The first book in Paradox (my epic sci-fi conspiracy thriller/sports/adventure series) goes live before Thanksgiving, but you can be the first on your block to lock it in now.
Pete Bedauern began his life as a latchkey kid in a run-down trailer park with a single mom, living on stale hot dog buns and bleak prospects. Those were the cards Fate had dealt him, and Pete was on his way to becoming an angry young man. Then Pete’s estranged uncle burst on the scene to punch Fate in the mouth.
Uncle Si is scarred inside and out; he’s a hard drinker; painfully blunt; a little mysterious and maybe even scary, but takes an interest in his nephew that Pete’s father never took. Most of Uncle Si’s life is a secret, but through the part of it he shares, Pete undergoes a master course on life, love, and full-contact sports.
As it turns out, Uncle Si not only has tons of money, multiple businesses, and a fleet of fast cars, he also owns a time machine.
Paradox is one good-hearted-but-alienated boy’s odyssey into manhood, and Escaping Fate is the opening leg of that journey. Before it’s complete, Pete will learn the guarded secrets of history, take on a pan-continuum conspiracy, contend for a world championship, crack the code for success with women…and even save the world.
Well, one world, maybe…
Book II in the Paradox series (Rebooting Fate) might be ready by Christmas. They’re all written–just need some tweaking before they’re ready for prime time.
Escaping Fate is for sale on Amazon, as well as the other e-book stores through this universal book link. Paperback editions will be coming along soon. Thanks to all my readers for your support over the years, and for staying loyal during my eight-year hiatus which is thankfully now coming to an end.
Last night during my typical bout of insomnia, I did some brainstorming about the books, the covers, titles, etc. I’m now gonna call the first book Escaping Fate. The second one will be Rebooting Fate. It makes more sense, I think, given how the master volume is broken up. Here’s a cover for the series debut:
I’m trying to keep the variety of colors on the cover to a minimum, per current wisdom. But I plan to change the font color with each installment, so that will become a bigger and bigger challenge as the series goes on.
Been doing some research on cover design in the time travel genre. There is some diversity there. If it’s more literary, serif fonts are used. Time travel romance uses fancier serif fonts–sometimes even script. Both of those offshoots use warmer colors in the art and font. The rest of the genre uses thin sans serif fonts and a cool or cold color scheme.
My “artist” chose cold colors, so that’s what I’m working with. I did the first cover concept with one of the comic book fonts I bought. It was kind of like the common sans serif fonts but informal, and I made it thicker for the title text. I wanted it to help convey that this is not any of the existing genre mixtures. It’s not hard science fiction, overly technical, or chick-lit time travel. Also far from safe and uncontroversial. So the font was a little risky, like the story itself. At least, that was my rationale.
Got some advice from an online friend and tried something else–what you see above.
To show how awful I am at marketing, it didn’t even occur to me to plug myself for my bestsellers, until it was suggested to me (thanks, MM). Well, duh. That should have been a no-brainer. It really does make a difference for many readers–the whole bandwagon approach to advertising is what bestseller lists came out of.
For those of you who are not authors, I’ll let you in on a secret: Most people who graduate high school never crack a book voluntarily for the rest of their lives. When you meet such people and they find out you are published, the first question out of their mouths is not what you write about, but whether you’ve written any bestsellers. They might never buy your book. They might never try to read it. But they definitely won’t if you’re not a bestselling author. If they have a passion for, say, horse racing, and Author A has written a novel about horse racing while Author B has written a novel about a retarded Serbian prostitute…which is a bestseller…then it’s not even a contest. Off into the world of retarded Serbian prostitution they go!
The latest advice is to use one other font for about half the text on the page. I think I’ll experiment with that, too. So this probably won’t be the final version.
The Big Based Book Sale ends tomorrow. You still have time to save money on some good reads by non-woke authors.
Wow–my Retreads trilogy made the top 10??!??! To think I almost didn't put them in this time… And I've been plugging the sale mostly to sci-fi and fantasy groups. https://t.co/lV3rvGqNaE
And despite it being mostly a sci-fi/fantasy deal, my Retreads trilogy made the Top Ten in sales. If you haven’t picked up my paramilitary adventures, now’s a good time to get those for cheap, too. (Not just on Amazon, BTW. There are universal book links on the “Books” page right here at Virtual Pulp.)
My thanks to Hans Schantz for putting this sale together. Hopefully the first novel in my new series will be ready by the time of his next sale. Or the one after that…
Hans Schantz has put together another sale featuring books by non-woke authors. Hopefully you understand that there is a war for the American culture. The right finally has some weapons, and is fighting back. If you don’t want a complete monopoly of pop culture by Marxists and perverts, consider supporting the based artists (authors, in this case) who are raising the flag and charging into the fray.
Or, as Hans says:
“Bypass cultural gatekeeping.
Support non-woke authors.
And get yourself some great books from both established and emerging talent, including over 60 new arrivals, all $0.99 or free. Check it out!“
My Great American Novel (which I have been calling Paradox lately) has 123 chapters and about 1585 pages. The page count may go down a bit as I edit, but that’s still Tolstoy length.
A year or more ago, when the size of the story was obvious, I pondered how I would ever market such a book, who would take a chance on reading it, and what a fair price would be to ask for it. I soberly faced the reality that there really isn’t a market for it. Nobody’s gonna buy a doorstop-sized novel in a male-friendly genre unless the author name is Tom Clancy or W.E.B. Griffin. But even those guys don’t write books this huge.
On the one hand are my motives. I write fiction I would like to read–not what “the market” dictates. In this case, I wrote it because I just had to. It’s been in my mind just too long, bursting to get out. Call it cathartic, theraputic, whatever…but this has been a fulfilling experience. Even fun–that’s one reason I took my time and even still, with my country turning into a dystopian hellhole all around me, I’m in no hurry to publish.
On the other hand, even a well-written, great read (yes, I’m implying that this is) will never get much in the way of sales without visibility. Even if the audience exists, they can’t buy and read the book when they don’t know the book exists, too. And in a market dominated by Amazon…well, with a simple tweak of an algorithm, its easy to ensure that the audience never discovers that well-written great read. I say this as somebody who has written three novels that hit #1 bestseller status in multiple categories. (Pretty sure I enthused about that here on the blog in years past, with screenshots–if you feel up to verifying.)
On another hand (when did I grow a third hand? Did somebody vaccinate me while I wasn’t looking?) the market is a shitshow.
I would puke my guts out, hold my nose, and crank out hackneyed lesbian vampire romances with contrived Marxist messaging if I wanted to “write to the market,” garnering sales and reviews galore.
Ah, but what about the “conservative” fiction market? It’s much like the RINO GOP Establishment–meaning, at its core, not much different from the mainstream drivel. It’s got the same Kickass Womyn Warrior tropes; same LGBT-pandering; same “the radical right is the greatest threat” narratives. But with lower corporate taxes and “Back the Blue” flags. And, much like everything else, it’s all uninspiring, mediocre pap.
Oh yeah: and you have to sell your soul on top of all that, just for the algorithm architects to make your mediocre pap discoverable. The longer I slog through life’s various shitshows, the more convinced I become that nearly every “inspiring success story” in my lifetime has been fake and gay. Especially “exciting new authors” who are unknown one minute, then the next minute their mediocre, formulaic debut novel (Harrumphs of the NPC: Book One in the Narrative Reinforcement Series) has 3,000 glowing, yet non-specific Amazon reviews.
Not gonna sell my soul–that market is flooded with cheap merchandise, too. Buyer’s market. Competition everywhere.
So, why sweat it at all? I wrote this tome for the joy of it. In my mind I know the Marxist Hive Mind that controls every single institution will hate it and condemn it to obscurity. Maybe even virtually incinerate it. But there’s the principle of the matter, sez I. Therefore, I must do what I can to monetize this years-long investment of my life.
Break it up and make it a series, of course. Right? The entire publishing shitshow market is geared toward series fiction. And our functionally illiterate culture has cultivated attention spans that can’t handle much beyond a TikTok video or Facebook post. A 1500+ page BOOK????????? One of those crazy outdated relics with pages, and words? I might as well have written a harpsichord concerto in the Baroque style.
Making Paradox a series is a no-brainer, on the surface.
Trouble with that is, this is a time-traveling sports adventure saga that follows the protagonist from his pre-adolescent years into his late ’20s. So, by fragmenting it, the first one or two books in the series would technically be “young adult” or “coming of age” time-traveling sports adventure (and [gasp! the horror!] without any lesbians, vampires, or Kickass Womyn Warriors). The other series installments would not be. So the unicorns male coming-of-age readers might feel cheated because of where the first book or two leave off. This was not written to be episodic. There is one character arc–not three or four. And the readers…both of them…besides myself, who would buy and read grown-up time-travel sports adventure sagas might never even begin the series because young adult just does not float their boat.
I shoved those concerns aside and kept writing the story I wanted to tell.
But now here I am: editing the rough draft and still clueless about how to market Paradox and how much to charge for it.
There seems to be no good solution to this conundrum. (Is it a conundrum or dilemma? The horns poke me, either way.)
So, I’m gonna bust it up and release it as a series. I think that’s the least self-defeating of the two options. My next move, then, is determining where to sever the plot, and adding scenes/sequels to make the different sections more episodic.
Know what else? Probably gonna move forward with no beta readers.
My bright idea of posting chapters here has resulted in exactly zero comments of any kind on the blog. Destructive criticism is the most common flavor and easiest to get (unsolicited, at that). But I didn’t even get that. The most I’ve received are some likes on Gab and MeWe. It’s nice to assume those like buttons were clicked after reading my posted chapters, but who knows. The only comment I received there was by somebody who read at least part of “Spin the Bottle,” then informed me that my depiction was not the way the game was played in their day. And, uh…they somehow decided that there’s some sort of “same sex” action in the chapter. Your guess is as good as mine. (Assuming you exist and are reading this blog post. Big assumption, at this point.)
I may post a couple more chapters, but am already close to where the first book will probably end, so this experiment will likely conclude, soon. Got some work to do, so I will get to it.
Let’s say you’re an elite, God-hating leader of an international cabal hell-bent on world domination. For whatever reason, you and your luceferian pedophile comrades have decided it’s time for a drastic, genocidal reduction in human population…BEFORE you have destroyed the sovereignty of independent nations and manipulated them into subservience to your New World Order. What do you do?
Keep in mind that, like all your other self-serving acts of Machiavellian scumbaggery, you have to disguise what you’re doing, and who is doing it. In fact, as the consequences of your genocidal scheme become evident; your present and future victims must be herded to where they will blame the consequences on somebody other than you–preferably your enemies or somebody who is a hindrance to your agenda.
So you can’t just start nuking cities. Too over-the-top. Plus, cities have nice stuff that other people built that you’d like to enjoy once you and your select elite comrades inherit a de-populated Earth. You might want to rape and eat children, for instance, in an office building, a restaurant, or somebody’s house.
Not every weapon of mass destruction is so high-profile. You could surreptitiously release a deadly chemical or biological agent that will spread and kill hundreds of millions of people. The trouble with that is, once released, it might kill you along with your victims. This scheme requires a bit more complexity. Also, it requires the collaboration of governments, news media, and nearly every other institution, public and private.
Science and medicine have never found a cure for any virus, including the common cold. So you could weaponize some kind of virus to make it kill people. But there’s a dillemma: again, if it’s truly deadly to a large portion of the human population, then it could backfire and kill you, too.
You need a way to kill off millions of people who are not in your elite luceferian pedophile network, which allows you and your fellow travelers to survive, so you can establish your managed, controlled Globohomo Utopia. You can use a virus to help get you there; but you have to use it indirectly–not directly. You need to poison the masses somehow; introduce the virus as the catalyst and the poison as the cure. Here’s a way:
It has to be a virus that makes people sick, but is survivable for most people–like the seasonal flu. It has to put people in bed for a while; but have, say, a 99.997% survival rate. Release this into the population, and spread it around the globe.
You can’t just call it the flu, though. It has to have a specific name that sounds new, scientific, and scary. You have to imply that this is something “novel,” that science has never seen before.
Play down the scary, “deadly” narrative at first, so you can spread it everywhere–especially to the USA. Any attempt to restrict international travel should be quashed. Spewing out accusations of “racism!” and “xenophobia!” should intimidate all potential interlopers into obedience and shut down any such restrictions. Then, once you’ve got virus carriers everywhere, you can switch narratives to: “THE MOST DANGEROUS VIRUS EVAHH!!!!!!” Then, whoever tried to restrict travel to stop the spread? Blame the spread on them by claiming they didn’t do enough to stop it.
Even though your weaponized virus is not deadly, you must make people believe it’s deadly. Use the Swamp Media, government agencies, corporations, and other assets to blitz the sheeple with hype 24/7 to convince them it’s the deadliest, scariest “pandemic” the world has ever seen.
5. Inflate the death count by any means necessary. Lie about causes of death, of course (if somebody died of the regular seasonal flu, or pneumonia, cancer, or anything else at all, report it as being caused by your virus with the new, scary, scientific-sounding name); but you also might want to legitimately kill some people off with your concoction, just in case. Since 99.997% survive your virus, you have to find extremely vulnerable people, with diminished immune systems, respiratory disfunction, or other serious ailments…and expose them to it. The easiest solution is to admit infected patients into nursing homes to kill off people’s grandparents. (If you want your own parents/grandparents to survive for whatever reason, pull yours out beforehand.) Afterwards, you can brag about what a hero you are for “saving lives.” You might even get a book deal to share your selfless heroism with…oh, hell, who are we kidding? Nobody’s gonna read it. The book deal is just a way to launder money to our useful little tools.
6. Prevent people from using effective treatments to overcome the virus. And if anybody touts safe, proven medicine that can actually protect people from your virus…demonize, ridicule, and censor them. You want the peasants to listen to your paid, controlled mouthpieces when it comes to their personal health.
7. Prevent herd immunity. A virus becomes more contagious but less dangerous as it spreads throughout a population. People build up an immunity to the virus until it’s just an inconvenience–not a grave threat. YOU CAN’T LET THAT HAPPEN! Lock everyone down (and you know who we mean by “everyone,” wink wink). Even if it means shutting kids out of your mandatory indoctrination centers public schools, do it. Mandate mask-wearing, to get people recycling their own germs and carbon dioxide all day/every day; and as an experiment to see what level of resistance subsequent dictatorial fiat decrees will suffer.
8. There are countless side benefits to what you’ve done so far. The lockdowns that you mandate will ruin the lives of countless inferiors who are not in your elite circle. They will wreck countless businesses not sponsored by your elite club. They will lead to a spike in suicides among the unwashed masses. They will provide excuses to help steal a first-world national election right under everyone’s noses. Those are just a few perks among many. But the best is yet to come.
9. I know, I know: When do we get to start mass-murdering the peasants? Fear not! Your kiddy-diddling comrades have patented the Final Solution decades ago. It’s time to roll out the solution that’s been waiting for a problem!
10. Under a state of “national emergency” (because the “pandemic” is so “dangerous,” see?) you don’t need FDA approval for your insidious gene therapy that you will now refer to as a “vaccine.” Eventually, you’ll get the FDA to play ball and approve it in record time, anyway. But until then, the “emergency” must stay in place.
11. This nifty little Darwin Stab will make people more susceptible to mutating strains of the virus–not less. In fact, it will spur the mutation. It can cause ADE so that the peasants’ immune systems are compromised and they will have to receive booster shots in perpetuity until you kill them off with whatever you want (like TB or the plague, which you’ve been sponsoring the spread of in West Coast cities). It causes organ inflammation, so that even young, healthy people will die of stroke and heart attack. Of course, the “solution” is far deadlier than the “problem” you introduced, but don’t worry–your useful idiots and the flyover rubes will never believe the truth. That’s what the Swamp Media and Homowood are for.
12. You need everyone not in your club, or serving your club, to accept your solution. Pretend you’ve taken the Darwin Stab yourself. Have saline injected, or post deceptive photos, and say you received it. Have the politicians and celebrities you own (pretty much all of them, in other words) publicly take the Stab to inspire their loyal worshippers to do the same. If your lies don’t convince them to take the Darwin Stab; and inspiring celebrities don’t convince them…bribe people to take it. Offer them food, gift cards, cell phones, lottery tickets, cash prizes…whatever it takes. Use guilt. Convince them that they must do it to protect their friends and family. Your reasoning can be convoluted and oxymoronic, and it doesn’t matter–we’ve spent 3/4s of a century making sure that the average US resident is incapable of reason and critical thought, so no biggie.
13. The bottom line is: the rubes must take the Darwin Stab! There will be some peasants who can’t be convinced, inspired, guilt-tripped or bribed into accepting our Final Solution. The Face Diaper mandates have already identified who most of these stubborn pests are. So threaten them. If threats don’t work, take away their ability to travel. Fire them from their jobs. Prevent their ability to buy or sell. Starvation will kill them off just as surely as our patented mRNA poison–maybe even faster. Unfortunately, those who can’t be coerced into taking our kill shot; and who might survive despite our efforts to starve them to death, are exactly the opposite of the sort of peasants we might want to allow to exist in our Globohomo Utopia. Jail them, or gun them down where they defiantly stand. Of course, there are plenty of options like the Havana Syndrome for more surgical cleansing.
Can’t vouch for the authenticity of this, but it’s far more believable than any iteration of the Official Narrative from the Swamp Media:
Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi to secretly retrieve US made Stinger Missiles that the State Dept had supplied to Ansar al Sharia in Libya WITHOUT Congressional oversight or permission.
Sec State Hillary Clinton had brokered the Libya deal through Ambassador Stevens and a Private Arms Dealer named Marc Turi, but some of the shoulder fired Stinger Missiles ended up in Afghanistan where they were used against our own military. On July 25th, 2012, a US Chinook helicopter was downed by one of them. Not destroyed only because the idiot Taliban didn’t arm the missile. The helicopter didn’t explode, but it had to land and an ordnance team recovered the missile’s serial number which led back to a cache of Stinger Missiles kept in
Qatar by the CIA.
Obama and Hillary were in full panic mode, so Ambassador Stevens was sent to Benghazi to retrieve the rest of the Stinger Missiles. This was a “do-or-die” mission, which explains the Stand Down Orders given to multiple rescue teams during the siege of the US Embassy.
…(This was why Hillary) had a Private Server, (in order to delete the digital evidence), and WHY Obama, two weeks after the attack, told the UN that the attack was the result of the YouTube video, even though everyone KNEW it was not.
Furthermore, the Taliban knew Bowe Bergdahl was just a useful pawn used to cover the release of the Taliban generals. Everyone knew Bergdahl was a traitor but Obama used Bergdahl’s exchange for the five Taliban generals to cover that Obama was being coerced by the Taliban about the unauthorized Stinger Missile deal…that the administration had aided and abetted the enemy WITHOUT Congressional oversight or permission, so they began pressuring (blackmailing) the Obama Administration to release five Taliban generals being held at Guantanamo.
In case you still don’t get it: you are paying taxes so that traitors, criminals, and evil perverts can bankrupt your country (starting with YOU); sell you out to foreign and domestic enemies who hate you; corrupt and/or molest your children; enslave forthcoming generations in perpetuity; blame people like you for all the suffering they cause; and make themselves rich in the process.
Hint: it’s not the side that has been fighting most of them, and wants to keep fighting them in perpetuity.
Those limprichard political officers on the US side make you proud to be, don’t they?
The America I once volunteered to fight for is gone; the uniform I once wore is now a perverse badge of shame; and the “leadership” of the Armed Forces is a sick joke.
The USA has not fought a full-scale war since WWII. That’s also the last time we fought a near-peer enemy.
Ever since then, we’ve had a huge technological advantage, plus overwhelming air and naval superiority. All three of those are dwindling, by design, as I type. Meanwhile, domestic enemies are purging patriots from the ranks and replacing them with freaks, faggots and feminists who hate the country they will supposedly defend in the next foreign war.
Now when our Navy’s ships aren’t being rammed into each other by hysterical diversity hire captains, our carrier groups are sitting ducks for relatively cheap anti-ship missiles. Our combat arms want to abandon physical standards because too many badass womyn warriors can’t pass a PT test. The Rapid Deployment Forces now have to schedule around menstrual cycles and gender reassignment surgery. The shitbox F-35 is flown by pilots who need maternity flight suits. All while the Pedophile Princes and Cocaine Queens in Washington are trying to provoke a conflict with an actual war-fighting force…apparently modeled after the Wermacht–only bigger, and with nukes.
Congress has forbid the Army from imposing physical fitness standards on its soldiers because it “discriminates based on gender.”
Single standards are sexist. (Probably racist, too–I’m sure somebody has already said so.) In our altruistic pursuit of equality, only heterosexual males should be held to standards.
Our moral/intellectual superiors have made the Armed Forces a hostile environment for white heterosexual males (especially if they love their country), so go figure: the very demographic that won the war that freed the slaves, and won two world wars, knows it is not welcome there, and is finding other ways to make a living that don’t suck as much. (And trust me–life in the combat arms sucks plenty, even without adding all the cultural Marxist idiocy.)
But now the favored demographic is leaving in droves because badass womyn warriors don’t want to take the Combat Fitness test. 84% of them can’t pass it. And that is a problem. (Not failure to be combat ready–the problem is not enough womyn, of course.)
But the answer is not to enforce standards and make sure slots are filled according to who is capable of fulfilling the mission. Oh no. Only some sexist science-denier who believes there are only two sexes (and that those sexes are biologically different) would propose such discriminatory policy. It’s not like combat could be physically strenuous or anything. Besides, every action movie for the last 30 years has taught us that womyn are stronger than men, anyway.
Actions speak louder than words. Whatever word salad the uniformed Yes Men (and womyn) regurgitate to justify this absurdity, what they are saying is: “Diversity and inclusivity are more important than combat effectiveness.”
Diversity and inclusivity, of course, mean anti-white heterosexual male.
The Globohomo Cabal wants to destroy America, and they’ve just about done it. Economic collapse is one method in their tool box. Pushing us into a pointless war with Russia (over Ukraine or whatever) is another way. And they want to guarantee we lose. But it might prove to be a double-edged sword for them–because they’re also provoking a civil war with the very white heterosexual males who are willing to uphold and defend the US Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
On a tactical level, I rather like our odds in a 3/4GW scenario going head-to-head against a bunch of fat dikes, entitled karens and gender-confused freaks who can be convinced to quit by the prospect of taking a PT test.
Red-Blooded American Men Examine Pop-Culture and the World
Pete Bedauern began his life as a latchkey kid in a run-down trailer park with a single mom, living on stale hot dog buns and bleak prospects. Those were the cards Fate had dealt him, and Pete was on his way to becoming an angry young man. Then Pete’s estranged uncle burst on the scene to punch Fate in the mouth.
Pete Bedauern began his life as a latchkey kid in a run-down trailer park with a single mom, living on stale hot dog buns and bleak prospects. Those were the cards Fate had dealt him, and Pete was on his way to becoming an angry young man. Then Pete’s estranged uncle burst on the scene to punch Fate in the mouth.
