An Excerpt from Leaving Who

Calling all Whovians and rom-com fans... Now on sale, Book 2 in the Loving Who series, Leaving Who! Feel free to share the book link with others. Thank you.

Leaving Who
by Cynthianna 
http://www.devinedestinies.com/leaving-who/

After traveling for six months throughout the vastness of time and space with the alien known as John Smith, Cici Connors wants to do one more thing—go home and see her friends. Homesickness is something Cici never expected to experience as a rabid Doctor Who fan, along with her deeply held desire to be a time traveler's companion, but it's real. Once back home, things aren't quite the same as Cici remembers. John's colleagues, the gorgeous Captain Mac and the femme fatale, Babbling Brook, may not be as harmless as they first appear, either. Will the imminent destruction of Earth throw a kink in Cici's plans of leaving John? Will John ever let her go?

An excerpt from Leaving Who:

 

“She doesn’t know?” Mac accused my lover without a glance at me. “You didn’t tell her? She doesn’t understand why you came to earth in the first place?”

John shrugged. “It never came up in conversation.”

“What never came up in conversation?” I demanded. “Will one or both of you start talking directly to me instead of around me?” They both turned and stared at me. “Thank you.”

Mac flashed a toothy smile and gave me a wink while carrying on his conversation with John. “I still can’t believe you didn’t inform such a beautiful creature that her life was in dire jeopardy--and everyone else’s on the planet.”

“Like I said, it never came up in conversation.” John continued to grin at me, but I may as well have been in the next county for all it mattered. “You can’t land on a primitive planet and tell them they’re doomed. They won’t invite you in for tea if you start a conversation with, ‘Excuse me. I have something important to tell you. You’re all going to die.’”

I jumped to my feet and shouted. “Why are we all going to die?” Several heads in the restaurant turned my direction. I sat down, blushing, and lowered my voice. "Why are we all going to die?” I repeated in a firm tone.

“Because you’re going to run out of oxygen,” Mac said calmly, his smile never wavering.

I stared at Captain Mac. “How? Due to global warming? Carbon emissions?” 

“No, a giant Hoover,” John interjected. “It’s going to suck the oxygen right out of your atmosphere.”

Mac sighed and flicked the fez tassel off John’s face. “Don’t try to make it any easier on her. She deserves to know the truth.”

Easier? We were all going to suffocate? A giant vacuum cleaner? 

“Okay, I’ll come clean.” John took my hand and squeezed it. “It’s because of us, Cici. The time traveling causes an imbalance wherever it takes place. Matter has to rearrange itself across the timelines and most of the time it means basic elements such as oxygen are moved from one place to another to rebalance the multiverse. It seems the Bygons are working for another concern that is in need of it, possibly due to their time travel throughout the universes. What better place to borrow oxygen from than Earth?”

“Surely they could find oxygen elsewhere!” I cried, trying to read into their expressions for any clues that they were joking. “Can’t they find an intergalactic Wal-mart somewhere and purchase it cheap? Why not make their own?”

Mac shrugged and tutted. “You’d think they’d do that, but in this case they’ve decided Earth’s air is quite sufficient for their needs. Right place, right price, right time.”

“I beg to differ.” There’s never a good time or place for suffocating, but then the entirety of what he said hit me. I leaned toward him. “Excuse me, but what price are these aliens paying and to whom are they paying it?”

Mac’s sexy grin faded. As the twinkle in his eye dimmed, John cleared his throat awkwardly. I turned to see an unusual blush coloring his cheeks. Oh, no.

“Don’t tell me it’s your people who are paying the Bygons to help them suck up Earth’s oxygen.” I moaned as my head dropped into my hands. “Why doesn’t this distressing revelation surprise me in the least?”

“Yes, you’ve been fraternizing with the enemy all along, Cici Connors,” John Smith declared in a quiet voice. “I can understand why you’d want to leave me, but I hope you can see why I wanted to keep you from returning home.”

Leaving Who now available at Devine Destinies Books, Amazon and wherever fine ebooks are sold.  http://www.devinedestinies.com/leaving-who/

And don't forget to read Book 1 in the series, Loving Who...
http://www.devinedestinies.com/loving-who/

Feel free to like my Loving Who series Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/lovingwhoseries/

Book Reviews: Y.A. books with a difference!

Since it's getting very close to when our first Y.A. SF book Olivia's Escape debuts, I thought I'd share some reviews of recent Y.A. books I've read. Enjoy! 

Highly Illogical Behavior by John Corey Whaley
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Solomon Reed is an agoraphobic with a panic disorder. In middle school while suffering a panic attack, he stripped and dived into the school’s fountain. Three years later, he’s being homeschooled and hasn’t stepped a foot out of his family’s home since that fateful day. His parents have tried therapy and drugs but nothing has worked. Sol has convinced them it’s better for him just to stay put. As long as he remains inside their home, the world outside can’t harm him.

Enter Lisa Praytor, an overachiever who has set her sights on attending a prestigious college on a full scholarship to study psychology so she can leave their small California town for good. Her plans include writing an essay about her “personal experience with mental illness.” Who better to write about than the kid who jumped into the fountain? Lisa decides to find him and “cure him” and write that winning essay. Of course, she won’t tell him what she’s really doing. She doesn’t want him to think she’s using him, right?

What Lisa doesn’t account for is becoming Sol’s best friend--and then introducing Sol to her boyfriend Clark, a super nice guy and water polo athlete who enjoys Star Trek: The Next Generation every bit as much as Sol. The three become a tight-knit group and genuinely enjoy each others’ company. Solomon comes to feel perhaps the world outside isn’t such a bad place after all. When he asks for a swimming pool, his parents are overjoyed that their son can at last step into the backyard, and they are grateful for Lisa and Clark’s help. But trouble arrives in paradise when Sol realizes he’s fallen in love with Clark and Lisa begins to doubt Clark’s sexual orientation.

Highly Illogical Behavior is a touching story of three teenagers who learn it’s who you’re with that’s more important than where you are.


The Hidden Oracle by Rick Riordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It’s not easy being a Greco-Roman god--particularly when you anger your father and he hurls you to earth into a garbage-filled dumpster. But that’s not Apollo’s worst problem at the moment. Great Olympus! He’s been transformed into a mere mortal and lost all his god-like powers and portions of his memory. To add insult to injury, he’s now a sixteen-year-old, acne-riddled kid named Lester. He must have really ticked off Zeus!

So begins The Trials of Apollo: Book One The Hidden Oracle. Apollo may be trapped in a mortal teenager’s flabby frame, but he’s still got most of his wits about him. He knows Zeus has sent him on a quest to do great deeds in order to redeem himself and save the world. The real trouble is he’s not got the powers to do it alone, so he has to swallow his over-sized ego and search for help. A street waif named Meg rescues him and reveals herself to be a demi-god like Apollo’s good friend, Percy Jackson.

With Meg and Percy’s help, he gets to Camp Half-Blood where he discovers not all the demi-gods and goddesses are happy campers. Some have disappeared into the woods where the trees seem to be talking, driving them insane. Visions of a malevolent force named the Beast and prophecies from the ancient earth goddess Rhea reveal what Apollo’s quest will be. But without his godly powers, and with his over-inflated sense of importance, can Apollo inspire others to join his fight and face certain death?

Fast-paced and loaded with action scenes and memorable characters, The Hidden Oracle is a strong start to yet another great Y.A. fantasy series by Rick Riordan. Can a movie treatment be far behind?

View all my reviews

Keep it tuned here for news of the release of Olivia's Escape -- from Desert Breeze Publishing.  http://blooddarkbooks.blogspot.com

Retconning the Doctor (on New Doctor Who)

 Retconning the Doctor

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***

"Am I supposed to understand anything you're saying?" -- Clara in the Matrix on Gallifrey

Take all the cool and interesting things that a multitude of writers have created for Doctor Who since its inception--the Time Lords, Gallifrey, the TARDIS, time travel, the Matrix, the cloister bells, those odd cardinal-like robes and funky head/shoulder gear the bigwigs wear--toss into a big pot, forget all about series canon, and stir. Upturn pot and pour out onto the page. Ta-da! You have the season finale, Hell Bent.

Of course, since this is Moffat's Who script you have to add in his creations--Clara and Ashildr (Me)--and plenty of creepy bits of his Blinking Angels and a Dalek stuck in a haunted-house-like data collection device known as the Matrix. (Google the Tom Baker episode The Deadly Assassin to see how different the original Matrix on Gallifrey is from this new incarnation. Yeah, it's that different!) There are some funny bits tossed in as well, such as Time Lords now regenerate without much of a hangover, changing gender/age/race simultaneously. Tack on a relatively satisfactory ending after a lot of head scratching and feet dragging.  Ta-da!

This time it's the Doctor who gets the mind wipe and not the companion (see Donna Noble) so he can move on. The undead Clara gets to have some "girlfriend time" with Ashildr in their own fifties diner-shaped TARDIS with a pure-white classic interior. How either of these young ladies know how to pilot a TARDIS isn't explained. Neither is the previous "rule" given that only a Time Lord could manage a TARDIS because of their psychic link. 

Is it good to violate the TV series canon? Nah, who cares! Nobody will notice.

Even for new Whovians who haven't a clue that Leela lives somewhere on Gallifrey, this "word salad" of a script seems to be missing something vital: emotional connection. Even with a script jumping all over the place like a hyperactive kid on a Christmas candy rush, you'd think it would be able to settle down long enough for the characters to connect with their audience. But therein lies its weakness: the emotions are telegraphed for you. 

You don't have to think or feel for yourself when you're told pretty much what is going to happen up front, similar to what happened in an earlier episode this season. (See my review for Before the Flood.) You know that Clara is going to "live" again, and the Doctor is going to forget all about her since we start out in a scene at the diner where this is made painfully obvious. I suspect the current show runner feels he has to spell everything out because he believes Doctor Who's viewers have IQs to match their shoe sizes, and we all have tiny feet.

I think my husband, a long time Whovian, said it best: "The show has gone from good scripts and wobbly sets to good sets and wobbly scripts."

All the lovely photography, location shoots, costuming, special effects, musical score, etc., do not a strong story make. (Just ask George Lucas.) Not even a classic character like the Doctor can withstand all the retconning that's happened to him in the Moffat era and come out for the better. He's been diminished somehow, made into a permanent fool, a pale shadow of the strong action character he used to be. 

Peter Capaldi reminds me of Pierce Brosnan when he finally got the part of James Bond after many years. Pierce made a great Bond, but unfortunately he got stuck with the weak scripts of that period and left early. If only the great writer Robert Holmes was around to give Peter's Doctor the shot in the arm he so badly needs after this season. A great actor like Peter Capaldi deserves the best!

We have the Christmas special with River Song to look forward to in a couple of weeks, and it appears to be a comical tale. That's good. After all the forced drama and tears of the Clara years, it'll be nice to see the Doctor relax and enjoy himself a bit with a mad romp. Fingers crossed!

What do you think? Please leave your comments below, and check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

Heaven Sent
Face the Raven  
Sleep No More
The Zygon Inversion (or Inversion of the Zygons)
The Zygon Invasion

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died    
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV

Inconsistencies in Tone (in New Doctor Who)

A great actor in need of a better script.

Inconsistencies in Tone (in New Doctor Who)

by Cynthianna

***Spoiler Alert!***


Face the Raven is presented as a "swan song" for the character of Clara Oswald, without the pay-off of being one. There is a genuinely interesting mystery happening at the first and it sucks the Doctor and us in immediately. Rigsy (a nice young man from last year's strongly written episode Flatline) is now grown up and a daddy to an adorable baby girl. Unfortunately, he's missing an entire day from his memory and discovers a macabre tattoo that acts like a bomb countdown on the back of his neck. He, of course, contacts the Doctor for help. 

After all, that's what characters do on Doctor Who--they look to the Doctor for solutions to their problems. Right?

The Doctor, Clara and Rigsy trace Rigsy's last known whereabouts before his amnesia kicked in and discover all isn't as it appears. The  "alien refugee camp" hidden in plain sight in the middle of London is a very cool setting, and the rag-tag lot of aliens who dwell in its Tudor-like maze of shops are all visualized nicely. Once again, the Doctor encounters the immortal Viking girl Ashildr (Madame Me) and finds she's been doing the dirty work for some unknown villains. The script has a creepy Edgar Allen Poe feel to it up to this point, and it comes complete with ravens that punish capital offenders by stealing their lives away. (Quoth the raven: Nevermore!)

The acting is good, the costuming inventive. The horror set-up seems to be working well--but then everything goes off the rails with a seemingly tacked on "death scene." It just doesn't fit the tone of the rest of the story. In classic Doctor Who, the Doctor solves the mystery and saves the day and rights wrongs, but in this tale he just steps back and allows the "Impossible Girl" Clara to die because she's foolishly traded places with Rigsy and taken his "killer tattoo" as her own. 
 

What's a stasis chamber for?

What about sticking countdown Clara into the stasis chamber standing which held the apparently dead Janus woman who Rigsy was accused of murdering? What about hopping into the TARDIS and going back in time to stop Clara from acting foolishly or to put her into another stasis-type situation to stop the clock? What about implanting an immortality chip into Clara, the chip Doctor gave to Ashildr to prevent her from dying earlier this season? There are no good explanations for the Doctor's passivity in the situation given other than we're suppose to see Clara die.

As I recall, the Doctor saw Clara as an old woman in the future in the 2014 Christmas special, but she's not going to live this long now because...? In the 50th Anniversary special year, Clara was shown to have lived throughout the Doctor's twelve (thirteen) lives, being there since the day he stole the TARDIS. She seems immortal as Ashildr. She's been a  girl in the future (turned into a Dalek), and she's been a Victorian-era nanny (who also died). But now we the viewers are to take it that Clara is finally dead and gone because they needed to write Jenna Coleman out of the series. That's the only explanation that works really.

The inconsistencies in tone in the new Who series are troublesome. At least the fifth Doctor's companion Adric was written out in a very noble way--he blew up when the spaceship crashed into Earth, saving the lives of others, and there was no logical sci-fi way to bring Adric back after the ship crashed. But Clara Oswald--love her or leave her--has been given a "rebirth" several times in the Moffat era. We're suppose to think she's used up all her nine lives now? 

Nope, doesn't make sense really. So, I suspect we'll see Clara again soon in some other incarnation. It would make the most sense in a fantasy universe, after all, one where heroes have held the power over of life and death on numerous occasions. Or we won't see her again. She's finally as dead as her late boyfriend Danny is, who may or may not be dead, either, if he's a Cyberman. 

Confused? I know I am! Inconsistent plot points abound in Moffat's Doctor Who. Why didn't the script editor check the "series bible" to make sure they all added up?

Let's forget we're all intelligent for a moment, shall we?

The teen-angst, soap opera tone of Clara's drawn-out death scene brings the entire episode down and ruined the first part of it for me. I like science fiction/fantasy adventure because the heroes usually can change the laws of time, physics and life/death itself so the viewers can enjoy a satisfying ending. Sure, the "logic" is made up at times (since we've yet to discover time travelers or travel faster than the speed of light), but at least it's consistent within its own fantasy universe rules. And usually the Doctor's companions have left the TARDIS alive and on their own terms--for instance, Barbara and Ian, Jo Grant, Romana, and Martha Jones.

If the character of the Doctor has the knowledge of time travel and advanced science, then of course he can save Clara by sticking her in a stasis chamber conveniently located in the same room she's standing in when she's "dying." He's not an idiot, is he? But once again, in Face the Raven inconsistencies strike. Clara is no longer the "Impossible Girl" and the Doctor is not quite as clever as one would expect him to be in the situation.

I see why my British husband has stopped watching the new series altogether. He started watching the show when the first Doctor, William Hartnell, was on the air. The charm of the sci-fi/fantasy adventure has been bled away and replaced with dreary inconsistencies of a daytime drama. What could have been an interesting mystery story full of fascinating alien creatures languishes in the end with a downer demise of a controversial character who was never quite one thing or the other. The hero has become yet another soap opera character battered in the seas of angst, unable to engage his brain and come up with a solution when a challenges arises before the next commercial break.

It all leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Oh, well, perhaps when we hear the news the series is being moved to a daytime slot (next to the other soap operas) it won't hit us quite so hard.

What do you think? Please leave your comments below. And check out my reviews of earlier episodes of this season of Doctor Who:

Sleep No More
The Zygon Invasion

The Woman Who Lived

The Girl Who Died    
Before the Flood

Under the Lake

The Witch's Familiar

The Magician's Apprentice

Classic Who on Retro TV