Okay, there is lots going on-

Book Stuff

I just sent off Servants of War to Baen. It came out awesome. I believe the release date is March.

My next release is Lost Planet Homicide which will be available for FREE to members on Audible. It’ll be an audio exclusive for at least a year before it is in print anywhere.

I am editing the last couple of stories for No Game For Knights the second noir anthology (after Noir Fatale) with Kacey Ezell. The stories so far are excellent. I just sent mine off to Kacey to edit, and this time I did a story set in the MHI universe, but in 1949. The anthology will be out in 2022 but I don’t know what month it is scheduled for (once you have enough releases dates start to blend together!)

After that I will be working on the 4th book in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior. My working title is Tower of Silence. Book 5 (the final) will be called Graveyard of Demons. But I don’t know when I’m going to write 5 yet.

After that I will be working on Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever with Jason Cordova.

And I’ve got a contract here for another, different MHI Memoirs style spin off with another author, but I can’t talk about that one yet!

There will be a Monster Hunter Files 2, but the hold up on that one is entirely my fault for being too busy writing books.

I’ll be working on a project with David Weber next year, and apparently he let the cat out of the bag while I was in the gulag, so I can talk about it. We will be doing a book set in David’s Norfressa universe, with novellas from me, Joelle Presby, Heather Holo, and Jim Butcher.

There is another Grimnoir trilogy planned. There may have inadvertently been a mention from me of a Hard Magic TV show being optioned on an episode of WriterDojo, but apparently that official announcement hasn’t happened yet, so whoops. Just imagine you didn’t hear that. 😀

That’s the quick version, there’s a bunch of other projects in the works too.

Swag Stuff

Jack is going to be opening up the store again soon, because we are doing a third run of Challenge Coins. He did a live stream on Friday with all the details showing off what’s coming.

(I didn’t get to watch the live stream because I was busy driving to a varsity football game to watch my son’s team lose with 200 yards of penalties. Ooof)

https://monsterhunternation.com/2021/10/04/state-of-the-swag-address-2021/

Note the really important part there, the store is only going to be open from October 8th – 17th. (and October 7th for WriterDojo backers because we are trying to give those people perks). That’s it. Once the store is closed it’ll be closed for the year.

Somebody asked Jack about Leatherbound Grimnoir which have been held up. That’s not Jack though. They’re still working on them. As you know from the last update the printer who did Hard Magic (which came out amazing) went under, and they found a new printer for Spellbound and Warbound, and are in line waiting due to fancy paper shortages. As soon as they have anything new I’ll post about it.

Con Stuff

I’m scheduled to be the Writer GoH for FenCon in Dallas in 2022.

I’m planning on attending LibertyCon and LTUE. I’m not sure about anything else yet.

Other Stuff

It has been crazy busy around here.

Unfortunately I injured my back a couple of weeks ago, and that’s really been screwing with my productivity. In the last year I hurt my shoulder (bowling!) and cracked a rib (wrestling!) It’s like I hit my mid 40s and everything started to break (and I have to wear glasses to drive now too). But my back has been feeling much better over the last few days, so back to work.

We are recording more episodes of WriterDojo this week, including doing some Q&A sessions for the backers. I’ve really been enjoying this project a lot. It’s been fun to just sit and talk about writing stuff. I hope the writers and aspiring writers have been getting some help from it, and I hope it has at least been amusing for everybody else!

Gritty Cop Show is still back burnered. I love that project. I just need to clean up a few more things and then send it out to beta testers. But sadly I’ve got to focus my writing time on the stuff that pays the bills.

This week Steve and I talk about how to write interesting characters and some traps to avoid. Character creation is a huge topic, and writing good characters is one of the most important keys to being successful as an author, so it is a topic we will be visiting many times, from a lot of different angles.

So please mash the reviews and subscribe the likes, or whatever all that podcasty stuff is. And if you are enjoying WriterDojo, please tell your friends. Our mission is to counteract all the crappy woke writer advice out there that’s trying to suck the fun out of fiction.

Most people listen on Apple, Spotify, or Anchor, but we also stick it on YouTube and Rumble for the non-podcasters.

If you’d like to become a backer of the program, you can do it at Anchor: https://anchor.fm/writerdojo  We will be be doing special Q&A episodes where we answer backer questions at the end of every season.

If you were reading my blog back around the election you know I’m a big fan of audits. They keep things honest. Auditing internal systems and looking for fraud and getting companies through 3rd party and government audits was a big part of my old career.

So like most of you I was really interested in seeing how this Arizona audit shook out. Leading up to it the democrats fought this audit every step of the way, in court, logistically, and by just being noncompliant pains in the asses (as companies which have nothing to hide often do!) My favorite part was when the democrats were freaking out about how the auditors weren’t certified by the governing body which doesn’t provide certifications to do this process there’s no certifications for. Good times.

When I googled the results on Friday, there were literally hundreds of news articles all sharing the same exact message. “Biden won. Cope losers. The audit was a sham put on by grifters, but simultaneously its recount proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that Biden totally won. If you ever thought there was any fraud in the election you are a stupid gullible idiot who believes conspiracy theories, and now shut up forever. Also it cost 6 million whole dollars and for the first time ever democrats care about fiscal responsibility. Orange Man Bad. etc.”

As I scrolled through dozens of these, I realized that none of them actually said what was in the audit report. Nor were there any links to the actual audit report. As a guy who used to write audit reports I’d rather read the actual document than take some journalism major’s take on it.

https://www.azsenaterepublicans.com/cyber-ninjas-report

And sure enough, as usual, the narrative was designed for maximum spin.

It turns out the audit findings are a lot more complicated that portrayed by the narrative. Shocker. Basically the headlines are all coming off of the executive summary, section 2. And note, they’re only taking the very first part, and then quit reporting as soon as they get to “based on our other findings, however” –

https://c692f527-da75-4c86-b5d1-8b3d5d4d5b43.filesusr.com/ugd/2f3470_a91b5cd3655445b498f9acc63db35afd.pdf

To break this down, the first part, the recount/canvass matches what was there before, and the only differences are statistically insignificant. News media goes Yay! Biden won by even more votes! Cope! Cope! Cope!

Except, the second part they aren’t talking about is… are those votes all actual legal votes? And the answer is possibly not (why possibly? I’ll get to that). Then see all those bullet points of problems, weirdness, and fuckery. Which comes down to there being about five times as many questionable votes as Biden’s margin of victory (for the state, in this one county).

This is where it gets sticky. Here is the breakdown of the findings.

https://c692f527-da75-4c86-b5d1-8b3d5d4d5b43.filesusr.com/ugd/2f3470_d36cb5eaca56435d84171b4fe7ee6919.pdf

Section 4 is the tally results. That’s what the media is talking about. Section 5 is the problems. That’s what they are studiously avoiding talking about.

They are divided into 13 types of problems, ranging from critical to inconsequential. Statistically, it’s the first few that are the big ones, and each of those gets their own breakdown in 5.3 and 5.4. Go read through those.

On some of these types you’ll be thinking, why didn’t the auditors take these problematic ballots and track them back even further to see if the signatures match the actual human being who supposedly cast the vote? Sorry. I believe the democrats blocked them from doing that in court. (which is totally not suspicious at all from people who have absolutely nothing to hide!)

Auditors go through the available data looking for problems. They can only take it as far as they are allowed by the system they are working in. In this kind of case, to go beyond these steps would require the law to step in. Will that happen? Beats me. I don’t know jack about Arizona politics.

Auditors aren’t cops (usually, unless you’re getting audited by certain government agencies, but you get my drift). They simply investigate and then provide a report to the body which makes actual decisions based upon their recommendations.

The rest of the report is about the systems and controls, and how they should be improved. This part is really telling. Basically the Arizona election system is easily manipulated trash, with crap controls, and if any private company I ever worked at got caught with this many holes in it, they’d fire all the accountants and half the managers.

Now, for the idiot brigade that is crowing about how this proves whatever they want it to prove about the election and how everybody else should shut up forever, here’s some stuff that’s not in this report to think about.

This was the audit of one county, in one of the questionable states. Back in the aftermath of the election, I found Arizona to be the least interesting of those questionable states. Other counties had way more fuckery afoot. Atlanta and Detroit were way crazier than Phoenix on election night. No audits there.

And even in Arizona, this is one county. I don’t know the area that well so I’m just going off of what friends of mine who live there say, but Maricopa is usually the red county. Pima (2nd biggest) is the blue county. And they still found 5x the margin of victory in questionable votes in the red county. I’m sure next door was totally clean.

So basically, of the handful of problematic places, we took a sample of one of the least problematic ones, and still found a bunch of problems… ergo, the narrative is that everything everywhere is fine, and you are stupid if you question it.

The media is just as smart and honest about how audits work as they are about how to ride horses.

Both sides are claiming victory based on what the report says. Only one side owns the media and big tech, so that’s going to be the prevailing narrative (and interestingly enough, that narrative was determined before the final report was given). What it says is what it actually says. So I’d recommend reading it for yourself to draw your own conclusions, rather than letting some pundit decide for you.

This week Steve and I talk about the concept of “genre”, what it actually is, what it is actually for, and why most of of the “genre rules” that get crammed down aspiring authors’ throats are nonsense. As usual our goal is to teach you how to work the system in order to Get Paid!

Link

(edit, and I do silly voices to make fun of dumb tweets giving bad writing advice!)

Also, we are going to be doing special Q&A episodes every season, where the questions are supplied by our backers. If you are a backer and would like your questions answered on the air, please email Questions@Writerdojo.com to get on the list (unfortunately when you sign up as a backer it doesn’t give us an email list, just names, so we have to manually compile that)

If you would like to become a backer of the podcast, go here: https://anchor.fm/writerdojo

This week’s episode is sponsored by Dan Willis ‘In Plain Sight’

That’s right! We are such mercenary capitalists that we’re gonna advertise other people’s books! (if you are interested in that, use the same email above)

WriterDojo Episode 5 is out. This week Steve and I talk about how to get, develop, organize, and use ideas for your fiction. Ideas are everywhere. (and I forgot last week to post that Episode 4, Outlining vs. Discovery Writing was out, and it’s a good one) This episode I also tell the story for the first time of where the idea for Wendell T. Manatee came from.

If you would like to support the podcast with a small monthly donation you can do it at Anchor: https://anchor.fm/writerdojo . Later in the season we will be doing some Q&A episodes using questions from our backers. As always we really appreciate you subscribing and liking and all that other podcasty stuff that helps us get more listeners.

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Most people listen through one of the podcast services, but we have also been posting these to YouTube and Rumble (though they’re sometimes a day later there). If that’s how you prefer to do, you can subscribe to the WriterDojo channel there.

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVzOkQ046Fav9ZukaK36eiA