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.

More Larry Gold from the Book of Faces- Jack

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I saw this on twitter and automatically read it in my Bad Twitter Writing Advice Voice. But then I got to expounding on why this is such a bad idea.

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Writing Community

@writingoutlook Oct 11

The aim is not to make money, the aim is not to be a best-seller, the aim is to change people’s lives. What do you think?

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Nope.

You ain’t changing shit if nobody reads your stuff.

If people read your stuff you make money.

We are entertainers, not preachers. Get over yourself.

I’ve got an incredible fan base. They have helped each other a lot. Tons of positive change. We’ve paid for surgeries. We’ve done massive charity drives. My fans once raised twenty grand for one woman’s breast cancer surgery in an afternoon. My fans have come together and paid for spinal surgeries and kidney dialysis. I have people who met on my fan page and gotten married. There are kids named after my characters. I’ve got a couple hundred people with the logo or characters from my books tattooed on their bodies. I’ve heard from many people where my books helped keep them happy through tough miserable times. I was the bestselling author in Baghdad and Bagram and helped distract dudes with fun stories while they were in the suck. My fans have become friends and consoled and boosted each other through all sorts of terrible life events. They’ve helped the out of work ones find jobs. They dominate the charity auction at conventions. They’ve shared knowledge and art. They’ve boosted the careers of dozens of other authors I’ve exposed them to so the cycle can continue. The amount of cool shit they’ve accomplished is way disproportionate to their numbers.

Over the last 15 years I’ve seen some pretty damned amazing things from them. I’m not the best writer, but I’ve got the best fans. By far. Wouldn’t trade them for anyone else’s.

Yet none of that positive stuff would have happened if my goal was to “change peoples lives”. They came together organically because I entertained them and provided them a product that they shared an interest in.

You goal should be to write good books that people will like, and get paid. As a side benefit of that you might make the world a better place for somebody. If your goal is to change people, you’re probably gonna fail as a writer, be annoying in the process, and die poor.

We’ve got an incredible bunch of authors for this 3rd anthology of noir sci-fi and fantasy stories. It came out really good.

https://www.baen.com/down-these-mean-streets-earc.html

An eARC is the Electronic Advanced Reader Copy. These are the versions of books that get sent out to reviewers before the actual book comes out. Baen realizes that some of you don’t like to wait so they make these early versions available for sale. eARCs aren’t the final edited version, but we got these in so early they should be fairly close.

Fever is on shelves now. eBook and audio are available for download HERE.

We are currently sitting at the #1 spot in Urban Fantasy on Audible. Because you guys are awesome. 🙂 Seriously, my fans rock.

Thanks for spreading the word, and when you get a chance after you’ve read or listened to it, please take a minute to leave an honest review. Jason and I appreciate it.

Now back to work on Graveyard of Demons.

EDIT: Currently #1 in multiple categories, #4 in scifi and fantasy, and #38 on ALL of Audible.

Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever is out tomorrow. I had a lot of fun with this one and I hope you guys enjoy it.

Monster Hunter Memoirs: Fever

Audio version

The memoirs novels are spin offs with other main characters, set in different eras, and I do them as collaborations. The last memoirs were the Chad novels with John Ringo, set in Seattle and New Orleans in the 1980s. This time I’ve teamed up with Jason Cordova, and it is California in the 1970s. The main character is Chloe Mendoza, who you’ve not met before, but stuff she did has effected the main series (and it’ll be fun when you guys catch those parts) 🙂

Somebody asked how much of this was me and how much was Jason, because people always suspect on collaborations that the senior author phones it in. Oh hell no. I’m way too nitpicky and meddlesome for that. I’ve talked about this a lot on WriterDojo before with Steve (another co-author) but my goal by the end of a collab is for neither of us to really be sure who actually wrote what bits. Ideally collabs are books that turn out unique from what either author would create on their own, but still be as enjoyable or better than what either author would come up with on their own.

Jason Cordova is a really talented author, and if you guys check this out and enjoy it I’d encourage you to go check out the rest of his books. The other big benefit of a collaboration between a more and less well known author is that the fans of the first guy go check out the works of the second guy so he picks up new readers.

And we finally got the audiobook preorder up! It’ll be available for download tomorrow. For the FAQs, Ollie is still the regular series narrator, but not the narrator on this one because Fever has a female PoV character. We went with a new narrator named Annika Chavez. Jason and I listened to a bunch of auditions, which were all good, but as soon as we listened to Annika we both went “Yeah, that’s Chloe.