Media Monday: Rambo V - Last Blood

There's no good way to approach a review of this without sinking neck-deep into the current socio-political quagmire. There just isn't. I'm going to do my best to talk about it without engaging this, but I will fail. I'm just putting it out there that this review isn't meant to be a discussion of racism and politics in film, but rather, how to handle such issues in a way that doesn't make you look like a pack of morons.

Rambo: Last Blood is a garbage movie. There, I said it. Bring on the hate. I grew up watching the Rambo movies on VHS and (edited) television channels, so if someone wants to accuse me of not loving mindless action movies, come at me, bro. I saw Rambo 4 in the theater and left absolutely thrumming with adrenaline because I thought it was, if not a masterpiece, certainly leagues better than Rambo 3, and felt like they at least put some effort into addressing the complexities of the issues at hand with how outsiders view violent civil conflicts, and the futility of "helping" in regions where such help is marginal at best, and bloodily counter-productive at worst.

Last Blood, on the other hand, appears to have been conceived for the sole purpose of getting to the last 20 minutes of the film, and no one gave any real thought or care as to how the film got there. In order to talk about this, I'm going to have to deal with some extensive plot spoilers, so now is your chance to bail now if you don't want this.

Keep scrolling.

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A little more.

Last chance.

Okay then, don't blame me if you're reading this and don't want spoilers.

The long and the short of it is that Rambo is now living on a horse ranch in Arizona with Maria, a woman who is at least approximate to his age, and Gabriela, a young girl who is graduating from high school and going off to college. The first big problem here is that Rambo's relationship to these two women is never actually explained. At the end of Rambo 4, you see Rambo going to a place that you assume is his family farm, but in this movie, you don't really know who is related to whom. Rambo isn't Gabriela's father, or even her grandfather. There's mention of her mother, and a deadbeat dad, whom Rambo stopped apparently at one point from beating up the mother. I'm not even sure of the relationship between Maria and the younger girl - I think she might be an aunt, but I can't say for sure. Seeing as the film spends at least its first 20-25 minutes establishing the family dynamic, the fact that I couldn't figure out the relationships makes this just sloppy writing. This is especially annoying, because the entire reason Rambo goes so batshit later on is that the girl is so emotionally important to him, the "one good thing in his life".

OK, according to Wikipedia, Rambo has no relationship to any of these people. The horse ranch belonged to his dead father, and Maria is the grandmother to Gabriela, and Maria just...runs the household? That at least makes sense, but this relationship isn't really ever laid out clearly, which shouldn't be that hard. You at least know that Gabriela's mother died of cancer when she was little, and after that, her father - who was apparently always an asshole - leaves her with Maria and goes off to Mexico. Fast forward to now, when Maria is 18. A childhood friend of hers - Gizelle, who is referred to as a "bad girl" by Maria - is now living in Mexico, and she has found Gabriela's father, who apparently lives in the same Mexican town. Despite Rambo and Maria repeatedly telling her that her dad Miguel was a violent asshole and she shouldn't have anything to do with him, and Rambo even telling her that she should maybe let her urge to visit her father simmer a little before she makes the decision to visit him, Gabriela almost immediately ducks out and drives down to Mexico to go find Gizelle and her father.

I've already spent two long paragraphs here, so I'll keep this short. Dad is an asshole (surprise) and tells Gabriela to beat it. Gabriela is sad, Gizelle takes her to a club, where she sells (!!!!!!) Gabriela to some sex traffickers, who then drug and kidnap Gabriela. Gizelle then calls back to Maria, tells her she lost Gabriela, and Rambo goes full batshit mode and drives down to Mexico, where he finds Gizelle, realizes she sold out Gabriela, and gets her to point out one of the bad guys. Stuff happens, Rambo fails, and gets beat up by the rest of the bad guys, who decide not to kill Rambo, a guy who just tortured one of their own, and showed up with a pistol and a knife.

Gabriela gets doped up, gets her face slashed, and is put to work as a forced prostitute. Eventually Rambo learns from an "independent journalist" (who just happens to watch him torture one of the bad guys and saves him after his beating) where to find Gabriela, but alas, after he saves her, she dies in his car as they're just...I don't know, driving around in the dark. Yes it makes no sense. He finally drives over the border and brings her body home, then buries her on the farm. Maria just packs up and leaves. Rambo tells her he's going to leave too, but that's a lie. He goes back to Mexico and kills one of the two lead bad guys in a way so that they know it was him. He then comes back home, preps his murder maze, and in the last 20 minutes of the film, kills everyone. The end.

You might be thinking, "Hey, this actually sounds awesome, what's the problem?" but honestly, everything is just so stupid. It's not that the characters make stupid decisions - although there is some of that - but that every time the story reaches a point where something could be done in an interesting, intelligent, nuanced fashion, the car screeches off the road and goes into the ditch. By the time you get to the climactic battle at the end, it is boorishly obvious that the entire reason the film was made was to show Rambo running around an underground death maze, murdering bad guys with knives, punji sticks, old-timey guns, booby traps, and other assorted ordnance (claymore mines and hand grenades???). There isn't even any strategy or cleverness to any of it - bad guys just die, over and over, running flat-out into death and screaming in blood and pain.

I'm sure many of you are STILL shaking your heads and saying, hey, what's the problem? The problem is, it is stupid, sloppy work. This movie could have been a really good reflection on the plight of old soldiers who never really left the war behind. On PTSD and re-integration, on wanting to be left alone, only to find violence at one's doorstep again. And while you might think there's some of this, the movie only ever skims the surface, like a stone skipping across the water, but never sinking, just bouncing back out on the other side of the river. What was the point of the movie? What themes does it dig into? What message does it send? You could get the same thrill just firing up your XBox and killing dudes in some FPS game for a couple of hours.

And yes, I am skirting the whole "Mexico" issue. The only thing I'll say about that is, you could have told the exact same kind of story, even with most of the major plot elements relatively intact - and not use Mexico as this sort of Hades-esque underworld that you only venture into at your own risk. It is, again, sloppy, tone-deaf plotting that so obviously doesn't care how it is going to be received, and in fact is probably counting on "snowflakes" hating the movie to stir up buzz and get defensive butts in seats in support of the movie. I don't know, and that's not something I want to engage with, but again - there were many directions the movie-makers could have taken this story and at the same time, left its bones intact. They picked a route through some really, really questionable waters, and at the same time, made a film so sloppy and superficial that there's no real substance to back up the choices they made, except to get us to the finale with extreme prejudice.

Honestly, I am really disappointed.

Wargaming Wednesday: Not Just Dungeons and Dragons

Dungeons and Dragons was the first pen-and-paper tabletop role-playing game I ever encountered. I started playing in the summer of '93, when two of my friends had the "Big Black Box" edition of the DnD Basic Rules set. For those of you who know what the BBB version is...well I don't need to tell you anything. For all you newbies out there, this was a really big intro boxed set that had a ton of "rules cards", a big map adventure, tiny cardboard monsters and PCs...basically everything you'd need to play the first few levels of your characters - which is not unusual for the D&D boxed sets - but in a larger format, with full-color maps and cardboard counters.

Up until this point, I really hadn't been into "Fantasy", but I had read the first three Dragonlance books (that's a post for another day), and so I had some idea of what I was getting into. Needless to say, I was immediately hooked - in fact, far more than the two other people I was gaming with. I quickly bought the 2nd Edition Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual, and the over the next few years, I bought EVERYTHING that TSR produced - settings, Class handbooks, DM's guides...the works. The biggest problem, unfortunately, was lack of players, since I was living in a fairly rural small town in Maine, and my high school peers, for the most part, weren't interested in gaming.

When I moved off to college in 1995, I brought most of my gaming materials with me, certain that I'd be able to find a DnD group at a large urban university. But of course, as soon as I found some nerdy brethren and asked who played D&D, I received mocking laughter. "We don't play that game, you dork. We play White Wolf games. Those are real role-playing games".

I got sucked into a Werewolf: the Apocalypse game, and really enjoyed it, and I played a little Vampire and a little Mage as well. My RPG tastes began to grow, and I started buying other games, surprised that there were dozens of games put out by a wide variety of publishers in any genre you could think of. And of course, this was the late '90s, when the Internet gave us the ability to communicate around the world and share documents online with each other, enabling the explosion of what is commonly known as the "indie gaming" revolution. New voices emerged in the industry, edgy people with games that strayed far from the staid boundaries of D&D, GURPS, Rifts, World of Darkness, and other, more established platforms.

Fast-forward twenty years, and the more things change, the more they stay the same. Dungeons and Dragons is now well into its fifth - and most popular - edition, and most of the old guard are still around in one form or another. But smaller, indie presses and self-published games continue to arrive on the scene almost daily. In addition, the disdain most D&D folks had for the 4th edition rules, coupled with the death of D&D co-creator Gary Gygax back in 2008 sparked the "Old School Renaissance", where many gamers went back to the old editions of the game, breathing life back into them and using the bones of their rules sets to create a huge variety of different games.

Over the decades, I've collected a lot of role-playing games. Far more than I ever have, or ever could, play. I don't know what the current number is, but it is probably creeping up towards a hundred different RPGs and/or editions. And yet, that barely scratches the surface of what's out there, even from larger game companies, never mind "indie" developers. It's interesting that Dungeons and Dragons is more popular and more mainstream than it has ever been, and yet, most people have no idea of the immense variety of games out there - settings, play styles, rules types - whatever your interests might be, there is likely a game for you. And, just to give a minuscule taste, here's a YouTube video I watched last night, which dips a toe into the fathomless pool of games out there:

Yes, the video is a bit long, but if you have any curiosity about role-playing games, it is definitely worth your time to watch, and certainly better than me trying to pitch a bunch of different games. Oh, and it is worth noting that of the ten games they mention, I only own one of these - Call of Cthulhu - and it's an old edition. So if I own nearly a hundred RPGs, and only 1 of them is on this list, that gives you some idea of the variety out there.

My 2016 Writing in Review

Hello all, and happy New Year. I've written one of these "writing in review" posts every year for the past several years, and wanted to get this one out as soon as possible (I realize I don't have a tag for these posts, so I'll be creating one now if you would like to go back and read the others). Although I did not actually publish anything in the calendar year of 2015, I sort of only book-ended this year with a major release in January and one with just hours left on New Year's Eve. And, as always, just to preface, I give my sales numbers only for the purposes of providing information for folks, not as some measure of my subjective success or failure. I do better than some authors sales-wise, but many others do better than I do, and that's a-OK.

This was easily my best year by a considerable margin. While last year I was down, money-wise, this year I beat last year by several thousand dollars. I had over 5,100 sales of all ebook titles, and I cleared over 840,000 Kindle Unlimited pages read (which works out to roughly 4,000 of my titles read through, on average). While that sales figure is down compared to last year by about 500 sales (and keep in mind that for the first half of 2015, I was counting KU "borrows" as sales), my average daily KU page read counts have skyrocketed. Between July and December of 2015, I had 170,000 KU page reads, which averages out to around 944 pages a day. This year's daily average is about 2,311 pages a day, nearly a 150% gain. In addition, starting in April of this year (when I received royalties for February, the first full month after Operation Archery was released), my monthly royalties were higher - sometimes double - every single month this year.

That is, of course, the good news. The bad news is that the percentage of books sold that aren't associated with my Commando series is, basically, almost non-existent. I sold twenty-five copies of San Francisco Slaughter this year, as well as thirty-two KU reads. Now, looking at my overall yearly sales figure, we see that SFS was less than one-half of one percent of all my sales this year. Killer Instincts sold 225 copies, about 80% of them over a two-month period during which I ran a large sales promotion after it received the new cover. There were also 96 KU reads, about half of those very clearly due to the visibility of the promotion. Both ebook and KU sales come out to about 4 1/2 percent of my totals for the year. As for all the other non-Commando shorter works, barely anything moved. Twenty-three copies of Renegade's Revenge were sold. Eight copies of Spiders & Flies (each moved a few hundred KU pages, a mere handful of reads). The rest are even more pitiful.

Last year the Commando series accounted for around 90% of my totals, but this year that number has nudged up to probably around 93-94%. While some of that growth can be attributed to having a new title in the series that sold quite well, it is clear that everything else I've written is just ignored. Keep in mind that without that KI promotion, that percentage would go from about 4.5 to barely 1 percent of my sales, so without those extra 180 or so sales, Commando titles would probably be...97-98% of my income this year.

Which is a little disconcerting, especially as I have just released Assault on Abbeville, the first in a new WW2 series, REVENANTS. This series is set in the same "universe" as my Commando books, so they are indirectly related, but that is no guarantee that the readers of one will be interested in the other - I may very well have another San Francisco Slaughter on my hands. I also want to push and get a Panzer-focused series out the door this year, after the publication of Operation Elysium, and my biggest worry is that title dying as well. As much as I enjoy writing the Commando books and short stories, I fear the notion that such are the ONLY things I can write which will earn me any kind of appreciable income.

And, of course, all of this comes back to productivity. This year after releasing Operation Archery in late January, I began work on Operation Elysium, but got side-tracked and wrote Assault on Abbeville, as well as polishing up and publishing A Sergeant's Duty, the second "Short Bursts" story. As of right now, about 15% of Elysium has been written, and the rest extensively outlined. In the next couple of days, while my day job is still quiet, I'll be making an effort to push forward on the first draft, with a great determination to have the book done by the spring, which will hopefully leave me with more than half a year to write and publish the first Panzer book, which also have some extensive outlining right now.

So now, it is just a matter of getting my shoulder against the wheel. I know I can do it - in 2014, I was actually surprisingly productive, releasing Operation Dervish, SFS, Renegade's Revenge, and Spiders & Flies - It is just a matter of sitting down, writing, and repeating that process as frequently as possible.

My 2015 Writing in Review

For the past several years now, I've been writing a year-end post about how my various books have performed, and although I haven't published anything in 2015 (more on that later), I wanted to give a rundown of the year's sales, as much for my own analysis as anything else. As always with such things, I provide these numbers not to boast, or to whine, but merely to inform. Some folks out there are doing much worse than I am, while others are doing much better. This is just the way it is, so take the following as provided for information purposes only.

In 2015, I sold roughly 5600 books, about 90% of those in ebook form. This is down about 2,000 sales from last year. A portion of that loss is, without a doubt, due to the new Kindle Unlimited payment method of calculating royalties based on pages read, not on 10%+ "borrows" as before, and in the past, I have been factoring any "borrow" as a sale to keep the bookkeeping simple. Since July of this year, when KU 2.0 went into effect, I've had about 170,000 pages read, which if divided by an average of 200 pages (the shortest of my Commando books, just for the sake of rough calculation), gives me another 835 sales, bringing me to around 6400 books sold. Of course, not everyone who started one of my books finished it, and it is impossible now to track such things.

In terms of what percentage of my sales went to each book, the total is overwhelmingly my Commando series. While last year I sold some 700+ copies of my western, Renegade's Revenge, This year I sold less than a hundred copies, with some modest few hundred pages borrowed. I was actually rather amazed at how RR sold very strongly for months, and then sales dried up almost overnight. While there were months where I'd sell over a hundred copies, now I am shocked if the title sells more than 4-6 copies in a month. Since RR was about 9% of my sales last year, losing it as a sales stream had a significant impact on my numbers this year as compared to last.

As for all my other titles, the numbers are minimal, at best. Killer Instincts sold about 300 copies and had a couple thousand KU pages read, but the bulk of that was due to a very successful promotion in March. San Francisco Slaughter didn't hit a hundred sales, and all of my short stories totaled together don't even break 100 sales for the year. That means the Commando series accounted for more than 90% of all my books sold in 2015.

The good news is, in terms of royalties, I ended the year only about $1,000 under what I made in 2014. Again, I think some of this discrepancy is due to difficulties in calculating sales vs. royalties because of KU 2.0, combined with much softer sales of my shorter works like RR, which paid out less than the longer works. In addition, more of the sales in 2014 were from countdown deals and other discounted sales, while most of the 2015 sales - especially the Commando titles - were at full price, making my average royalty per sale much higher overall.

And now we come to the fact that in 2015, I didn't publish anything. The year in general was frustrating for me, both in terms of my day job (I am firmly burned out there) and in terms of getting past my writer's block and completing Operation Archery, the fifth Commando novel. Archery deals with the Vaagso Raid of December 1941, and there is a lot of very detailed information out there about the events of that raid. I found myself frustrated at many points, often trying to figure out how to weave my fictional characters into the historical timeline in a way that gave them something to do, while not stealing the thunder from historical characters. It was a really good learning experience for me, because it taught me that, while I enjoy writing historical fiction, I am not great at writing about specific historical events. Thankfully, at the end of the year I was able to press on and finish the manuscript, and Archery is now in the editing stage, with a hopeful release in the next week or so for the ebook version.

So, what does 2016 look like? At this point, I dare not speculate, because I had extraordinarily high hopes for 2015, none of which came to fruition. Archery will be published this month, and I am already working on Operation Elysium, the sixth book in the Commando series. Beyond that, I really don't want to make any promises, although I have some ideas for what I want to accomplish. As with 2014, the vast bulk of my success as an author last year was tied to the Commando books, so that is where I need to focus my energy, but as we also saw, that comes with the risk of hitting a wall, and not being able or willing to step around it and carry on with something else. At what point does exploiting success at the expense of diversification mean you burn out on what you love? Let's hope we don't find out any time soon.

As always, please share your thoughts and questions in the comments section.

My 2015 Prospective Writing Projects

Whenever I have a book idea, one of the things I do for fun is to draft up a simple cover design that conveys the feel of the book. It is both a focusing and motivational technique for me, and although some of the covers will never result in stories - at least in 2015 - I thought I might share a few of them as a sort of "teaser" for the rest of the year. Keep in mind, these are just draft covers, and might change considerably before the titles (maybe, eventually) go to print. Any and all feedback is certainly welcome!

HANGMAN #2: Battle for the Blacktop. The next book in the HANGMAN series. Ex-Green Beret Sergeant Jamie Lynch is hired to provide protection for a long-haul trucking company when attacks by a gang of outlaw bikers threaten to ruin the business. Not only must Lynch take on a roaring pack of chain-swinging, gun-wielding, maniacs, he must figure out who is backing the outlaws and attempting to ruin the trucking company. It'll be death by bullet, blade, and bumper along the highways and back roads of southern California.

KANSAS KILLERS, the sequel to RENEGADE'S REVENGE. Paul and David Miller decide to leave Missouri and head west, but as they ride into Kansas, they find themselves dodging both U.S. Cavalry patrols and packs of roving Jayhawkers, many of whom are now little more than murderous, pillaging outlaws. When the Miller brothers save a young woman from death at the hands of a pair of Jayhawker bandits, they find themselves on the run from a dozen more, as the band's leader seeks revenge for the deaths of his men.

STREET SWEEPER, a vigilante cop novel set in Boston, 1985. Detective Nick Malone used to be a good cop, always playing by the rules. But when Malone makes a move against the Irish mob, the rules set free the gangsters who killed Malone's partner. Unable to find justice while working within the bounds of the law, Malone decides the rules don't just need to be bent, they need to be blown away. Maintaining the facade of a good cop by day, Malone cleans up the streets of Boston at night by sweeping away the filth with a loaded shotgun and a magnum revolver.

KRUEGER #1: Boston Bloodbath. Another Boston-based story, set in 1921. Krueger is a former German storm-trooper who'd fought in the trenches and no-man's land of the Great War for four bloody years. Wounded by bullet, blade, and bomb shell, Krueger survived and returned to the front again and again, a killing machine who just wouldn't die. Now a wandering soldier of fortune, Krueger is hired by a gang of bootleggers fighting to dominate the black-market liquor trade in Boston. But when you hire Krueger to fight your battles, you better be prepared for all-out war..

PANZER ACE: Crushing Poland. Cannons roar and tank treads grind men into pulp as the Blitzkrieg of the Third Reich rolls into Poland. Panzer commander Victor Krieger has no allegiance in his heart for Hitler and his gang of Nazi thugs, but he is a soldier born and bred, and the business of fighting is what he knows best, the razor's edge between life and death the only place he calls home. Krieger pits the armaments and armor of his Panzer against waves of stout-hearted Polish defenders, where quarter is neither asked, nor given. It is war at its ugliest and most savage, just the way Krieger likes it.

DOGFACES: A Day at the Beach. It'll be one hell of a summer's day for Private Jonathan "Jack" Russell and the other men of Dog Company. Along with Captain Collier, Lieutenant Shepherd, Sargent Barker, Corporal Basset, and all the rest, Russell finds himself bobbing around off the Normandy coastline, about to hit the bloody beaches of Fortress Europe and drive back the Germans one hard-fought step at a time. Unfortunately for the men of Dog Company, the same cosmic prankster that put them all together in the same outfit is going to make surviving their day at the beach tougher than a concrete pillbox.

My 2014 Writing in Review

Two years ago, I wrote a piece called "In 2013, Always be Closing". The year after that, I laid down a 2014 Short Story Challenge. This year, I want to take a look at the past twelve months, where it has brought me, and where I'm going from here.

In 2014, I sold a little over 7,600 copies of my various works, roughly half of everything I've ever sold in the past 3 1/2 years, and 800 more than in 2013. That figure averages out to a little under 21 sales a day over the course of the year. Granted, in the third quarter of the year my daily averages dropped to significantly less than that, but I had a strong opening to the year with the release of Operation Cannibal around Thanksgiving of 2013, as well as a couple of really strong Kindle Countdown Sales during the first quarter. In addition, I'm finishing off the year with a very strong past six weeks, thanks to the release of Operation Dervish, which has sold over 460 copies so far.

I lay out all of the above so that people can decide for themselves how successful I am, and do some comparative analysis with their own and others' sales figures. I was glad to see overall sales increase substantially, and royalties increase as well (I made about a thousand dollars more this year than last year), but it certainly wasn't a bowl-me-over sales year. Let's break it down...

The COMMANDO series made up about 81 percent of my total sales this year, utterly dominating all my other titles. With four novels and a short story, that's certainly understandable, but it is important to point out how much my sales figures depend on this series. Without it, I wouldn't be breaking a hundred sales a month on average. In addition, while I used to sell at least twice as many copies in the UK as in the US every month, the ratio is now mostly even, and with my new title in the series so far, I'm selling far more US copies. There are probably a variety of factors at play here, from the much larger Amazon customer base in the US, to what might be a more saturated genre market in the UK (there are several UK-based WW2 series that aren't available as ebooks in the US), the dominance of the UK sales region is now firmly over.

RENEGADE'S REVENGE was a surprise hit for me this year. I sold a little over 700 copies of this title in eight months, accounting for roughly nine percent of my total sales this year. Since a significant number of these were Kindle Unlimited borrows, I actually made pretty good money off of this title, especially given that it was originally written as a project that failed to launch. For many years, publishers and critics considered the Western genre one of the worst-selling, but there seems to be a resurgence in the last few years, both in re-releasing old titles as ebooks, as well as original content. I fully intend to write a sequel to RR at some point in the next year, and maybe a few other standalone Westerns as time goes on - it is certainly a fun genre to write in, with a great blend of action, adventure, and history.

SPIDERS & FLIES was released at the beginning of the year, and has gone nowhere since. It sold 28 copies in 12 months, 18 of those in the first month of its release. The few reviews it received were positive, and people seemed to like the cover art, but the title simply doesn't sell, even when I have tried free giveaways. Considering its poor performance, and that of NANOK, while I'm glad I finally got around to finishing and publishing this piece, I think even if I can write decent fantasy stories, it isn't worth my time or energy. I doubt I'd even write a sequel to this title, but while I do have several NANOK stories in mind, that's where they're going to stay for the foreseeable future, until I have enough "legroom" to take a chance on writing them.

HANGMAN #1: SAN FRANCISCO SLAUGHTER was also well received by both beta readers and those who've written reviews. However, it did not take off like I'd hoped it would. I sold about 130 copies in the six months it's been out, better than S&F but terrible even compared to RR. I have a number of sequels in mind for this series, and perhaps with an additional couple of titles it'll have more appeal, but so far, I'm not that hopeful. Still, I really enjoyed writing the book, especially since it allowed me to ramp up the "mature content" compared to the COMMANDO titles. SFS contains a lot of swearing, a little sex, and some very cruel violence. It is definitely a darker work, and getting out of my morally-cleaner mindspace was definitely interesting.

KILLER INSTINCTS continues to perform terribly. More than a few people still feel my first novel is the best thing I've written, and I certainly believe it is a good, solid story. I did a cover change for the ebook mid-year, and a couple of promotions helped bring in more sales, but of the roughly 350 copies sold in 2014 (~4.5% of my total sales), at least half were during promotions, meaning I made nowhere near the money I could have with those numbers. Next year I would like to get the title into a BookBub promotion, which would be amazing, but I don't have high hopes. In a market choked with thrillers of all stripes, KI goes largely unnoticed. I would still love to write a sequel to this book, but at this point in time, I feel it would fail to thrive just as KI did, a pointless gesture.

In conclusion, I face some tough choices. It is clear that my niche genre titles (WW2 and Westerns) sell much more than my more mainstream genre works (thrillers, crime, fantasy). COMMANDO titles and RENEGADE'S REVENGE make up ninety percent of my sales this year. Clearly, this is where my focus should lie, but on the other hand, I don't want to limit myself in terms of what to write. Writing is not my full-time job, nor will it be for the foreseeable future, meaning I am not as much a slave to the market as I could be were it my only income. And, in addition, I might stumble upon another genre with a title that's more popular than I'd imagined. Certainly, when I wrote both the first COMMANDO title, as well as RR, I never anticipated their degree of success.

In a few days, I hope to follow this column with one discussing my hopes for 2015. Until then, Happy New Year!

RENEGADE'S REVENGE - On Sale Now!

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I'm happy to say RENEGADE'S REVENGE, my first Western story, is now available on the Kindle store for $0.99, with a Trade Paperback version to come some time in the next couple of weeks. I had a lot of fun writing this 20,000 word novella, and there is a possibility of a sequel if interest is high enough.

At the start of the Civil War, twin brothers David and Caleb Miller found themselves on different sides of the battle lines. David enlisted in a Union cavalry regiment, while Caleb joined a band of Missouri irregulars, the infamous "Bushwhackers".

In the war's last days, Caleb's Bushwhackers ambush David's cavalry unit, but when the Union troopers gain the upper hand, the Confederates are forced to surrender. The two brothers are brought together again mere moments before Caleb is murdered on the orders of Captain McNeil, David's superior officer.

Months after the war's end, David returns home and reunites with his older brother Paul, himself a former Confederate irregular. The two brothers vow to hunt down Captain McNeil and exact retribution for Caleb's murder, but not only will they have to find McNeil, they'll have to fight their way through a score of war-hardened, ruthless veterans in order to bring him to justice.

Renegade's Revenge is a story of duty and brotherhood, revenge and retribution, war and the scars it leaves behind, both physical and emotional. 

BOOK REVIEW: Fargo #3 - Alaska Steel by John Benteen

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John Benteen (aka, Ben Haas) knocked another one out of the park with this, the third installment of his long-running FARGO series. This time around, we find Neal Fargo - ex-soldier and Rough Rider, now mercenary adventurer and gun-for-hire - standing in as a Hollywood extra on the set of a Western film (a nice bit of self-referentialism here, I must say). Another old comrade of his got Fargo a bit part as a gunslinging heavy in a cowboy picture, but Fargo being Fargo, he turns down an offer by the filmmaker to get into the movie-making business full-time.  Of course, he's also a little annoyed that he has to slow down his quick-draw so he doesn't pull faster than the hero of the picture, although the movie star who "kills" Fargo on-camera later asks him to demonstrate how to perform some fancy pistol tricks, rolling and spinning a Peacemaker in a way that'll please the crowds.

However, the pistol-spinning comes to an abrupt halt when Jane Deering, a young and sexy Hollywood starlet, drops by looking to invite Fargo to her home later that night to discuss business (and have sex). Fargo of course accepts, since the only thing he enjoys more than making money and shooting guys in the face is having sex with gorgeous women. Deering has a simple business proposition for Fargo - travel to Alaska and acquire confirmation that her estranged husband is dead. Deering is savvy enough to understand that Hollywood (even circa 1914) is just a meat grinder for talent: young, beautiful, naive people go in, and come out prematurely aged, washed-up and kicked out to pasture as the studios move on to the next big name. But Deering's husband was wealthy, and if she can find proof of his death somewhere in the wilds of the great white north, she will inherit his fortune. Fargo agrees to take on this assignment, although he is reluctant to bring Deering along with him, since she insists she's as tough and capable as any man.

What follows is a great action-adventure story set in the wild and unruly world of early 20th century Alaska. I was especially eager to read this particular novel because, as a native-born Alaskan myself, I was curious to see how Benteen (Haas) portrayed the territory and its people in these largely lawless, pre-statehood days. Overall, I wasn't disappointed. Even today, Alaska is a place for the independent of mind and spirit, for people who are self-reliant and take satisfaction from being in control of as much of their lives as one can be in the 21st century. But a hundred years ago, it really was one of the last North American frontiers, a place where the unwary could be killed by the savage winter cold or the teeth and claws of even more savage predators, by knife or gun or whiskey bottle or icy stream.

The extraordinarily dangerous environment is well-envisioned in this novel, but equally impressive is the amount of action and intrigue that takes place in the story. I won't give away any spoilers, except to say that Fargo and Deering stumble into a situation much more deadly than they'd ever imagined. There are a number of good fights in this book, from fists to knives to pistols and rifles, and of course Fargo's infamous double-barreled shotgun gets a good workout. There is a large battle at the end of the book that feels like something out of the battle for Berlin, 1945. In fact, the only criticism of the book I might have is that the final battle is a little TOO huge and bloody - but of course, that's just crazy talk.

If you've made it to Alaska Steel, you're no doubt a Fargo fan like myself, so I know I don't have to sell you on it, but rest assured, this is another excellent volume in what has quickly become one of my favorite action-adventure series. Pick it up, because you won't be disappointed.

Book Review: SUNDANCE #1 by John Benteen

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The folks over at Piccadilly Publishing are pretty dang smart. When they grabbed John Benteen's (aka Ben Haas') amazing FARGO series, they were clever enough to also grab his Westerns. This includes his SUNDANCE series, a great haul if for no other reason than the series itself is much longer-lived than FARGO.

Thankfully, there are plenty of reasons why republishing SUNDANCE is great. The eponymous character, Jim Sundance, is a half-white, half-Cheyenne adventurer. When we meet him he's in his 30's, already a man who has roamed and fought across the length and breadth of the U.S., moving between the worlds of the white man and the Indian. The timeframe for the book is sometime a few months after the Battle of Washita River, putting the book most likely in the late spring or early summer of 1869.

Sundance is your typical Benteen hero: tall, broad-shouldered, with a slim waist and a lean, powerful build. He has the complexion and features of a Cheyenne Indian, but his hair is a bright golden blond, a gift from his English father. Sundance received his name - his Indian name - after participating in the Sun Dance ritual, The description given of Sundance's experience is one of the more extreme, although it's got nothing on the movie A Man Called Horse, which has a really graphic Sun Dance ritual scene. I've actually attended a Sioux Sun Dance, and even back in the 90's, there was some ritual body piercing going on, although very rare.

On top of his unusual heritage, Sundance carries an unusual arsenal. In typical Benteen fashion, his main character is very deliberately armed with an assortment of weapons from both cultures. Sundance carries a Navy Colt and a Henry repeating rifle, as well as a Bowie knife with a fourteen-inch blade and a hand guard for knife-fighting. In addition, he carries a steel-bladed tomahawk, as well as a Cheyenne dog soldier's war shield and a bow, along with a quiver of thirty flint-headed arrows. Benteen goes to great length to note that Sundance prefers flint tips to steel, claiming that they deliver a more grievous wound, and that with the bow Sundance could kill a man at four hundred yards, or put an arrow through a buffalo. Over the course of the novel Sundance puts every weapon in his arsenal to use, another Benteen trait, and it is interesting to see how Sundance typically uses the white man's weapons for "every day carry", but when he really means business, he tends to favor his more traditional arsenal. It is a cool dynamic, and having read Sundance #2, one that is probably going to carry through to every book in the series.

As to the plot? Sundance is hired by a railroad baron to find his young, beautiful daughter, who willfully departed for the West Coast some time ago in a well-guarded wagon train. The train was attacked by Indians and the daughter was captured. Being able to move between the two cultures, Sundance is known to be the man you want when it comes to dealing with the Indians, especially the Cheyenne. But, his services don't come cheap. In an interesting twist, and opposed to Neal Fargo, Sundance funnels his fees back to a lawyer in Washington D.C., where the lawyer lobbies for Indian rights in the hope that they can be saved - as much as possible, at least - from the machinations of the white man. Sundance is an educated man, and he's fully aware of how bleak the future of the Indian is in the U.S., so he does what he can to mitigate damage. I think the idea that he's not just spending his money on liquor and whores is an interesting premise, and makes him a more sympathetic character. Without giving away any spoilers, I'll note that this dedication to his cause results in more than a little turmoil over the course of the novel.

Overall, this is an excellent western adventure tale. Sundance is a fascinating character, a mix of some standard Western themes with Benteen's own unique style laid over. The action is fast and violent, the level of detail extraordinary. There's a buffalo hunting scene about halfway through the book that is very impressive, and just as thrilling as any battle sequence.

Even if you're not normally a fan of Western stories, I highly recommend the SUNDANCE series. The $1.99 it'll set you back to buy the first book is well worth the experience, and it was certainly enough to get me to buy #2 the moment it was live (and I read it practically in one sitting).

Book Review: A Fine Likeness by Sean McLachlan

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Normally, I'm not really that interested in the American Civil War. I understand the basics of the war - the lead-up, the battles, the conclusion and the aftermath - but for one reason or another I've never felt the need to do a deep dive into this time period. Because of this, I've never had a strong interest in reading any fiction relating to the ACW, such as The Killer Angels or Bernard Cornwell's Nathaniel Starbuck chronicles.

Even with an only lukewarm interest in the conflict, I was intrigued by Sean McLachlan's A Fine Likeness when I first heard about the book. A "Civil War Horror" novel written by a seasoned archaeologist, travel writer, and historical reference author sounded peculiar enough to warrant a second glance, and although it took me a while to circle around to reading it, I'm now kicking myself for waiting so long, because it's one hell of a good yarn.

The book starts off near Columbia, Missouri with a skirmish between Captain Addison's militia company and Rawlins' Rangers, a six-man band of "bushwhackers". The term refers to small bands of guerrilla fighters who operated in many states during the war, launching ambushes and raids and falling back into the wilderness, where the men lived off the land and the generosity of sympathizing civilians. Like the guerrilla fighters of the Napoleonic wars and WW2, these "combatants" occupied a weird middle ground between organized military units and simple armed civilians taking action against their enemies. Missouri was a state absolutely infested with bushwhackers, and due to the fieldcraft of these guerrillas, and their habit of carrying upwards of four six-shot revolvers apiece (opposed by men carrying single-shot long arms), these small bands were often able to cause a degree of havoc and mayhem disproportionate to their numbers.

What starts off as a small battle between Union militia and Confederate guerrillas grows into something a lot more deadly and dangerous when Jimmy Rawlins, the "Captain" of Rawlins' Rangers, gets his band involved with Bloody Bill Anderson, one of the most violent and dangerous guerrilla fighters of the Civil War. I don't want to give away any of the book's twists and turns, but suffice to say the small conflict between militia and bushwhacker is only the facade of a much larger, far more diabolical battle taking place, one that stretches beyond the boundaries of our physical world. Some of the characters are hinted to be far, far more than they appear, and there is a greater "mythos" for lack of a better term, lurking just below the surface of the story.

This is a whole other aspect of A Fine Likeness that should be discussed. At first I thought this was going to be an ACW "ghost story". Because of the war's incredibly brutal nature, and the way it coincided with the rise of spiritualism, mentalism, and the more pseudo-scientific theories regarding ghosts and the spiritual world, there were many people during and after the war who tried contacting dead friends and relatives, and a great deal of fraud was committed by charlatans who preyed upon those who sought them out.  Hand-in-hand with this, a lot of post ACW horror fiction, especially Southern horror, revolved around ghosts and hauntings. So, I figured the author was throwing his hat into the ring, so to speak, and writing a ghost story tied to the Civil War.

While the story does have elements dealing with ghosts and spirits, that's just the tip of the supernatural iceberg, and as I said above, the story makes it clear that there are forces - both sinister and benevolent - at play in a much larger and more active cosmology. This was a pleasant surprise for me, and I feel it shifts the book from being a "Civil War ghost story" to something a lot more like a Weird West tale, similar to the Weird fiction of the 30's written by authors like Robert E. Howard or H.P. Lovecraft, tales that blend history and the supernatural in a way that could be considered "Pulp Horror", although I don't feel that this book really falls into the category of "Pulp". Indeed, I think the only weakness of A Fine Likeness, if there is one, is that I'd be hard-pressed to pin this book down in any sense of a traditional genre. I don't really consider it traditional horror, but the supernatural elements definitely take it out of the realm of historical fiction. I think the author was actually very smart in independently publishing this book, because I can't imagine a traditional publishing house attempting to market this book.

Which reminds me to set any potential reader's fears to rest and point out that this novel is very well-written. The author has a long career writing non-fiction works for established publishers such as Osprey, and that professionalism carries over into this book. I didn't notice any spelling or formatting errors, and the prose overall is very deft - descriptive without being exhaustive, colorful without being overwrought. The author handles both action and dialogue quite well, and every character has their own well-considered "voice".

In conclusion, if you like historical fiction with action and a touch of the supernatural, you cannot go wrong with A Fine Likeness. It's a great novel, and I'm eagerly awaiting the sequel.

Book Review: FARGO #2 Panama Gold by John Benteen

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After reading the excellent debut Fargo novel a couple of weeks ago, I was really chomping at the bit to get the sequel on my Kindle ASAP. Ordering the ebook at the end of last week, I powered through Panama Gold in about 24 hours. They might be short, quick reads, but Benteen packs a LOT of action and adventure into a relatively compact story.

Panama Gold starts off with Fargo arriving in Long Island to visit his old commanding officer, The Colonel. And by 'The Colonel', we actually mean former Rough Rider and ex-President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt. However, no matter how high his star had risen, Fargo will forever only think of Roosevelt as his commanding officer, and we are reminded that Fargo saved Roosevelt's life during the battle of San Juan Hill. The two are fast friends still, even after all those years (this story is set in 1912), and Roosevelt has a favor to ask of Fargo.

Roosevelt needs Fargo to kill a man.

Cleve Buckner is, like Fargo, a former military man, but unlike our main character, Buckner is a deserter, gone on the lam after shooting an officer who caught Buckner in bed with his wife. Buckner is a sort of dark reflection of Fargo; tough, battle-hardened, and utterly ruthless, but there is an evil, sadistic streak to Buckner which makes him immediately repellent. In a nice bit of symbolism, before we meet Buckner, it is pointed out that Fargo has clean, white teeth that are well-cared for, because the last thing a fighting man needs, out in the middle of nowhere on campaign, is an abscessed tooth or other ailment that could quickly lay him low. When we meed Buckner, one of the first things we learn about him is that his teeth are blackened and rotten, just like his soul.

Long story short, Roosevelt needs Fargo to kill Buckner, because Buckner has raised and trained a small army of mercenaries and cutthroats to attack and possibly blow up portions of the Panama Canal. Although Roosevelt is no longer President and has no real authority, he represents a small group of "private citizens" who have a vested interest in making sure the Canal goes through on time. There are also rumblings that foreign powers - namely Germany and Japan - would like nothing more than to see American and British naval powers deprived of the ability to move through the Canal any time soon. If Buckner succeeds in delaying the completion of the Canal by even a few months, it could give these aggressive nations just the window they need to take action on their enemies.

I won't give away any more of the story than that, because, like the first Fargo novel, there are a number of interesting twists and turns that shouldn't be spoiled. There's plenty of gun-fighting and adventure, especially in the depictions of the brutal jungles around the Canal, which Fargo finds himself having to traverse a couple of times. We are reunited once again with Fargo's small arsenal; the .38 Colt revolver loaded with "dum-dums", the sawed-off 10-gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot, and the deadly Batangas knife. Like the first novel, Fargo also carries a .30-30 Winchester carbine, but it gets misplaced early on and sees essentially no use.And again, like the first novel, the Fox double-barrel blows people away with the authority of a Napoleonic field piece loaded with canister shot, but the weapon is just so badass that we don't really care.

This book is a fitting follow-up to the first Fargo adventure, and if you liked that debut novel, you'll enjoy Panama Gold just as much. There's action, adventure, sex, boozing, gambling...pretty much everything you'd ever want in a book like this, all told with Benteen's skillful economy of words. These are definitely the sorts of books you buy as soon as you can, read as quickly as you can, and then you sit around slightly miffed that you'll have to wait so long to get your hands on the next volume.

Book Review: FARGO by John Benteen

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To me, Neal Fargo is a combination of Robert E. Howard's Conan mixed with Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch. Fargo, John Benteen's (aka Ben Haas) eponymous globe-trotting adventurer/mercenary is in his late 30's, a highly-skilled and incredibly lethal fighting man who's already had a lifetime's worth of adventures by the time we meet him arriving in El Paso in the beginning of the book. Like Conan, Fargo is a lone wolf, a man who really trusts no one and nothing except, perhaps, his weapons. He fights for money and because it's what he's best at, and because he's one of those rare breed of men who, unashamedly, needs to be in mortal conflict with man and the elements in order to feel alive. Fargo knows he'll meet a violent end one day, and you know his only hope is that he dies on his feet, surrounded by his enemies.

But at the same time, the world Fargo lives in is one of chaos. The series is set in the era around WW1, a time of change and upheaval, of increasing mechanism in the manner in which men kill each other. Like the men of The Wild Bunch, you get the sense that Fargo is a man born out of an earlier age, symbolized, I feel, by his shock of white hair, evidence of how life has aged him far beyond his relatively young years. He's a man who is, in a way, better fitted to the latter half of the 19th century than the beginning of the 20th. But to Fargo, it is a small matter; he knows men skilled with guns, knives, and their bare fists are still in demand all around the world, and his reputation is such that he can command top dollar.

In this first novel in the series, Fargo is looking for employment along the border with Mexico. He knows the revolution to the south is a perfect place for a man of his skills, but Fargo won't throw in with just anybody. He picks and chooses based on the most profit and the best chance of success, although sometimes those two might be at odds to each other. Fargo is approached by Ted Meredith, a man who owns half of a silver mine three hundred miles south of the border. The mine is under siege by a Mexican bandit lord by the name of Hernandez, and Meredith knows the mine is lost to him, but perhaps they can sneak out with a mule train loaded down with a quarter million dollars' worth of silver coins. Meredith offers Fargo ten percent of whatever they get out of Mexico, and Fargo agrees to take on the assignment.

I don't want to spoil the plot, because there are a number of twists and turns, some predictable, some not so much. There's a lot of fighting, especially gunplay, and this is one of the areas where Benteen/Haas lavishes a lot of strong detail. Fargo is a man who lives and dies not only by his wits but by his weapons, and he carries a small arsenal with him wherever he goes. I was somewhat reminded of that scene in 1999's The Mummy when O'Connell - a fighting man in the same "globe-trotting adventurer" vein as Fargo - throws his duffel on a table and opens it up to reveal a small army's worth of weapons and ammunition. Fargo always brings with him a steamer trunk filled with weapons and ammo. He carries a .38 caliber Colt Army revolver, a Winchester .30-30 rifle, and, his most prized firearm, a custom-made Fox ten-gauge double-barrel hammerless shotgun given to him by none other than Teddy Roosevelt. Fargo rode in the Rough Riders and fought on San Juan Hill, and as payment of sorts for an unnamed favor, Roosevelt gifted Fargo this shotgun. Fargo cut the thirty-inch barrel down to a more portable thirteen inches, and keeps the weapon loaded with double-ought buckshot. There are several times in the book where this shotgun is fired with both barrels, and the blast of shot has the seeming effect of a Napoleonic field cannon loaded with grape, but I'll forgive Haas the embellishment because, frankly, it's just that badass. Fargo also carries with him a razor-edged Batangas knife, better known as a butterfly knife, that sports a ten-inch blade. Fargo is dazzlingly lethal with this knife, and in one epic fight scene, demonstrates his gift of ambidexterity.

The wonderful folks at Piccadilly Publishing are re-releasing all of the Fargo books as ebooks, and this first novel is a steal of a deal in ebook format for $1.99 on Amazon. It is an incredible read, full of high adventure and epic battles, dangerous villains and sultry women. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, and my greatest frustration is that I'll have to wait for the followup volumes to be released (the original paperbacks can be found, but the one I have is rather brittle, and I'd rather just read it as an ebook).

Book Review: Dinosaur Wars - Earthfall by Thomas P. Hopp

Every so often, you come across something that looks so completely and utterly ridiculous, you just have to check it out. Maybe it's a bizarre restaurant or shop. Perhaps it's a late-night movie or a new television series. Sometimes, it's a book you've seen in a free book promotion email.

A book about dinosaurs.

Dinosaurs...with lasers.

From the Moon.

 I saw this in a book promotion email a couple of months ago. It was free, and shockingly, the vast majority of reviews were very favorable. Not only that, it was selling surprisingly well. And let's face it, look at that friggin' cover. I mean seriously - look at it. Tanks, attack helicopters, a cowgirl, a freakin' Tyrannosaurus Rex, a comet or spaceship or something falling from the sky, and A Giant Laser Beam From The Moon. 

Does it sound like one of those SyFy Channel movies you watch at two in the morning when you're kinda drunk but too wired to actually go to bed? Yes it does. And to be fair, the whole plot and the storyline comes off something like those movies, but in the best way possible, if that makes any sense. The book is pure pulp science fiction - if you strip away all the 21st century tidbits, this could have been written in the 50's, printed as a series in some sci-fi magazine, or showing up on a spinning book rack in a garish little paperback. Heck, it could be some black & white drive-in theater movie blending cowboys and army men and scientists and guys in funky rubber suits and stop-motion animation. I wouldn't be surprised if the author's agent isn't farming around the movie rights to this - not because it'd be some huge blockbuster, but because it just feels like it should be on the little big screen of direct-to-flatscreen fame.

Oh, what's that? You want a plot? ::sigh:: Fine. One day a gigantic friggin' laser from the southern pole of the Moon starts blasting key military, communications, and other infrastructure installations all over the globe. At the same time, massive spaceships crash-land all over the world, disgorging thousands of dinosaurs, as well as dino-men piloting chicken-legged attack mechanoids that probably look something like this. Chase, a wildlife re-introduction specialist in Montana, teams up with Kit, a rancher's daughter who wants to be a paleontologist, and Dr. Ogilvy, an actual paleontologist. Together, the three of them try to survive while being attacked by T-Rexes, Utahraptors, and laser-toting dino-men. JPL scientists, NORAD staffers, and some plucky U.S. armored cavalry types serve as secondary characters. The action is pretty non-stop, but although the characters aren't hugely detailed, there's enough meat on their bones, figuratively speaking, to serve us sufficiently well over the course of the novel.

Right now, Earthfall, the first of the series, is free. There are two other books in the series, with a fourth, I believe, on the way. The author, Thomas P. Hopp, is actually a full-blown biotechnology scientist, and although there's plenty of science fiction in this book, it's dressed up nicely enough to serve its purpose. If you like sci-fi, like dinosaurs, like Jurassic Park-esque plotlines, and like free ebooks, go pick this one up.

Book Review: Under the Ember Star by Charles Gramlich

When it comes to publicity, those of us who do our own thing often feel an obligation to pay it forward. If a fellow author writes a good review of one of our books, we often feel obligated to go out and read one of theirs, and if the work warrants it, return the favor. I don't feel this is in any way underhanded or "cheating"; take a look at the cover copy of a lot of bestselling fiction out there, and you'll often see quotes from authors in the same genre extolling the book's virtues. Hell, Tom Clancy, Larry Bond, Dale Brown, and Harold Coyle were a veritable Mutual Appreciation Society of military techno-thriller writers who all praised each others' latest works.

When Operation Bedlam was released, blogger and writer Chris La Trey was kind enough to write me a review, both on Amazon and on his blog. The blog post contained a couple of other works, all of which I immediately went out and bought. One of these was Charles Gramlich's science fiction novel, Under the Ember Star. I'd read Gramlich's fantasy short story, Harvest of War, and enjoyed it, but like a chump, I'd never written a review. Feeling guilty, I sat down a couple of nights ago and began reading Gramlich's novel. Allow me to quote from Amazon's product description:

"Ginn Hollis was fourteen when her father's mysterious death left her alone on the planet Kelmer. She's grown up since then. Kelmer is a harsh world, an old world: its people are ancient, its civilization long fallen and dimly dreaming under a brown dwarf sun the natives call the Ember Star. But now, long dormant forces are beginning to stir on Kelmer, forces that could destroy the planet forever...or bring it back to life. One being stands at the center of the turmoil. His origins are veiled, his destiny is unclear. Everyone wants a piece of him. Only Ginn Hollis can protect him from both sides--if she can save herself first...."

Although a relatively short novel, Gramlich's book definitely punches above its weight. Within a couple of chapters we have a strong, vivid feel for the world of Kelmer - the dry, ancient planet kept alive by a life support system of unknown, alien origin. We also get an immediate feel for Ginn Hollis, our heroine - a tough, smart young woman who's handy with a blaster pistol, deftly handles a hoverbike, and isn't afraid to punch first and ask questions later. It's easy to fall into cliche with a "tough angry chick" stereotype, but Gramlich is a deft enough storyteller to avoid that trap and keep Ginn Hollis fresh and interesting enough to keep our attention.

Overall, Under the Ember Star feels like a much older work, like a battered old gem of a pocket paperback from the 60's or 70's dug out of the stacks of a used bookstore and bought for a dollar. It reminds me of the works of Leigh Brackett or C.L. Moore; part gritty sci-fi adventure fiction, part epic space opera, with more than a touch of classic Western and maybe even a pinch of detective noir mixed in for good measure.

If you're looking for a quick, enjoyable read to get you back into the mood for more science fiction, I highly recommend this book.

Post Modern Pulp Blog Wins Liebster Award

Sean over at the Civil War Horror Blog has been kind enough to nominate PMP for the Liebster Award, a great way to get people to shine a light on some excellent, but less-traveled blogs. Sean's a writer for Osprey books (an invaluable research source for my WW2 writing) and he's also an accomplished travel writer, recently doing a multi-part travel blog about Iraq for Gadling. Even if the Civil War isn't of much interest to you, Sean's blog has something for everyone.

Back to the Liebster Award. Allow me to provide the the rules for accepting the Award:

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Copy and paste the award on your blog linking it to the blogger who has given it to you.

Pass the award to your top 5 favourite blogs with less than 200 followers by leaving a comment on one of their posts to notify them that they have won the award and listing them on your own blog.

Sit back and bask in that warm fuzzy feeling that comes with knowing that you have just made someone's day!
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As I stated on Sean's blog, I don't know if it's a good thing or a bad thing that five of the most interesting blogs I regularly read have less than 200 followers. But hopefully this will do them all a service and drive traffic their way. Here goes:


Glorious Trash is penned by Joe Kenny, one of the most dedicated readers and reviewers I know. Joe's ability to grind through some of the most awful dreck imaginable and write a lengthy, detailed, informative, and yet highly entertaining review is second to none.  Anyone who enjoys "trash fiction" of any stripe should check out Joe's blog, because while a lot of it falls under the "men's adventure" umbrella, other works are simply exploitative, trashy, decadent, erotic, or just plain pornographic. Fun times.


Atomic Pulp & Other Meltdowns is authored by fellow Mainer, Christopher Mills. Chris is a trained comic book and graphic design artist, and he's also done a fair bit of writing himself. Chris maintains a number of blogs, but I think AP&OM is his best. Chris has a taste for 70's and 80's action movies and television that I can relate to, and while I'm not that interested in comic books, Chris presents a lot of classic comic material in such a way that I can still get a lot out of his posts. If you're interested in sci-fi/pulp/action/kickass media, Check out Chris's blog.


Rough Edges is the blog of veteran author James Reasoner. An author with decades of experience under his belt, RE is not only a great resource for finding new books to read, but James is one of the many traditional authors who is delving into the e-pubbing revolution. He's releasing new titles of varying lengths, from whole novels to short novellas and lots in between, as well as getting his old titles back into circulation again, some of these for the first time in decades. Even if you're not a fan of the Western fiction genre, Rough Edges is worth visiting on a regular basis for new book releases as well as a ton of other great content.


Adventures in Writing is owned by another long-time author, Mel Odom. Like James, Mel has been diving into the world of e-publishing with both feet forward, penning new works, partnering with other authors, and promoting various books written by both new and veteran authors. Mel has a love for many genres, from Western to Sci-Fi, to Urban Fantasy, Military Adventure, and the list goes on and on. I've bought a number of ebooks over the last couple of years on Mel's recommendations, and most of the time, I've found he's been spot on.


Arcadia Prime was originally created by my friend Dan Eldredge as a place to post his battle reports for the Warhammer 40,000 military sci-fi wargame. But over time, Dan has expanded AP to include the occasional book review, studies in creating wargaming terrain, vehicle modeling, and a number of studies in camouflage and camouflage painting techniques. Recently, Dan's become interested in the WW2 wargame Flames of War, and has written about it as well. Furthermore, Dan is not only a longtime friend, but he serves as  one of my most faithful sounding boards for my writing, and last month, he entered into the forlorn ranks of us indie publishers with his new novel, The Pirates of Alnari.

Book Review of Wolf Creek: Bloody Trail

Collaborative works are difficult to pull off correctly, even between two people who possess similar sensibilities and trust each other's work and methods. Sometimes a "collaboration" may be one writer and one "idea person" or two writers with one of them being the dominant voice. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't, but either way, it is a complex dance.

With the Wolf Creek collaborative concept, we have a whole stable of writers, each with their own characters, writing successive chapters in a sizable novel. The potential for this idea to fail was probably considerable. One or more participants might not have lived up to the standards of the other writers, or possessed such a strong written "voice" that it immediately took you out of the story.

Fortunately, that wasn't the case with Wolf Creek: Bloody Trail. Each writer was able to craft their own portion of the story and develop their own characters, but each portion of the story fit together seamlessly with the rest, creating a story that is greater than the sum of its already high-quality parts. I think the idea to have each author write a couple of chapters and then let the next writer have a crack at the tale helps cut down on the confusion of voice and style, as the voice of the story might evolve, but it is not shifting back and forth between several writers constantly.

All in all, I have to say this was a great read, highly enjoyable, and I hope to pick up the next volumes in the series as soon as they are available.

Movie Review: The Wild Bunch (1969)

There's really nothing new that can be said about The Wild Bunch. Many consider it not only director Sam Peckinpah's seminal film, but one of the greatest westerns ever made. I think, more than any of the "Spaghetti Westerns", The Wild Bunch defines the post modern western, the "anti-western". Some folks think Eastwood's Unforgiven is the true anti-western, but I'd argue that anything Unforgiven did or tried to do, The Wild Bunch accomplished just as well, if not better. I don't say that as a snub to Eastwood and his work, but I think it takes a troubled spirit to bring to life such troubled spirits as Pike, Dutch, and the rest of the gang. At one point in the film, at Pike and Don Jose are talking, Don Jose points out that he can clearly tell that Pike and his gang are outlaws. Pike laughs, of course, and throws a kind of "takes one to know one" right back at the Don, who laughs and nods in turn. I think that understanding of the kindred spirit is what let Peckinpah create such a masterpiece.

I have seen this film at least six times. I say "at least" because it is probably more, although some viewings were partial, just popping in a DVD and watching a few choice scenes. In film school I know I saw the movie twice for different classes, and I've seen it on the big screen twice, both times at the Coolidge Corner Theater, in my opinion Boston's best independent / art house theater. I watched the Director's Cut of the Wild Bunch last night at the Coolidge with my old film school comrade in arms, John Mayhem. John is something of a Peckinpah scholar (he wrote the essay on Peckinpah's Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia for Hatchet Force Journal #1), and we both waxed nostalgic before, during, and after the film. it was great to sit and watch such a classic on the big screen, a cold beer in hand (yes, the Coolidge sells beer and wine to patrons, something I heartily approve of). As an aside, if you ever get a chance to see a great classic film on the big screen for the first time, don't pass it up. Even the best 60" flatscreens with home surround sound pale in comparison to seeing a classic like this in the venue for which it was created.

If you haven't seen The Wild Bunch, do yourself a favor and indulge your inner outlaw for a couple of hours (even if it is on a "small" screen...). I dare say that it is a thinking man's western, a film that works on multiple levels. Not only are the heroes of the film firmly in their twilight years, but the film is set in 1913, as horses and sixguns are being replaced by automobiles and belt-fed machine guns. As this is a "post modern pulp" blog, I'll point out that I feel The Wild Bunch fits firmly in the post modern mindset. I think it is no coincidence that the movie was made at the height of the Vietnam War, when most people were beginning to realize that hey, we're probably not going to win this one. The world had become a much different place, and films like The Wild Bunch were as much an expression of that change as Don Pendleton's Mack Bolan novels. As the final line of the film states, uttered by the oldest of the 'bunch', "It ain't like it used to be, but it'll do."

Television Series Review: Justified

Since it's been on TV for three seasons (just wrapping up its 3rd season last week), I feel a little silly recommending this amazing series simply because, if you haven't watched it yet, you probably aren't going to do so any time soon.

However, my love for this series compels me to get on a soapbox and state that I think it's one of the best crime dramas I've seen in a long, long time.  This past week, I sat down and watched the first two seasons on DVD, mostly as a refresher to events leading up to the third season. For anyone completely unfamiliar with the series, Justified follows the adventures of Deputy U.S. Marshall Raylan Givens as he hunts down criminals and battles his own personal demons deep in the heart of Kentucky coal country, Harlan County. If that place-name rings a bell, that's probably because you've heard of Harlan Country, USA, an award-winning documentary about coal mining and battles (literally) between the miners and the mining company. I've seen the documentary and it is a powerful, sometimes shockingly brutal story of small town feuds, politics, and the struggles between small towns and big businesses.

However, back to Justified. After a very public and controversial shooting in Miami, Raylan Givens is transferred to the Lexington, Kentucky office of the Marshall's service. Born and bred in Kentucky, Raylan is horrified to be transferred there; he "escaped" the state at 19 and had no intention of ever going back home, but the Marshall's service thinks otherwise. Raylan is put under the supervision of Art Mullen, an old friend and former shooting co-instructor when Raylan taught at Glynco, where the Marshall's service training facilities are located. Between this piece of information and the shooting in the opening moments of the pilot, we're given some indication that Raylan Givens is not a man you want to draw down on, and believe me, that is a notion reinforced over the course of the series.

Back home in Kentucky, Raylan finds himself returning time and time again to Harlan country, where he grew up and now must perform his duties, hunting fugitives who used to be old high school classmates and hell-raising buddies.  This is one of the strongest points in the series; the interactions between Raylan and so many people from his past, most of whom have decided to pursue interests and a way of life that is fundamentally at odds with Raylan's career as "a federal". That he is now lumped in with the "revenuers" and other "big city lawmen" who are universally despised by his old acquaintances is a constant point of conflict, and one that is handled admirably, both by the writers and directors as well as the cast.

As has been done by many reviewers, Graham Yost (the man who developed the series) refers to Justified in one of the commentaries as a "post-modern western". This comment perked my ears up for obvious reasons, and I think the label fits. Raylan Givens is every inch the Western lawman, from his quick-draw skills to his cowboy boots to his hat and his intense, deadly stare. Timothy Olyphant is the perfect actor to portray a western lawman, a fact validated by his great performance as one in the HBO series Deadwood, where he played another Marshall, Seth Bullock. However, Olyphant's great performance on that series is, in my mind, completely overshadowed by his role as Raylan Givens, who's wife describes him as "...the angriest man I have ever known". This is one of the lines that sold the role to Olyphant, because it cuts to the heart of his character; for all his modern civility and smooth talking when the situation calls for it, there resides in the heart of Raylan Givens a smouldering ember of righteous fury and explosive violence. When he is confronted over his recent series of shootings, his boss Art says something to the effect of "...if you were in grade school and bit a kid every week, pretty soon you'd get the reputation as a 'biter'". Well, Raylan has the reputation as a "shooter", and over the course of three seasons, that is a reputation he earns in spades. Justifed has a number of shootouts, and while they are all to a greater or lesser degree "justified", it is clear that Raylan has a tendency - conscious or not - to place himself in situations where gunplay is the only solution to the problem. Raylan is a hammer, no doubt about it, and many people throughout the series feel that he looks at every criminal as if they have a nice, flat surface at the top of their heads.

However, the fault doesn't lay entirely in Raylan's lap. The criminal element in Justified is rife with violence and murder, where poverty and desperation drive many to commit heinous crimes, and where generations of feuding and clandestine criminal activity in the backwoods of the "hollers" can only be mitigated by law enforcement, never eradicated. Every character has access to a firearm, be it a double-barreled "scattergun", a hunting rifle, a revolver in a drawer somewhere, a more modern semi-automatic pistol or assault rifle. Having grown up in a rural area myself, I know that guns are more common than pickup trucks, and there's a whole lot of pickup trucks. This doesn't necessarily make every character a criminal, but it does give everyone a lethal means of resolving conflicts if pushed into a desperate corner.

All this mixes into a heady brew of American tropes that form the heart and soul of the series. Classic Western stories most often revolve around the individual coming into conflict with an entity larger than themselves - a feuding family, a coal mining company, a law enforcement agency, or a marauding band of violent gun thugs. The individual taking the law into their own hands - justified or maybe not so much - forms the crux of the conflict in these stories. In this series, Raylan's struggles to remain on the right side of the law in a lawless land form the show's over-arching conflict, as he is dragged time and time again into personal feuds and vendettas with old acquaintances and new enemies.

But what makes this show a "post-modern western"? Well for the easy money, you could certainly pick the show up, dust off all the modern trappings, and drop it back into Harlan country a hundred years ago, and the series would still pack a lot of punch. But it is the generations-old mentality of the locals coming into conflict with the modern world of business, criminal enterprise, and 21st century law enforcement that gives the show its unique flavor. Hillbilly moonshiners using cell phones and M-4 carbines, drug dealers selling "hillbilly heroin" (Oxycontin), meth cookers making deals with Cartel kingpins on Florida golf courses...despite the mixing of such disparate worlds, it is a mixture that works, and works very well.

Although the third season has just ended, you can get the first two seasons for a song via Amazon. I picked up the first season on DVD for $15, and I think that's not too much to ask for 13 episodes of top-notch television drama. Fire up the television, pour yourself a bourbon, tip back your hat, and dive into the world of Harlan country, Kentucky.