Monster Hunter Guardian is out this week!

Monster Hunter Guardian

Okay, end of July, but I snuck it in under the wire.

Tour

Monster Hunter Guardian comes out next month. Because I’ve got a coauthor on this one, and Sarah’s health won’t let her do the marathon crazy 5,000 mile, 16 stop book tours like I usually do, we’re just doing an abbreviated tour for this one.

August 7 7:00 PM | Thornton, CO
Book Signing
Barnes & Noble Thorncreek Shopping Ctr

August 8 7:00 PM | Colorado Springs, CO
Book Signing
Barnes & Noble Citadel-Colorado Springs

And as an added bonus, Dave Butler will be there too for his new novel Witchy Kingdom. I’ve signed with Dave before in Texas, he brings a guitar, sings songs from his books, and always puts on a really fun show.

Audiobook

Because people always ask, yes, there is going to be a Guardian audiobook. Because this one is from Julie, a female PoV character, it’ll be narrated by Bailey Carr. Ollie Wyman will return for the regular Owen PoV books.  Bailey has done some great work though, and she was in the Monster Hunter Files so I’m really looking forward to listening to this one.

In related Audibook news, Tom Stranger 3 should be going into production soon.

Vault Special Leatherbound Edition Grimnoir

After running into a whole bunch of production delays the special edition of Hard Magic is currently shipping.

I signed all of them, and they are truly the best looking books I’ve ever seen. I mean they are straight up gorgeous. Lots of extra art from Vincent Chong inside, and the cover is just amazing, both the French slip jacket cover, and the leather embossed Grimnoir symbol inside.

They still have some available for sale too.  I haven’t heard the ETA on book 2 and 3, but they’ve got the bugs worked out at least.

https://www.vaultbooks.pub/store/p19/Hard_Magic.html

Political Crap

I was out of town most of last week for a business thing, so I missed most of the stupid controversy.  Apparently somebody decided to weaponize Wikipedia to try and delete a bunch of Baen authors off of it. (and by a bunch I mean Mike Williamson, Tom Kratman, Sarah Hoyt, Brad Torgersen, Jody Lynn Nye, Sharon Lee, and they’d started to nibble at John Ringo, and me)

Now of course, these particular editors claimed they were totally unbiased, and they were just trying to delete all of these authors because they were “not notable”.  Other editors disagreed but they got dismissed as “sock puppets”. Any sources which backed up these authors were immediately dismissed for a wide variety of silly reasons.  (and apparently, Baen Books, which is distributed through big dog Simon & Schuster, so it’s on the shelves of the majority of book stores in the country, which has like a dozen NYT bestsellers actively writing for them, is just a “vanity press”…)

All sorts of sources got dismissed and deleted. Sales didn’t count. Primary sources didn’t count. (which was why they didn’t have much luck with mine I think, because love me or hate me, I’ve shown up in a lot of news articles so it’s hard to say I’m not notable). It was pretty obviously a weak attempt to deplatform a bunch of authors for wrongthink (ironic considering what some of those people’s politics are) And many of the arguments boiled down to BUT SOME OF THEM ARE MEAN AND HURT MY FEELINGS!

But thankfully this foolishness got shut down when many honest editors rushed into to argue about why these authors are clearly notable. Thank goodness for the honest, hard working editors who care more about reality than politics.

And one in particular surprised me, but credit where credit is due, John Scalzi jumped in to defend Mike Williamson, pointing out that Mike is clearly and obviously notable as an author.  Scalzi more than likely recognizes the danger here, because if Mike, Sarah, Tom, and Brad aren’t “notable” then neither are most of his friends. You can’t just go around weaponizing info sites to scrub your political opponents. That’s just Orwellian.

Personal Stuff

We are still unpacking boxes!  Moving is nuts. I never want to move again.  The new place is amazing though, so it’s totally worth it.

The Adventures of Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent was the #1 audiobook in the world (for the second time!) last week.

http://www.tribtown.com/2019/07/18/us-audiobooks-top-10-2/?fbclid=IwAR06Fysp402j2QHtkXFDGD0IkweJuyQsMcnosr0Tli3E31nuwuld0fxnxgI

Obviously, it helps to be FREE!  😀  And you can still get it now as one of the monthly free originals at Audible.com. You can check out Adam Baldwin’s amazing narration here:

https://www.audible.com/ep/audible-originals-member-benefit?pf_rd_p=4870f8d9-9b0b-4dbd-874a-8b510ed0a5ee&pf_rd_r=7BZE84KJ0M3V1ZS2E9ES&ref=a_hp_c11_banner_img_0

Tom Stranger #2 is called Murder of Manatees.  I just sent them #3 including the epic tale of Apocalypse Cow.

The Dragon Award Nominations close tomorrow. Now is your last chance to nominate your favorite books of the year. http://application.dragoncon.org/dc_fan_awards_nominations.php?fbclid=IwAR1mIzKxpFMlWyHRfm_WgvyxzcfhAYblHbU_WXfBn5w_6nz19lUDorvbbyw

Not me though. I’ve already won. Spread the love and nominate other people.

Hey all- Jack Wylder here. With Larry hard at work relocating into the new Stronghold of Yard Moose Mountain, he hasn’t had time to blog much lately so I wanted to take this opportunity to share a post of his from the Book of Faces. Enjoy!

It is time once again to explain my Three Cooters Theory of Internet Discourse.

-X happens.
-Three guys named Cooter get very upset about X and post about it on Twitter. (1 is actually a person, and 2 of them are probably troll accounts)
-30 people actually see the Cooter’s outrage first hand, and write tweets condemning the Cooters for being offended about X.
-300 people immediately share these condemnation posts to signal their virtue.
-3.000 click bait news articles are written about this terrible scourge of hatemongery that is sweeping the internet.
-30,000 trolls (like Cooter69, CooterPowerForever, and DarkCooterAngel) pretend to also really hate X, because it gets a rise out of people.
-300,000 memes are created mocking both sides for being butthurt snowflakes.
– 3,000,000 people claim victim status because they have been so irreparably psychologically damaged by the legions of Cooter. A special federal task force is formed to combat Cooter related hate crimes and the UN General Assembly issues a proclamation blaming it all on Israel.
-30,000,000 Americans who actually have an opinion about X are all like lol wut?

X may be things like “Black Storm Trooper” or “Starbucks Holiday” cups. (we’ve had a new one about every other week for the last four years) but whatever it is, Cooter got very upset, and though he grew up eating lead paint chips, his angry tweet represents you and the half of the country that nominally agrees with you about topic X. His incoherent outrage has been assigned to you, and the half of the country that disagrees with you is going to be sure to post about how you’re all really stupid, so that all their friends will know how virtuous they are.

This week it is because Alexendria Ocasio-Cortez or whatever her name is–I don’t care enough to go look up how its spelled–had a video of her dancing while she was in college posted to the internet.

She put up a tweet about how conservatives are outraged and offended by her dancing (I saw it because the cool Navy SEAL congressman with the eye patch laughed at it). When I went onto Facebook I saw lots and lots of memes about how conservatives are all the dad from Footloose, and want to ban sinful dancing because its from the devil, and we want women to wear burkas.

(seriously, life is way nicer now that I’m trying to limit myself to 30 minutes a day in this cesspool).

Except as I scroll through my feed, which has lots of knuckle dragging, right wingers, clinging to their guns and bibles, the most damning things I could find were people saying stuff like “She’s pretty cute for a deranged socialist” and jokes about the hot/crazy matrix. Most sane and regular people don’t give a shit how she dances, they just don’t want to pay 70% of their income in federal taxes.

And of the many many many threads about this latest super controversial subject, I saw ONE reliable person saying that they witnessed firsthand an actual cranky Cooter (who is a real person and not a troll) outraging about her dancing, and it was on some small town board nobody outside of Somnambulist County Iowa has ever heard of.

We live in a country with a third of a billion people in it. This shit is tiresome and people are gullible. Next week will be some other hot button topic that three Cooters (who magically represent half of the country) get upset about.

Just say no to three guys named Cooter.

EDIT: – this is Larry again. Jack found this post that I wrote a year ago. But if you check current events it is still going on. I think right now the Three Cooters who magically represent half of America are very upset about black mermaids or something. It’ll be something new next week.