Book Review: The Sentinels: When Strikes The Warlord (2006)

I met Van Allen Plexico a few years ago at DragonCon through my friend James R. Tuck. I've since kept up with him through Facebook. I've tried my hand at superhero (or more specifically supervillain) fiction with "Ubermensch" and "Needs Must," but Plexico has written a series of superhero novels, the Sentinels series. What follows is part of a deal for his help promoting the audio version of "I am the Wendigo," let the record state, but it's an honest one.

So here's my review of the first one, When Strikes The Warlord...

The Plot

Earth is under threat from the villainous Warlord, a world-conquering supervillain. Standing in his way are a combination of superheroes, some seasoned veterans and others newbies still exploring their powers. But the Warlord has allies and minions of his own.

Who will triumph? Well, you'll have to read the book. :)

The Good

*Although the book does not seem to be primarily a comedic work, there are some lines and situations that are straight-up hilarious. The appearance of minor super-villain known as "The Wombat" made me laugh out loud, something that rarely happens in a book. There's other humor as well that's more subtle, including a villain(ess) who lampshades the trope about improbably skimpy female comic-character costumes.

*The character Francisco, though initially a sycophantic Igor figure for the villainous Warlord, has a lot more initiative and is in control of a lot more than he initially seems. Giving a villain a servile minion is kind of a cliche, but Plexico elaborates on his character quite a bit. That's one of the more creative elements in the book and I approve.

*The story flows well and has some good description.

The Bad

*There are some aspects of the story that could have been developed better if they'd been introduced earlier. For example, the villainous Warlord has got several lesser superhumans--most of them villains, but at least one a hero he's misled--working for him, but they aren't really developed as characters. The most interesting one--the misled hero, as opposed to the goons--is only in one scene. He seems like he could have an interesting back-story, but we don't see a whole lot. Perhaps he can get his own Sentinels story? Mr. Plexico himself said the story gets more complex as the series goes along, so this might be a positive, not a negative, for some readers.

*The humor doesn't really kick in until the later part of the story. And the humor, when it comes, is really funny--see my above comment about the Wombat. If the humor had started from the get-go, it would have been a much stronger book.

*One character is amnesiac and remembers little about his pre-superhero past--think Wolverine from X-Men. However, that's not introduced until well into the book. I think it might be the first scene from the character's point of view, in which case the later introduction makes sense, but it might then have been better to have his POV earlier or have it referenced in another character's POV so it's not so jarring.

The Verdict

A good, quick read for when one is exercising with one's Kindle, but could be better developed. Check it out on Kindle Unlimited if you're not up for buying it. Definitely going to read the second book. 7.5 out of 10.

FREE Supervillain-Protagonist Story on Thanksgiving and Black Friday

For Thanksgiving and Black Friday 2016, I've made my short story "Ubermensch" FREE. Those of you interested in superheroes, supervillains, villain-protagonist stories, and diversity in speculative fiction (lead character Andrew Patel is Indian-American) should take a look.

(Alex Claw has illustrated many of my Amazon stories, which can be found here. I think "Ubermensch" is the best cover. Here's his DeviantArt account if you're looking for an artist.)

And now for some background you might find interesting. I first started writing "Ubermensch" sometime in 2011. I published it independently on Amazon in early August 2013, with the sequel "Needs Must" appearing just under two weeks later. I've got a lot of potential stories to tell with this character, as the fact I've made it a series on Amazon indicates.

If you read the story, please leave an honest review, good or bad. I've got a cover made and a fourth (but not a third) story written for a four-story Andrew Patel collection. If and when it goes up, it will tie Andrew Patel and his world in with my Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods. But I'd like to know if there's sufficient interest first.

Here's the cover for the planned collection for those who'd like to know more:

Alex did this one too.

FLASHING STEEL, FLASHING FIRE and "The Long Tail"

This really would have been better as an addendum to my last blog post on my writing and "the long tail," but it was late and I needed to go to bed. I looked over my sales figures for the last few years and saw that the principle of The Long Tail applies to my short-story collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire.

When I published Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire in July 2014, I sold 21 copies that month. Over the next five months, I sold eight copies at a rate of zero (August) to three (September) per month. That's over one-third of the premiere month's numbers in five months. In 2015, I sold 14 copies at a rate of zero (three separate months) to four (February) per month. No sales in 2016 so far, but when you combine the non-premiere months of 2014 with all of 2015, the "tail" has already exceeded the "head." And there's still most of 2016 left.

So if you've self-published anything and your numbers have crashed after the first month or two, don't worry. One or two sales per month over the course of years will add up in the long run.

Of course, if you plan on making a living--or at least more than, as Marko Kloos put it, "beer money"--doing this, you'll need to have a lot of product. One book earning $10 in royalties per month is $120 per year, but ten books earning $10 per month is $1,200 per year. And with that many books available, odds are you'll be earning more than $10 per month in royalties anyway. People who buy one book from an author are likely to buy other books, after all. My story "Ubermensch" is a superhero story, but people who bought it also bought Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire despite the complete lack of superhero stories in it. Moving outside of my own work, people who've bought my friend James R. Tuck's supernatural Robin Hood story Mark of the Black Arrow also bought his hollow-earth blaxploitation story Champion of Hollow Earth.

So as my friend Jeff Baker put it (and he learned the phrase from somebody at LibertyCon a couple years ago), if you want to make bank, "churn and burn."

Visit Where Your Story Takes Place, Or Why Google Maps Isn't Everything

I spent most of Saturday 12/26 (Boxing Day for you Commonwealth types) taking MARTA around Atlanta to do some research for two of my writing projects.

The first project is a short story entitled "Actions Have Consequences," which will feature my supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel. It will be part of a collection featuring "Ubermensch," which introduces him and his nemesis Silverbolt, the second story "Needs Must," and a fourth, "New Friends, Old Enemies."  The second is a novel entitled The Atlanta Incursion, the sequel to the teen Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods I'm currently shopping around.

"Actions" features some gang members pursuing Patel around Atlanta. The action starts in East Point, so I took the train down after eating lunch at Peachtree Center. I soon realized the limitations of Google Maps--although I had used it to map out some buildings, I soon realized I'd gotten a lot of the detail wrong. Downtown East Point is more spread out, much more like Griffin, the town where I had my first newspaper job, than Atlanta or another larger city. It would be difficult for Patel to run down an would-be assassin without too many inconvenient witnesses. Fortunately there's an area that's built up enough for the scene to work, so I was able to get away with just tweaking it a bit. I also discovered the big pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks connecting downtown to an industrial or ex-industrial site, which I'll work in there somehow.

I later took the train over to the East Lake MARTA station, where I planned to have Patel and a friend make a long run down Howard Avenue for downtown Decatur after the train is delayed. I found the station sat squarely in the middle of a bunch of single-family homes and was well-attended by MARTA police. It's also right by the city of Decatur's water tower. That whole area is not going to be having gang shoot-outs, at least not ones that don't get squashed immediately. I thought about having the final confrontation take place around the King Memorial MARTA station instead, but the whole area is surrounded by lots of brand-new apartments. That's not the kind of place where gun battles are going to be allowed to happen either. I'll need to think about how to deal with that.

For The Atlanta Incursion, the protagonist is a student at Georgia State University. I found via Google Maps there was an apartment complex near the Garnett MARTA station one stop south of Five Points, the station I got off at when I was a student at GSU. So I (briefly) stopped at Garnett. The station is jammed down amid taller buildings and I couldn't find any apartments. There's the Atlanta jail, some courthouses and police buildings, and a lot of people loitering around. I don't think anybody actually lives there. And a lot of the buildings are run down. Probably most students--especially my protagonist--wouldn't really want to live there even if there were student housing available.

As a result, I needed to make some fixes. One fix was pretty simple--just change where the character was going when he had a PTSD episode. The other fix required changing a scene more substantially--instead of taking the train from Five Points to Garnett, he's walking through campus.

So let this be a lesson in writing research for you. If you're writing about real-life places and you're able to visit them, do so. You might avoid some obvious missteps.

The Writing Plan for the Coming Year-ish

In a little over a week, I will start a new job--in fact, an entire new career--putting an end to years of graduate school and part-time freelancing. This will drastically cut into my time for personal writing projects, blogging, etc.

This means that you will be seeing a lot fewer blog posts, movie reviews, etc. here. I will continue being part of Myopia: Defend Your Childhood, but I won't be reviewing every movie we watch like I've been doing. I will also write posts linking to the podcast The Geekly Oddcast put on by The Brothers Herman, but since Geekly Oddcast records on weeknights, I'll probably be doing that less often than Myopia. I will have less time for my personal writing projects, so there will fewer updates on those.

Speaking of my personal writing projects, here is the plan for some of them.

*I intend to finish two additional stories featuring my supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel and release them as a four-story electronic collection Consequences that will also include the first story ("Übermensch")and the second "Needs Must." I have partially written both, with more progress made on the fourth story (which will ultimately tie Patel with the world of my Lovecraftian novel The Thing in the Woods) than on the third. This will be my top personal writing priority aside from selling my completed novels Battle for the Wastelands and Thing.

Here's the cover, which my regular artist Alex Claw made awhile back, to whet your appetite:

I will also be working on a novella entitled "Fairmont," which will take place just over three years before the events of my novel Battle for the Wastelands. My fellow writers James R. Tuck and Delilah S. Dawson both secured book deals that saw the release of novellas for e-readers alongside more conventional print books, while Marko Kloos self-published the short story "Lucky Thirteen"and the novella "Measures of Absolution" alongside Terms of Enlistmentand kept them online even when he got a traditional book deal for Terms. Regardless of whether I go traditional or independent with Wastelands, "Fairmont" would be an excellent way to whet readers' appetites for Battle, much like how "That Thing At the Zoo" preceded Blood and Bullets.My completed novella "Son of Grendel" can come afterward, much like "Spider's Lullaby" came after Blood and Bullets and before Blood and Silver.

I have received some good comments from agents and publishers on The Thing in the Woods (but no bites yet--you'll find out when that happens), so I don't foresee tinkering with the manuscript too much. Depending on how things go with that I might resume work on the sequel The Atlanta Incursion or resume work on the third project I'm holding close to the chest at the moment. I've let that one fall by the wayside due to graduate-school responsibilities, but I've been told by fellow members of my writing group that this project plays to my strengths (world-building and journalistic writing) and, owing to the nature of the project, it's something I could finish more quickly than a conventional narrative novel.

My Andrew Patel Plan...

Lately I've been listening to the Sell More Books Show, a podcast focusing on independent writers/publishers. Podcast member Bryan Cohen has a book series starting with Ted Saves the World and continuing with Mind Over Easy, Portal Combat, and The Light, the Dark, and the Ugly. Mr. Cohen apparently has set the first book for free and that has spurred many sales. I remember hearing that Robert Jordan had done something similar with the Wheel of Time series--the first book, The Eye of the World, was free to pick up at Waldenbooks (anybody remember that wonderful place?) and spurred sales significantly for the second book, The Great Hunt.

So here's how this applies to my Andrew Patel supervillain protagonist series. At some point I'm going to set the first story "Ubermensch" permanently free, remove the second story "Needs Must," and then then post a four-story collection entitled Consequences. The combined tale follows Patel as he deals with the consequences of the events of "Ubermensch" and "Needs Must." Since collections sell better than individual stories, this will hopefully be more economically lucrative as well.

And here's the probable cover, courtesy of Alex Claw.

I'm finishing up coursework for my masters degree right now and I'll need to study for comprehensive exams in June, so this might not be for some time. So get the individual stories while you can. :)

January 2015 Writing Contest Results

January 2015 was another iteration of my writing contest. I ended up writing 3,230 words on various fictional projects. Now that I'm starting the last phase of graduate school (the last classes and various exams), I doubt I'll be doing any more writing bets with friends until possibly this summer. So this'll be your last monthly update as to what I'm working on for awhile.

*Most of the words went into bringing The Thing in the Woods up to 56,000 words. That's at the low end of the right length for a young-adult novel. I've begun querying agents again, since it turns out there won't be an Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest this year. Mostly just dribs and drabs of content, since the really big stuff went into the text in December.

*I also added a few hundred words to The Atlanta Incursion, the more UFO-centric sequel to The Thing in the Woods. I basically went through the entire text as written and added a little bit here and there. In the near future I'll need to do some research and go to the Videodrome in Virginia Highlands--the last in-town video rental store. A pity I don't live near it. :(

*I added a few hundred words to my near-future hard(ish) SF space-war tale The Cybele Incident. It's still around a third finished approximately.

*Also added a few hundred words to my two additional short stories featuring supervillain protagonist Andrew Patel (who has appeared in two earlier stories, Übermensch and Needs Must).The plan at present is to release an omnibus on Amazon containing all four stories--Alex Claw has already done a cover--that will be the only place one will be able to get the two remaining tales.

*Finally added a little bit to Battle for the Wastelands based on my reading of the history book River of Dark Dreams about the settlement of the antebellum Mississippi Valley. The Flesh-Eater regime just got a little bit more dystopian, although we won't actually see the details under the second book.

December 2014 Writing Contest: The Results

The revival of my earlier writing bets with a couple friends is now in its second month, so it's time to update you on how the first month went.

In the first month, I wrote 3,838 words of fiction. This doesn't compare well with a previous December in which I wrote just under 12,000 words, but I can plead extenuating circumstances. I was editing a novel for a client, which will be available on Amazon sometime soon. Between that and the end of an editorial internship I had with a magazine company, I had significantly less writing time than in 2013, but I made more money. :)

Here is what I did accomplish:

*Although I only finished bulking up The Thing in the Woods in preparation for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award this morning, I got much of the work done over December. One of the better critiques I'd received from my writing group is that a character introduced at the end of the novel in the first draft should have been introduced earlier. The technical term for this is a Chekhov's Gun--if you see a gun in the first act, it had better be fired in the third, or don't include it. In this case, it was the reverse. I plugged the scene introducing him (part of which I wrote in November and part in December) around two-thirds into the book and had his earlier appearance play a role in driving events toward their climax. He's going to play a much bigger role in the sequel, The Atlanta Incursion, so this will help set him up for that.

*I finished and then after writing-group critique heavily revised a chapter in my new novel project. I'm keeping this one more quiet until it's finished so I won't go into a lot of detail but now I've got four complete chapters. I've plotted out a fair bit more and this project plays to my strengths (imaginative situations, world-building) rather than my weaknesses (characterization), so I have high hopes for it.

*Little People, Big Guns got the short end of the stick, I'm afraid. Just under 200 words written. This is something I thought I'd be able to finish quickly. I start class again Monday, but maybe I'll be able to do more this month.

*Added a link to the sequel Needs Must to the "back matter" of Übermensch, my supervillain-protagonist short story. For independently-published authors, "back matter" is something quite useful to have. That's your chance to link people to related projects, encourage them to leave reviews, etc. Hopefully this will lead to more sales for "Needs Must," especially during periods where I give "Ubermensch" away for free.

Review of My 2014 Kindle Sales

Looking back on my Kindle short-story project, here are the lessons I've learned in 2014. Hearken to my words, aspiring e-book authors, and let's see what you can gain my from my experiences...

*For starters, short-story collections sell better than individual short stories. I've sold nearly 30 copies of my collection Flashing Steel, Flashing Fire, which debuted in June. In contrast, my most successful short story has been I am the Wendigo, which had 14 sales or borrows this past year. My supervillain-protagonist tale Übermensch had 12 sales or borrows, while The Beast of the Bosporushad 11. This is something "the rock star of the small press" William Meikle has experienced as well--he's consolidated his short stories into multiple collections like Flower of Scotland, which I own, rather than selling them individually.

*Needs Must, the sequel to "Ubermensch," wasn't a strong seller (six buys or borrows), but it exceeded Illegal Alien and equaled Melon Heads. I'd posted before about how I worried that my Patel stories weren't selling well, so this is a pleasant surprise. I've got a partial for a third Andrew Patel story written, so maybe it'll see the light of day.

*If your product is cheap enough, you'll actually get more royalties per borrow than per buy. My royalty for a borrowed short story is nearly six times per that of a purchased short story. However, if your royalties are relatively high (say 70% of a $10 book, like FSFF), then a borrow rather than a buy is a significant step down. This might explain why so many authors more successful than I have been complaining about Kindle Unlimited I didn't put FSFF in KU because Nicor, one of the stories in the collection, is available elsewhere online. Unless the borrow rate goes up significantly (which Chuck Wendig has suggested in his recent blog post), it's going to stay where it is.

*I have made zero sales with "Nicor," possibly due to it being available online elsewhere for free. I was gambling on the cover art and the portability of a downloaded e-book vs. a website (you'll be able to read it whether you have an Internet connection or not) as something one couldn't get just by swinging by a website, but it looks like that gamble didn't pay off. Still, I'm not taking "Nicor" down anytime soon. Things might change.

*If you really want to make money, do what my friend Jeff Baker suggested and generate sales through volume. Most of my income lately has been coming from setting a story or two free for a couple days, which encourages the occasional buy or borrow. This risks becoming a source of diminishing returns if I don't keep supplying new material. However, posting FSFF on Amazon spiked my revenues for months. "Nicor" fizzled, but there are extenuating circumstances. I've got a kind of bizarro story I'm working on now called "Little People, Big Guns" that might be my first independently-published novella (I don't anticipate it being very long), since it's more goofy and comedic rather than the thoroughly-twisted stuff a lot of the bizarro markets seem to want.

(That said, maybe I should consider Eraserhead Press first--their novels Shatnerquest and Shatnerquake seem goofy rather than grotesque stuff like The Bighead. "Little People" might be too short for their purposes, but I haven't written too much of it yet.)