-Hi all Jack here- at Marscon Larry mentioned this and I realized it hadn’t made it over here. From the Book of Faces circa 2019…

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American Airlines has destroyed society. It is chaos here. Not like the Before Times, when airlines didn’t sell 87 tickets for an airplane that only holds 70 passengers.

The demon lord, American Airlines, offered me a voucher. I declared, nay to your wickedness, foul beast! I bought a 1st class ticket three months ago, you already ruined one whole day of my book tour this week. I should not be cast out amongst the pathetic Bumped!  But American Airlines laughed, and said foolish mortal, if you don’t “volunteer” then you will be bumped anyway, and be banished to the outer darkness of Dread O’Hare for at least another day.

So I took my voucher of sadness, that I may book another flight so that they may torment me again in the future. When I asked if I could use the voucher at another airline that wasn’t a complete shit show, American Airlines was not amused.

Thus I was cast from the holy 1st class, and sent to live among the dregs.

I have joined a tribe to survive.

The Delayed live in fear of the roving gangs of the Bumped. We battle for the vital territory of O’Hare, like the six working power plugs in the entire airport. Or the one water fountain that actually squirts far enough you don’t have to wrap your lips around it.

Rations are running low. I went to Chili’s but Endless Chips is a lie. There is an end.

I bought a hot dog. It was $4000. It mocked me with its sadness.

I remember Valentines Day with my wife in the Before Times, but my only intimate alone time today was spent with a blue gloved TSA agent, because his machine thought my testicles looked suspicious.

Though I dwell in Dread O’Hare, my luggage has flown to Utah. Where they assure me it will be taken care of by competent, American Airlines employees who totally won’t laugh as it is looted off the baggage claim.

Deprived of luggage, I have hunted and killed a service animal, and fashioned from its hide a loin cloth.
The Bumped Tribe has started a bonfire in terminal H to stay warm. We plot our next move against the Delayed Tribe.

-Jack, here. Larry shared his Hollywood experience on TwitterX recently and I thought it should be preserved here.

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There are thousands of books out there with original ideas that could be made into movies, but Hollywood is mostly illiterate.

Okay, I’m gonna expound on this with a thread about my experiences with Hollywood, as limited as those may be. As a working novelist and red state American I’m like an outsider barbarian there. 

First, I’m not exaggerating about them being illiterate, let me tell you a story-

Back when I was first getting started, Monster Hunter International had just blown up. I got contacted by my first movie producer. Nice guy. Had a made a bunch of movies I’d heard of in the 90s and early 2000s. 

This guy actually read books. Little did I know just how odd that was at the time. So this producer read MHI, loved it, showed it to his friend who was the #2 person at a major movie studio, who also read books. And he was literally like the only guy at the entire movie studio who actually READ BOOKS.

I wish I was exaggerating. I’m not.

The #2 guy at Major Studio you’ve all heard of reads MHI. Loves it. Even had an MHI patch on his desk. I flew out there to meet with these people, only to promptly discover that literally everybody else in Hollywood is functionally illiterate. I have a lunch meeting with these dudes, some Studio People, another novelist (way more famous than me), and a guy who has won an Academy Award for special effects. 

First time in my life I had mango chutney. Which is pretty awesome. Not so awesome was the rest of Hollywood. Studio guy starts pitching who should star in MHI, and this is when I learn Hollywood doesn’t give a fuck which actor actually fits the part, or who would do a good job, but who they have a deal with to give more work to. So they started casting- they start casting my 6’5″ 300 pound half Polynesian former illegal pit fighter main character. 

“Hey, what about Tobey Maguire?” 

“Oooh, I know, Jake Gyllenhall would like this part!” 

And I’m like… are you people high? WTF is wrong with you? Other writer leans over, whispers in my ear “Don’t say anything. They never give a fuck what us writers think.” Of course none of the studio people had read the book, nor did they care to. Their job is to be VISIONARY. 

As this went on, their vision got goofier and goofier, but I enjoyed my mango chutney quite a bit. It was an expensive place and the studio was paying for it.

Amusing side note- being a Hollywood restaurant, other patrons were wannabe actors, so when they heard us talking business, the actors realized these were actual studio people, so they started interrupting our lunch to introduce themselves and drop off glossy pictures and bios. 

“Oh hi I couldn’t help but overheard your conversation and I think I’d be perfect for blah blah blah” as they are handing out pics. 

When the first actor did this, all the other wannabes there saw this happen, so they all ran back to their cars and came back with pictures and bios to give us too. The studio people didn’t seem to notice. I didn’t know what to do with them so I started collecting them like trading cards.

So the Major Studio people loved MHI. They’re going to make me an offer. A week later the literate producer calls me and says the deal is dead. Why? Because Will Smith, who at the time was the biggest box office winner in the world, had just talked about doing a family comedy with Kevin James called “Monster Hunters” where a pair of child psychologists discover that the monsters under kids’ beds are real. (great pitch by the way)  Which meant instantaneous death for my project. They aren’t messing with Will Smith. 

And then Will Smith never made that movie anyway. 

(Keep in mind, this was way before most people in America had ever heard of the Japanese video game with that name too, which extra kicks me in the nuts 12 years later!)

A few years later I option MHI to Entertainment One for a TV show. I get paid money to just let somebody else hold the rights. And then nada… I don’t hear anything for years. Occasionally something changes and I get an update. They actually paid for a couple of screen plays to be made of it. But nobody tells me anything because I’m just the writer. 🙂

At one point I was told Dwayne Johnson tried to pick up MHI from E1, but that fell through (I have no idea if he read it because who knows, but I was told he wanted to be a bad ass and fight monsters).  But that fell through, and the Rock then bought the rights for Seal Team 666 from my friend Weston Ochse (good dude, RIP) where bad ass Navy SEALs fight monsters. I emailed Weston when that was announced and told him “congratulations, you bastard” 😀

Hard Magic got optioned by Radar Pictures, but same story. I haven’t heard anything new for a while (nobody tells the writer anything). Same thing. Occasionally a movie star I’ve heard of expresses interest, and then nada. A producer briefly shopped Tom Stranger for an adult cartoon, and Adam Baldwin said he’d love to play Tom again if it got picked up (he killed it on the audiobook) but Rick and Morty came along and anything “multidimensional” was seen as a rip off of that, so that project died too. 

Long story short, Hollywood options a lot of books, but they only go into production on a fraction of those. Most of them just hang out in limbo, with us authors getting paid option money to just not sell the rights to somebody else. Ender’s Game got optioned for like 30 years before they finally made a movie. 

So Hollywood has a ton of original unique properties available, but very few people who can actually make decisions actually read any of them. I’ve got a bunch of things which would make great TV shows or movies, and people ask me all the time who I’d like to see play whatever character, but I’m so jaded, I don’t care. I’m gonna cash that check and shut up because nobody gives a shit what the writer thinks. 

Seriously, if you aren’t JK Rowling, Hollywood doesn’t give a shit about us wanting to “maintain our creative vision”.

People always ask me, aren’t I worried that Hollywood will screw it up and make a bad movie? Oh hell no. First off, they have to pay me more if they actually go into production. I am a devout capitalist. Second, if it is actually good, I sell more books because they are now a successful media tie in, and if it is a shitty movie, I just got an hour long commercial with everybody who has read it telling everyone “the book is better”.

So that’s my experience with Hollywood. It is a bunch of people who don’t read books and who don’t really give a shit about the story doing whatever they feel like, while desperate beautiful strangers give them glossy head shots. 

-Jack here, once again archiving one of Larry’s rants from the Book of Faces. It seems they are not fans of the J Word these days…

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If I use The J Word on Facebook right now Facebook throttles the shit out of it. (See my last post). FB really doesn’t want to talk about how bastions of liberalism talk a big game about diversity and inclusion, but then everything they control inevitably turns to shit and chaos with angry mobs threatening to murder and burn stuff .

Democrats simply can’t run things for very long without fucking it up. Their fundamental basic philosophy is based on tearing down society and replacing it with magic unicorn farts. The transition period between reality and imaginary utopia is the part where people die and everything sucks.

For my friends of the religion which this giant evil mega corporation doesn’t like us talking about what’s being done to you right now, I think it behooves you to-

A. Move away from the big blue cities.

B. Buy guns.

C. Learn how to use those guns.

D. Stop voting for the evil shits who love gun control, violent criminals, and angry mobs, so that those nice areas you can flee to which still have cute traditional stuff like “equal protection under the law” so Ilhan Omar’s brother-husband can’t just have you decapitated in the school library with impunity, stay nice and traditional.

As a block 80% of you guys keep voting for the dumbfucks who enable the assholes who want to MURDER YOU. Stop voting for that shit! Yes. The other party sucks in other ways but at least they are big on letting you shoot back at the people WHO WANT TO MURDER YOU.

If you don’t do anything else, at least do B and C, because if you live in a big blue city with a big blue mayor and a big blue police chief, they do not give a fuck if you get murdered or hate crimed, but by golly they will do their best to make sure none of the angry mob gets offended by any hurtful words during the press conference. Sure. The big blue prosecutor will still send you to big blue prison for daring to defend yourself (you voted to make that illegal remember?) but at least you aren’t dead. Yet.

Quit voting for this bullshit! We had the same discussion with another demographic voting block that votes 80% D a few years back when their democrat police chiefs and democrat mayors let their democrat mobs burn down democrat business and democrat neighborhoods because they felt democrat prosecutors and democrat run police departments were extra mean to certain color democrats… and the obvious solution to this was republicans are racist, explained the democrat professors who are currently part of the angry mob protesting the religion who FB says shall not be named on democrat college campuses. What a mystery that all this wacky social division keeps happening!

Fucking duh.

This rant brought to you by my disgusted reading of the news this morning, and multiple conversations with my friend M.A. Rothman in Las Vegas this week about the goofy state of our world and what guns we are gonna stockpile next.

Since Larry’s currently in Vegas, allow me to share one of his recent entries from the Book of Faces- Jack

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Some reviews just baffle me. The ones where the reviewer thinks they are clever are the worst.

I just saw one that was complaining how Fever is different than the previous memoirs novels. Well no shit. It’s an entirely different narrator, set in a different time and place, with a different co-author. He knocked it for being more like a regular MHI novel and not the “slice of life” of the previous memoirs. Dude. It’s an entirely different book.

He knocked it for being short and made a snide comment about how my novels are getting shorter and that “must be the economy” like I’m greedy and ripping you guys off.

A. All the memoirs novels are the same size just over 100k. Fever is almost the exact same length as the previous 3.

B. The rest of my books tend to be very similar in length based on the series. MHI was the one anomaly because it was my first book and I didn’t know what I was doing. Most regular MHI novels are 120-140k.  All the Saga novels are around 140k. I’m actually remarkably consistent.

He said he didn’t like it because it was a “cliff hanger”. It is not a cliff hanger. The actual plot is resolved. The thing he’s bitching about is that there are allusions to further threats and adventures in the future. Which I leave in all my books, which ironically he praised about the series earlier in the same review. (roll eyes) This would be like bitching about a book about WW2 because it doesn’t tell you how it shakes out with the Soviet Union.

Then he repeatedly complains about how SLOW I AM. Because it is LIKE TWO WHOLE YEARS BETWEEN MHI NOVELS.  And then he dings Fever because he guesses the sequel won’t be out until 2026 or 2027…

A. how the fuck do you ding a product because you’re guessing when the next book will be out?

B. I write like five series simultaneously, and have averaged 2 books a year for 15 years, so get off my fucking back, man. 😀  

C. Over the last 15 years I’ve written 8 regular MHIs, 4 spin offs, and a collection of shorts. Holy fuck. In between that I wrote like 20 other books in my other worlds. What do you people want from me? I’m only human. 😀

D. If I did just want to be lazy and cash in, I would only write MHI novels nonstop, because those make the most money. Except I don’t because if I did that I’d get bored and the books would get stale. The reason they stay good is that I step back, do other things, and then come back fresh. That’s one reason why each book is different than the ones that came before, and THAT IS A GOOD THING. DUH.

“I’m not sure anyone was really longing for 1970’s LA monster hunting but I guess when you only get a book every 2 years you can’t be overly picky.”

If you want to feed prompts into an AI and have it barf out some soulless garbage that checks all the boxes you want, go do it. Ain’t nothing stopping you. Us human authors are gonna create what we feel like. You know, that whole “art” thing that makes it so the entertainment products you are consuming are actually something we’re enjoying making, so they stay good.

If I took this bullshit advice I’d be the same as the MCU churning out 4 mandatory Marvel movies of declining quality every year.

“Also how is there not a Hotel California monster or location in this book?”

What kinda nitpicky fucking bullshit is this? Why didn’t I have every reference to every single pop culture thing that happened that decade? This motherfucker doesn’t want an author. He needs ChatGPT. 😀  Plug that shit in and leave me be!  

He has a giant confusing paragraph talking about stuff I WROTE in the other MHI novels and how he liked that better (and some grammatically confusing stuff about Sluggy Freelance?) then whines “You never want to come across as “A better writer did something funny, I need to copy that.”… Dude… I WROTE ALL OF THOSE THINGS YOU ARE COMPARING IT TO.  😀

And it’s also extra fucking stupid as he’s citing that and I know exactly what I was shooting for in each of those scenes, and they’re all accomplishing wildly different goals… but I’ve got to get knocked because this dude doesn’t understand how storytelling works.

So basically, three stars for keeping my long running series fresh and interesting rather than formulaic and repetitive, while only having an work ethic better than like 99% of my career field. 😀

These fucking people, I swear.
I’m glad most of you aren’t like this. 😀

Larry posted this over on the Book of Faces and good golly they didn’t like it! They throttled it to the point that there were maybe 24 comments in over 2 hours. Even with their regular throttling of his account, he would normally have been yelled at by a few hundred people by that time, so it’s really telling. Know where they can’t throttle it? Right here on the Monster Hunter Nation site. Enjoy. -Jack

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I posted this on twitter earlier. Now I’m going to get yelled at by crazy people for the next few days.

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For all the people on social media crying about Israelis blowing up innocents this week, yep, that sucks, but why do terrorists hide behind civilians?

You.

That’s it.

You make it an effective tactic for them.

I see people saying that anything that harms innocents should be a war crime.
Congratulations.

You just ensured that’s the tactic every evil bastard out there will use from now on. Hiding under a church or school or hospital becomes a get out of jail free card.

Go do terrorist shit. Then hide behind your kids. Kids die. Wait for the world to freak out and pressure the people you murdered to give up and leave you alone. Do more terrorist shit to them again tomorrow.

Your naivete about the nature of evil ensures that hiding behind civilians is a winning tactic for them. You get sad for their human shields, governments cave, the evil doers get to live to rape and murder again tomorrow.

There is nothing nice or kind or merciful about war.

It’s miserable. Innocent people suffer and die. It’s total bullshit.

And it’s been part of human nature forever and will never ever stop, regardless of how hard you virtue signal your angst on Twitter.

Letting aggressor barbarians hit you but get away just ensures that they’ll do the same shit tomorrow. Every nation in history has understood this.

It isn’t about being mean. It is about being punitive.

There aren’t diplomatic solutions with barbarians who are willing to go house to house, raping people to death.   That ship has sailed.

The people who got hit are going to respond. We would. In fact, we did. Did we do it smartly? Nope. We did a lot of pointless shit for the next 20 years, but on 9-11 we didn’t give a shit what any other country had to say, and anybody who talked to us about “proportional response” got told to fuck off. This is the same thing, but approximately 30 times worse adjusted for relative population size.

So they’re going to do what they’re going to do, in the hope that they can stop it from happening again.

Will it work? Beats me. This shit’s complicated and anybody who pretends it isn’t is trying to sell you something.

But what I do know is that if you reward the enemy and give them what they want for hiding behind human shields, that just ensures they are going to do it more. Because when you’re evil, life is cheap, even your own kids, and everybody is expendable to get what you want.

So when Hamas hides under a school, they’re doing it for you.