This blog tracks the epic of kick-starting a whole writing career, with spies and thrillers, now saints and vampires. I cover the creative process, stuff that blows up, history, philosophy, and theology. If you like any or all of the above, you'll like this one. We talk about comic books, movies, music, and writing. Usually, all at the same time. [Note: All Amazon links here are associate links. Which means nothing to you, but it means Declan Finn gets a few pennies for the sale. Thank you.]

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Updates and Cover Reveals

If you follow my substack, you already know this. If you've wondered where I've been the last two years, some updates.

I lost my publisher Silver Empire.

In the meantime, I’ve picked up others. Maybe three.

Let’s go around the books.

First things first: Saint Tommy, NYPD is going to be through Tuscany Bay Press. You may remember them as the publisher of my White Ops space opera.

Including

Oh yeah, I even have a cover.

And there’s already a cover for #10, brought to you by Michael Gallagher. You can find him at his website, or on Twitter under the handle BasedPapist, and DM him for details.

And then there’s #12, Blue Saint

This cover was created by NR LaPoint, author of the author novel Chalk, among others I haven’t gotten to yet. His website is here.

Cover #11 is en route.

So, whew. Things are getting back to normal there. Yay.

[MORE BELOW THE BREAK]

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Main Street D.O.A.

Due to ... blogger ... I have not posted on this blog for some time. I am making up for it now, however. If you want to see some of these original posts, go to my Substack. You can't miss it. It's Declan Finn's Substack. :)

Yup, I’ve been busy.

Book three releases all over the place.

I had… some fun here.

Heh heh heh.

Sean Patrick Ryan's White Ops team has survived two wars, pirates, a cannibalistic alien horde from another galaxy, space jihadis, and political maneuvering. Their boss thinks they deserve a break and sends them to the "happiest place in the galaxy."

Luckily for Sean, terrorists take over the amusement planet before he can lose his mind.

To stop the terrorists, White Ops will have to battle a weaponized planet, including cloned dinosaurs, giant sharks, animatronic amusements and a doomsday device that will destroy the planet.

And when the deadliest assassin alive joins the fray, whose side will he be on?

Main Street D.O.A. (White Ops Book 3) by [Declan Finn]

I had so much fun with this one.

Let’s just say that the entertainment planet, the “Happiest Place in the Galaxy” had a different name in the draft copy.

I think it’s now called Yesdin.

Or was it Yisden?

Either way, crossword enthusiasts will be amused cracking that particularly unimaginative cypher.

You can see just how crafty and wily I am.

That and an ACME box of Earthquake pills, I'll get that roadrunner any day now.

Anyhow, what you’re going to read was originally a 35 page short story. During the rewrite, I took one look at that and said, “Nah. I can have WAY more fun with this.” I took the original short and ballooned it. No, I didn’t pad it in any way. There are some threads that will be pulled, and pulled hard, in book 5. Just like there are threads in book 2 that culminate also in book 5.

Hell, who am I kidding? There are some threads in book 1 and 2 that get wrapped up in Main Street DOA.

Oh, and yes, I have a book 5 coming. Probably a book 12, if the outline holds up that long, and people keep reading it.

Speaking of people reading, if you’ve read White Ops and / or Politics Kills, please remember to review it/them.

And Main Street, DOA is available here.

Buy the rest of my books here.

Wednesday, November 23, 2022

The Great #BlackFriday / #CyberMondayBook Sale

I’m sending this one out a little early, mainly because everyone is busy on Thursday with cooking, and Friday with shopping. Hopefully, this one will register just a little.

So, my friend Hans Schantz is hosting a book sale over at his website.

CLICK HERE FOR FREE BOOKS

Yes, that’s right, free books. Also, $0.99 books.

The list of authors here is… absurd. And it includes

These are some of the top offerings from previous book sales including science fiction grandmasters, established mainstream authors and emerging indie talent. Authors include James Alderdice, Tony Andarian, J.M. Anjewierden, Leigh Brackett, Jonathan P. Brazee, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rachel Fulton Brown, Carlos Carrasco, Kit Sun Cheah, Paul Clayton, Alexandru Constantin, Travis J.I. Corcoran, J.D. Cowan, Lucca DeJardins, Jon Del Arroz, Declan Finn, Amanda Fleet, Milo James Fowler, Erin Furby, Adam Furman, Michael Gallagher, Charles E. Gannon, Peter Grant, Fiona Grey, Paul Hair, Harry Harrison, Frederick Gero Heimbach, Alexander Hellene, Daniel Humphreys, C.S. Johnson, Steven G. Johnson, Joseph L. Kellogg, Tom Kratman, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Christopher Lansdown, N.R. LaPoint, Frank B. Luke, Loretta Malakie, T. J. Marquis, Russell May, Michael McCloskey, Paul McKesley, Yakov Merkin, Bradley J. Mitzelfelt, Jonathan Moeller, Alexander Nader, Morgon Newquist, Brian Niemeier, Andre Norton, Christopher G. Nuttall, Deidre J. Owen, Richard Paolinelli, Iris Paustian, Francis Porretto, Matthew W. Quinn, John Ringo, Timothy Scott Roach, Justin Robinson, David Roome, C.A. Sabol, Denton Salle, Cedar Sanderson, Hans G. Schantz, Richard Sezov, Jonathan Shuerger, David Skinner, Benjamin A. Sorensen, Emily Martha Sorensen, Kevin Steverson, David V. Stewart, John Taloni, Kevin Trainor, Jr., Kalkin Trivedi, Bev Vincent, Henry Vogel, Patrick Walts, Mark Wandery, David Weber, H.G. Wells, David J. West, Barry Scott Will, Michael Z. Williamson, Ryan Williamson, Fenton Wood, John C. Wright, and Timothy Zahn.

And those are just the highlights.

So, enjoy.

And happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022

Creating an Alien: Designing Renar

The funniest part about my life is that I have a history degree that I have used almost as much for fiction as for nonfiction.

Sure, everyone (by now) has heard me talk about The Pius Trilogy having been born from a graduate paper gone amok.

Then I used it to design an alien race in the White Ops series. In book one, you might remember that I had the Soivan and the Touri as two empires who expanded into each other and just didn’t stop since. Well, I took the “two empires expanding into each other” from the Zulus and the British, and I just let it ramp up for five hundred years, because why not? Also, I wanted two political entities that truly and deeply hated each other.

Then there are the Renar.

In designing the Renar, there were several elements I wanted to throw in.

The look

First, the Renar were going to be similar to humans, but I wanted them to stand out, something the demarks them as nonhuman.

I put an external bone on the skull, because I hadn’t seen that since Babylon 5. However, unlike neat the bone crest of Babylon 5’s Minbari, it’s more like a helmet that covers the sides of the head, wraps around the back, and goes from the nape of the neck to either the hairline of a human, or just above the eyes. There are no eyebrow muscles, or ears—the “ears” are a thin part of the bone, with slight, almost invisible divots to channel sound better. Their eyes are two-toned: the iris and the pupil are two different colors.

Oh yes, and the skin tone is the color of metal. Variable metals, but metal.

So yeah, metal / high gloss skin, two tone eyes, full bone helmet like a stone. It was going to look DIFFERENT, damn it.

The Culture

This is where the history was going to come in.

The culture was going to circle around, four castes, like the medieval period. I know what you’re thinking: weren’t there three castes? Nope. By the late medieval period, there was an entirely new social class that had emerged: the merchants.

So this world was going to have four castes: The Ansolas are the peasants / workers. There will be the soldier caste, the Zahal. Then there’s the Religious and Merchants.

With the Religious, there’s going to be an overlap in philosophy. Natural philosophy is a thing. It works no matter where you are. Unless something is decidedly off, it works wherever you are. They believed in a deity, because cause and effect is a thing: the big bang (for which we currently have evidence via telecommunications satellite—they hear the echo). They know there’s a starting point, so they reasoned to a First Cause, and if Something could create the universe, then it’s not going to be the cartoon cutouts they have in most mythologies—there will be no Zeus that has sex with everything.

The Clothes

This is going to be a culture that uses a lot of robes. I’m thinking designs and colors that are more like kimonos. This stems from part of their culture which will come up on the

The religious will wear brighter colors, because they need them for their various professions—like medics. Both Ansolas and the Zahal will prefer darker colors, as they hide blood and dirt better. The merchants will be more of a wine-dark royal purple, because don’t they always?

The Language

I am not a linguist. I’m not Tolkien. I’m not even going to try.

However, I have an eclectic collection of words floating around in my head.

So, I steal from everything.

White Ops is part of a group called the Toten’tanz, they who dance with death. Or death dancers. In context, it’s “sentinels against death.”

Meanwhile, on Earth, you may have noticed that the word is German and I just threw in an apostrophe. I was going to make it “toten’shok” (death + hydrashok hollowpoints) but it looked too close to another SF.

The toten’shok are based in Muskva… which is how the Russians pronounce “Moscow.” I just changed a vowel.

“Ansolas” means “worker”… in Gaelic.

The Zahal… is a mistake on my part. Because the Zahal is another Earth word. It’s Hebrew, and it’s what they call the Israeli Defense Force.

I stole Renar cursing from a Dublin phone book when I was there in 1998. But maybe 6,000 people on the entire planet read Gaelic, so what are the odds?

Applications

Putting all of this together, I have

Turak: a Zahal turned religious. Obsidian bone crest / helmet, with silver skin, silver eyes and blue pupils. A wiry sucker, he has to make some hard choices if he’s going to stay in the toten’tanz.

Lakonn: Ansolas. A design engineer. His skin is gunmetal blue. His bone crest looks like granite and almost a battering ram. His eyes are the color of molten metal—a bright yellow in the middle, and a brighter red in the iris. He’s built like an Italian garage mechanic, and he has to design a new weapon system. Preferably before everyone gets eaten.

Furlann: Religious, a medic. She’s almost an albino. Her skin is pale, almost stark white. Her bone helmet is almost smooth, and a pale green, so pale it almost looks like the rest of her skin. The most striking part of her body is her bright violet pupils.

So yeah, I had fun here.

By the way, White Ops #2, Politics Kills, is out. Enjoy.

Monday, February 28, 2022

(Red) Dragon Awards

Guess what everybody, it's that time of year again...

Time to have yet another Dragon Awards discussion!

Yay.

If you’ve been here a while, you know I often talked about the Dragon Awards, from January to July. They’re the largest fan-voted awards out there. It’s free to vote on it. You don’t even have to register attending the convention.

It also gives me an excuse to talk about books at large. Not that I really need an excuse.

If you want to think that way, the Dragon Awards a front in the culture war. Nerd culture is, surprisingly, important. If you don’t believe me, look up “GamerGate” sometime. It was largely just a matter of calling out gaming journalism for being, well, crap. While GG has been out of action for years (at least seven years, IIRC) you’d think that it was a massive conspiracy theory on par with the Illuminati. It left a mark. You’d think the line was that “the Geek shall inherit the Earth.”

It could be worse. It could be Sad Puppies. And that’s another kennel for another time.

One of the reasons I even go into the cultural aspect of things is that, in 2020, no one cared about the Dragons. I can’t imagine why. Something about the Beer Plague, probably. So, that front was ignored entirely.

The dirt bags interested in taking over every aspect of American life moved in. And while DragonCon is not a bastion of the Right (just look at the parade of Handmaiden cosplayers a few years ago) it has always been a place where everyone can show up, do their own thing, and most importantly, be left alone.

People are trying to make it not that. Then 2020 became… a clusterfuck, really.

So yes, we need to push back.

Voting in the Dragons is a way of making sure that we can all push back without any real investment … aside from a little bit of time.

And if you want to vote, trust me, I’m going to be investing WAY more time than you are.

Nominate here

Yes, the nominations are already open! I'm not even joking.

Yes, I have a list of who I’m voting for. Here, for you folks, I’m also going to give you my reason for why I’m voting for each, and why I think it’s important.

But first…

My thought process

I'm not nominating anyone who already has an award. Most of those who have won already have the attitude of “Oh, I don’t need more dust collectors.”

I’m leaving out Big Name Authors. Frankly, if you're Jim Butcher or a Baen author, you don't need my help.

If I leave the categories blank, it means I STILL got nothing.

You may wonder why I’m not having a full, massive, months-long discussion, gathering up every eligible author and product.

Been there, done that. It turned into an unmanageable mess. Authors came in a hit and run to my posts, screamed "ME ME ME" in the comments, then dropped links to their book and ran. There was no discussion. That’s it.

I seriously want a discussion if I can get one. Why do this? Because if I don’t try one, who will? And the nominations **are already open.** Believe it or not.

Voting happens here:

Please remember that eligible nominees came out AFTER 7/1/21, up 6/30/22. So double check before throwing something into the ring. I’m starting with who I’m voting for at the moment. Unless I have no other option, if someone has an award I’m not giving them more dust collectors

But then again, if you’re Jim Butcher, you don’t need my help.

So... here... we ... go.

Best SF

White Ops

Reviews

It could also be Military SF, but since it’s a space opera, it’s genre fluid.

Then again, I’m so far behind on my TBR pile, this is one of the few SF novels that I know came out in the eligibility window.

Yes, for the record, White Ops is mine. I’d like to boast that I deserve it. I’m the best out there. I covet the shiny award, blah blah blah.

But I also can’t name you a damn thing in SF that came out in the eligibility window.

Best Fantasy (Paranormal)

My personal pick is The Dragon and his Wrath, by Dan Humphreys.

Yes, this this is an Urban Fantasy novel.

Why can’t the Dragons please get one lousy UF category?

We can call it the Jim Butcher award.

Best YA

Sworn to the Light, the Avatar Wizard Book 1, by Denton Salle.

My Review.

Good God, this was just plain FUN. I do recommend you at least check out the review over here. It’s where I did most of my gushing.

Best Military SFF Novel

Karl Gallagher, Seize What’s Held Dear.

My review.

Imagine if Honor Harrington were fighting 1984 and not the French Revolution. You’d get this. I don’t think I’m exaggerating how good this is in the review.

Best Alternate History Novel

The Romanov Rescue, by Tom Kratman, Kacey Ezell, et al.

This review is incoming, but it’s Tom and Kacey. Are we really surprised that it’s entertaining?

Best Media Tie-In Novel

I just found out that Timothy Zahn released a Thrawn book last year, called Lesser Evil. I’ll read it and get back to you.

Best Horror Novel

Summer Storm, Morgon Newquist

Best Comic Book

I’ve been told that "Finnian and the Seven Mountains #5" is good. No, I haven’t read it. I haven't read a comic book since Straczynski left Amazing Spider Man nearly 20 years ago.

However, I’m told that Demon Slayer outsold the entire American Comic book industry last year. And the English run finished in in August 2021. So it’s eligible.

Offical Demon Slayer DvD Cover : DemonSlayerAnime

Best Graphic Novel

I got nothing. [To be clear, it’s: an illustrated story in traditional comic book format that is at least 36 pages long and has been first released in print or electronic format]

I’m told Kamen America is good.

Kamen America, Volume 4: Scars and Bars by [Timothy Lim, Mark Pellegrini]

Best SFF TV Series, TV or Internet

I hope someone comes up with something, or Disney shills are going to just vote in Book of Boba Fett, and everyone seems to hate that... except for when it's an episode of Mandalorian.

I’m not a fan of what they’ve done to The Witcher.

I couldn’t get into The Expanse.

However, I’m told that Resident Alien is pretty good.

Best SFF Movie

While I haven’t seen anything that came out last year, I’m told the following were good.

Ghostbusters: Afterlife?
Dune?
Spider-Man: No Way Home?

Best Science Fiction or Fantasy PC / Console Game

I have no idea, I have a stack of video games over a foot high that I haven’t touched.

Halo: Infinite, 343 Games?

Demon Slayer?

And not for the "I have no f***ing idea" categories.

Best SFF...

Mobile Game?
Board Game?
Miniatures / Collectible Card / Role-Playing Game?

Good luck with those, I have no clue.

So that’s it. Those are my best guesses for right now. I'd throw in hashtags or tag people, but most of the ones who I'd want to bring in either don't care, or are so self-aggrandizing, it wouldn’t be a discussion, it'd be nothing but "ME ME ME."

Trust me, been there, done that. Never again.

So if you want to start voting, you can.

Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Declan Finn! (Geek Gab, Episode 263!)

If you’ve wondered why I’ve slowed down with the blog posts, it might have to do with all of the podcast interviews I’ve been working on.

White Ops 1

White Ops 2

Tuesday, February 22, 2022

Live From the Bunker 360: Declan Finn Finally Publishes His First Novel

Another Podcast. This was fun.

But God I hate that photo.

White Ops 1

White Ops 2

White Ops #3

Monday, February 21, 2022

White Ops Reviewed

Sorry for the lull between posts. But I wanted to collect some reviews out in the wild. Previously, I had posted these online one at a time on my old blog.

But yikes that sucks up a lot of time and effort.

So, I have some excerpts and links.

Enjoy.