Catching up. Again.
How is it the end of October already? I’ve just returned from FactoryCon – the annual conference held by Chris Kennedy Publishing in Coinjock, NC. It’s a place to relax, connect with other Authors and talk shop, plan, plot and scheme for the year ahead. It’s also one of the places where we talk with readers – the hardy souls who venture out to connect with folks that (we hope) are the best kind of crazy.
I have a bunch of catching up to do, so I’ll start with what’s happening now and work backwards.
First up is the short story release of Hollow Threats, The first story in the Irving Tolliver Case Files. Hollow Threats originally appeared in And Then It Got Weird, edited by Jamie Ibson. Its a Genre-smashing future noir detective story set against a mythos background. Cosmic horror? Not so much, but by the time you make it through all the twists and turns – I hope you have as much fun reading this story as I did writing it.Seven hundred years in the future – the stars are right. Followers of Cthulhu are calling out to the Great Old One, and it’s up to Private Detective Irving Tolliver to stop them.The next Tolliver Case Files story – Shoggoth on the Run – is in progress!
September saw the release of The Valkyries Initiative edited by Marisa Wolf! In my story Glass Houses I had a fantastic time exploring the relationship between Mila and Ivanova. This one was all about the ladies.
In Hit World, everything is legal—if you pay the right amount to the right person with the right paperwork.
LifeEnders, Inc. has made a lot of money taking all kinds of targets off the board—everything from an annoying boss to a rampaging monster from another dimension.
But there are some things no contract can cover. When a rival organization threatens to eat LEI from the inside out, they’ll need something beyond their licensed Shooters to counter their new enemy.
They’ll need Valkyries.
In September I also completed Soul Mate – a novel in William Alan Webb‘s Hit World Universe. Soul Mate is the continuing story of Solomon Thorpe, AKA The Sin Eater, and stars characters from Cast the First Stone and Glass Houses which appeared in: You Pay; We Slay and The Valkyries Initiative respectively. Now that the manuscript is turned in, once approved I can begin the editing process. More info on this later.
In May I was part of: Wanted, Dead or Alive, edited by Jamie Ibson, and wrote what I hope will be the first of many tales in his Contractor Wars Universe. In ContAInment Reynard Dupree gives you a new way to look at Bounties and Bounty Hunters.
There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.
– Hemingway.
Bounty hunting is one of those morally gray areas that exist at the periphery of civil society. Few people know anyone whose job it is to find and retrieve fugitives, and bring them before the courts. In the future, however, one can envision any number of ways of how bounty hunting can be used (or abused) for any number of problems. Alien monsters haunting your space station? Bring in a team of hunters, and watch the double-crosses fly. Indentured workers flee ‘the system’ for the safety and anonymity of the Underhive? Facial recognition and some DNA sampling might help you find them. On the flip side of the coin, what if you were born wanted, and have been on the run your whole life?
From there we go alllllll the way back to the end of April for the release of The Executioners! The Executioners was a kick-ass ride written with my friend Jason Córdova which has already passed 200 ratings on amazon – A first for a project I’ve been a part of. There’s more to come in this segment of the 4HU!
Death comes for us all. Enforcers simply expedite the process.
The Alpha Contracts was the turning point in modern Human history. Of the one hundred companies who accepted the first mercenary contracts, only four returned. These four—collectively known as the Four Horsemen—would go on to become the largest and most successful Human mercenary companies in existence.
But what happened to the people who survived the Alpha Contracts when the rest of their friends and their companies died? Some were subsequently killed by merciless aliens, while others were enslaved. Still more tried to find their way through an unforgiving universe, eking out a living with the hope of one day returning home. Some became legends, while others faded into obscurity.
Juwan Washington, on the other hand, was recruited into something bigger—and more important—than anything he could have dreamed of. Thrust into a clandestine operation to discover the truth about a Peacemaker Candidate’s long-forgotten murder, Juwan and his newfound allies will have their revolve tested in ways unimaginable.
The only question is, can any of them survive it?
Whew! That’s a lot of stuff – there’s more in progress, but I’m going to save that for the next installment.
Keep Reading!
Matt