My co-editor on the Monster Hunter Files has a new thriller out now. This isn’t a Book Bomb because I’ve not read it yet, but I have read snippits that are really good.  (and me and Jonathan Maberry might even show up as police detectives!)

Simon Says

 

It has been another busy month here on Yard Moose Mountain.

Book Release Aftermath Stuff:

My last regular release was Monster Hunter Guardian in August with Sarah Hoyt. I got some numbers for that, and it did awesome. I am very pleased.  On Nielsen Bookscan (the most comprehensive bestseller list) in fantasy the only things we lost to were Good Omens (two of the most popular authors ever with a new hit TV show) and James Patterson (who holds the world’s record for #1 bestsellers). So I’ll take it! 😀

I couldn’t figure out why my overall Amazon author rank didn’t jump much though. Usually when a new MHI book comes out I end up in the top ten. It wasn’t until two months later that I realized Amazon didn’t have Guardian listed as one of my books for some bizarre reason. It’s fixed now. (honestly, the only real point of ending up that high on the author list is so you can take screen caps of which big shot you are next to for bragging rights!)

Then Invisible Wars came out. This is an omnibus collection of the Dead Six novels with Mike Kupari. Omnibuses are interesting, in that they’re this oddball product, but I really like them. The Monster Hunters one has made me a surprisingly large amount of money over the years.

One note on Invisible Wars though, because it’s a collection and people have already reviewed the books, it only has a couple of reviews on Amazon so far. And one of those is a one star because the guy loved the books, but zinged it because Amazon labeled it wrong. Thanks man, but the giant soulless megacorporation don’t care. All reviews like that (or my other favorite, UPS damaged the package, one star) only punish the authors by lowering our overall ranking.

So if you guys who’ve read the Dead Six series get a chance, would you please go post a review? That’s always super helpful.

My next release is Target Rich Environment 2  in December. This is the 2nd volume of my collected short fiction. I love these. I love writing short stories. And for me it is a lot of fun to bounce all over between different universes in one collection. There’s MHI, Grimnoir, Forgotten Warrior, some original stand alones, and then I got to play in other people’s worlds, like Joe Ledger, Freehold, Alien, and Predator. All in one volume.

Plus on the cover, I look like Dad of War and my super hot wife is in a fur bikini.  So basically the best cover ever. 😀

Book Stuff: 

I’m almost done with Destroyer of Worlds, the 3rd book in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior (Son of the Black Sword and House of Assassins). I am really pleased with how this one turned out. The rough draft is mostly finished. All I’ve got left is the final battle sequence, which I’m not going to give any spoilers for.

I believe our release date for this one is Fall 2020.

Both of the previous two in the series have won the Dragon Award, which is awesome, and I appreciate that, but you guys really need to nominate somebody else. Share the love. I got mine. I’m doing awesome. Other authors could use the boost.

Normally when I finish a rough draft I then take a break and work on some short stories for a few weeks. That way when I go back to edit I’m no longer so close to the manuscript that I miss dumb things.

Up next I need to do a short story for the LibertyCon anthology in honor of Uncle Timmy Bolgeo, and a short bit for an anthology Christopher Ruocchio is putting together.

Once the final Destroyer of Worlds is turned in then I will be working on the sci-fi collaboration with John D. Brown. John finished the rough a while ago, and has been patiently waiting for me to meet my other pressing deadlines so I can do my thing. I appreciate that. John is one hell of a good writer, so I’m really excited for this one.

There’s a bunch more stuff in the pipeline after that. More MHI, more Grimnoir (new trilogy), more Forgotten Warrior, and another planned dark fantasy collaboration with Steve Diamond.

Related Book Stuff: 

The MHI Savage Worlds RPG has been shipping! Yay!

As many of you (and everybody who backed this project) know we got hit with some big delays because Savage Worlds switched to a new edition during our project. So we were stuck, release a dated product with the old rules, or wait for the new edition.

We decided to wait for the new edition, and I’m glad we did. I think it came out beautiful.

Once that’s all caught up I really want to Kickstart Gritty Cop Show, but RPG stuff is just a fun side project for me. Regular book writing has to come first.

Also, related, the Vault Books limited edition Grimnoirs. Hard Magic has shipped and they are working on Spellbound. There are still some available for sale. These are truly the prettiest books I’ve ever seen.

I’ve got a couple other secret projects in the works, but nothing I can talk about yet.

No new updates on the TV show options. They renewed, which is nice. So I’m still getting paid to do basically nothing, which is also very nice.

Personal Stuff:

Life is good.

One of my coauthors and best friends is getting married this weekend. Congratulations, Mike and Cathe. You guys are amazing and we’re all really excited for you.

We’re still unpacking boxes at Yard Moose Mountain. I got some help from the USU Extension office and we’re going to be planting a bunch of native plants in all the parts the construction tore up. And also the range, because my range is gigantic, I need to prevent erosion, and also needed something that wouldn’t catch on fire during the summer.

Some excellent news, we sold our old house. Yay! We bought and built when the market was down, so we made a pretty darn good profit on it.  Selling a house is a pain, but we had an awesome realtor. If you are in northern Utah I unreservedly recommend Cade Erickson.  He’s sold two houses for me now in ten years, and found us our last house, and the property that would become Yard Moose Mountain.

I mentioned this in the last update, but we got puppy, Panzerfaust the Krasnovian Waffle Hound (or Booflehund in his native language). Holy moly I forgot what a pain the ass puppies are. He’s a wonderful, happy, fun little floof, but my gosh potty training sucks. I’m having flash backs to our actual babies. But he’s–slowly–coming along.

Faust is a lot of fun though.  It’s a good thing dogs have the whole unconditional love thing going for them, because otherwise it would be tempting to just leave him out at 2:00 AM for the coyotes.

And thankfully the other giant time suck in our lives, high school football, the season is almost over. Don’t get me wrong. It’s a lot of fun to watch (my son is a 6’4″ 240 pound Freshman and all around beast) but my poor wife spends a lot of time driving back and forth for practices. Football is a giant time suck and I’m looking forward to this kid getting his driver’s license.

It’s weird having your kids get old. I’ve got one in college being a responsible adult (and published author!). The next one has a job and will be in college soon. That’s nuts. I don’t feel old enough to have adult children.

This is the complete omnibus of all three Dead Six novels (and two bonus short stories!)  and it is available now!

 

Here’s a fascinating demonstration of just how stupid and backwards the political gatekeepers in fiction really are.

This week author Dan Simmons wrote a post about Greta the Climate Scold, and because his opinion went against left wing orthodoxy, a bunch of virtue signalling morons threw a fit.

For those of you not familiar with Dan Simmons, I’ve said this before here, I think he is one of the most talented writers alive. My first exposure to him was Hyperion. I was in college, and dating Bridget. She was already a fan, couldn’t believe I hadn’t read it, and loaned me Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion. A week later I got Endymion and Rise of Endymion out of the library. They are amazing, big imagination, huge universe, crazy (multi)world building, stories.  They are considered classic works of sci-fi for a reason.

(I learned a lot about how to write big casts of interesting characters each doing their own thing while that was somehow connected to everybody else from Dan Simmons. Kassad and Ashok would probably get along really well)

Personally, I like Olympos and Illium even better. They have the most batshit crazy plot synopsis I’ve ever heard of. It’s the battle of Troy on Mars, with space gods, and post-apocalyptic Earth has dinosaurs and Jews menaced by killer Muslim robot pods and a giant brain thing, and monster characters from Shakespeare run a space station, as narrated by a reborn history teacher, and a robot from Jupiter who really loves to quote Proust… and Dan Simmons MAKES THIS ALL WORK.

Also, The Terror is just fantastic. It’s this moody, historical piece, where he makes being trapped in ice the most menacing thing ever, and then it gets really really weird. Then he’s got classics like Song of Kali, which is straight up scary ass horror, or Carrion Comfort (which Stephen King called one of the best three novels of the century).

So basically, Dan Simmons is really freaking good at his job. You might even say by the harshest standards of the literary snoots, he’s a *real* writer. They even used to give him Hugos back when those meant something.

Well, he used to be a *real* writer, but then Dan Simmons made the unpardonable sin of having public opinions that went against the mandatory left wing orthodoxy of publishing. After 9-11 he wrote a short story where a time traveler from the future comes to our time to warn us about an Islamic Caliphate… and the woke scolds declared that to be super bad islamophobia and totally unrealistic right wing hatemongery (even though it was basically ISIS’ mission statement a few years later)

Then this week, Dan Simmons had the audacity to have an opinion that was different that all good thinking, proper, authors should…. and thus he must be destroyed. What did he do this time? Unfortunately, like most reasonable adults, Dan Simmons was not impressed by a teenager throwing a rather impassioned tantrum about how if we don’t give government’s absolute control over everything right now, we’re all gonna die. Oh yeah, and we all stole her childhood.

Now, personally, my childhood was spent milking cows, so it wasn’t all that awesome to begin with, and we lived down the road from a SAC base that had dozens of Soviet nukes aimed at it for the inevitable upcoming End Of The World As We Know It and we still managed to be happy and hopeful… So I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Greta’s parents are really really shitty at their job.  And it’s really cruel to fuck over your kids like that, just so the wokescolds (who never actually change their lifestyles) can feel superior to you for not changing your lifestyles, per the commandments of their unimpeachable climate gods.

Oh yeah, and it’s the ultimate Motte and Bailey play, because they can put an uneducated teenager with no scientific creds at all in front of one of the biggest government bodies in the world to demand socialism now or else, and when you go LOL WUT they switch to We Just Want A Clean Environment Why Do You Hate Children. It’s total bullshit.

But that’s just my opinion. Dan Simmon’s opinion was actually far more diplomatic.

Anyways, as soon as this author said his badthink opinion, hordes of virtue signalling morons piled on to talk about what a horrible child hating monster this former elementary school teacher must be. There was lots of rage, and screaming, and lamenting how sad it was that he used to be talented, before he descended into hateful hatemongery, so on and so forth. Basically, the usual.

Of course after that, Fandom’s Prolapsed Anus (the shittiest gossip website ever, File 770) simply had to report on it. China Mike can never resist any opportunity to screw over an author’s career when given the chance. Their headline might as well have been AUTHOR GUILTY OF WRONGTHINK! GET YOUR FRESH OUTRAGE HERE.

http://archive.is/tNELI

Don’t worry. It’s an archive link so you don’t get File 770 cooties.

I’ve talked about File 770 before, and how China Mike Glyer is a wretched scumbag vulture made of pond slime and syphilis, but this post isn’t about him being a parasitic piece of shit who rejoices in sabotaging the reputation of any authors who get out of line. It’s about how bad these people are at it.

So what was the result of all these has-beens, never-weres, and virtue signalling assholes dog piling this author for having an incorrect opinion?

 

Yep. A book that came out THIRTY YEARS AGO shot to number one.

This is good, because it’s a really good series,and the more new people who get to read it, the better. But more importantly it shows just how powerless the wokescolds are.

In ye olde tymes most authors still believed that the monolithic, left-wing, mean girls table of publishing and fandom could actually harm their livelihood. The bullies were very much “Hey, nice career you’ve got there, be a real shame if something bad were to happen to it.” And authors fell in line.

So conservative, libertarian, or hell, anybody to the right of Mao basically had to keep their mouths shut because they were scared of getting articles written about they by wretched shitheels like China Mike, Cameldung Frapington, or Frau Butthurt, proclaiming Author X is a Bad Person And Should Be Shunned.  Then the authors would see the internet lynch mob of wokescolds sharing those articles getting out their torches and pitchforks, get scared, and then debase themselves by apologizing even though they’d done nothing wrong.

Thankfully those days are coming to an end.  Rather than being a career threatening bludgeon like they used to be, the wokescolds are so annoying and obnoxious that fans actually go out of their way to thwart them. If a wokescold starts screaming than an author is guilty of badthink, the fans take that as a sign it is probably pretty good, and go check it out.

The only places these people still have power is where people grant it to them, meaning they are also members of the Church of Unrelenting Bossiness and  need to ritually flog themselves to remove theirs sins, or they are the poor authors who are stuck at publishing houses where their editors are members of the church.

As for the rest of us, we can now safely laugh at these idiots, and go on writing whatever we feel like.

Seriously though, check out Ilium and Olympos. They’re nuts. Dan Simmons is a bad ass.

 

 

Edited to add: If you’re a fan of WrongThink and great fiction, here’s a link to the paperback -Jack