I know a bunch of you preordered MHI from Amazon. They just bumped up the In Stock date two days, so it is now July 26th. Only two days left. It will be shipping very soon.
For those of you that got it from there, I’d like to ask a favor. When you get done, write an honest review on Amazon. Thanks.
The anti-idiotarian rottweiler absolutely demolishes the chOsen One.
The basic 1st rough draft of the the first book of The Grimnoir Chronicles is DONE.
It is titled Hard Magic, and it clocked in at about 150,000 words. I wrote the final scene last night.
Now I still need to clean it up. My rough drafts are a huge mess. I’m one of those super-fast writers who’s a terrible editor. I have friends that agonize over each scene, making sure that every last word is perfection, and when they’re done, they’re done, it is about perfect. Not me. I sit down, crank out 2,000 words, go, hmm… that’s cool,whatever, I”m excited to go write the next one! Yay! Later I have to go back and see all the many horrible things that I did wrong, but that’s what word processors are for.
While they write an absolutely beautiful 500 word piece, I cranked out 2,500 words of bad pulp, riddled with errors, cliches, bad grammar, nonsense, ramblings, and a 27 extra apostrophes and 15 extra commas. And to think people who don’t like me read my blog posts and say, “You suck at writing on your blog! Look at all those mistakes. You must be a terrible novelist! and you’re stupid and fat, Go Obama! Wooo!” Well, to those folks, keep in mind that I wrote this entire blog post in the time it took you to cook your morning meth. I write fast.
I would never have made it as a writer in 1932. No delete key. No cut & paste. Though they did have Coke, and they had vanilla that I could have added myself… Well, maybe I could have. Me and Raymond Chandler would have totally hung out, talked shop about accounting, and then he’d probably get totally wasted on bootleg hooch and I’d have to drive him home.
Anyways, I still need to come up with 16 more opening chapter quotes and do a ton of house keeping, but after that, I’ll start trying to sell this bad boy. It seems appropriate that I would finish the rough of my 4th novel the same week that the 1st is finally hitting bookstores.
I’ve sent TGC to Reader Force Alpha. I’ll let their feedback percolate before going back to take another shot at cleaning up TGC. I like to work on a project until it is done, then step back, work on another project for awhile so I have to change voice, and then go back to the first. I find that gives me a fresh set of eyes. So while that’s going on, I’ll be editing my half of Dead Six in with Mike’s half. He’s cranking along despite being at “Don’t cut the red wire! NOOOOO! HUGE EXPLOSION!” School. (another hat tip to Chris and the boys at the Gun Counter for the laptop).
When Reader Force Alpha is finished savaging me, calling me names, and poking me with hot sticks, I’ll go back and do the 2nd draft. Don’t bother asking how you can get on Reader Force Alpha. They are a top secret, ultra-elite squadron of the finest proof-readers in history. Rumor has it that one of them is a former X-Men who lost his powers during the events of World War Hulk. One of them isn’t even a person… It is a combintion of non-Euclidian geometires and colors beyond the visible spectrum from outer space, far beyond human comprehension. I suspect that their leader is actually the goddess Belona, returned to our reality on a flaming chariot to pick apart my comma usage. And the last one is Bob Westover.
So we’re down to SIX DAYS until MHI is officially on shelves. Though I’ve already gotten e-mails from bookstore owners who’ve got them already.
I’ve decided that Barack Obama is probably going to be a one term president. Oh, that’s not just wishful thinking on my part, by watching him lately; I think he knows it too.
He’s pushed way too far, way too fast. He’s done more to advance FDR’s progressive agenda in 6 months than FDR managed in his first term. Obama knows he has no time to lose. This will be his greatest, and only opportunity to reshape the US into his utopian vision.
I think he also realizes that he doesn’t even really have 4 years. By pushing this hard, there will be an inevitable backlash, and the stupid party will pick up seats from the evil party in the 2010 elections. How many seats remains to be seen, but it might be enough to thwart the total revamping of America into Big Dumb Canada.
If you look at the actions of our government over the last six months, all they have done is passed or pushed legislation designed to accomplish the opposite of what they’ve said they wanted to accomplish.
We need to save the economy, so we’re going to yank a bunch of money out of it, tax it, and stick it into places that won’t stimulate jack squat except for Democrat political allies, and ruin the value of the dollar forever in the process.
We need to save the environment, so we’re going to tax America into oblivion, knowing full well that it will only drive the last of our manufacturing jobs overseas to countries who don’t care about the environment.
Healthcare is inefficient and costs too much, so we’re going to raise the costs by a trillion dollars, make it as efficient as everything else in the government, and in the process, we’ll also make it so that you’re more likely to die, live sicker, have less freedom, and end medical research forever.
The banks (goaded on by government regulation), were out of control, so we’re going to put more government regulation on them, hell, never mind, we’ll just take them over outright, and then force them to follow more of the same government policies that caused the problem in the first place.
The auto industry is in crisis, (while the non-union companies are doing okay) so we’re going to take that over too, throw more money at it, and then let the union run it.
So in six months, the government has grabbed the US economy by the spine, taken over the auto industry, the insurance industry, the finance industry, and is poised to pass the largest tax increase in history, and take over the medical industry. FDR was a piker in comparison.
So, what do every single one of these things have in common (besides not solving the problem they were floated to solve?). Every single one increases the stranglehold the federal government has on our lives.
Everything they’ve done has made America weaker, and the weaker and poorer we become, the more they hope we will come to depend on the government. The progressives would rather have total control over a pathetic shell of a nation than just be a small part of a great one. It is like that old adage, would you rather be a slave in heaven, or a king in hell?
Unfortunately, I think we took the king of hell and elected him president.
M Day is coming. We are now in the single digits for the paperback release of Monster Hunter International. Review copies have been sent to various magazines and review webpages.
The e-book is out at Baen’s Webscriptions, and I’ve been getting bunches of e-mails from people who’ve now read the book, and it has been extremely humbling. When you put a lot of effort into something, and a reader comes back and tells you how it brightened their day, or they couldn’t put it down, or that it just captured their imagination, then you are on top of the world. You guys like it, I’ve managed to entertain you, and that, my friends, is an absolutely wonderful feeling.
And so is getting paid! Book is doing well on Amazon. Still dominating in the Christian Romance (snort!) section on Tower (but they’ve got Jim Butcher in there for some reason too, so whatever), and I’m now as high as I’ve ever been on B&N. For the longest time, if you just put Correia into the search engine on Amazon I came up first (take that Correia Art Glass, which is really pretty by the way, and we’re probably cousins, so maybe you could hook me up for something nice for my wife’s birthday… just saying),but I was always further down the list on B&N and Tower, behind various cookbooks by Correias, and movies with Correias in them, but now I’m first.
I figure it is kind of like the Highlander, and various Correias will square off until there can be only one, but I’ve still got some pro baseball players and hockey players to go, and those guys are in better shape, so I shouldn’t talk too much smack. Man, I’m just glad my last name isn’t Jones or Brown.