I went onto Amazon to see how the preorders for the Baen edition of Monster Hunter International were doing (21,000 something on the bestseller list this morning, which ain’t bad considering I’ve still got 100 days before it comes out) and I stuck my name into the search engine.

The Amazon engine came up with another book that had my name in it, and it had an excerpt page.

So on page 28 of this book: http://www.amazon.com/reader/1440407541?%5Fencoding=UTF8&ref%5F=sib%5Fbooks%5Fpg&qid=1239301770&query=larry%20correia#reader it says that the original Infinity Edition of MHI, was in the top 3% of fiction last year.

Okay, I know how many books I sold. So I guess that just means that there are a LOT of books published, because I didn’t think I sold that many!

Ironically enough, Patriots, (which I haven’t read yet) was in the top 1%. See, us gun nuts do like to read.

By the way, if you just put Correia into the Amazon search engine, I’m the first thing that pops up. Take that, melodic stylings of Amy Correia! Who’s laughing now, Design and Construction of Pavements and Railtrack; Geotechnical Aspects and Processed Materials by Antonio Gomes Correia?! Yeah, I thought so… You better keep on walking…

I like the little thing on Amazon that shows you “people who bought this book also bought these”. It tells me a bit about my audience. 

You’ve got Ringo, Weber, and Williamson (that’s flattering) as well as other sci-fi and fantasy, World War Z and various zombie books (makes sense), Atlas Shrugged (Libertarians love killing monsters), James Rawles, Jeff Cooper, Matt Bracken, and Boston T. Party, (told you gun guys like to read), and On Killing (yep… that’s some light reading right there), and finally Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog, just because it is, in fact, that awesome. 

And while I’m posting about the writing front, the rough draft of MHI:2 goes to Baen this weekend, as well as the outline for my Grimnoir Chronicles, which I’m hoping she likes. Meanwhile, the thriller, Dead Six, by me and Mike Kupari is coming along nicely, and we should have it totally wrapped up in the next two months. Baen gets first look at it, but it doesn’t really fit into their regular genres, so I’ll be shopping a publisher for it while Mike is off playing Mr. Cool-Military-Dude and using our tax dollars to blow stuff up. 

Since I’ve got half a dozen projects in various stages of completion, I’m probably going to need to get an agent before too long.  I still have that one script that I wrote for a produciton company that specializes in CGI for a Sci-Fi Original picture, but they’ve never given me an answer, so if you work for a production company that does that kind of thing, give me a call. Let’s do lunch. 🙂

So stuff is moving right along.

I haven’t really posted much about politics lately. I can say that it has been because I’ve been so busy, exciting new job, had to buy a new car, submitting a rough draft and a new book pitch to my editor within a week, stuff like that, but it would be a lie. The truth is that the American political scene has just been too obnoxious and frustrating to think about lately.

If a year ago I had posted an April Fool’s joke about how the government was buying banks, bailing out the auto industry, buying insurance companies, multiplying the national debt over and over again in a period of a couple of months, passed a stimulus bill that didn’t stimulate anything but cost more than the 2^nd World War, that all of the new government appointees were either socialists, tax-evaders, trans-nationalists, or lunatics, that we were cutting all of our military programs in a time when other nations were growing theirs, and that our president would take a tour of Europe where we apologized to other countries for being America and the only thing the media could report on is that his wife has buffed arms, you would have said that I had gone way too far  coming up with something too far-fetched to be a good prank.

I find it ironic that our government is printing money and passing it out to anybody and everybody, but meanwhile we’re cutting back on military spending. I suppose that creating jobs building useless crap is more stimulating than jobs building fighter planes. Apparently ACORN employees need jobs a whole lot more than Lockheed’s. Personally I would rather have more F-22s than Harry Reid’s magnetic levitation train to Disneyland.  

The president of the US went to Europe, apologized to everybody for everything, kissed butt, stood in lots of photos, gave out I-Pods, bowed to the Saudis (literally), and now the media is tripping over themselves in the rush to pat him on the back because the rest of the world (like Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, etc.) loves us again.  Personally I don’t really care if a bunch of despots don’t like us, but that is priority number one of the new administration.

And here is something scary. I find myself actually agreeing with France and Germany about how useless the American president’s plans are… That is downright disturbing. It is like I’ve entered Topsy-Turvey Land. I’m waiting for Bizzaro  Superman to fly past my window or for it to start raining doughnuts. I may have to start carrying an HK.

Obama gave a speech where he talked about all of the wonderful things the Islamic world has brought to us to make the US a better place. I’m kind of drawing a blank from the 1400s on, but I’m sure there is something just awesome in there that I’m overlooking. I’m kind of a Rachid Taha fan,(especially Barra Barra from the Blackhawk Down soundtrack) but I don’t know if that’s quite what Obama meant.

Every time I turn on the news, I’m deluged with something else idiotic. My country is trying its best to abandon capitalism, because that has only worked better than everything else for all of recorded human history, in order to switch to some bastardized socialism than even FDR would have laughed at.

On FDR, my latest fiction project is set in 1932. I’ve been doing a lot of research into this time period lately. The media keeps comparing Obama to FDR for a reason, and I’ve seen a definite trend in the way Obama keeps trying to define himself in the same terms. Obama wants to be FDR, and he’ll probably succeed. As in, we’ll cause the economic downturn to get even worse and last longer by government meddling, and through typical democrat weakness on the international stage, we’ll end up in a great big war with somebody, and then we’ll spend the next few decades recovering from our flirtation with letting the government run everything.

And on that note, anybody who thinks that this is the same as the Great Depression is an imbecile and needs to crack open a history book. We averaged as high as 25% unemployment, and that was closer to 1/3 in some states. Though once we manage to utterly destroy the dollar by spending 8 times what we make, and you have to have a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread, Weimar style, then we’ll probably be close.

Meanwhile, the opposition party is still sucking merrily along. While America is being revamped into Big-Dumb-Canada, John McCain is fixated on getting boxing champion Jack Johnson pardoned for violating the Mann Act back in like 1910-something. Was Jack Johnson wronged? Yes. But since he’s been dead for like 60 years, maybe, John, you should concentrate on something more friggin’ important right now…

I hate you, John McCain… so very, very much, for so many reasons…

But I digress. I’m still waiting for the Republicans to float a leader who can actually gain some traction off of this mess. Most Americans don’t want to be Big-Dumb-Canada. They will gladly support somebody who stands up to this madness. In the meantime, we’ll keep sliding along this path toward who knows what.

April fools? Man, I wish…

I found this over at Lawdog’s blog. Oh my gosh that’s awesome.

http://thelawdogfiles.blogspot.com/2009/03/class-ii-beverage-alert.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbVA__DwqAQ

Neil is probably the most mild mannered, reasonable guy on the news. It takes a lot of stupidity to set him off.

Well, here you go. Congress is that stupid. Basically the government wants to cap salaries that are unreasonable, but they won’t tell you what “unreasonable” is.

And the only thing the moron can come back with is that Neil dared to use profanity on the air. *GASP!* Guess what Congressman? Everybody in America who is paying attention is cussing you and your ilk right now.

http://theunionstation.org/browningmuseum.html

My family and a bunch of friends went to the old Ogden train station, home of the John Moses Browning museum. If you haven’t been to the Browning museum, and you’re a gun person, you’re missing out. You need to go, it is kind of like a pilgrimage to Gun-Nut Mecca.  It contains most of the Great One’s designs, including prototypes you’ve never heard of, then guns designed by his kids, and even his workshop.

For those of you who don’t know who John Moses Browning was, he was basically the greatest gun designer in the history of the world. Pretty much everything was invented by Browning, and what wasn’t invented by him directly was influenced in some way.  We still use his designs today, some of them have barely even changed.

One of the guys took a bunch of photos, and I’ll see if he’ll e-mail those to me so I can post them.

I’ve been a few times, and my personal favorites are the original prototype BARs (including top eject!) and the .45 auto prototype that looks like a cross between a Tokerov and a 1903. It’s hammerless!  The prototype of the gun that would eventually become the High Power (designed by Browning, not Saive, in 1923) is really swoopy, doesn’t have a thumb safety, and has some sort of weird hammer/striker mechanism.