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What a Hockey Rom-Com Taught Me About Love, Fear, and Visibility
It started with a recommendation. A good friend at the office suggested I watch the TV show “Heated Rivalry.” I didn’t know anything about it but looked it up. Based on the second book in the Game Changers series by Rachel Reid, Heated Rivalry focuses on two rival hockey players—Shane Hollander (Hudson Willams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storie)—who fall in love over the span of multiple years. When I asked my friend why she thought I’d enjoy the series, she commented on my love of rom-coms, good stories, and great characters. Plus she knows how much I adore stories that elicit an emotional reaction. All true, especially that last one.…
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How the Parenthood TV Show Helped Write My New Novel
It’s fascinating what influences us writers. In my last post at the original blogspot version of DoSomeDamage, I wrote about finishing my latest novel, Mid-Lives. It is the story of four middle-aged men who grapple with a central question: where were you when you realized you were old? The idea began six years ago this summer, in 2019, with an odd observation: what would the characters from the Kevin Smith movie, “Clerks,” be like when they got older. As surprising as it may sound, I never watched any of Smith’s films until that summer when I binged them all. I recognized myself in the characters from Clerks and Mallrats and…
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How Does Fandom Change as We Grow Older?
Being a fan of something is different when you’re younger. A fellow Gen-Xer and I have discussion about fandom: what it was like as a kid or a young adult and what it’s like as we continue to get older. Recently he sent me a text and I’ve been reflecting on it. I think my new take is that something has to touch my life in reality for my mind to naturally lock onto it the way it did before. For example, a TV show doesn’t actually touch my life. I’m not part of the creation of it, distribution, marketing, etc. My role is the very last step, and it’s…
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Daredevil Born Again and Why You Don’t Always Have to Start from the Beginning
A few years ago, I was shopping at Kroger when my eyes landed on the cover of a book. It was The Race by Clive Cussler. Here’s the cover. I was immediately captivated. Old-fashioned planes! Cussler’s name! And was that trailing plane firing weapons at the leading plane? I picked up the novel and read the description and discovered the Isaac Bell series. The Race was the fourth one and I made the decision to start from book one and make my way forward from the beginning. With all of my other reading, it took me months to get to The Race but I read, listened to, and enjoyed every…
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What “Saturday Night Live” Can Teach Writers About Failure
Failure sucks, but failure isn’t all bad. After rehearsal on Thursday night, I came back home to find my wife watching a new four-part documentary on the history of Saturday Night Live. I missed the first episode and most of the second, but I ended up watching the last two. The third episode is an entire deep dive on the Cowbell sketch. That was fun. The fourth, however, was brand-new to me. Entitled, “Season 11: The Weird Year,” it details the new-to-me saga of that year. And there was a lot I didn’t know. Randy Quaid was a cast member?! Full disclosure: I didn’t start watching SNL regularly until my…
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What Was Reacher Like When He Had Friends?
I’ve now watched the second season of Amazon’s “Reacher” and not only am I caught up, I’m all in. Let’s be fair: I was all in back in the first fifteen minutes of the pilot episode, when Reacher did the Sherlock Holmes thing to the local police detective. Alan Ritchson’s portrayal of Reacher is fantastic. He has the brawn to take on anyone and be scared of no one. He has the brain to outthink any opponent, usually before they even realize it. But it’s Ritchson’s gentle demeanor that is probably my favorite part of the character on screen. Season 1 is Reacher the Wanderer, the guy who literally walks…
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True Detective: Night Country Asks an Interesting Question: What if The Thing Was a Murder Mystery?
I’m a True Detective newbie but I was all-in on the fourth season, True Detective: Night Country. Why? Jodie Foster. And the setting. I know Foster moved behind the camera for a long time and she did some great work. She worked on an episode of the science fiction show “Tales from the Loop” a few years ago and I really enjoyed that series. Last year she co-starred with Annette Bening in “Nyad,” a movie I’ve not seen (but will now). Thus, Night Country is the first acting performance I’ve seen in a long time. She’s fantastic! She’s hard, stern, dogged, determined, and occasionally unlikeable. In a recent podcast episode,…
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A Maverick Pathologist (Mostly) Seeks the Truth: Harrow Season 1
I actually laughed when I watched the first fifteen minutes of the pilot episode of the Australian TV show, Harrow, that ran for three seasons from 2018 to 2021. I then chuckled at the last minute as well. Why? Because the script did exactly what a pilot is supposed to do: Introduce you to the character(s) and then hook you good enough to watch the next episode. Done and done. The Characters Daniel Harrow (Ioan Gruffudd) is a forensic pathologist based in Queensland. He is a maverick in the department, brilliant of course, lives on a boat, and always rankling the higher-ups and his more uptight peers. He always wants…
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When Reacher Did the Sherlock Holmes Thing, I Was Hooked
It took a pair of podcast hosts and Sherlock Holmes to finally get me to watch Season 1 of Reacher. By the time I finished the first episode, I wondered why it had taken so long. Setting the Hook Kevin Smith and Marc Bernardin host the Fatman Beyond podcast and in the first episode of this year, Smith discusses Season 2 of Reacher. He was his usual ecstatic self when he loves something and that finally tipped the needle. Granted, when Bernardin mentioned it last year, that should have been been my cue to watch because Bernardin is one of the brightest guys I listen to, and his understanding of…
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How’d You Spend the 99 Days of Summer 2023 – (Part 1)
I read at lot and watched a lot of movies. There. End of post. See ya. What did I see and read? I’ll recap the reading next week. Here’s what I watched…and hopefully you did, too. Summer 2023 Movies Were Great When was the last time we had a summer movie season like this? I think many of us earmarked certain dates on the calendar to get ourselves to the movie theater. I did that nearly every weekend this year. The end result was that, with the exception of the Pixar film, Elemental, I saw every movie I wanted to see this summer. And I enjoyed just about every one…