Godzilla 2014 & TGT2




My wife and I are fans!  We were there at the first advance showing
IMAX 3-D was incredible!  When Godzilla roared - WOW!

The summer of 2013 was a Kaiju filled three months in my house.  That’s when I was inspired to collect my thoughts on twenty-three films from the Kaiju Eiga library and see if it would work as a book.  The finished product has worked better than I could have expected.  In fact, the fun of watching movies with giant monsters was so engrossing that it pushed several of my other writing projects (including this blog) to the background.

 



The Sequel!  Prototype cover image!

And, this summer will be more of the same.  Besides booking my tickets for G-Fest XXI in Chicago this July, I have also been hard at work on the second volume of Kaiju Eiga goodness which I am calling There Goes Tokyo 2: Kaiju Boogaloo.  I’ve been talking with my cover artist on various designs and am attaching our first pass (plenty of changes coming).  We want it close enough to the original to invoke a sequel without being too much of a copy.  I'll hold off on any reveals until it's closer to sales time.  At this point in the writing I have completed the Heisei Series and will be shortly entering into the Millennium Series.  All told, this volume will contain thirty different Kaiju movies (so considering both of those series are totaling thirteen movies there’s plenty of room for some surprises - and boy did I watch a couple stinkers!).  The biggest shock was when I compiled my list of possible choices I discovered there's enough Kaiju Eiga films remaining for a third and even a fourth book in the future.  Most likely I'll wait for a Pacific Rim 2 or Godzilla 2 to have at least a couple main films to tie into all these obscure titles. 

I also have an actual novel to finish first.  I'm currently 65 pages into what looks to be a 300+ page book.  I have all the notes and plotting worked out.  There's only one character so that makes much of the writing fairly easy.  Oh and there's...monsters too...but more to human scale.  Besides works in progress I also have a long finished collection which I will be releasing shortly - the completed HORROR 101 - look for it sometime in October.  I have at least managed to get to my computer and write every single day on one project or another (a first for me as a writer).

 


My notes, never looked at the page - too dark.

Obviously the big release for Kaiju fans this summer is Legendary’s new Godzilla movie.  This was a first for me, not only seeing a great movie on the big screen multiple times, but also attempting to take notes of the movie at the same time.  It’s an interesting experience writing in a dark movie theatre, there’s no point in trying to look at what you are writing, you simply write and hope at the conclusion of the movie there is something legible and straight on the paper.  Luckily my wife has become a diehard Godzilla fan and was able to assist with the highs and lows of the movie as I furiously wrote.  Did I mention AMC provided us with a private screening?  Well, they didn’t but through fate we were all alone in the theatre.  When the lights came up I had four pages of thorough notes and a surprised look from an usher wondering, “What the hell is this guy doing?”

Here’s a picture of my movie snack leftovers along with my notes, taken as the credits rolled.  Interesting that four pages of notes translated to a nineteen page chapter in the book.  For the diehard fans, look for this to be on sale in December 2014.