We did this podcast interview to talk about Gun Runner, which will be in stores and audio next week.
https://www.baen.com/podcastfiles/mp3/baen-free-radio-hour-2021-01-29-audio-Correia-Brown-Uncompromising-Honor-50.mp3
I had a lot of fun with this. John and I talk about the book, how it came about (which is actually a pretty cool story), and our collaborative process. The book came out really good too and I’m excited for you guys to read it.
I wrote this on MeWe just now, but then it turned into a rant big enough to stick on the blog: I get a text from my daughter this morning (she knows I’ve bailed on most of Facebook except a couple private groups, but wanted to keep me in the loop for fun stuff) about how she’s in a thread my buddy Brad Torgersen put up there about how stupid student loan forgiveness is.
My daughter commented that students don’t have to go into debt if they go to a cheaper college, watch their spending, and have jobs. She’s debt free. Immediately some guy told her about how maybe that was possible way back in her day, but it is impossible now because tuition and books are so much more expensive now and any jobs that college students can get all pay crap, so on and so forth, the usual.
My daughter is all like, DUDE I AM A JUNIOR IN COLLEGE NOW. ????
Yeah, and I don’t pay for it either. My wife and I warned our kids their whole lives that we weren’t going to pay for their schooling. If they wanted to go to college, they were footing the bill.
But some of you might say, but Larry, you’re a rich successful author, how cruel of you! Surely you could pay for your children’s education!?
Nope. Because when Bridget and I were in college most of the kids we knew where mommy and daddy paid for everything, they just fucked around and had a good time, bouncing from major to major to “find themselves” (and I guess finding yourself involves a lot of recreational drugs, parties, and road trips!). Whenever they flunked or screwed up, daddy would send another check, until they eventually ended up with some useless but fun degree.
Meanwhile, I came from a super poor farming family that barely scraped by. Bridget’s family wasn’t as broke as mine by that time, but they certainly weren’t in a position to send her any money to pay for school. We met at State Cow College. When we got married we were broke. Everything we owned was second hand junk. But we set goals, worked our asses off at whatever the best job available was for as many hours as we could pick up, and got through college as fast as we could and only took out loans in emergencies.
Then we paid off those student loans as fast as we humanly possible, which is saying something, because we had our first kid before we graduated, and we were committed to having Bridget be a stay at home mom (which we’ve stuck to for 4 kids) but that also meant that I had to work my ass off and we had to delay a lot of gratification.
Twenty years later, Bridget and I are doing fine. Meanwhile, many of the people we know who coasted through school are still blundering about aimlessly, trying to figure out what they’re going to do with their lives. Hardly a scientific sampling, but enough to convince us that we weren’t going to screw over our children for life by letting them think college was a six figure, four year party, and twenty years later they’ve got a Masters in Gender Studies in order to be a bank teller, but they’re really hoping their artisanal scented candle business takes off on Etsy.
My kids are smart. They could have gone to whatever school they wanted. The oldest (who inspired this rant) got recruited by Ivy League schools. She was briefly excited by that idea, until she saw the $40,000 a year tuition, and that she couldn’t carry a gun in Boston, and said screw that noise, and went to one of the cheaper state schools. She has gone through a series of jobs, moving to whichever one has the best earning potential (as in lots of available hours) and then she picks up all the shifts from the dopes who call in sick every time they’re hung over.
A couple of years later our next daughter is dong the same thing, at a different cheap state school. Also working poor college student jobs and looking for opportunities to work extra. And both of them only borrowing the absolute minimum they need to survive (and so far, neither of them has had to do that, which puts them ahead of their parents)
And both of them are currently seeing the same exact kind of behavior Bridget and I saw two decades ago, as the kids who get constantly bailed out by mom and dad make an endless series of idiotic choices. Why not? There’s no repercussions (that they can see now at least). Spring break here we come!
The kids you’ve got to feel sorry for are the ones who want to live that happy good time lifestyle, but who don’t have a rich mom and dad, so they instead turn to the endless money faucet of student loans, because they don’t yet realize that eventually that’s going to come back around to bite them in the ass.
And Big College loves this shit, and just keep jacking up the prices. Because as long as there is some sucker who is willing to pay $400,000 for a degree that is functionally indistinguishable from one that costs $40,000, they’re going to do so, gleefully.
** So that’s what I wrote on MeWe, but I’m just getting started on this goofy topic.
Everybody seems hung up on this idea that going to an expensive school is going to make you so much better off than going to a cheap school. But as far as I can tell, outside of some very narrow career field networking situations that’s bullshit for the vast majority of us.
The only places I’m aware of that magical “networking” makes that much difference is that you are on the Yale rowing/golf team and friends with Chad Moneybags who can put in a good word with his dad who is on the board at FuckYou, FuckYou, and PayMe on Wall/K Street so you can get that sweet six figure right out of school venture capital/think tank job.
For the vast vast majority of the rest of us who aren’t anywhere near those social circles (and who don’t want to be!) the “prestige” of the place you got your degree from only matters when applying to your first job because the rest of your resume is garbage, and from that point on literally nobody gives a shit, and they’re going to judge you on the quality of your actual work.
Is the actual education at these elite schools really orders of magnitude better? No. Of course not. You’re paying for the name (and in some cases theoretical “networking”). Actual education might be better, but I wouldn’t bet on it, and there’s no way the improvement is proportional to the cost increase. And having friends/coworkers who went to various elite schools, sometimes the education is actually worse.
My senior year I took some test that they give to all the graduating business majors across the country every so often to gauge our overall business knowledge and how our schools stack up against each other. The only reason I remember this at all is that year State Cow College kicked the shit out of Stanford. Go Aggies.
And Stanford’s still relatively cheap comparatively. You want to go a couple hundred grand into debt for your fancy degree from NYU? Then you’d damn well make sure that you’re going to get sufficient return on your investment. Otherwise, you’re a dope. Sorry. You went to college. You’re supposed to be smart.
College is kind of a joke anyway. They keep you there paying money for four+ years. The part that is of actual value in your career/life takes up maybe half of that if you’re lucky. And even then you’ll probably learn more in the first six months to a year of doing your major for a living than you got out of college.
The rest is gen eds, that are supposed to make you “well rounded”. A concept which quite literally everybody knows is total bullshit. And most gen eds could be replaced with a few hour long Wikipedia spiral on the subject and you’d probably learn more, for thousands of dollars less. We all know it. The universities know it too, but they pretend that this is some enlightened educational blah blah blah to make you a better person, when in reality it’s just to make you a poorer person.
Even in your major, you’ll probably be required to take some bullshit classes that only exist because the university needs to keep employing some otherwise useless professor, and this is the only thing they can teach. Hell, to get my accounting degree I had to take a class in Future Basic, which was already a dead programming language twenty years ago. It was a joke. We all knew it was a joke. The class only existed because this was literally the only thing this tenured professor was qualified to teach. Yet we still all paid money to jump through pointless hoops.
Talking to my kids and other young people today, it hasn’t changed. If anything it’s gotten dumber. Gen Ed English class now is teaching basic shit kids should have learned in high school, only now you’re paying thousands of bucks for the privilege. Now go to your Gen Ed science class, which is mostly watching videos about global warming (which you could stream on YouTube for free if you felt like it, but this way it is more expensive and there’s a test at the end).
So we participate in this process where theoretically we learn about the major thing we want to do for a living, and in exchange the school makes you sit through a bunch of pointless bullshit that you’re all going to forget about ten minutes after the final, and never use again for the rest of your life. If half your degree is hoop jumping bullshit, then you might as well make get the cheap hoop jumping bullshit.
If you really wanted to make college affordable, ditch all the GenEd hours, and you could be handing out practical degrees in two years instead of four. Don’t know basic English enough to write your way through your real classes? Then your dumb ass can go take English 101. And the kids who didn’t sleep their way through high school can save money.
But nope. You need to spend hundreds of bucks on “Music Appreciation” in order to be “Well Rounded” instead. (and most Music 101 classes could easily be replaced by a Spotify playlist and listening to a couple of podcasts, and you’d actually learn more).
I can’t forget the most important part of all these mandatory GenEds though. If we didn’t have GenEd, how would academics be able to beat regular students over the head about whatever their left-wing cause of the day is? Sure. You probably just want to go to school so you can get a good paying job in engineering, business, or programming, but then you wouldn’t get indoctrinated… err… I mean, well rounded, by exposure to such vital topics as Critical Race Theory or Feminist Dance Therapy, and those professors need to get paid too.
Of course, any criticism of our crazy expensive yet shockingly lackluster higher education system will be met by screams of outrage by people who will label me “anti-intellectual.” Too bad the hucksters who came up with this scam are hardly deserving of the title intellectual.
So now to bring this full circle, Student Loan Forgiveness is the big brain proposal that says debts which are overwhelmingly held by privileged white liberals (who paid money to other privileged white liberals in order to theoretically achieve greater earning potential), should be paid for by everybody else, including those who don’t have college degrees and greater earning potential. So basically all of you truck drivers, shelf stockers, and now unemployed pipeline workers get to play the part of the mommy and daddy I talked about earlier who bail out their stupid kids after they make bad choices. Yay.
Now, will Joe Biden actually do some kind of student loan forgiveness? Or will this be another empty promise, like the DNC has done to every other group they milk for votes and then promptly abandon? (Black Lives Matter is simply shocked that the old racist white segregationist “racial jungle” guy who was BFFs with a KKK Grand Kleagle is snubbing them now that he’s in office. Who could have possibly seen this coming?)
Honestly, I’ve got no idea if loan forgiveness will happen. It’s a stupid idiotic proposal that reinforces bad behaviors and will raise costs long term, so the DNC should love it. However, since the DNC is merely a wholly owned subsidiary of the CorpoUniParty (don’t get butt hurt, libs, half the GOP belongs to it too), it depends if BigEd and the banks gain money/power off of it. If that cost/benefit analysis comes back positive, the loans will be forgiven, and if it doesn’t, then it’ll quietly die… Until next election when they need to make more promises to gullible liberals.
In the meantime, if you’re going to go to college, don’t bank on Santa Claus bailing you out. Go cheap. Go fast. Have a job. Get that shit done. Don’t borrow money you can’t pay back. Compound interest is a bitch.
It’s almost the end of January (better late than never) but if I’m not going to interact with the fans on Facebook anymore, I need to make sure that I blog consistently to make up for it. (I am going to be curious to see how much difference not using that page makes in sales, because if it doesn’t make that much, being scared of losing sales is the main reason writers stay there).
First off, the 7 author giveaway is over and the random winners are being contacted now. (I think we beat their previous record by 4x) All of us will be shipping books to the winners. I’ve got to get with John Brown so we can both sign those copies of Gunrunner.
Speaking of Gunrunner, it is out in a couple of weeks. If you would like to get an autographed copy go here:
http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-correia-larry.php
Thats right. Uncle Hugos is still in business. Their store (which has been open since the 70s) got burned down during the riots… Oh sorry. “Mostly peaceful yet fiery protests”. However, you can’t keep a good book seller down, so Don is still shipping books from his house. John and I signed a bunch of book plate stickers for him to put in the front cover. Since I’m not doing a book tour (stupid Rona) this is the ONLY place you can get an autographed copy (other than catching me somewhere later, and then you’d have to find both authors). Don also has signed copies of Destroyer of Worlds.
BOOK STUFF
The next release is Gunrunner, on February 2nd. This is a scifi action/adventure collaboration between me and John Brown, about a crew of thieves who specialize in stealing/smuggling advanced weapons to worlds who can’t have them. It came out awesome.
My next book release is August 3rd and that’s the next regular MHI series book (back to Owen’s PoV) Monster Hunter Bloodlines. This is what I’m currently working on now. It was supposed to have been finished last month, but I’ve been kinda distracted. This is the first time I’ve blown a book deadline in 12 years, but don’t worry, it doesn’t change the release date. Those get set way in advance by the publisher.
I’ll be editing two more anthologies, but I can’t announce what those are just yet (contracts are in the mail).
I have some new short stories which will be coming out in other people’s anthologies this year as well. I’ll post info and links to those as soon as they’re listed.
I am also working on another collaboration (with Steve Diamond) for a new fantasy series. I believe that will be next in line after Bloodlines, but I’ve got to talk to Toni about that, because I’ve got a few other projects also in the works.
Specifically, the next book in the Saga of the Forgotten Warrior (title to be announced) which is a 5 book series (not a trilogy like I originally pitched because after book 1, Toni took a look at my outline for the whole series and laughed at me, saying “You’ll never fit all that in 3 books” and since House of Assassins and Destroyer of Worlds were basically what I had planned for book two, she was right which is why she’s the editor).
And there is still another Grimnoir trilogy in the works which I’m trying to figure out how to squeeze in, because I really want to do that. This is the downside of having a bunch of different series going on at one time. The upside is that I never get bored and don’t phone stuff in.
People keep asking if there will be a 3rd Malcontents. Those are really good, and I really like them, but the problem there is that it isn’t my world. I don’t own it. At this point of my career time spent working in other people’s IPs is time that I’m not expanding my own. And the Malcontents are by far my least known/selling books (which is too bad, because they are really fun). So another of those is really unlikely.
Merch/Tie ins/Other Business Stuff
Jack has wrapped up the orders for the last run of coins, they’re being made now, and he’ll get them out as fast as he can. Because the next thing we’ve got planned is awesome and hilarious and you’re all going to want one. Plus it will possibly be the greatest Christmas/Birthday gift of all time. It has gravitas.
There’s a couple of other projects in the works where I’ve teamed up with other companies, but nothing I can officially announce yet. And a really cool one that is currently in negotiations (fingers crossed).
Social Media Stuff
I’ve mostly bailed on Facebook and am actively rooting for their demise. I’ll be posting these blog links, but I won’t be interacting with any fans over there anymore. I’m just tired of being randomly blocked/censored and yelled at. So please share. 😀
The emergency backup fan page was over on MeWe, which is where I’m currently at. We’ll see how that shakes out, but I’m still looking at other alternatives for interacting with the fans.
However, the very best place to keep up on all my book related stuff is to sign up for the email newsletter here:
I wrote this a few days ago on FB, because I’m out. 🙂
#
I’m paring down my FB presence. For the last week I’ve only been on for a brief time each day. I’ll be taking that down even further. I’ll be posting links when I blog for the people who stick around. There’s a few groups I use here that I can’t get the equivalent resource anywhere else yet (but I’m currently banned from posting in all groups anyway). And that’s about it. Basically, I’m done being a content creator for those censorious pieces of shit.
Guys like me write stuff which gets shared hundreds of times and gets thousands of people commenting/participating. FB uses that free content to keep people corralled here so they can mine your data. And then when us content creators get uppity, they fuck us over with impunity while their ideological allies get a pass. But then we come crawling back again and again, like abused trailer park wives, because we don’t want to abandon the kids (as in the communities we spent the last ten years building before the relationship turned abusive). I’ve stuck around because I didn’t want to hurt my business/sales. It is still the best place to reach the most people the fastest. We made it that way. All us content creators foolishly moved over there back when Facebook promised to be one thing. Now that they’ve pulled a bait and switch, the content creators feel trapped. In good conscience, this can’t continue.
I’m done helping those parasites. Facebook is trash. We all know it. We’ve all seen it. We’re just there because of inertia. Over the last decade, working with some stupendous moderators and great fans, we built a gigantic, thriving, fun, fan page here on Facebook. It’s one of the bigger author fan pages on the internet where the author can still actually talk to his fans. Being able to interact there was great. But Facebook took that from me on a whim.
They banned me from my own group because of what I MIGHT say.
However we prepared a fallback. There’s another Monster Hunter Nation fan page over on MeWe. LINK I’ll be posting there instead from here on. If the fans want to keep posting there, great, but I won’t be. I can’t even post this to my own FB fan page, which illustrates just how screwed up this situation is. We’ll see how long that lasts, until Big Tech finds some way to squish every place they can’t control. My primary place will still be here on my blog, monsterhunternation dot com. There is an email newsletter you can sign up for which is only book related stuff, no politics. I’m on MeWe under my same name. I was on Parler as @monsterhunter45, though I never really used it, and I have no idea if that place is going to survive. I’ll be looking into other alternatives as well.
##
So for the last few days I’ve avoided Facebook entirely (while the fan page on MeWe gained a couple thousand new members), and I had three of the most productive writing days I’ve had in months. Then last night I checked my FB feed for a few minutes to see what I missed..
Very first notification, some random crazy stranger had tagged me in a post screaming at me about Sad Puppies (which was like 6 years ago) and how I was a crybaby loser, and something about QAnon(?). Beats me. I just instablocked and kept scrolling.
There were probably a bunch of other random assholes tagging me to scream at me (there always are) but I didn’t scroll through the notifications far enough to tell. (random nobodies always feel the need to “call me out” for some inexplicable reason, and I’m like dude, George Martin at the height of his fame “called me out” for 40,000 words of sanctimonious blog posts and it didn’t do shit. Who are you?)
So then I scrolled through my feed. There was lots and lots of links to Proper Media and gloating and virtue signaling about the end of our “national nightmare” by total strangers which I’m being shown for some baffling reason. Then there were posts by my actual friends, only anything they said which deviated from leftist orthodoxy usually had comments from angry self-righteous types trying to shame/browbeat/gaslight them into compliance.
And then the last post I read? Some local dude I friended years ago for reasons I can’t even remember posted a giant screed about how he was butt hurt and outraged because he walked into a blue collar automotive business, and some of the employees weren’t wearing masks. (GASP!) So he did his business in abject terror of looming death (he’s around my age) and immediately afterwards reported the business to their corporate headquarters and the state health department so those evil murderous (probably scraping by on just over minimum wage) employees could get fired and their (probably struggling) franchise owner could get fined into bankruptcy. Then all the comments were people telling this hero how stunning and brave he was.
At that point I closed the page, assured I was making the right call. Any loss of sales I get from no longer participating in that cesspool will more than be made up for by improvements to my mood. If leaving Facebook means that I’m going to be in a “right wing echo chamber” (as I’m continually warned by my co-dependent friends who have become accustomed to the endless abuse masquerading as “dialog”) so be it. That sounds splendid. 😀
I’m participating in this book giveaway with seven other authors. The winners get signed copies of all of our books. I’ll be giving out 5 copies of Gunrunner signed by me and John Brown.
http://davidjohnbutler.com/giveaways/seven-authors-five-books-january-2021-giveaway/
Even if you don’t win, you can still get signed copies from none other than Uncle Hugo’s! Like a phoenix that rises from the ashes, you just can’t keep a good bookstore down. Uncle Hugos is selling autographed copies of Destroyer of Worlds and Gunrunner (preorder now, available February) I signed a bunch of stickers for them to put into the front of the books. I’ve got a package of them here on my desk already signed by my coauthor John Brown to send off.
http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-correia-larry.php