I got up this morning and saw that the charity red shirting is over $17,000. That’s awesome. I wasn’t sure how long I was going to leave this open, but I’m probably going to have to cut it off soon. Dave is putting together the information for me, but I’m betting this is going to be another one of those five years worth of names things again.

The next BOOK BOMB is for Peter Orullian’s Trial of Intentions. I’ll put up the link tonight because of Amazon’s time delay, so we should be able to see the numbers trending up when we officially start tomorrow morning. Great read, great dude. Big epic fantasy. I think you guys will really enjoy it.

It is Charity Red Shirt time again!

That is where if you donate enough money to a specific cause, I will use your name in a book. Details are below.

This time we are helping my friend Mitch with his medical bills. I’ve known him for about 20 years. Mitch suffers from spina bifida and has gone through a bunch of surgeries. This is to help him climb out of the hole. Here is the link.

https://www.gofundme.com/2m664f98

Let me tell you a little bit about Mitch. If you don’t care about the mushy bits about why I like the guy and just want to get redshirted, you can skip to the next section.

I got to know him back at Utah State. Despite having a serious medical condition he never let it get in the way of living life. He’s perpetually upbeat, obnoxiously honest, and just a really straight forward kind of dude. He’s doing standup comedy now, and yes, he is aware of the irony.

We used to paintball together and had a pretty good system. Because I was the strongest, Mitch and I were a team. We’d get a five minute head start before the match started, and then I’d carry him piggy back into the forest, find a good spot, and then drop Mitch on the ground. Dude could go low prone ninja crawl ambush with the best of them. Keep in mind this was twenty years ago, so if we tried that now, we would both probably die.

Back then Mitch did wheel chair racing. A racing chair is like this low slung, light weight, death sled. A few times Mitch decided to see how fast he could gol, and if you’ve ever been to Logan, Utah, you know there is a mountain pass called Sardine Canyon, and on the way out is a steep downhill slope that goes forever. Only a madman would want to ride a wheelchair down it. So obviously, Mitch did.

Because a racing chair is so much lower than a bicycle, cars tend not to see you until the handicapped guy is stuck in their grill. So if you’re going to fly down the shoulder of a highway in one of these things, it makes sense to have somebody right behind you in a vehicle, basically serving as your blocker. I volunteered to be the blocker.

So we’d take his truck to the top of the canyon, unload the death sled, Mitch takes off, and I’d follow (and apparently I was a better blocker than his roommate, who tended to tail gate, which I suppose is kind of terrifying). Best part, as I would be going 40 down the right lane of a two lane, other drivers would pass me in the left lane, always grumpy and scowling, like look at this slow ass jerk going slow on the downhill stupid ass—and then their expression would change when they realized I was protecting a guy in a wheelchair to—OMG I’m the worst person ever and I hate the handicapped I’m so ashamed.  Okay, I didn’t do that for Mitch. I did that to watch the other driver’s reactions. It was awesome.

Mitch was always so upbeat and can do about his health issues that his insensitive loutish friends would sometimes forget he had them. One time we drove my car up to the USU library. When we got to the parking lot, I drove right past all the handicapped spaces. Mitch says “Hey, Larry, just park there. I brought my placard.” And my response as I absent mindedly drove to a space on the far side of the lot was “I can’t do that! Those spots are for the handicapped.” And he’s pointing to his legs like “Dude.”

He’s a good guy who has spent his life helping others, and now I want to do something nice for him. Medical bills are expensive and Mitch has been through the wringer for years. Our mutual friend Dave set this up when he found out how far in the hole Mitch is.

This is not tax deductible. This isn’t through a 501c3. It is just a couple of guys raising money for their buddy.

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Rules of the Red Shirting

If you donate $150, or you donate less but win the raffle, then I will use your name in an upcoming novel. (You can donate more too if you like, because Mitch will just use it to pay off bills).

When you do this, you’ll need to provide some information. At minimum I need your name. If you would like to include a brief bio and description, that’s awesome too. On that info, and this is super important, I can’t promise what will or will not make it into the books.  I can’t promise which book you will appear in. I can’t promise how long it will take. All I can promise is that your name will appear.

A few years ago I raffled off a bunch of charity red shirtings to pay for a local kid’s kidney dialysis until he could get his transplant. We got so many that it took me almost five years to get through all of the names. The reason I can do this again now is that the last of the charity redshirts from last time will be appearing in Monster Hunter Siege (and David Gerecht turned out to be a bad ass Monster Hunter from Maccabeus Security).

Other questions, are you willing to appear in any of my books, or do you want to hold out for Monster Hunter? If you’ve got a specific universe you love that you want to hold out for, that’s cool (Dead Six is done, but there is another Grimnoir trilogy planned. Somebody asked about being one of Madigan’s Malcontents, yes, there is one more of those planned but your name would have to fit that universe’s style. If your name is Johnson I probably can’t fit you into the sequel to Son of the Black Sword, but if your name is Chandrasekhar we’re good to go). I know everybody would love to be a heroic badass with lots of speaking parts, but that isn’t going to happen. You could be Fry Clerk #3 and die poorly.

I tried to gauge interest for this project the other day, and lots of people were setting conditions. Nope. So I posted the following on Facebook to try and explain how this works:

For the people saying they’ll donate X if I do at least Y… Ain’t gonna happen. All I can promise is that your name will be used for a character. I’ll try to work in requests, and I’ve done pretty good in the past, but I can’t write books based around the personal wishes of a hundred people.

That said, I do try. And quite a few pivotal characters over the years have been for charity redshirts. Some got recurring speaking roles. Others got big scenes where I worked in how they actually look and things they like. The new head of the MCB and STFU were both charity redshirts. Several recurring members of MHI were charity redshirts. All of Briarwood were chairity redshirts (and Lococo ended up coming back for more books)

Others, they were mentioned once and then got hit by a truck. Or they were mentioned once, and got eaten by a werewolf. 

This may also take a while. The last time I did this was leading up to Monster Hunter Nemesis. I got so many charity red shirtings that we paid for a kid’s kidney dialysis until he could get a transplant, but I didn’t get to the last charity redshirt until Monster Hunter Siege, which I’m working on currently.

(this would have gone faster if some of you had Indian names for Son of the Black Sword, but oh no… I had to figure out how to stick eleven white guys named David into one book).

Yes. This writing thing can be challenging. And rule #1 is the books have to be awesome, so that comes first.

Sometimes your name just doesn’t fit, so I’ll have to wait until it does. Names have to sound right for corresponding characters. Other times your scene will end up on the cutting room floor (which is what happened to the guys showing up now in Siege, because I couldn’t fit that extra scene into Nemesis for Franks to kill them)

If you specifically want to wait for MHI, you’re going to have to wait longer. If you’re willing to be in any of my books… Who knows. Beats me. But most of the English speaking supporting cast of the later Grimnoir novels were charity red shirts. Including most of the OCI staff who got murdered by Heinrich. Great death scene… And others got mentioned once and then fell off a blimp. So no promises.

 

And let me add, I’ll also reject any really stupid made up names. Because I know how you guys operate.  Though come to think of it, there is always Tom Stranger…

So there you go, charity redshirts for a good cause.

First, forgive the lack of blogging. Monster Hunter Siege is due by Christmas. I’m on track to hit that, but I’m in that super focused working like crazy, book is coming together stage. Which sort of consumes your life.

Also, another piece of land came up for sale next to Yard Moose Mountain, so we swooped in on that. And we’re in the planning stage for building a house up there (want to break ground in the spring, fingers crossed), but in the meantime we’ve got wells to dig, lots of prep, and a half a mile of driveway to put in, so it is kind of a crazy project.

In a note totally unrelated to me building my mountain dream estate, it was brought to my attention yesterday that the Guardian’s Village Idiot has not written an article there since that one bashing me (on my birthday no less!) back in August, and that on his Wikipedia page (yes, I too was shocked he rated one) he was a “former” Guardian reporter. It would appear that after years of him lying about me, crowd sourcing witch hunts, and writing about how I’ve “irreparably damaged” my career, I still have a job, and he doesn’t.

(If you don’t know what this is about, for your reading enjoyment, go up to the search bar on this blog and type in “Village Idiot”. There’s a bunch of fiskings. It’s a hoot. Journalism has been diminished by this tragic loss of talent)

On Monday the 24th I will be putting up a link to a GoFundMe page for a friend of mine to help pay for some of severe medical issues. Donate over a certain amount and I will use your name in an upcoming book. Details to follow on Monday.

Our next BOOK BOMB is on Wednesday the 26th (which means it will actually go live Tuesday night). I will be Book Bombing my friend Peter Orullian, who is a fantastic author, with the best heavy metal hair in the business (sorry, Jim Butcher, you are 2nd).

I’m running way behind on planned Book Bombs. After Peter Orullian, I’ve got BBs planned for Peter Grant, David Coe, and Brian Durfee. I try to do these once a month, but that whole writing books thing keeps getting in the way of my plans.

I’m back from New York City and playing catch up. I just need to point something out. If you look to the right side of this blog you’ll see a counter. That’s when you need to get your Christmas Noun book preorder in before we cut it off.

https://mhiswag.myshopify.com/

The glossy book, nice prints, and cards are probably going to be a limited time only project, because I don’t know if we’re going to be doing future runs of this. (We might, but it just depends on how popular/profitable it turns out to be).

And to demonstrate why you need this in your life, here is some sample art from Christmas Noun 4: Occupy Christmas Noun (2011) which I believe is the first ever appearance of the now famous Wendell T. Manatee.

Alliance of Shadows is out today! It is the final book in the trilogy that began with Dead Six, and was continued in Swords of Exodus.

##
I posted the following back in July when I finished the final edits on this book, but figured I would copy it over again for those who didn’t see it, because how these books came to exist is really kind of a cool story. 

These books came about in a really odd and interesting way.

Back when I was working on the first MHI, I was a moderator on a popular gun forum called The High Road.

There was another member there named Mike Kupari. I had never met him in person, and only knew him from his THR posts.

In 2006 he started writing an online fiction serial called Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler. He would write a scene, and then post it on the forum that day. The next day, another scene.

Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler was a thriller about mercenaries in the Persian Gulf. Mike had just gotten back from working there as a contractor, so he knew the area and really nailed the vibe, but his job had been uneventful guarding stuff kind of work.  Mr. Nightcrawler was the stylized action hero version he started working on when he was bored.

It was pretty popular. The forumites were really enjoying it. I started reading the serial posts, and it was really good. This Kupari guy could really write. Then I got to this scene where his mercenary character Valentine takes out a terrorist financer, it was awesome, but it got my writer brain turning. And I came up with an idea about one of the bystanders.

So I started thinking about the scene from the perspective of somebody who was there to rob the bad guys. What the heck, I wrote it up. That was how Lorenzo was born.

http://www.thehighroad.org/archive/index.php/t-207390.html

Keep in mind, I’d not published anything yet at this point, so Mike didn’t know me from Adam. So I sent him a message, said hey, I’m a wannabe writer too.  I just wrote a novel about monster hunters. You inspired this scene set in your world. Do you mind if I post it to your thread?

Fortunately, Mike took it as a compliment, and said go ahead. I posted it to the serial thread.

The readers went nuts. My scene integrated so well that they all assumed we had been planning it that way from the beginning.

So Mike and I got to talking. Neither of us were professionals at that point. We didn’t have a clue what we were doing. But by golly, people were reading it and enjoying it. So what the heck? He’d keep writing his serial, and I’d keep writing my side story. Let’s see where it went.

So then Mike would post another scene the next day. Then I would write up a couple thousand words from my character’s perspective and post the next day. Then Mike would read what I wrote, and post up another scene from his character’s PoV. We were going so fast there was no proof reading and hardly any planning at all.

The fans loved it.

At some point Mike and I realized that if this story was going to have a coherent plot, we really should figure out where it was going. Both of us had just been pantsing it based on what the other guy had written the day before. So we started brainstorming where this thing was going to end up.

What people don’t realize is that during that initial brainstorming for Mr. Nightcrawler, we would also come up with the basic plot for what would eventually turn into Swords of Exodus and Alliance of Shadows.

Over the course of that summer Mike and I wrote a hundred thousand words of on the fly fiction. By some miracle Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler actually worked out great, everything came together, and it had a satisfactory conclusion. By the end we had thousands of people hooked on the serial.

The best thing about that for me was I now had a couple thousand people in one place who knew I could write, and hey, look at this… I just so happen to have this novel I’m conveniently self-publishing soon you guys can throw money at. That led to MHI having some fantastic sales for a self-published novel (this was before the eBook revolution, so we’re talking about $20 Print on Demand paperbacks), one of the serial readers introduced me to Uncle Hugos, which is how a PoD paperback wound up on a national bestseller list, Uncle Hugos is how I met Toni at Baen, and the rest is history.

During this Mike and I started working on the next serial idea which would turn into Swords of Exodus and Alliance of Shadows. We decided this one was going to be epic. (Uh yeah, since neither one of us knew what we were doing, the plot of this “little serial” actually ended up around 350,000 words over two novels). I wrote a bunch of Lorenzo’s half of what would turn into SoE, but we never ended up posting it on the gun forums, because stuff got kind of crazy.

During all of this I owned a gun store in Utah, and anybody who owns their own small business knows that consumes your life. Mike (who I still hadn’t met in person) came out to Utah for a change of scenery, and ended up moving here. The first time I met the guy who I’d basically written a book with was when he stopped by my shop.

And when it turned out he was super good at selling guns, we ended up working together. Sure, he didn’t get paid much, but then again, neither did I most of the time. We ended up teaching pistol classes together. Long story short, Mike has been one of my best friends ever since.

I sold the rights to MHI to Baen and discontinued the self-published version. A year and a half went by before the Baen version came out. My really limited writing time was spent on MHV, so the plan for the SoE online serial kind of fell by the wayside. Mike, who had been in the Army before, joined the Air Force and went to EOD school. Burned out of the gun store, I sold my shares to my partner in 2008, and for four months I was unemployed wannabe writer guy (which was when I wrote Hard Magic) until I found a military contracting job.

In 2009 the Baen version of MHI came out and did shockingly well. I was selling well enough that Baen wanted more books from me. So I got to thinking… What about Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler? It was way too rough to just publish it as it was, it would take a lot of work to really clean it up, but it was one hell of a story.

Keep in mind, Mike was kind of busy right about then (I’ll get to that in a second), but he was game. So we cleaned the heck out of Mr. Nightcrawler (and both of us were more experienced writers by this point) and it turned into Dead Six. (It was now nearly twice as long too). Toni thought it was great and picked it up.

It came out in 2011. Remember when I said Mike was kind of busy? He’s the only author I know who had his first book signing at a FOB in Afghanistan.

We still had the story we had come up with for the second serial, and I’d already written a bunch of my half. So Mike dove into that and we finished off Swords of Exodus. It came out in 2013.

It took us a while to wrap up the last book considering we had the basic plot figured out nearly TEN YEARS AGO! One reason is that between SoE and AoS, by popular demand, Mike launched his solo career with the excellent space opera Her Brother’s Keeper. (Seriously, buy it. Great book)

Last week we heard back from Baen, the final edits were in and done for Alliance of Shadows. The eARC will be out soon. The book will be on shelves everywhere in October.

That is the end of one heck of a creative journey.

I’m proud of this book. I’m proud of my coauthor. I think you guys are really going to enjoy it.