elmore Leonard gives us 10 rules for writing: 3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue. The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary. 5:22:24 PM    comment []

My Pilot Watching Band of Brothers made me start imagining what is sure to be a hit TV show. Kind of a combination of Band of Brothers, the Haunted Tank and the X-files. During the Allied campaign in France, rifts develop in the space-time continuum and a certain unit keeps wandering in and out of their reality frame. They meet Prussian Junkers, soviet agents, American Scientists, French hotel keepers, other bands of soldiers, robots from the future, nuclear armed nazis, vampires, mummies, werewolves, and people of all types trying to deal with the rifts and their implications in the war. Some generals are dimly aware that the rifts exist, but most of the western front is simply unaware. However, this platoon seems to be fated to keep having missions into the rifted French countryside. They are cut off from their headquarters for weeks at a time, they sneak back into England, they get abducted by aliens, they have members of the undead join their unit. The possibilities are endless. The series should be packed with nods to historical facts, large and minute, and to fiction, good and bad, that came out of the war. The 10 or so main characters of this platoon are developed intensely so that their personal lives wind around one another in endless and tangled sub-plots. Then, the rest of the platoon is filled with colorful stereotypes of American soldiers of the era. 1:59:05 PM    comment []