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As you no doubt have learned, Rowdy Roddy Piper has passed away. Wrestler, actor, favorite loudmouth, we all remember him in different ways. I'm sure the internet is already full of the news of his death, videos of him shouting, or references to him being all out of bubblegum. I want to draw your attention to one of his most recent appearances, in that of one of my favorite video game franchises: Saints Row. In Saints Row 4, the player is the President of the United States, pulled into a virtual world created by alien invaders. Many of the President's friends and staff are imprisoned as well, including Keith David. In Saints Row 4, Keith David is the Vice President of the United States. Not Keith David voicing a character, not just a character with the shared name. No, actor Keith David is voicing himself, who had been elected Vice President of the United States and stolen by aliens. As part of the plot, Keith is brainwashed by the aliens. The President must go into Keith's pocket virtual world to figure things out. Within he finds a very familiar scene, which is about where this video starts... (credit to Sickdistic, since it's their video)
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 I KILL MONSTERS, the first adventure of the Nowak Brothers, is free on Kindle for the next few days! Get a taste of the city of New Avalon before returning to the city in The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment in August! And look for a new Nowak Brothers adventure later this year!
I KILL MONSTERS Mikkel and Szandor kill monsters. They're not government funded, they're not from a time-honored lineage of hunters, nor are they rich kids with lots of toys. They're two twenty-something brothers from the poor side of town who have taken it on themselves to rid the streets and underground of creatures who would prey on the innocent. Donning gas masks and using makeshift weaponry, they delve into the labyrinthine sewer system of New Avalon to grapple with snarling zombies, flesh-eating ghouls, insectoid hive creatures, and more. It's a dirty job and it rarely pays, but someone has to do it. Hired by a woman from the rich side of town who believes she's being stalked by monsters, the two brothers think they've finally gotten an easy job that will pay well. But as they follow the clues, things are not adding up. Kidnappings, jackbooted commandos, and mysterious emails are just the beginning. Soon they find themselves involved in something bigger than monsters. It's anybody's guess whether they'll come through it alive, much less get paid. I Kill Monsters is an exciting punk rock urban fantasy for those who enjoy their protagonists with a mouth on them and a weapon in their hands.  The above image is the work of Frank Kelly Freas. He created the above cover in 1953 as an illustration for the story "The Gulf Between" by Tom Godwin. The image was captioned "Please... fix it, Daddy?" It's a great image, but that caption really drives it home. The whole suite of confusing emotions: sadness, pity, horror, alienation. Of course, most of us have not had lives such that we'd see a 1953 science fiction magazine, but the image is still familiar.  Here we see it again for Queen's News of the World album. If you're even younger, you may only recognize it from an episode of Family Guy where the running gag is Brian teasing Stewie with the image.
So what happened? Why is the same accidentally murderous robot given a second chance to then go ahead and murder one of the more iconic bands of the 20th century? Queen had seen Freas's picture and wanted it for the album. They contacted the author, who agreed to alter the painting for the album cover, also adding more art for the inside of the album. Seen as just the Queen album cover, it's already an emotive image. But bringing it back to its original state and adding in that caption, it's haunting. Wikipedia Link Frank Kelly Freas News of the World on Youtube News of the World on Amazon  My upcoming novel, The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment is available for preorder now! It will come out on August 14th! In addition, if you're interested in getting an advance reader copy to review it, please contact me!
Preorder on Amazon When Jake arrives home to find his not-quite-girlfriend Melody murdered in his apartment, things seem like they couldn't get any worse. But when the killer, a ferocious man turned monster, is still there and looking for something of Melody's, Jake fights for his life, just barely getting out of the apartment to safety. Now he's on the hook for the murder of Melody. To clear his name, his college friends put together a reluctant Mystery Gang: Anna, the mystery-obsessed Criminal Justice Major; Eva, Jake's best friend and escapee from New Avalon's high society; Nathan, cynical Philosophy Major; and Thomas, the weird Physics grad student from across town. Together they investigate the murder and the object they murderer was looking for, stumbling onto something bigger and stranger than they ever imagined. Monsters, memory wipes, magic, men in black, and a secret war of Good versus Evil for the fate of the city and possibly the world. Mysteries have never been this strange.  A young man moves into an odd apartment building in Los Angeles. Inexplicably cheap to rent, he starts discovering strange facts about it. There are mysteries about the building that even the other occupants noticed before he came there. Temperature issues, a lighting fixture that turns any bulb into a blacklight, green mutant cockroaches, an elevator that hasn't worked in decades, facts that don't add up. And then there is the door covered with four padlocks, the one that goes to apartment 14...
14 by Peter Clines is an interesting novel. If you were to check the reviews around, you wouldn't be able to toss a rock without getting a comparison to the TV show Lost (it's even right there on the cover!). And that is not a bad comparison - 14 builds steam based on its mysteries, the unexplained weirdness, and its characters. It starts with one character, Nate, but builds to a larger cast. It's also much like Scooby Doo and their mystery gang, a similarity the novel not only touches on, but grabs and runs with to the finish line, making it one of the common aspects of the banter between the characters. As much as it seems like it could veer into being a horror novel, it's not. It's mysterious, it's scifi at times, there are bad things that happen, but it's never full on Stephen King, Clive Barker, or Bentley Little. If you hoped it was an homage to Silent Hill 4 from the cover, you're out of luck. Despite all that, I love this novel. It does start slow. At the beginning, it's just following Nate as he moves in and discovers stuff. At times that feels a little mechanical; I even got a bit of déjà vu like I was playing a point and click adventure where it was go here, move that, cutscene, go here, do this, cutscene. But once it opens up and he becomes friends with other members of his apartment building, it really gets going and you enjoy the Mystery Gang interactions. Of course, after about a third through the novel to the midpoint, a different uncomfortable feeling crawls up on you. Having seen Lost, you might wonder if there's ever going to be a satisfying payoff to the mysteries the novel keeps building. You wonder if the ending is just going to be disappointment, the mysteries built for the sake of mysteries, never making sense in explanation, only in the teased weirdness. Get through that and you do end with a novel that makes sense, one with a satisfying conclusion that is reasonable for what has been presented. That was true for me, though not for some other reviewers. I also didn't hate the ending of Lost as much as some people do, so your results may vary. Some notes on the edition. I got a paperback from my library, so I have no idea if it was a special advance edition or anything. But my copy had no page numbers. Only the author's name and the novel title were written in barely visible ink at the tops of pages. And sometimes the line formatting was off. In a few cases there was an end quote on its own line at the end of a paragraph, not pulled to the previous line. Nothing preventing me from enjoying the experience, but no page numbers means you should have a trusty bookmark on hand to keep your place. Ultimately, whether you enjoy this novel depends mostly on what you like. Don't like I-don't-know-what's-going-on mysteries? Sorry, keep looking. Aren't willing to suspend your disbelief for weirdness and scifi? Nope. Need your strange home stories with blood and large body counts? No. But if you like strange stuff, if you want something different, read this. Despite my reference, if you were intrigued by Silent Hill 4, read this. Been wanting a modern day Twilight Zone, a more grounded Lost, an adult Scooby Gang, a primetime miniseries Lovecraft? Then read this. That's really the highest compliment I can give a book. 14 on Amazon I think anyone who works with text regularly has had an instance when you used Find and Replace to change a word, or more likely a character or project name. As we know, sometimes this can end up with some unintended results, especially if no proofreading is done after.  I encountered this text error in the game Leviathan: The Last Day of the Decade. The game was originally in Russian and I don't think there was a lot done with the English text, because this is far from the only text error in it. I guess the Darina character was originally called Ruth, and after they changed it, nobody did a full proofreading pass.
Does anyone else have any other amusing proofreading errors in games or other media to share? "We see things not as they are, but as we are."
The source of this quote is under debate, but that's not what I'm here to talk about. I want to talk about the essence of this quote. It's about skewed facts, it's about bias, it's about what we think about the truth. We don't see the world as it is. We see the world through the lens of who we are, the past we carry with us, the hopes we have for the future, and our here-and-now feelings. We think we're seeing the world as it is, that we're seeing the truth. But we're only seeing a version of the truth. Like the saying goes, when you only have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. When we're carrying around past trauma and hopes for the future, we tend to interpret everything through that filter. Good or bad is defined not by things as they are, but as how we think things should be. Two people can experience the same thing and have wildly different experiences. I'm sure we've all known this to happen at least once in our lives. Two people go to an event - concert, sporting event, bar, club, family meeting, etc - and sit right next to each other. One has a grand time while the other finds every moment an exercise in misery. But they sat right next to each other, and aside from very minor variables, had the same experience. Yet one thought it was great, the other terrible. It's because one saw it through their version of reality and the other saw it in theirs. Different hammers, different nails. Every moment we are howling out who we are and how we are at the world around us. And what we see is based on what comes back. It may rebound back to as vibrant splendor or it may come back as inert horror. And that's all on you. Of course there are real tragedies, things that we'd all consider objectively bad. But for most people, those events are few and far between. They're not often enough for the tragic or panicked lives that some of us lead. They're not responsible for the dusty halls of the dead museums some of us live in, every experience dismantled, tagged, and placed behind glass. While some of us walk a death march through the halls of hollow lives, some lives in the same spaces, free - or at least more free. We are all photographers of life, except we are not taking still pictures and looking to frame the perfect shot, we are using our lives to frame the perfect moments. And we can frame experiences as better or worse. If you go looking to frame a beautiful world, you will find one. And if you go looking to frame an ugly world, you will find one. Your choice.  My recent lighthearted urban fantasy novel Manic Monday is free in ebook form over at Amazon for the next few days! It's the second of my New Avalon books! Go check it out and enjoy the first adventure of caffeine-loving investigator Dane Monday!
Manic Monday on Amazon Dane Monday deals with weird stuff. Mad scientists, sorcerers, robots, time-travelling cats, cyborgs learning the concept of love, and more. Whether it's a death ray, a doomsday ritual, or simply magic gone wrong, Dane Monday is there to stop them. He's even got a rogue's gallery of megalomaniacal villains who want revenge. Armed only with his wits, some reluctant allies, and a satchel full of gadgets, Dane steps forward to save the city of New Avalon. While investigating an abandoned building, Dane encounters the remnants of a magical ritual shortly before the building explodes in spectacular fashion. Narrowly escaping this destruction with his new ally, the aspiring journalist Abby Connors, Dane follows the threads of this mystery while evading a menagerie of homicidal robots, kidnapping thugs, and the wrath of a mad scientist. At the bottom of it all is a scheme to destroy New Avalon involving a century-old architect, a historic hotel, and something not of our world. Can Dane and Abby brave the dangers and the strangeness to save the city of New Avalon? Find out in Manic Monday!  Today I'm pleased to announce my next novel, The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment! It's another light urban fantasy, but this one skews more toward mystery gang style protagonists and good vs evil. It's also the third novel to take place in the city of New Avalon, after I Kill Monsters and Manic Monday. Look for The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment in August!
When Jake arrives home to find his not-quite-girlfriend Melody murdered in his apartment, things seem like they couldn't get any worse. But when the killer, a ferocious man turned monster, is still there and looking for something of Melody's, Jake fights for his life, just barely getting out of the apartment to safety. Now he's on the hook for the murder of Melody. To clear his name, his college friends put together a reluctant Mystery Gang: Anna, the mystery-obsessed Criminal Justice Major; Eva, Jake's best friend and escapee from New Avalon's high society; Nathan, cynical Philosophy Major; and Thomas, the weird Physics grad student from across town. Together they investigate the murder and the object they murderer was looking for, stumbling onto something bigger and stranger than they ever imagined. Monsters, memory wipes, magic, men in black, and a secret war of Good versus Evil for the fate of the city and possibly the world. Mysteries have never been this strange. I thought I'd give you an idea of what I've been working on and what's upcoming.
First off, if you've been wondering what's next, there'll be an announcement of my next book very soon. It's another New Avalon book, but different protagonists than you've seen so far. The next Nowak Brothers book is pretty much done. I need to do a little fine tuning and some final edits, but otherwise it's finished. Expect to be able to read that late this year. On the subject of the Nowak Brothers, I put up a new edition of I Kill Monsters a few weeks ago. I know some of you found some typos and editing errors. They should all be fixed now, though you might need to download a new copy from Amazon. If you do find a remaining error, please let me know, there's a free book in it for you. Check my Typo Policy. I've been working on a New Avalon Christmas story. Think of it like the Holiday specials you see with television shows and comics. It's no KISS Saves Santa - but what is, really? I'll say it's a little strange to be working on a Holiday story and people finding the Christmas spirit in July, but I think I'm just going to have some eggnog and just deal with it. Look for that story as the Holidays approach. If you missed it, I released a new short story, The Last Ghost. It's sort of a Victorian ghost story. You can grab a copy of it on Amazon. I've also put on new bio on the site, a longer one for people who want to know more about me and my career so far. Got questions? Send me them! I'd love to hear from you! |
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