I got my wish! 

In my ongoing series the Vanished (starting with Queen of Monsters), we learn that Amelia Earhart was among the people of Earth who have been pulled into this world. She was partnered with Alex Thompson on the Frontier for a while, and he implies that they didn’t get along very well. Since then, I have had several readers tell me they wanted to know more about what happened to the famed aviator when she got pulled into this world.

I have a new novella that answers some of those questions. At least what happened in July, 1937, in our fantasy world. Heart of the Sky: An Adventure in the World of the Vanished is now out. It’s a side-story, not part of the main series,

It’s an exclusive for readers of the newsletter, and it’s free. If you have the newsletter, you’ve already gotten your link.

If you are not, fear not! You can get it by signing up! You can unsubscribe right after you get it if you want, but I hope you’ll stick around. And maybe a pulpy fantasy novella about Amelia Earhart and lost cities and dinosaur-like monsters isn’t quite your cup of tea, and that’s fine. But, as always, I had a lot of fun writing it, and I hope you have fun reading it.

So, if you aren’t on the newsletter, CLICK HERE for your copy.

You should receive instructions on how to get it onto your e-Reader of choice (or read it from the web) when you are given the download link. If you have any problems getting it / reading it, let me know.

While the main series takes precedence, let me know if you’d like more stand-alone stories like this. It was a lot of fun to write, and there are a lot of interesting characters in this world.

Enjoy!

In the U.S., it is Thanksgiving. It has been a difficult year in a lot of ways, but a ton to be thankful for. As a writer, I am truly grateful to each of my readers, and to you… either a reader, or at least someone who has continued interest in what I’ve been working on as a writer.

Coming Soon!

I had hoped at this time to reward you all for that by offering you a free novella. It’s coming, but the above difficulties delayed things a bit. Up until now, the delay was entirely my own fault. Hopefully by the end of the year, but that depends on schedules other than mine for editing, etc. Watch this space! It will be available to everyone subscribed to the email! And if you want to know how to do that… there’s a link on this page to the right of this post. 🙂

I also have a novel coming out from Three Ravens Publishing (hopefully) very soon. I’ve seen the cover. It’s AWESOME! It is a book in the Autoduel Chronicles, set in the world of Car Wars by Steve Jackson Games. As a fan of the game since the 1980s, and a developer of the original Twisted Metal game series for the Sony Playstation many years ago (which was a dark comedy take on a similar concept), I was thrilled to have a crack at it. Hopefully I’ll have more news on that soon, but it looks like we’re entering the home stretch.

It’s a dark science fiction future where much of the U.S. has returned to a lawless frontier, and armed vehicular combat has become the dominant sport. My novel is a stand-alone in the series, so there’s no need to have read any of the other books in the Autoduel Chronicles. However, I still recommend the rest of the series!

Book 5 of the Vanished is coming along. If you have read book 4, you have a pretty good idea of what’s coming next. The refugees from Earth and their families cannot keep their growing community deep in the Frontier a secret forever, and they are vastly outnumbered in the inevitable war at their doorstep.

Cool Stuff Now!

Haunted Yuletide, an anthology of supernatural stories taking place during the winter holiday season, is currently available on Kindle for only $0.99 USD (for the next week or so?). When I say “holidays,” it literally covers several (some stories cover more than one at once), including New Years. The stories range from extra-creepy to bittersweet to action-comedy. We had a lot of fun editing this one, and this is a great time of year to enjoy it! (Personally, I think it’s great any time of the year, but Halloween through New Years Day is perfect…)

On December 7th, I will be at a booth with John M. Olsen and Julie Frost, two great friends and great writers, at the Winter Dreams Festival at Grove Station in Pleasant Grove. If you are in the area, it would be a great chance to do some Christmas shopping and say hi!

A few months ago, Queen of Monsters was featured in an article called, “The Best Books with Heroic Male Leads You’ve Never Heard Of.” Now, I’d love if everyone hears about Queen of Monsters, but I appreciate the call out! Hopefully a few more people will have heard of The Vanished series. I love writing them.

Until next time, may you all have a wonderful time and plenty to be thankful for!

I was a little apprehensive watching the TV series Twisted Metal on Peacock, starring Anthony Mackie (Falcon in the Marvel movies). Emotionally, I feel a little bit of ownership of Twisted Metal. Legally, of course, I have none. I was hired to help create the original game back in 1993-1994. It was my first real job out of college–creating a pair of games for Sony’s then-upcoming Playstation. Yeah, the first one. Twisted Metal was a launch title, and while it wasn’t the prettiest game, it was enough of a hit to spawn an entire series of games across multiple Sony (and PC) platforms.

And, now, a television show.

I planned to watch the entire TV series regardless of whether it was a dog or not. And, to my surprise, it was pretty good. Good enough that they are making a second season, and I’m looking forward to it. Yes, it’s over-the-top, tongue-in-cheek, and violent. So were the games. I make no apologies. 🙂

In some cases, they made fun of our original characters / situations, like the original driver of Roadkill. Ya know what? I’m fine with that. We were just having fun, and while we fleshed out the characters, we weren’t the original designers. Mike Giam and Dave Jaffe had the original concepts, and whatever evolved was a combination of ideas from them and the SingleTrac design team, and whatever evolved during development.

I was really only involved in the first two, and I transitioned from the Twisted Metal 2 team to work full-time on another game pretty early in its development. To be honest, I’m not 100% sure how many Twisted Metal sequels and spin-offs there were from there. I’m familiar with Twisted Metal 3 (which was not done by my studio, but instead by Sony internal, if I remember correctly), and Twisted Metal: Black and Twisted Metal Small Brawl, which were done by Incognito, a studio made up of a lot of my former coworkers.

Anyway, there will always be a place in my heart for Twisted Metal. And I’m not at all disappointed seeing the TV show. I consider myself lucky to have something I worked on turned into a TV show. I doubt I’ll ever have that happen again.

The War-Priests of Kalnath, book 3 of The Vanished, is releasing next week. I’m excited for lots of reasons. I’ve had people tell me it’s the strongest book of the series so far, which is nice. As the author, I absolutely have no clue and cannot judge. I know for sure it’s my favorite cover yet for the series, so that’s awesome. It’s also a mix of intrigue, deceit, and high action, which is hopefully as fun to read as it was to write.

Aiden and his team make their way to the city of Kalnath seeking aid from Paula Jean Welden and her allies for their growing community of exiles in the Frontier. Naturally, nothing is as simple as that, and they soon find themselves embroiled in the plots and ambitions of dangerous people, including a shadow from Earth’s past.

I hope you enjoy it!

“Isekai” is a Japanese word meaning another (or alternate) world. As a subgenre, it’s roughly synonymous with “portal fantasy.”

Now, some folks make the method the method of conveyance (for example, a magical portal, like a the inside of a wardrobe…) an important factor in both definitions. I don’t. In general, it’s not much more than a MacGuffin. In spite of the name, I don’t believe a literal portal is necessary for portal fantasy, nor must the other world be something other than Earth in an isekai.

What the isekai genre means to me is a character from our world being forced to survive, adapt, and make a life in a new setting very different from our own. The story should focus on this new world being viewed through the eyes of someone from our world, which makes them a reader surrogate. The transported character can therefore describe the wondrous new things in terms we understand, like a monster being the size of a bus, or breaking down the magic system into game-like terms.

If the main character is simply visiting, or hopping from world-to-world without any sense of permanence, or the story is focused on this world rather than the alternate world, then in my mind it’s not really isekai. My own series, Blood Creek Witch, divides the story between the two worlds with slightly more emphasis on our world. So I wouldn’t count it. In the manga and anime “Saving 80,000 Gold in Another World for my Retirement,” the main character’s special ability is being able to teleport between worlds at will. The story focuses on the new world, but it’s an interesting gray area. I  consider it more “isekai-adjacent” than a true isekai genre piece–which doesn’t make it any better or worse than a “true” isekai story. Likewise “reverse isekai” is a different subgenre entirely with an inverted point-of-view of looking at our world through the eyes of a stranger.

Now, keeping with this definition, the important thing is that the main character is forced to make the new world their home, at least for a while. This is where the method of conveyance may be important. The commitment is important. The Aincrad arc of Sword Art Online certainly counts, as the bad guy has cut off the players’ methods of returning to the “real world,” and the players are forced to make a life for two years in an artificial fantasy world. Later arcs mix it up, but it isn’t until Alicization that we could really call it a true isekai storyline. In GATE: Thus the JSDF Fought There, there is one physical location to go between worlds, but it is under strict government control, restricting travel. In most resurrection fantasies, the character dies on Earth and has no life to return to. At the end of A Princess of Mars, John Carter is returned to Earth against his will, but having made a life on Barsoom, he spends years trying to find his way back.

Okay… so now we go to the question from the title. What about time travel stories?

Well… it depends.

If the character is thrust into a world significantly different from their own, and must make a life there because there’s no convenient point of return, then it counts in my book, regardless of the MacGuffin reason they arrived there. If a character falls asleep for hundreds of centuries a la Buck Rogers, it’s an isekai time travel story. If they travel to the distant past and must make a life there, at least for a while, then it’s isekai. Time-loop stories like Groundhog Day probably don’t count because the world is very familiar (extremely familiar, after a few loops), so there’s not much ‘sense of wonder’ in exploring a new setting through modern eyes. If they are jumping through multiple time periods through the use of a blue box or something, it is something else as well. Maybe something cool, but not really isekai.

So, whether it’s a reincarnation, portal, time machine, hypersleep, astral projection, act of deity, getting digitized by a laser, it all counts as isekai if it meets these loose requirements.

And yeah, my latest book series, The Vanished, is isekai. It starts with the first book, Queen of Monsters. Aiden finds himself transported to another world and granted (unfortunately for him, somewhat glitchy) special abilities. Even more unfortunately, this is a common enough event that the natives are well-prepared for arrivals of people from Earth and have mastered the art of “spawn camping” – immediately capturing and pressing the people from Earth into service as slaves or cannon-fodder.

Queen of Monsters, the first book in my new series, is a finalist for the Whitney awards in the “Adult Speculative” category. (Adult as in… not for Middle Grade or YA. Not… you know, the other common usage for “adult.”) Perennial favorite Brandon Sanderson is competing in two different categories this year, so hey… there’s a chance! The four other finalists for the category are by some fantastic authors — Melissa McShane, John M. Olsen, DJ Butler, and Charlie Holmberg.

Anyway, you can check out more information at the Whitney Award nominees & finalists page. And if you’ve already read Queen of Monsters and Sorcerer of the Ancient Depths, I will happily recommend books by all four of the other authors. Like I said, they are fantastic.

Sorcerer of the Ancient Depths, Book 2 of the Vanished series, is out both in eBook and Paperback. Huzzah!

This one picks up just a few weeks after the end of Book 1. Without getting too spoiler-y for those who haven’t read the first book, Aiden and his allies are now hiding in the Frontier, one of the most dangerous lands in the world, trying to survive. Aiden leads an expedition to find safety and supplies. What he finds is a deadly threat and an ancient mystery lurking below them…

Yeah, we had portal fantasy and “gameLit lite” — and now we’re in for a taste of dungeon-delving. I hope you enjoy the new novel.

You can find it here:  Sorcerer of the Ancient Depths (eBook and Paperback)

Blood Creek Witch and Haunted Yuletide are on sale from today until the 27th as part of my publisher’s Halloween sale.

Blood Creek Witch is the first book in the 4-book Blood Creek saga. So this is a great entry point. This book introduces the story of four main characters of the series: Jenny is a young woman taken in by family she’d never met, and discovers a legacy of witchcraft she would have never believed. Sean Williams searches the old towns of West Virginia for information on a mysterious girl he met in college–a girl who died long before he was born. “Lyin'” Jack wants to escape the tiny community where he never belonged, a community that never believed his story of the creature he had seen lurking in the woods. Jessabelle has lived her entire life in the same rural town, terrified that others might discover her secret–that she is actually a monster, a shape-changer.

Haunted Yuletide is an anthology my wife and I edited. Someone at my publisher had a bright idea inspired by The Nightmare Before Christmas or the Victorian tradition of ghost stories around the holiday season, and Haunted Yuletide was born. They asked me if I would be interested in producing this anthology–but the one they actually wanted was my wife, a professional oral storyteller who specializes in ghost stories. We jumped at the chance, and I am very pleased with the results. The stories all center around the holiday season, and include supernatural or even horrific elements. But beyond that–there’s quite a variety of stories, from straight-up spine-chilling terror to broad comedy. Perfect reading from October through January… although it’s a great read all year round. 🙂

Anyway, now’s a great chance to pick up either book if you use the kindle app / reader.

Haunted Yuletide at Amazon

Blood Creek Witch at Amazon