Good morning (good morning!)

We've slept the whole night through...

Well considering I started this morning by dropping my laptop onto our wooden kitchen floor (Thank you, Laptop Gods for letting me escape with no damage... and thank you to Lenovo for hard drive shock protection!) things got a lot better as soon as I checked my email.

Another message from Steve Zink over at Maskingwriter was first. Steve's a fellow author who I know appreciates the value of commenting on stories (and whose prodigious output I will probably never match). If you've never read any of his stuff then frankly, why the heck are you still here - get over to SuperStories and read all 100 (!!) of his published pieces on there immediately.

Second, I heard from another author who I'm not going to name write now, as they are working on a new piece of mask fiction... we've been batting emails back and forth about it and OH MY GOD I WANT TO READ IT RIGHT NOW DAMMIT. Those of you who know my tastes may have an idea of what kind of thing I'm hoping for... and I'm sure none of us will be disappointed. Believe me, if this thing turns out good I'm going to be shouting from the rooftops.

Speaking of rooftops and shouting (??) my third email was from Andy Rodriguez, who is the owner and principal creator at New Phoenix Filmworks.

(Long aside to set the scene: New Phoenix is an outfit I've had my eye on for quite a while; they make superheroine short films. Now, I've been a subscriber to a number of superheroine sites over the years, most notably Superheroine's Demise, but frankly I've never been happy with any of them... the primary reason I want to look at this stuff is for transformation scenes (Surprise! Not) and generally, they're just not on the agenda; it's usually the euphemistically termed 'peril' that superheroine sites are primarily concerned with. I'm repeating myself here - go read this previous post if you want to know more of my thoughts on this.

Anyway, to finish setting the scene, I've exchanged emails with superheroine site webmasters before where I've basically said "Hey, you know, doing transformation stuff will probably get you a whole new audience!" and been told "I know my business and if I had a dime for that" etc. While I'm sure these people do know their current business, they're missing a trick with new business, and that was what bugged me. End of lengthy aside.)

So basically I purchased a movie from New Phoenix recently (more on that in a moment) because I was hoping for some nice transformations; the trailer certainly seemed to contain a few. In the end while there wasn't as much as I was hoping for, the movie was fun and I was happy I spent the money... so I started thinking I might buy some more, but wanting to see where I'd be best placed to spend my cash I drop the New Phoenix folks a line. And got a reply from Andy, which I thought was cool; he seems to belong to the same school of thought as me, which is that while the customer might not always be right, they deserve to be listened to!

But here's the best part; Andy actually listened to my idea (which, unsurprisingly, was "Hey, how about more transformation stuff??") and entertained it. Here's a man who knows if there's one person asking for something, perhaps there's ten behind him who are also interested, but aren't saying anything. While he certainly hasn't promised anything yet (although he's teasing me, dammit) he at least considered the idea... which is more than I got from other webmasters I could mention. So we'll see.

Back to the movie I bought briefly, before I go; I picked up Retrogirl 4: Nightmare, which was quite a bit of fun. While the production values aren't exactly $100m Hollywood movie, everyone involved took it seriously, Andy's script is fun (with a nice, genuine twist) and the cast are pleasing on the eye... especially the lead, Megan Redstone, who looks fantastic in her Batgirl style Retrogirl costume. Yeah, bet you ain't surprised I went for that movie....

Anyway, keep an eye on New Phoenix, folks. They have plenty of back catalogue material, and you can watch trailers for almost all of their movies on YouTube. In particular check out PowerCat 3 - it's due out in a couple of weeks, according to Andy, and damn, if that evil impostor theme isn't giving me ideas. Lots of ideas....