Super Authors Super Mega Book Signing Tomorrow. Super!

Tomorrow night from 6-8 at Sam Wellers in SLC, I’ll be doing a book signing with a whole bunch of bad mamba-jambas of the writing world. Including:

Tracy Hickman

Eric Flint

Kevin J. Anderson

Rebecca Moesta

Brandon Sanderson

Dan Wells

Jessica Day George

Brad Torgersen

Eric James Stone

Mary Robinette Kowal

Some dude that looks like James Gandolfini and has written some books about monsters, another one about the 1930s only with more dirigibles, and a thriller about some guys doing stuff in the middle east with lots of expolsions, or something.

AND MORE!

As in there are probably others that I don’t even know about. There are a bunch of best sellers on that list. So come on down to Sam Wellers book store in downtown Salt Lake City. Inevitably when I go downtown I get accosted by crazy homeless people, so a fun time will be had by all!

Fascinating look behind the scenes of the evolution of a book cover

Recently I posted the final cover artwork for the thriller Dead Six, coming out in October 2011 by me and Mike Kupari. I also posted a bunch of the final badge logos so you can see what we were choosing from. Well, if you want to see some of the other things that Kurt worked through to get to the final, go here:

http://www.kmistudio.com/blog/index.php/gallery/image_full/203/

He read the book and then consulted with me and Mike for our opinions. He worked up Photoshop roughs of a wide variation of designs, some that were action scenes from the book, others that were kind of a movie poster montage showing the two characters. One of the things that came about was the whole black/white duality. Some of these had pictures of Valentine and Lorenzo, while others were just their guns.

Once Kurt had a selection of ideas, he ran them past our editor, Toni Weiskopf at Baen. Toni then picked the style that she liked the best. One thing to keep in mind that I didn’t when I was picking my personal favorite, is that Baen is known as a sci-fi/fantasy publisher, so they need to be careful to differentiate their thriller covers. Hence the simplified version with just the guns. (which, by the way, are accurate for the characters)

Once Toni had decided on the style, it went back to me and Mike for our opinions. That was when the D6 badge got jazzed up. Kurt worked up several, Mike and I picked our favorites, and then Toni picked one of those.

Cool huh? Now you know how book covers work. Well, not really as it is different every time. 🙂

Understanding media, or why are you right-wingers so filled with hate?

It is time to help out my racist/hick/red-state/hate-monger readership again. Some of you have been confused by the media coverage of yesterday’s tragic shooting. As a “wise Latino” who understands the media, let me help you:

A left-wing, Communist Manifesto reading, schizophrenic, nut-bar, dirt bag that posts obviously deranged YouTube videos about mind control, who has no association with the Tea Party, shoots a congresswoman = SARAH PALIN IS EVIL

Yes, that can be confusing. I know. Bear with me. Remember the last time we went over this kind of thing:

A Muslim in the US Army, after preaching Jihad and corresponding with Al Queda in Yemen, goes on a shooting rampage while screaming “Allah Akbar” = NOT TERRORISM

Clear?

I know you may be thinking that the correct thing to do here is to take the assassin, try him, and execute him accordingly, but that would be incorrect. The proper thing to do is pin the whole thing on the people that the media don’t like first.

Remember:

Tea Party movement is about how regular Americans are sick of paying too much in taxes and the government is too big and ineffectual = SETTING A DANGEROUS AND VIOLENT TONE

Making a movie about the assassination of George Bush = ART

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Okay, I’m ticked. You know it is time for a political blog post when you get to sleep in on a Sunday morning and you still wake up angry.

Why am I mad?

Because I am sick and tired, because I’m a gun owner, for being blamed every single time a nut job goes on a rampage. But at least I’m used to it. I was a gun rights activist back when Bill Clinton was president. We’ve been blamed for every whackadoo, schizophrenic, off his meds, mopey-ass nitwit crying for attention that has ended up on the news.

It never mattered that people like me and the people that I trained were the last line of defense against these types. It never even mattered when it was a CCW holder that stopped the shooting. That part usually didn’t get mentioned.

But we got used to it. Gun people see it coming. We expect it as soon as we hear that there has been another senseless murder on the news. We know that we are going to get maligned and vilified by a media that only cares about pushing an agenda (and gun control was liberal cause #1 back in the 90s) and not that their 24/7 coverage and insta-stardom for the bad guy is going to spur copycats, but that’s okay, because like I said, we are used to being the bad guy.

So…  How do the rest of you feel now?

See, now it isn’t just us gun owners, it is the entire right leaning half of the country. It is the one third of the nation that belongs to the Tea Party. This shooting yesterday? The media declared it was your fault, your hatred, your bitterness, that set it off. They were open and blunt about it before the facts came in, and once the facts were out, the mainstream toned it down to just insinuation while the lefty fringe got even crazier.

I wasn’t even paying attention until I stupidly took a break from writing (ironically, about an incident involving a lone nut assassin in 1933) and went onto Facebook where I discovered that there had been a shooting and that it had been caused by (in order of evil):  Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, Arizonans in favor of closing the border, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party, and easy access to guns… Whew. My people came in last for once!  

So I looked into it, fully expecting the shooter to be some right-wing crazy spouting off Ayn Rand.

Nope. Not even close. But I forgot. Reality doesn’t matter.

Right after the shooting, before anyone knew what was going on, so early that the president himself didn’t even know if the congresswoman was deceased or not, the Daily Kos (the mixed nut selection par excellence) ran an article about how this was Sarah Palin’s fault because Giffords was one of the members of congress she had “targeted”.

Targeted. Yes, to get voted out of office. I missed the part about shooting them. 

Apparently, we are no longer allowed to use any words that can be construed as weapons related. The chain of stores known as Target will henceforth be called Big Red More Expensive Walmart.

Oh, but Correia, surely Sarah Palin was calling for VIOLENCE with such careless use of words.

Okay…

If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun. – Barack Obama (in a lame attempt to sound like Sean Connery) during the fight for Obamacare.

I had one Facebook idiot (Hi, Bob Snare!) who has since unfriended me so I can’t find the quote, say how Sarah Palin was bad because she called the shooting a tragedy. He said that she couldn’t call for violence and then have it both ways! 

Uhm… What? That’s loopy as hell right there. I pointed out that she hadn’t called for violence (outside of in the imagination of lefties where us evil conservatives are going to round them all up and put them in reeducation camps run by Jerry Falwell) and besides the shooter turned out to be a schizophrenic nut-weasel. (I watched his YouTube videos yesterday… wow. Just wow).

We went back and forth, with me typing on my iPhone. The shooter wasn’t even from my side of the political spectrum! I pointed out that among the assassin’s  favorite books were the Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.

I was told that there were other books on there too…

Yes, but there aren’t a lot of Tea Partiers with the Communist friggin’ Manifesto in their FAVORITES list. I read the Communist Manifesto once, mostly so I could argue with morons more effectively, but it sure as hell wouldn’t make my favorites list. (It is horrid) Nor would it make the favorites list of anybody who listened to Sarah Palin so intently that they’d go shoot somebody for her.

Then various liberals jumped on said that the Bible was responsible for the most killings of all (actually, I’m pretty sure Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Imperial Japan edge out Jesus and the Crusades by a good margin) and then somebody else had a giant rambling bunch of BS about how Communism and Nazism are both exactly like being conservative today, and how they are nothing like being liberal… He also used a bunch of big words to display his academic prowess, though he used several of them wrong. (for the record, I’ve written two books on the 1930s… Don’t try to spout off about historical political theory to impress me, because you are probably going to look like an idiot).  

I was told to shut up and **** off. All in caps. Like he was screaming it while ineffectually punching at his crying pillow. (it smells of lilacs… and shame) Man, I wish I could access that quote, because it was comedy gold.  Basically, children are dead! I was told that I have a blog and to take my “right wing ideologies” there because I wasn’t welcome on his and that people would listen to me because I have “bestsellers” and he actually put bestsellers in quotes.

(for the record, I’ve now made 4 different national bestseller lists on multiple occasions, top 25 on Amazon and #4 in the country on Nielsen Bookscan in my genre, and the big dog, the NYT… so I don’t really think the quotes are necessary, Bub)

He told me to take it to my blog.

My pleasure.

Then he posted this to my page:  During his campaign effort to unseat Giffords, GOP challenger Jesse Kelly held fundraisers where he urged supporters to help remove Giffords from office by joining him to shoot an M-16. “I don’t see the connection,” said John Ellinwood, Kelly’s spokesman. “I don’t know this person, we cannot find any records that he was associated with the campaign in any way.” John Ellinwood is clearly an idiot.

Okay. So because somebody else shot a gun at some point in time, that is clearly what motivated the shooter that didn’t listen to nor had any association with the people that shot the gun. If he had asked them to help him shoot an M-16 AT SOMEBODY, then I could see the issue.

Bob, you are an idiot. You are a half-wit, slobbering moron. My brain will not allow me to descend to a level of dumb sufficient to form a response that you will understand.  For everybody else, M-16s are a lot of fun to shoot. (not a lot of fun to carry around all day with crap bolted to them). To most regular people, guns are a normal part of life. We use them. They are fun. Politicians like things that are fun, because then they can use said fun things to raise money.

Only in la-la land can you stretch that far and still sound credible. The rest of us just scratch our heads and feel kind of sorry for you.

Once upon a time, after ObamaCare was passed, Nancy Pelosi said that the founding fathers would be pleased. The response I put on this blog was “Bitch, George Washington would run you through with his sword.”   So by the media’s demented reasoning, if Nancy Pelosi ever gets murdered, it would be my fault.

An Arizona sheriff(you get one guess where he falls on the whole secure the border thing) issued a statement yesterday saying that “Arizona has become a Mecca for prejudice and bigotry”.

What is with these people? Do they wait for something awful to happen so that they can harness it to whatever their pet issue is? Yes. The white congresswoman and a bunch of white people were shot by a crazy white guy because of prejudice against Mexicans. Do these idiots ever listen to themselves? Wait… shouldn’t the sheriff have to apologize for using the word Mecca in a negative light?

I read repeatedly yesterday about how Glenn Beck has been calling for violence… Really? Has he ever actually done that? Or has that just been repeated over and over again on the left as some sort of mantra until it has become their truth?  Here’s the thing. I listen to Glenn Beck on my morning commute because it is one of the only stations I can get up in the mountains. I’m not a Beck defender nor am I a huge fanboy (mostly because a lot of the stuff he’s saying now I was called crazy for saying ten years ago, so it is kind of old news. Welcome to the party, Brother Beck).  Beck is the opposite of calling for violence. He’s railed on it over and over, and he’s terrified that somebody on our side will do something stupid. He’s asked people to pray for the safety of our elected officials.

That sure sounds like a call for violence to me.

This whole thing ticks me off, though it shouldn’t. I should know better. I should know it is coming.  I’m tired of the media talking about average Americans on my side of the fence like we’re just simmering and ready to explode, while Black Panthers threatening people with clubs get a pass.  I’m tired of union leaders being caught on tape talking about using violence and intimidation as a valid political tool getting zero coverage, while people on my side are maligned for things they didn’t say.

None of this is new. Crazies have been killing politicians since they were tossing black powder bombs under their carriages. The only reason Roosevelt lived long enough to become president only because Gieseppe Zanagara (who believed evil capitalists had cursed him with a disease that caused flatulence) was short and had to stand on a wobbly chair to see over the crowd.

The victims are the people that got killed or injured. The villain is the person that shot them, not regular America, no matter how fervently the press wishes it would be.

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EDIT: I just got an e-mail with a link where it was pointed out by a random illiterate internet moron that my facts were wrong and “cringe-worthy” when I said that the Crusades had killed fewer people than various modern political ideologies because the Crusades went on a really looong time. Nope. Read a book sometime. Population density was much lower then.  In fact, even if I take the highest estimated death toll numbers for all the Crusades put together that I can find, Stalin by himself would probably still win.

I made the Locus Bestseller list again

http://www.locusmag.com/Magazine/2011/Issue01_Bestsellers.html

Cool. MHV came out a few months ago, but it is still hanging in there and selling well. I have no idea how Locus calculates their list, but I was #5.  Which is odd, because I sold a much higher number of books during the release month (October, when I made the New York Times bestseller list) but I didn’t show up on Locus then, but Bookscan had MHV as the #4 fantasy novel in the country. 

I don’t know how these bestseller lists work. They’re like voodoo or something.  Maybe they hired that octopus that predicted the World Cup. I don’t know.

So both of my released novels have made the Locus list. Let’s see if we can get Hard Magic on there next. Maybe one of these days Locus will review/mention me.

Oh, and writing update. There are not going to be three Larry Correia releases in 2011. There are going to be FOUR.  TGC:1 in May, MHA in August, D6 in October, and TGC:2 in November. EDITED for clarity. I forgot that it is 2011 already. 🙂

Yep. Things are hopping around here. 🙂

I was the #1 bestseller at Uncle Hugo's in 2010

http://unclehugo-edgar.livejournal.com/182316.html  Though Lois Bujold took me in dollars, what with her fancy hard covers. But still, if you’re going to lose, you might as well lose to somebody that awesome. 🙂

Uncle Hugo’s is one of the biggest stores in the country. They are who introduced me to Baen back when I was self-published, and if you recall, that’s where I steered the blog traffic for autographed copies when MHV came out. I’ll be flying out there in May to sign a bunch of hard covers of Hard Magic too.