THE WOKE: Everyone we don’t like is a nazi. If you disagree with us about anything, you’re a nazi. That black woman? Nazi. That Jewish guy? Jewish nazi. That old guy who literally got blown up fighting nazis? Also a nazi for not agreeing with us. If you question this in any way? Nazi. And we’re going to get crazier and crazier so that we can weaponize this until we can bully everyone into compliance.
THE DEMOCRATS: Cool. We can use you useful idiots to consolidate power.
THE MEDIA: We are happy to reinforce this nonsense.
HOLLYWOOD: We can still keep raping each other though right?
THE WOKE: Sure.
THE REPUBLICANS: Duuuuuuuuuuuur…
BIG TECH: Awesome, then we’ll start installing a dystopian nightmare system that makes everyone you guys designate as undesirable subhuman filth unable to function in society.
GINA CARANO: You guys are kinda acting like nazis.
DISNEY: FIRED!

This post isn’t really about Gina Carano. Her firing is just another milestone in the culture war. I’ve been talking about this problem for about a decade now, as it’s gotten worse and worse, accelerating as big powerful lefty institutions discovered that they could harness the fire. You either toe their arbitrary line, or they try to destroy you.

And of course, regular people see this and understand it, but they keep their mouths shut because they don’t want to get cancelled themselves. Or they actively join in condemning whoever just got cancelled, in the hopes that they’ll be seen as friendly. Only that only works temporarily, because eventually the mob will turn on them too. We’ve seen that happen over and over with “allies”. You’re only an ally as long as you are useful.

When there are no Other-Than-Lefty targets, they eat each other in a cannibal feeding frenzy. I’ve documented a bunch of those here over the years. But as soon as there is an OTL target, they fixate on that. The nail that sticks up must be hammered down.

Of course the social justice mobs don’t actually give a shit about any of the stuff they claim to. They’re just in this to feel powerful. They’ll happily destroy any of the groups they’re claiming to want to help on any given day. There isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to their bullshit. That’s because it isn’t about “the victims”. The oppressed can be swapped out as needed. They’re just a handy excuse.

Of course the DNC and their allied megacorporations don’t give a shit about any of this woke nonsense. They just use the woke as clubs against their foes. They are the epitome of Useful Idiots. They use SJWs the same way they use BLM or Antifa, or whatever disaffected organization they can get some mileage out of today, and then they ignore them when they are inconvenient.

You can go look at Gina Carano’s tweet for yourself and see how “Anti-Semitic” it is. It shows young victims of the Holocaust in a concentration camp labeled Germany 1944 next to a pic of migrant kids in cages labeled America 2020, which insensitively minimizes the magnitude of the horrors of the Holocaust.

Oh wait… Sorry. That tweet was from her costar Pedro Pascal and is in no way controversial at all. My bad.

Gina’s tweet says absolutely nothing negative about Jews at all. It is about how it was the German people (not just the German government) harming the Jews after a propaganda campaign convinced the people it was okay to, accompanied by an image of a Jewish woman being victimized.

Don’t take my word for it. Both of these are still screen capped and on the internet. (WordPress is being buggy today and not letting me post Jpegs). So alluding to the fact that some people today are acting like the actual nazis did is a super insensitive hate crime, but those same people literally labeling everyone they disagree with nazis (one of the most evil organizations in history, which logically should be destroyed) regardless of their beliefs is perfectly fine.

The narrative will be about how Carano is Anti-Semetic and the regular useful idiots will run with it. Bullshit. She’s at worse ineloquent. But that’s a lame excuse too, because I’m a really successful professional wordsmith, and these same fuckers keep trying to cancel me for all sorts of insane made up nonsense things I never wrote. It doesn’t matter how clearly or understandably you state your point, they’ll just twist it into whatever horrible thing they want it to be and run with that instead.

If I recall correctly the last time they labeled Gina Carano as Anti-Semitic it was because she put up the famous picture of the lone man in the crowd who DID NOT SALUTE and something about be that guy. Back when Americans actually learned history, we all knew this picture. And somehow the historical ignoramuses took that and ran with it to prove she was a Jew hating nazi… which is literally fucking backwards as to the point of the meme. But it doesn’t matter what you do or say. They just lie and make shit up.

And when she didn’t bend the knee, that made her target number one. People are supposed to cower before the mob and apologize and beg forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you did anything wrong or not. That’s how it works. Celebrities, big companies, it doesn’t matter, you have to do the public show trial apology to placate them (actual behavior doesn’t matter, just the show) And if you don’t, it makes you a continual target, and they will keep coming after you, over and over, forever.

People making excuses for the cancelling are fools. They might even be well intentioned, but they are still fools. They are allowing the left to weaponize internet outrage into a tool that can be used to selectively dehumanize and remove voices that stand in the way. They tested this out on the most extreme voices, and when they got away with that without too much backlash, they keep working their way inward, labeling the next level extreme, and then the next, and the next. So on and so forth, until everyone who isn’t in lockstep compliance with the leftist orthodoxy of the day is a dangerous extremist.

And in just a few years we’ve gone from don’t let those dangerous extremists share their dangerous extreme ideas on certain internet sites, to they shouldn’t be allowed to have jobs, bank accounts, credit cards, or any ability to communicate. While the bar for “extremism” has been lowered to include basically whoever they want at any given moment.

“Hey, why is a Detroit election van dropping off dozens of big mystery boxes to the supposedly shut down vote counting center at 3:00 AM way after the deadline? There are several angles of this event on security camera videos. I don’t know. Maybe we should audit that or something?”
-Shut up, you extremist insurrectionist domestic terrorist. Now we need to remove you from society for everyone’s safety.

We’re slouching our way toward a Chinese Communist social credit system, only because it’s disorganized and coming from multiple allied angles instead of codified by a central committee, people are acting like it is fine.

The problem with what Gina Carano said isn’t that our modern left acts like nazis, it is that any historical comparison will never line up perfectly because we live in different situations/cultures. People get all fake-outraged like “how dare she compare the bullshit we are putting modern republicans through currently to the absolute horrors suffered by Jews!” except that the butt hurt people are picturing 1943 level nazi evils, when our current modern left is probably only about at a 1933 level of nazi fuckery. The Nazis didn’t suddenly appear on the scene and kill millions of people overnight. It took years of consolidating power, propaganda, and growing evil.

Today the left is still pushing and seeing what they can get away with. Both them and the nazis used statist control freak behavior designed to dehumanize and remove all opposition to their power grabs. Our modern left has not got to the cattle cars and concentration camps part… yet. This may hurt some feelings, but this comparison is far more accurate than the casual, tiresome, endless “everyone I don’t like is a nazi” line they use against all of us (regardless of our actual beliefs).

I’m not saying that Gina Carano getting fired is “tyranny”. I am however saying that her firing is yet another warning to entertainers and people in the public eye that we must always comply with the rigid groupthink narrative, or they’ll never work for the handful of megacorporations which absolutely dominate their industry ever again. Meanwhile, if you have the proper politics you can apparently be a horrible piece of shit and get a pass for years. The message is clear. Be on the winning team, or else.

The left has paid attention to the culture war for a long time, because they understand the value of entertainment products for shaping philosophy. They locked up most of publishing years ago, and writers like me who talked about it got dismissed as cranks. Then they did video games, comic books, RPGs, podcasting, Youtubing, whatever, it doesn’t matter, if it is something that they can sink their hooks into, they will, and then they’ll go about driving out everyone who doesn’t toe their line.

They did the same thing to academia. They did the same to news. So now all your entertainment, education, and information has to follow leftist orthodoxy or else, and that’s been growing and accelerating for years… and yet conservatives are continually shocked when the left sets the tone and the rules of discourse in our culture, and yet they roll over and act like all this culture war stuff is meaningless.

It isn’t. Don’t think you’re safe. It is coming for you too. Gina Carano is a wildly popular actress on the biggest show streaming. The rest of us are nobodies in comparison. So what happens when one of us says something that could be construed as bad? (and as we’ve seen, they can declare anything bad). You’re fucking toast. The message is clear, you think wrong, you’d better keep your mouth shut or we’ll ruin you.

It’s the same reason they’ve gone nuts censoring social media for the last few years. They want you to feel isolated, alone, and unable to speak (if you speak you might discover that you’re not alone). If you go someplace else to talk to people who agree with you, they crush those places. They can’t allow dissent. We all have to agree or else. They need to control the space so that they can label all dissenting views as fake news. If you go someplace that doesn’t adhere to rigid leftist orthodoxy, then you’ll get mocked as being in a “right wing echo chamber”, which is ironic considering since they control all entertainment/news/media/publishing you’d basically have to live in a cave in the forest to avoid being exposed to leftist views.

And the powerful lefty institutions fucking love this. Because this gives them a giant club to dominate American culture. (Those 1933 nazi propagandists would have loved the internet!)

People ask me what the solution is. Sorry. I don’t have a good easy answer. I’m just a pebble in the avalanche.

I watched the Super Bowl yesterday. I don’t follow pro-sports. Heck, I didn’t know who was playing until Saturday, but my son plays high school football so it was fun to watch it with him. (the boy is nearly Gronk sized) I rooted for the team with all the old dudes, and as an added bonus I found out afterwards that Brady is a Trumpkin, so him winning caused a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth among certain circles of super obnoxious dorks on Twitter. So double victory.

But the highlight of the whole evening for me was the commercial by Jeep. Because holy shit, there is a perfect example of an utter failure in marketing.

I can imagine how they came up with this ad campaign:

##

JEEP CORPORATE OFFICE –

The CEO of Jeep stands at the head of a conference table filled with the CorpoUniParty’s best and brightest. “Alright, our new campaign is going to be about Reuniting America, so we’re going to aim it at those horrible, knuckle dragging red state deplorables.”

“But sir, aren’t they all domestic terrorist insurrectionists who need to be driven from society because they believe in evil conspiracy theories like unfair elections?”

Everyone at the table laughed, because red staters are so stupid. Everyone knows the election was merely fortified.

“Oh no. That was so last week. They’re only garbage people who must be resisted by any means necessary when they’re in charge. Now that we’re in charge it’s time to come together and all that other bullshit. Reuinited America it is. So we need to figure out how to appeal to…” the Corporate Overlord made quote marks with his fingers. “the working man.”  

“Gross,” said one of the many Corporate Underlings.

“I know right? But we’ve maxed out our sales to butch lesbians and suburbanites who think they need four-wheel-drive because they occasionally go over speed bumps. Have any of you ever been to the country?”

The underlings share a nervous glance. Finally one of them tentatively raises a hand. “I went to Danbury Connecticut once for summer camp.”

Everyone from Manhattan knows that Danbury Connecticut is filled with scary murder rednecks like the movie Deliverance, so that would do.

“We need to appeal to the middle of America. What’s in the middle of America?”

“Corn?”

“Racists?”

The CEO thought it over. “Let’s mix it up and go with corn. What’s that corn state? You know the one that our jets fly over between LA and New York?”

“Kansas?”

“Whatever. Set it in one of those bullshit states we don’t care about. I know! We’ll even title it The Middle. What do people out there in The Middle do?”

“Their sisters!” shouted one of the MBAs. They all laughed and high fived.

“They voluntarily snow plow their liberal neighbor’s driveways… Just like ISIS.”

“All good points, but they sure do like to cling to guns and religion.”

“We can’t use guns. Guns are only okay when they’re in Hollywood action movies or being used to guard Congress. So we’ll go with the religion angle. I want to see lots and lots of crosses. Shots of crosses on the wall. Churches. Church steeples. Make the telephone poles cross shaped. Do they make cross shaped corn? And find some dilapidated church built back in the 40s, because everybody knows religious people are too stupid and poor to build anything new.”

“You know, sir, during our celebrity voice over talking about the dichotomy between the two sides of the country, to contrast the red staters playing in the dirt, we should put a bunch of big gleaming pretty glass buildings in the background, so that we can subtly remind them that we’re above them.”  

“Good call. And for the fly over people get all the cow skulls, broken wind-mills, and silos you can find. We can’t ever let them forget their place. Alright, on that voice over, what celebrity is hot right now with those racist dipshits?”

“Cardi B? She’s a Hash Tag Strong Woman.”

“No. Everyone knows Red Staters hate women. I saw it on the Hand Maid’s Tale. We need nominally male gender identifying, someone who represents those backwards inbred hicks. Can we get Bruce Springsteen?”

“But sir, isn’t he a flaming liberal from New Jersey who campaigned for Joe Biden and who routinely sneers at our target audience of uneducated rubes? Since they’re feeling mocked, disenfranchised, and thousands of them just lost their high paying energy jobs, how can we foist a coastal elitist millionaire musician on them?”

The MBAs all share a confused and worried glance about how to overcome this seemingly insurmountable issue.

“Hmm…  But what if we stick him in a cowboy hat?”

“BRILLIANT!”

##

“Hi. I’m Bruce Springsteen, millionaire musician, but today I’m driving around bumfuck nowhere in some busted ass old jeep to a melancholy soundtrack looking like an extra on Longmire so that you know I’m JUST LIKE YOU. Poor.

Look. A cross. Because Jesus or something. I don’t know. I got paid like two hundred grand for one day of work. Here’s some high-minded sounding poet laureate style voice over about how we’re all in this together that I probably recorded in the studio in my mansion.

Now I’m gonna be extra sanctimonious about how hard it is to meet in THE MIDDLE.

Red versus Blue… Sure, team blue was all #RESIST for the last four years and endless goofy investigations, but if you think security videos of 50 mystery boxes being delivered by a Detroit election van at 3:00 AM is worthy of an audit you are basically a terrorist who needs to be cancelled and driven from society.

Citizen versus Servant. Like it’s okay for riots to burn the places where citizens live and work for months on end, but if the servants are inconvenienced for a day that’s basically a coup that requires more troops than we landed on Utah Beach.

We need that connection. We need the middle. Because somebody has to pay the taxes to bail out our hedge fund buddies.

There’s a Divide. Of course that divide is your problem and totally not our fault. Look, a horse.

Our light has always found its way through the darkness. Said darkness obviously being four years of somebody we didn’t like briefly keeping us from doing every crazy ass thing we wanted to. Have some more executive orders.

But there’s hope… on the road… because we installed an old white segregationist who got millions funneled to him through his crackhead son from communist China… but if you talked about that in October you got kicked off the internet for Fake News. But now the news is real. So Hunter got a book deal from the same publishing house that cancelled a senator’s book about the dangers of Big Tech censorship.

Damn… How many crosses do you people need?

To the ReUnitied States of America. We even made the star red too because we are completely incapable of any introspection whatsoever.

Buy our shit.

Normally it is customary that authors never respond to their reviewers, because that is seen as uncouth. Some authors would say, barbaric, or unprofessional even. Luckily for me I’ve built my career on doing everything basically ass backwards from what publishing considers normal. (considering I actually open Tom Stranger 2 with a scene responding to all the bad reviews of Tom Stranger 1, I even make money with it!)

So far most of the reviews for my latest book have been good. However, there’s a couple that made me laugh because of how goofy and off base they are. This one in particular for the audiobook is going to peg the Brandollini meter, but it illustrates a few things about how the writing process/reviewing works, that I thought might be professionally helpful for the writers who read this blog to understand how my collaborations work.

“Having never read anything else by John Brown I can’t say Gun Runner is exclusively his story, but I can say it’s definitely not Larry Correia’s style of writing. “

Ha. Bullshit. 😀

Okay, this line of attack is one that I get on pretty much every collaboration I’ve ever done, and it’s just downright wrong. I’ve seen this said about my collabs with Kupari, Ringo, Hoyt, and now Brown. And I guarantee I’ll see the same thing said by some crank next year when the collaboration with Diamond comes out.

First off, these people assume that they can pin down my “style”, which is funny considering the same dude wrote Ashok Vadal and Jimmy the Intern. I’ve already demonstrated that I don’t give a shit about tone or genre, can write wildly divergent PoV characters, and bounce around as I see fit from world to world, so it’s kind of amusing that somebody thinks that I’ve only got one style in my tool box. (I’ve also ghost written some shit that would blow your mind because none of you would ever in a million years guess it was me. I can be a chameleon when I feel like it.)

Second, there is this goofy idea that collaborations consist of some phoned in nonsense where the junior author does all the work and then the senior author just sticks his name on it in some cash grab. Sure. Some authors do that. I don’t. Feel free to ask any of those many authors I listed above about how hands off I am on all those books. I take a great deal of professional pride in the fact that all my collabs are actual collabs. Everybody who knows me knows that I’m too much of a workaholic and a control freak to not make sure something with my name on it represents me.

Plus, it is always kind of hilarious to watch people guess which character/scene was written by which author, as everybody continually gets it all wrong, and I never say shit because I like watching very self-assured people be incorrect. (this is particularly fun on the Ringo collabs)

“While there’s interesting elements the pace of the story is torpid, the characters are somewhat flat and cliched and many scenes that should be immersive and exciting are very much just watching the action. I kept listening, hoping it would get better, but when redundant explanations started occurring that the reader is fully aware of, having seen all that info during the introduction, I called it quits. I’m about six chapters in and can’t take any more of the dull, remedial storytelling.“

Oh ho ho ho. He ALMOST pulled that off! For the first bit he had me believing that he was an honest reviewer who simply had a conflict of taste (and taste is subjective and thus can’t be wrong) and wasn’t just another troll review. Except then he had to go and overreach by saying how many chapters he made it in.

Chapter six is 60 pages in of a 439 page book. Of the “dull and remedial” storytelling that occurs in those 60pages, 14 are a panicked evacuation/rescue mission like the fall of Saigon but with more mind control and giant robots, from one character’s perspective, then the rest is a heist story on a different planet that goes from subterfuge, to a street chase, to a train job, to riding a stolen mech into outer space, from a different character’s perspective. During those 60 pages we briefly introduce probably ten named characters, and though almost all of it is action sequences, we toss in a lot of backstory and world building to lay the groundwork.

If this guy found that intro torpid, he really needs to stop doing meth. That shit ain’t good for you. 😀 So there you have it people, if you are flying high on crank, Gun Runner is not for you. Also, quit scratching yourself. It makes sores.

The “redundant explanations” is amusing, considering that the change between our rough draft and the final, Toni Weisskopf had us PUT MORE EXPLANATIONS IN. Because behind the scenes John and I both come from fantasy/action/thriller backgrounds where you under explain until you can’t, and Toni had to educate us that sci-fi audiences tend to expect more clear laying of groundwork earlier on, so we didn’t need to explain how the fundamentals of the universe worked for the next 400 pages.

But what does Toni know? She’s only considered one of the most successful and prolific editors of sci-fi in the genre’s history.

“Oliver Wyman does a terrific job on narration, but even he can’t save Gun Runner. “

At least he didn’t bag on Ollie. Because Ollie rocks. Nobody was going to believe him if he did that.

“Not sure what is going on with Larry Correia.”

Well, I do have a newsletter you can sign up for if you are curious. 😀

“This is the second story I purchased, based on his name and have been disappointed with the results.”

Hmmm… curious. Out of my 25 books in half a dozen different genres/worlds. I’ve let you down twice with my profound torpor? Or, more likely my take on space opera ain’t your thing, but rather than just put a low rating on it because it wasn’t your thing, you had to pontificate about my lack of work ethic and dishonest business practices to try and scare other readers away?

“Is he a sponsor for other authors now? ”

You caught me. I’m really billionaire James Patterson, and I keep 20 younger authors chained to computers in my basement dungeon.

 “Or is it his publisher using his name to draw sales?“

Well duh. 😀

Publishing education time! Gather ’round aspiring authors and random internet cranks, and I’ll explain what a “collaboration” is. That’s when more than one writer gets together to write a story. My publisher, Baen, has a long and successful history of pairing authors together. Usually one of them is more famous than the other, which helps drive sales, and helps get the less known author’s name out there, which boosts the sales of their books. (though this isn’t always the case, like me and Ringo both being bestsellers when we teamed up, and some writers are just an endless powerhouse team up, more famous together than apart, like Niven and Pournelle, or “James S.A. Corey” which is Ty Frank and Daniel Abraham)

And here is a dirty little secret about these terrible cash grabs that us rich and famous authors do just to hoodwink poor customers like Johnny InternetRando… Collabs actually take LONGER than writing a book by yourself, and then we SPLIT the money. BRILLIANT! 😀

This charge is extra funny on Gun Runner however, considering that this is the book John Brown and I plotted live for a two hour panel in front of 200 people at LTUE.

“Regardless, I’m aggravated with their misleading representation.“

Okay, I actually snort laughed when I got to that line. I wasn’t going to say anything about this until I hit that sentence, and then I was all like, oh man, this bullshit has got to go on the blog. Just for educational purposes for other writers, because that’s so goofy. That was the point where my Benefit of the Doubt killed itself in shame.

“What’s next? The ‘narrated by’ isn’t accurate either?“

That’s not a bad idea. I was actually thinking the next book I’d put Oliver Wyman, Bronson Pinchot, AND Tim Gerrard Reynolds on the cover, and then 20 hours of audio would just be a repeating 30 second loop of Adam Baldwin making manatee noises. WE WILL MAKE MILLIONS!

Or as Wendell would say (for 20 hours straight!) Fleeerp mewhoo HOOOON!

However I bet that would still crack the top 10…. Hmmmmm… Damn it. That is actually tempting. Get thee behind me, Satan!

“Not happy with the bait and switch.”

Hahahahahahah Hahahah
Oh shit…
That’s awesome. 😀

Dude. See that cover? It has both our names on it. This isn’t one of those ZOMBIE TOM CLANCY in giant letters at the top with “presents” in little letters, and then tiny tiny print in the bottom corner “By JimBob ScrubHack” books. John and I wrote this book together.

Hell, I usually don’t go into that many details of who did what in a collab, but I’m going to here for educational purposes. I’ll even give you the timeline. We started this project clear back in 2015 (when I was less famous!) when we got ideas from my at the time 10 year old son, and then used those to plot an entire book over a two hour period in front of a live studio audience. When we got done, we looked at each other and said, wow… that’s actually pretty solid. We could write this.

And then it wasn’t until 2018(?) after the successful conclusion of some of my other collaborative contracts that Toni asked me if there were any other collabs I wanted to do. I pitched two, this one with John and another one with Steve which this reviewer will surely hate next year.

John is also a successful thriller writer (he got his start doing epic fantasy at Tor around the same time I wrote MHI. We did some book signings around the country together which is how we became friends). In 2018 we got together and did a more in depth brain storming session based on the panel we’d done at LTUE. Then I wrote a detailed, scene by scene outline, that was about 10k words if I recall correctly. We then hashed that out for a few weeks back and forth via email before John went to work.

I’m trying to recall file sizes now, so these might not be 100% accurate but they are close enough you get the idea. John wrote the rough draft over the next few months, sending me updates about every 20k words. I’d make comments and send them back. John put those together into a 100k rough over about 4 months and sent it to me, where the poor guy had to wait a couple of months because I was finishing up another book (Destroyer of Worlds I believe) that was on deadline. (and I can’t switch back and forth between worlds because it takes me about a week to find the right voice for a project)

I sent him back a bunch of notes and he revamped all those. (some day I will tell the tale of poor Bruce, who John loved, but who didn’t make my brutal uncaring cut!) John made a slew of changes and we ended up with about 100k of rough draft.

Other novel sent off, I took that 100k and chopped it down to about 90k, and then wrote it back up to 130k. And that was not -10k in one spot, + 40k in another. Those edits were spread throughout the whole thing. Every page. It took me about two straight months (because I edit/write at about half the pace I write/write).

To put this in perspective, from beginning to end for me to write a novel by myself is usually 4-6 months, but I’m so clever with all this bait and switching, that this collaborative method takes twice as long to turn in a product and afterwards I only get half the money. BRILLIANT… It’s almost like there are creative or artistic reasons to collaborate or something, but I’ll get to those.

Then John got the manuscript from me and went through it again with all my notes. At this point I think we were about 140k when he sent it back to me. I really liked it. I did one last small edit pass, and then sent it to Toni.

Toni went through it and came back to us with some changes that she felt were necessary. At this point that whole opening chapter, Fall of Gloss evacuation/rescue scene DID NOT EXIST. We’d only referred to those events in passing bits of backstory and conversations between Jackson, Jane, and the Captain. Toni is normally anti-prologue, however in this case she thought it was necessary to tell the story and set the themes.

And now here is the part that is really going to piss off our erstwhile mind-reading totally-not-a-troll reviewer… Because I’ve written a couple dozen books for Toni and know how to incorporate her edits, and we were now on the clock with the deadline approaching, and John had gone back to finishing up one of his books, I told John that I’d take care of all her edits, including writing what is now the intro. John had an idea for the new opening that he started on, but I’d just read a thing about the Fall of Saigon and wanted to get a visual equivalent to everyone trying to get on the Huey.

Yes… That first opening part that this reviewer managed to suffer through which he was so certain wasn’t MY voice? On the contrary, that’s the longest part of the whole book that I wrote pretty much by myself. I kicked it over to John after I was done and he had a few suggestions that I implemented, but that opening Holloway scene was mine.

So going back to his clever thesis of: “but I can say it’s definitely not Larry Correia’s style of writing. “
Whoops. 😀

(EDIT: final word count was 154k)

Okay, so goofy review out of the way, why should authors collaborate? I’ve written about this in depth in some of the Ask Correia posts, but it comes down to creative reasons. The book that you write with someone else is going to be different than the one you write yourself. This can be good or bad. It depends on each author’s strengths and whether you play to them or not. It’s also a learning process, because every time I write with some other author I inevitably pick up some new tool that I can add to my personal tool box for writing my own books.

Sometimes a collab can be a cash grab for the bigger name, but psychologically I’m not wired that way. I couldn’t put out a book without working on it (and the the logistics of the back and forth are going to make it take longer than I could do it by myself no matter what). But some authors do that sort of thing and their fans love it, so more power to them. I wasn’t joking when I called Patterson a billionaire. (If he’s not, he’s got to be close by now). Heck, if George Martin collaborated maybe all the GoT fans would have gotten a satisfying conclusion by now.

I wrote Gun Runner because I had a lot of fun plotting it with John, and he’s a cool guy to work with, and it was a new genre that I’d only ever messed with in short fiction. Every collaboration I’ve done has been for a different reason, but ultimately, the most important thing a writer can do is make sure they are having fun. Because if you keep having fun, then your fun is contagious through the page, and your readers have fun too.

If you do what internet cranks tell you to do, you’ll be miserable. And then your writing will be miserable. Its the same way I tune out all the needy types who bark at me You Should Be Writing X Instead of Y! Because series X is their favorite and they hate that I waste time on series Y. Except they’re idiots who don’t understand that creativity isn’t simply a faucet that you can turn on and off. I write series Y (and W, Z, 4, and !) because that is what is fun. And because I’m having fun with those, I can then go back and write more X without me ever getting tired or bored.

Collabs are the same way. They mix things up for me. Working with another author gives me a chance to step back and refocus on my craft. I can’t just take things for granted. I’ve got to think things through because I need to be able to explain why those are the things to do. I’ve been pretty consistently good for a long time across a bunch of different series, and I think one of the reasons I’ve been able to keep up that level of productivity/quality is because about every three books I write one with somebody else.

You also have to check your ego, because sometimes you’re wrong and the other guy is right. And recognizing that they’re right and why they’re right helps you become a better author.

That’s another reason that I don’t recommend collabs for two newbs starting out. From what I’ve seen those projects usually turn into train wrecks. Good collabs usually have an ultimate decision maker, but they work best when both of the collaborators already know how to write. (that said, some newbie collabs turn out really awesome, so once again, there are no hard and fast rule to this stuff. If you can make it work, it works)

But anyways, there you go. That’s how collaborations work for me.

Final note, honest reviews are awesome and appreciated. Authors love reviews, good, bad, the more the better. Just spare us all the mind reading and pontificating about our character and business practices because it’s fucking embarrassing. 😀

Gun Runner, the new sci-fi novel by me and John Brown, released yesterday. And it seems to be doing pretty good.

The orange tag means we hit #1 in a category on Amazon. Our full price book was stuck at #2 in some other categories last night because there’s a dude selling a 9 book series for a BUCK parked at #1. As a devout capitalist, all I can say to that is rock on, sir. 😀

Gun Runner on Amazon! Order here!
Autographed copies available from Uncle Hugo’s here!
Podcast discussion with the authors here!

The only source for autographed copies this time around is Uncle Hugo’s. John and I signed a ton of book plate stickers for them to insert into copies to then ship to people. However, apparently you guys overwhelmed the supply of autograph stickers yesterday and bought them all out. Don’t worry. Baen is overnighting me another package to sign. Then I’ll drive over to meet John half way (we live in the same state, but it’s about a two hour drive between us) we’ll sign them all, and then overnight them to Uncle Hugo’s so you guys won’t have to wait too long for your autograph copies.

I am really looking forward to seeing the reviews when you guys finish this. So far people seem to be enjoying it a lot. I’ve not even got to listen to the audiobook version myself yet, but apparently Oliver Wyman kills it on narration. But the guy is amazing on Monster Hunter, and he is a total pro, so I figured it would be awesome.

I saw one professional review so far that made me laugh (I will name no names, but I know this place hates my guts on a deep personal level, so I was impressed by their impartiality) because even they gave it a good review, though they had to warn readers that a constant and possibly upsetting theme in my work is how the individual little guy is more competent than the government or big corporations… and I was like, guilty as charged! 😀 I will happily own that one!

Also, for those who asked, yes, the role of Captain Holloway is played by Nick Searcy in my imagination. Somebody tell Nick and I’ll mail him a copy.

Gun Runner on Amazon! Order here!
Autographed copies available from Uncle Hugo’s here!
Podcast discussion with the authors here!

The Heart of a Warrior

Once, Jackson Rook was a war hero. Raised from boyhood to pilot an exosuit mech, he’d fought gallantly for the rebellion against the Collectivists. But that was a long time ago, on a world very far away.

Now, Jackson Rook is a criminal, a smuggler on board the Multipurpose Supply Vehicle Tar Heel. His latest mission: steal a top-of-the-line mech called the Citadel and deliver it to the far-flung planet Swindle, a world so hostile even the air will kill you. The client: a man known only as the Warlord. Rook has been in the smuggling business long enough to know that it’s best to take the money and not ask questions. But Rook cannot stand by and watch as the Warlord runs roughshod over the citizens of Swindle, the way the Collectivists did on his homeworld. For all his mercenary ways, Rook is not a pirate. And deep within the smuggler, the heart of a warrior still beats.

How John Brown and I came up with this book is kind of cool. We live plotted it in front of a con audience at LTUE based on story ideas given to us by my son (who was a little kid at the time). And now here it is. And it came out really good. I’m excited to hear what you guys think of it.