Forget Sparta. I! AM! PUBLISHED!!!!!

I waited three hundred posts just so I can use that headline. Really....

...

Okay. No, not really. It just turned out that way.

But it's true. I'm published.  It Was Only On Stun! is available on Amazon.com.  Buy it here, now.  And you can also buy a kindle copy, right here. And a schedule for a virtual book tour, and maybe even a real life book tour, will be forthcoming .....

But I'm going to take a moment here.

I'm not sure you know what this means to me.

It's been fourteen years.

Two million words. Dozens of rewrites. Entire novels spiked. Two agents. A dead economy, "the end of publishing," and every negative thing about the business of publishing you've ever read in The New York Times.

There have been bridges burned with people whom I have deeply loved. There are people that I owe this to who are no longer talking to me. People who cared just enough to encourage me, but not enough to stay. There have been people I, admittedly, drove away while I was being driven insane by the thorns of this world.

It's been a long road, with a lot of work. I want to thank all of you who stayed around to read what I've had to say.

And, of course, there are specific people who have stuck with me that I need to thank, like: Jason Bieber, Karina Fabian, Kelly Garcia, Ester Lamm, Matthew "Funtime" Pryce, Allan and Annie Yoskowitz, Ann Margaret Lewis, various and sundry people from the Catholic Writer's Organization (Ellen Gable Hrkach, Jacqueline Vickers, Ann Seeton, and, of course, Walter Staples (who can now compare writer's notes with The Great Author). And, of course, there is my family, including my sister Margaret, who helped me with her editing services of Just Write! Ink (on Facebook).

I owe all of you. And I only hope I remembered you all in the acknowledgments. It's all been kind of a blur, so if I missed you, my aim will improve next time around.

Hopefully, you'll like It Was Only On Stun! to a ridiculous degree. You'll want to gift copies to all your friends, and insist that they do the same. Unlikely, but I've been living on hope and Red Bull for so long, I'm shooting for Mars (because the moon is just not ambitious enough). It's also a fairly kick-ass action, mystery, and comedy.

And, if by some chance you don't like it, well, I've got a dozen more books, each with a different flavor and style. The next book will be A Pius Man.  One way or another, it will be published.  Will it be by Amazon.com? Maybe. If that's the case, I'm going to have to find a way to pay Matt for his cover art.

Winston Churchill (everything interesting said in World War II is attributed to him), after the battle of El Alamein, said, "This is not the end. This is not the beginning of the end.  This is, pray God, the end of the beginning."

This is my beginning.

Thank God.

And thank you, too.

But, enough sentiment: here's a fun video with epic music, and weapons.




By the way, while this is an aside -- I also have a new website. Enjoy, all.

Impossible Odds: From Masada to Talisman

"Whether it's the Trojan War, the Battle of Thermopylae, or the Last Stand at the Alamo, many of the famous battles in history were sieges in which small forces took on much larger armies. Unfortunately, sieges don't make good stories because the smaller force won. They make the history books because the little guys fought well, before they died." ~Michael Westen, Burn Notice. Last stand, Ep 4.18

I like thousand to one odds.  Love 'em.  Can't get enough of them. Make it an intelligent war, I'm with you all the way.

300 Spartans (with about 10,000+ other Greeks) versus one hundred thousand (or a million, depending who you ask) Persian Imperial forces?* I'm there.

Nearly seven hundred Jewish rebels vs. a Roman legion at Masada?** I'm with you ...

The Alamo ... Okay, not so much, but I'm more familiar with the players involved, and I can't say that I liked any of them, on any side.

A hundred thousand Orcs of Mordor versus Gondor? That's at least worth an Academy Award....

In my own writing, I have a tendency to give the bad guys the upper hand as much as possible.  I try not to leave it as a matter of "evil badguy gains upper hand because he's using underhandd methods, while virtuous goodguy never sinks so low." Anyone who had read even one my self defense articles knows better.  When in doubt, bite a nose off, pull at an ear, gouge the eyes, and, of course, kick 'em in the groin, whenever possible.  My characters fight like their lives depend on it, usually because it does.

No, when I give the bad guys the upper hand, it's because they either have better training, better equipment, more people, or all of the above.

That's when I whip out The Anarchist's Cookbook, and go to work.  Because when my characters are out-manned  outgunned, outmaneuvered, and when things have stopped looking grim and have moved on to "we're all going to die" ....

That's when my characters get smart, get sneaky, and become very, very dangerous.


I've done it a few times in my books.  In A Pius Legacy (book three, should book one ever be published), I've practically got the army of darkness on our heroes' doorstep, and not one of my heroes even looks like Bruce Campbell.

I've got a murder mystery series on my hard drive that involves a writer, and a nerd, who's being hunted by assassins .... however, he got very good grades in chemistry, will hit people with everything and the kitchen sink, and he knows how to kill people with a pen.

The list goes on.

Besides, if it's a fair fight, you know how things go in fiction: the protagonist wins ...

However, when you have lopsided odds, and an author who has shown s/he's quite willing to assassinate any of his/her characters at will ... well then, that's when things get interesting, now, isn't it?






*Everyone by now should have at least heard of the story of Thermopylae ... aka The Hot Gates ... aka "The Gates of Fire" (which is my personal favorite translation) ... You may have seen the ads for the film 300.


**If you've never heard of Masada, in 70 AD, you had Israelites versus the Roman Empire. Only this wasn't Mossad or the IDF, but the sicarii, or knifemen. By 73 AD, the war was lost, and the last of the sicarii were held up in an old mountain fortress called Masada.

Originally, it was a story of how 700 rebels held out against the siege of a Roman legion, until the Romans finally breached the walls, only to find everyone had committed suicide, rather than be taken hostage again.

Recent research has concluded that the tale is a little different than originally reported -- the sicarii of Masada fought to the last man, woman, and child.

To this day, the Israeli Defense Force takes an oath: "Masada Shall Not Fall Again."

***Isn't it sad that this blog needs footnotes? :)

Holy Terror ... Batman? A writing Blog.

Frank Miller is a name you might be familiar with.  He wrote the comic books that would spawn the movies 300, Sin City, several Batman titles, including the annoyingly omnipresent Batman: Year One, and he had a very popular run on Daredevil, and even created the character of Elektra, the assassin with father issues.  Miller was also the director on The Spirit-- and has a small lynch mob after him for that, I'm sure.

So, Miller gets around.

Several years and a few lifetimes ago, Frank Miller said he wanted to write a graphic novel called "Holy Terror, Batman!" a play on a line from the 1960s Batman TV show with Adam West.

Miller has debuted his Holy Terror and ...

It doesn't have Batman.

Miller decided to work with a new hero, it wouldn't be a DC comics project, etc, etc.

On the one hand, I can understand that Frank Miller has had issues lately with DC.  His All Star Batman and Robin, the Boy Wonder was, as I understand it, universally panned by reviewers, except for those who seem to want Frank Miller's baby. They weren't pretty, either way.

Miller's version: it was more Dirty Harry than Batman. It just didn't work with Batman.....

Really?

Music Blog: Domino Death, Still Alive, Let the bodies hit the floor.

This one is just going to be pure strange. You may want to run.

First,a song from Tom Smith .... Have you ever had problems with your pizza delivery?



The end of the video game Portal was done by Jonathan Coulton; as sung by the evil computer that's been trying to kill you throughout the entire video game.  By this point, it had been broken to pieces, and incinerated in order to disable it's ability to flood the installation with nerve gas.

Johnathan Coulton's "Still Alive"


And after the break is the closest thing to "normal" .... the song that I play when I have a bad day.... a really bad day.

Music to Write to: Cruxshadows, Nightwish, and Doctor Who ... sort of.

Yup, another music blog. What do you have to lose?

To start with, as always, there has to be at least one cut from Two Steps from Hell. The title Protectors of the Earth, always makes me think of Doctor Who.

I tripped over this one recently. I had been playing through videos for "This is War" (previous post) and uncovered this tune by accident. I think it works.

Evil Religions 1: Allahu Akbar.

An evil religion blog post.

When I first proposed the "Evil Religions" series of blogs, I figured I would make it ironic. You may all remember the "first" Evil Religion post back on April 1st. This is the real one.

Before you get your panties in a twist, I warned readers of this blog quite some time ago that there would be a series of “Evil Religion” blog posts, and that it wouldn't be what you think it is. Guess what, it's still not going to be what you think it is. Read the rest of this preface here.

Now, let's start with our first “Evil Religion.”  The following can be footnoted in the works of Bernard Lewis, David Dalin, Ralph McInerny, or Roy Schoeman’s “Salvation is from the Jews”

The Middle East has a problem, and it's not Islam. It's their culture... which is also not Islam.

Yes, sorry, hate to break it to all of you, the culture of the Middle East was not substantially altered by The Prophet. Mainly because there were no real fundamental building blocks for the culture to be altered …

The trouble with the Middle East, in part, can be traced to the Nazis.

No, I am not being allegorical, but literal.

If you're a newcomer to this blog, you may not have heard of the term “Hitler’s Pope”: that Eugenio Pacelli, aka Pope Pius XII, worked with, for, or around Hitler in support of the final solution of the Holocaust.

What I'm almost certain you never hear about is what has been labeled Hitler’s Mufti.

Why anyone can enjoy A Pius Man.

From Comic books readers and Scifi fans, to James Patterson and back. Why anyone can enjoy A Pius Man.

[Author's note: this was originally going to be a note on Marketing. It didn't turn out that way.]


What do you call a book chock full of hundred year old conspiracies, dangerous priests, psychotic mercenaries, operatives trained to kill practically from birth, international political intrigue, a terrorist plot, and a wide ranging collection of protagonists the likes of which the world hasn't seen since the team that took out Dracula?

You call it A Pius Man.

Fans of this page who remember that a contest is on will remember that there's something in it for you when you get people to join the Facebook page for A Pius Man: when the Facebook page hits 100 fans, I post and origin sotry for one of the characters. When it hits 150, I post a podcast of the prologue. When the Facebook page reaches critical mass, I post a chapter from the middle of the book, and the person who has brought in the most fans will have their name put into the novel.


Sound like fun?

Next question: who should read A Pius Man?  Or, who should you invite? 


On the face of it, it seems like yet another in a long line of bad Da Vinci Code ripoffs that have come out in legion since Dan Brown's super-hyped novel hit the scene an interminable amount of time ago. However, while my book has conspiracies and religion, that's more or less where the similarities end. There will be no puzzles, the French will not be a threat, and no one will spend dozens of pages finding their way out of an art museum.

That said, there are some people who just don't read thrillers. Understandable, it's a term so generic you can toss a net over a whole host of authors... some of whom probably should have a net thrown over them anyway, just to be safe. However, when a field is as vast as the comic-bookish feel of Clive Cussler's NUMA novels... to the theoretical science of James Rollins..... to a Barry Eisler novel, half of which takes place in the head of his protagonist, assassin John Rain..... It's almost as diverse a group as public Catholic figures—as Oscar Wilde used to say: Here Comes Everybody. Can't call it a historical thriller, because then it will be mistaken for a period peace like the Sharpe's novels of Bernard Cornwell—I wouldn't mind having his audience, but they might feel gypped to find it set in the 21st century.

So, who the hell should read this book?

Let's see....

Comic book fans: My first agent drew parallels between the team of protagonists and the Justice League.  One character has already been compared to Deadpool—of the comic, not the film. Throw in adversaries who seem preternaturally strong, fast, and trained... well, it's not like fighting the Hordes of Hydra, but my villain isn't exactly the Red Skull. Some are as serious as a police procedural, and some might as well have wanted to be Doc Savage when they grew up. One of them even works with “Middle Earth's Most Wanted Elven Assassin,” and no, I'm not kidding.

Science Fiction fans—who will hopefully forgive me for calling it “SciFi” above: Key pieces of this story involve NLW technology. Or, in standard English, non-lethal weaponry. Microwave cannons that emit plasma beams, tazer beam weapons, gases, explosives; if it's been mentioned, or appeared in a semi-realistic video game, it's probably in there. Throw in the laser-keyboards and the microwave microphones, you can outfit a small Sharper Image store.  And ALL of the technology is real.  I got it from Time magazine.

Spy fans: International intrigue? Got it. Shadowy figures? Check. Conspiracy theories? At least five of them, and three are right. We also have: the obligatory evil Cardinal; a pale, silver haired priest with commando training (not to be confused with an albino, of course); the Jesuits, the Opus Dei, and the Knights Templar all show up, just so I can play with some of the old cliches

Readers of history: Yes, A Pius Man actually has historical facts. Literally, they happened. This is a book where the history presented in its pages can be footnoted. I know this because the original draft had footnotes. It was suggested that I take them out... however, I still have a bibliography in the back.

People who like intelligent destruction: There's an assassination on page two, an explosion on page three, a wrecked car by page seven, and a mercenary with a resume that reads like scripts of the A-Team tv show. We'll ignore the shootout on the Spanish Steps in the armored SUV. Death, property damage, and utter ruination are always good for an audience. It worked for four Die Hard films.

Political folk: As much as I loathe to admit it, there's politics in this novel. It goes to motivation for the various and sundry parties. Besides: how do you negotiate being a Catholic—universal—Church? Unlike being a superpower, like the United States, you can't pick and choose who you associate with just because they're valuable to you. If that were the case, I wouldn't have a friend whose uncle is a missionary in China. And what happens when you put an African Pope who's to the right of Attila the Hun into the middle of this particular hurricane?

At the end of the day, the only people who should probably NOT read A Pius Man are those who expect a novel by way of Mitchner, or Clavell. Half of the book is filled with thoughtful, drawn out characters who are trying to think their way through the problem at hand. The other half of the book is filled with various and sundry creative ways to lay waste to large parts of Rome—from shooting up the Spanish Steps to trashing Leonardo Da Vinci airport.

And this is just the first book. Book two is the fallout, and countermoves by those bad guys who survive book one. Book three is where I recreate the Battle of Thermopylae.... if the 300 had possessed remote-detonated landmines.

Anyway, if you or any of your friends might enjoy anything listed above, you might want to join the fan page, or invite them to tag along. Or both.