I just got this today.  Alan did an awesome job.  For those of you who’ve read the book, this is a scene from aboard the French freighter, Antoine Henri, off the coast of Georgia.   

It is kind of cool as a writer to see the interpretation of something from your imagination by a professional artist for a book cover.  I take it back, it isn’t kinda cool, it is damn cool.

I was watching Sci-Fi last week when there was a commercial for a movie where there was more than one Noah’s Ark, and one of them was EVIL.  The movie was called Monster Ark, and I admit, I geeked out.

As you know, I’m a B-movie nerd, and overall monster geek.  Heck, I’ve written 2 monster based novels now, (yes, MHI:2 THE ROUGH DRAFT is almost done).  So when I heard that commerical, the wheels started turning.  Holy crap, what an awesome idea.  Imagine what you could do with an idea like that.  An ark filled with other animals that never made it.  Man, I could write one heck of a cool story off of that idea.

So I tuned in to the Sci-Fi Original Picture Presentation of Monster Ark, and like 95% of the Sci-Fi original pictures, it was pretty lame.  You would think that by now I would have learned my lesson.  If it is a Sci-Fi original picture it’s probably gonna suck.  There will be a lame CGI monster, some propane explosions, and random nameless people will suffer CGI death, with CGI blood, at the CGI claws of the CGI monster. 

And there was just one monster.  And it sucked.  No ark full of monsters. 

As usual, the producers couldn’t find a single person who had ever actually been in the military to consult and point out that soldiers don’t shoot their rifles from the hip, while yelling incoherantly, while wearing black in the desert, and screaming things like “Stand Down!” when nobody is actually doing anything that they might actually, you know, stand down from.  Tiny Lister played a major who actually yelled “Don’t you die on me, Boy!” after yelling for somebody to stand down, so the dialog was just awesome.

None of the movie actually makes a lot of sense, and you get the feeling that they just didn’t really care when they made it.  I’ve decided that caring is what seperates Good B-Movies from Bad B-Movies.  There are two moments that are supposed to ‘homages’ to Indiana Jones, except in one scene where the rip off the Map Room At Tanis scene, they just happen to be able to pull the heads off of two shovels, stick them together (like legos!) and the staff is the right length to show them where the… heck, I can’t even remember what the hell they were looking for at this point… was. 

Overall, just keep on walking.  I was only mildly entertained, and I’ve got low standards, and I was dehydrated and sunburned from teaching pistol, and when I’m that incoherant, I’ll go for just about anything.

FBMG is proud to announce that we’re raffling a gun to benefit breast cancer research.   All proceeds will be donated to the American Cancer Society.  The winner will be announced at our 3rd Annual fun shoot on October 4th. 

Tickets are $5 each.  They can be ordered in person at FBMG, online at http://www.fbmginc.com/Breast-Cancer-Raffle-AR-15_p_1-8969.html , paypal at slg2qcorreia@yahoo.com, or over the phone at (801) 571-1160.  Tickets will be on sale until October 4th. 

All federal, state, and local laws apply.  If the winner is not a Utah resident, then it is the winner’s responsibility to find an FFL for us to transfer the gun to.  The winner is responsible for all local transfer fees.  If the winner is a resident of a state with sucky gun laws, we’ll do what we can to make the gun compliant, but if you’re a resident of California or someplace equivelent, we can sell it for you and send you a check. 

FBMG has donated a Stag 15 rifle.  Our gunsmith, www.gundoctor.wordpress.com has done a custom pink Duracoat paint job.  The pictures above are not the finished product, as he still needs to touch it up and apply the final clear coat.  Once that is done we’ll do up some glamour shots, but the reaction was so great to the original posting that we had to hurry and put this up.

To all the gunbloggers who have linked to this, thank you.  This is for a great cause, and we’re looking forward to raising a bunch for charity.

We came up with this idea a little while ago.  My mother-in-law had just got done with chemotherapy, and we were talking about it at the shop.  Plus we’ve got our big event coming up on October 4th, and had been talking about doing some sort of charity to go along with that.

So we decided to take a Stag 15 and paint it pink, then raffle it off for Breast Cancer Research.  I took the gun back to my smith ( www.gundoctor.wordpress.com ) and told him what we were doing. He volunteered to do the Duracoating, but said that if he was going to do it, he was going to make it nice.  Turns out Joe’s family has been through this too. 

This is what we’ve got so far.  The camera wasn’t very good, and the job isn’t done yet.  He still needs to touch up and clear coat. We’ll post final pictures when I put up the raffle details probably first part of next week.

We’ll be raffling off tickets at $5 each.  Anybody can enter.  The winner will be announced at the October 4th Mega Fun Shoot.  All proceeds go to charity. I’ll post up the charity details when we put up the offical raffle next week.   All federal, state, and local laws apply.  I’ll also be begging other gunbloggers to post it.

UPDATE:  http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2008/08/04/the-pink-camo-breast-cancer-charity-gun-post/

I’ve got a counter on the right side, and I usually just kind of forget about it.  But today I noticed I’ve broken 200,000 hits.  Not bad for having started in September.  That’s 8 months.  That’s kind of nuts. 

I do check my stats all the time, but mostly because I always think it’s fun to see where people are coming from.  Plus I’m a self promoting son of a gun, and I’m always looking to see if anybody’s talking about Monster Hunter anywhere.