 Looking to get your urban fantasy Scooby gang vs the End of the World fix? It's a very specific genre, but of course you do! For a limited time, you can pick up my most recent novel, The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment for 99 cents! Yeah, for just a buck, you can get my most recent New Avalon book! No prior reading required!
The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment 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.
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The truth of the matter is that fart jokes exist. They're part of every culture. Even if you do not like them, you'll concede there are a bunch of people laughing at these jokes while you are making a scrunched up and disapproving face. Whether you consider this humor the lowest of the lows or not, you know someone will always laugh. Someone will ALWAYS laugh.
It turns out there's a long history of fart jokes. They're hardly a modern thing, as you can read about in James Spiegel's (Professor of Philosophy & Religion, Taylor University) article on The Conversation about why fart jokes never get old. Do you think they're new? Well, turns out you're wrong, as the earliest known joke, from Sumeria around 1900 BC is a fart joke. Think that fart jokes are the refuge of lazy, low brow writers? Then you have a low opinion of such writers as Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonathan Swift, and Mark Twain. I hereby suggest that every writer should go for the fart joke once in their careers. It's fun! It's low hanging fruit! It's liberating! Only within that great wind can you really see the eye of the fart hurricane. Of course, I say this as someone who has already pressed the Fart Joke button once in their career (Damned Lies #1, true believers!). But really, writers of the world, who are you that you're too good for a fart joke? People have been laughing at them for millennia. Relax and squeeze out that joke you've been holding in. Sneak a little flatus into your fiction. From the Sumerians to Shakespeare to Twain: why fart jokes never get old I'm not really a fan of playing or watching golf. But I realized I would watch the shit out of golf if it was more like it was in this recent Geico commercial...  The recent Iron Maiden video is a homage to video games, but particularly to coin-op video games. Of the four game types referenced, three are coin-op, the last being a first person shooter. This nostalgia got me thinking about my own past with video games. I grew up with coin-op games. I remember being able to go to the local 7-11 to play one of the two machines in a small nook in the corner, playing games like Bad Dudes and Double Dragon. When I was young, malls still had video arcades. When my mom went shopping, I'd beg her for some quarters and then tell her to collect me at the arcade. It was a cramped affair where you had to step past people to get around to see what they had or to find the guy with the holster of coin dispensers that would break your paper bills. Whenever my mom showed up, I would beg her to let me stay longer - just one game! - or to watch others play a little longer. Usually I lost my gambit for time and I'd have to grab my remaining coins from the machine and follow her in disappointment. This was the time of waiting for your turn. You'd place your quarter on the lip of plastic between the game's control console and the plastic that covered the screen. Typically there was just one coin up there for either side - particularly in fighting games - but sometimes the game would get popular and coins would be arranged over the lip, all of us knowing the order in which they were placed up there. There was a courtesy in the quarter order, even if there wasn't always in play against each other. I remember being at the local comic bookstore and burning a few dollars on Street Fighter II when it first came out against a guy who realized but never mentioned that I didn't know how to block. The games might have seemed cheaper, a quarter versus today's $60 games, but the pay-to-play aspect was strong. Depending on the game, your quarter could be anything from a minute of time to ten minutes. Many games would ramp up the difficulty toward the end of the game. If you wanted to complete them, you found yourself pumping in quarters to get through until the end. When you died, there was a ten second countdown to continue. The decision to push on or to give up was always made in those ten seconds, one of the earliest pure impulse buy decisions. How long you lasted depended on where you were in the game. One of the old beat-em-up Dungeons and Dragons games had a boss fight versus a red dragon. The dragon's breath was an instant kill unless you stood in a certain place. I remember one time playing with a friend, dying, putting in a quarter to continue, pressing the Player One button right before the dragon breathed, so my dude dropped into the game right into that fire, immediately dying and putting me back into the ten second countdown that was ravenous for another quarter. Tough times. Sometimes even completing the game was a many staged affair. There was winning the game, and then there was really winning the game. Sometimes the game was short. In Altered Beast you rise from your grave and in a few short levels you won. Sometimes the game was punishing. In Crime Fighters, you win the story of the game but are then put into a final round where you must fight every boss in the game simultaneously. And this wasn't an RPG or modern game where you are more powerful later on. You had to fight every boss in the game just as weak as you were when you first saw the boss. And the game did you no favors. Should you finally defeat a boss, then a thug was thrown into the battle to replace them, keeping a dense crowd of enemies to destroy you. That stage could suck the life out of your wallet very quickly. There was also no internet to learn all of the game secrets in a faq or, more common these days, a video. It was all word of mouth. For example, the Mortal Kombat games have always had particular things (joystick movements and key presses) you had to do to pull off a fatality. You only knew them if you figured them out or someone told you. Back then we didn't even know which fatalities even existed unless we saw someone do them. When MK3 introduced things like Animalities and Friendships, we were shocked when we first saw them. In those old games, secrets were hidden for years. There were still uncharted mysteries for new or uninformed players. Nowadays we're spoiled. Get frustrated with a difficult or confusing part in a game? You don't even have to be frustrated for five minutes! Just go online and either read up on it or watch some person on Youtube talk their way through doing it. It was a different time, and I don't miss having to put coins in the arcade machines. I do miss having the arcade, having the standing cabinets, having the semi-social aspect. I missed having arcades just around rather than only at home. In college there were arcades near some of the places we frequented and studied in, so sometimes a study break consisted of walking next door to feed the machine a few quarters before returning to books. My recent novel, The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment, has a scene in a video arcade, an homage to two that I spent a fair amount of quarters in during my college years. In more recent years, there has been a rise of arcades without the coins. Instead of paying per play, instead you pay a fee at the door and just play as much as you like. It's more up front, but it's better than always deciding "Do I want to play this?" and hoarding your money. It's not as useful for casual play, but it's more fun for an evening or afternoon spent with friends. However, these arcades are few and far between. They're novelties rather than something reemerging. They're nostalgia. For good or for ill, the days of coin-op games are over. We may have fond memories, old stories, and no use for the quarters which crowd our pockets, but the arcades aren't coming back. Video games are still with us and always will be, but in a different form. Here's the Iron Maiden video in question:  Today's the day! You can finally get my urban fantasy Scooby Gang-style novel, The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment! Head over to Amazon to grab it on kindle and in paperback!
This is the third novel I've set in the city of New Avalon, after I Kill Monsters and Manic Monday. You don't need to read either of those to enjoy Case of the Dead Girl, but those who have will notice familiar elements and places. Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment 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.  There's currently a Goodreads Giveaway for Manic Monday! Go enter for your chance to win a signed paperback copy of my last novel!
Goodreads Giveaway  My western story, The Devil Takes His Cut is free for the next few days! Go grab it!
Amazon Two aging outlaws on the run after a botched robbery. They’re low on ammo and they’ve lost half their money. With a relentless federal marshal hot on their heels, they stumble across an old mountain fort where decades ago one of the outlaws made a deal that still haunts him. When his partner is wounded, the outlaw is confronted with his past and the bargain he made so long ago.  Just a few more days until my Scooby Gang urban fantasy releases! You can read an excerpt from the first chapter! Or catch up on New Avalon! The new book drops this Friday!
Excerpt 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.  Been curious about the newest New Avalon novel, The Case of the Dead Girl in my Apartment, coming on August 14th? Now you can read an except from the first chapter! Protagonist Jake comes home to his apartment, discovering a scene of violence in the darkness...
Read the except here! Preorder the book on Amazon!  Watchdogs - Xbox One, PS4, PC, Xbox 360, PS3 - Ubisoft
When Watch Dogs arrived in May 2014, it had a tumultuous reception. There was a big uproar about how the hype was false, how the videos shown at E3 didn't reflect the final state of the game, and that customers were lied to. Then there were complaints of technical issues with the game (which were supposedly patched later). Then there were complaints that the game just wasn't very good. Some liked the game, but for others, the game left a poor taste in their mouths, whether affected by the hype or not, it was unclear. I was interested enough that I kept the game on my radar, but I was in no hurry to check it out. Over a year later I picked it up for the price of $10. I went into it with a fairly open mind, knowing it wasn't going to be a great game, but also expecting that many had reviled it based on broken expectations and the negativity hype. Unfortunately, I didn't find a sleeper hit or an unappreciated game. Yet it wasn't completely terrible game either. I want to share thoughts on Watch Dogs over some of the better games I've played just because it's interesting how it has so much potential to be better and just keeps missing the target. |
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