After a weirdly long development cycle, The Bygone Dagger has finally released! It’s Amazon exclusive at the moment, and for now it’s just 99 cents!

More information in a couple weeks when it actually releases, but I’m happy to announce the pre-order and release date of The Bygone Dagger (The Greater Lands Saga 1).

This is my first venture back into long form Epic Fantasy since The Book of Deacon. The release date is June 23rd, 2021. Here’s the blurb!

They just don’t make artifacts like they used to.

In a world where arcane contraptions are capable of just about anything, running an antique shop is a dangerous business. No one knows that better than the Masker family. Strict rules and cutthroat competitors have pushed them to the limit. They need to make a big sale soon or they just might go under.

Fel Masker won’t let that happen.

True, he’s not half the tinkerer his father is, and he certainly lacks his mother’s skill with money. But right now what the family needs is someone foolhardy enough to risk ancient traps, mystic creatures, and bloodthirsty mercenaries on a death-defying treasure hunt. Fel is the man for the job.

A mysterious customer, a cryptic map, and an ancient vault could provide him with the payday he needs. Now all Fel has to do is survive long enough to deliver the goods.

One way or another, the world is going to remember the name Masker.

It was a fun one to write, and the sequel is already with Tammy Salyer getting a once-over. Good times!

So… It’s been a year, hasn’t it?

This year kicked my butt, and all things considered I got off easy. Being a writer isn’t an easy or a secure job, but it’s one that operates pretty much the same in a pandemic as any other time. This year, I sat in my home with my family and I wrote as the world outside became darker and more muddled, more dangerous and more vicious. 2020 cost us all dearly. Long-time followers need not look far to see the greatest toll it took on my life.

But we’re still here.

This is a tiny, neglected site on a forgotten corner of the internet. It exists to share the things I’m excited about with the people who like my writing. But after what we’ve been through, and what remains to be done before the world’s new normal becomes something resembling the old, I feel as though I’m obligated to look for a little bit of light.

What went right?

I set out, when this year began, to release the sixth (and potentially final) books in each of my main series. I achieved that. The Coin of Kenvard, Contaminant Six, and Nova Igniter were all released and it seems that you folks enjoyed them! I also released my first Patreon collection, Paradoxes and Dragons.

It wasn’t my most active year. By April my brain was already mush, and it just got mushier as the year progressed, but I soldiered on. NaNoWriMo was again a success. I had some experiments with audio, leading to not only a flurry of audio-books courtesy of Books in Motion, but also in a few self-produced pieces for the patreon, including what may well be considered the canonical “voice” of Ma.

The Patreon has proceeded apace, with new shorts and novellas (or re-releases of old favorites) each month. I’ve been fortunate enough to support artists by commissioning great artwork for covers and other gun goodies.

What next?

My NaNoWriMo project, which started off with the name “Rip Off Player One” because it was written specifically to appease my friend who wanted something in the same vein as Ready Player One, evolved into a full novel called “Top Level Player.” I’ll have to figure out to what degree the story can be published, but one way or another you folks will get a taste.

My brand plan for 2021 is to start my first new Epic Fantasy series in 10 years. I’ve had a lot of fun with The Book of Deacon, and it’s been my most successful series, but the time has come to try out a new setting. I spent the last week tinkering with it, and I think I’ve got something you folks are going to enjoy. Chances are you won’t get your first taste until mid 2021, but if I’m a good boy I’ll release at least two more in the same series before year’s end.

I’ll be continuing the Patreon, ideally with more new or re-released stories each month. And since that means heaps of new shorts, I think we can safely assume you’ll be getting a second volume of Paradoxes and Dragons.

There are also some projects I planted the seeds for many years ago which still have a chance of bearing fruit. The first children’s book (the one about Myn) technically isn’t dead, though I’ve been unable to contact the artist in some time. The second children’s book, illustrated by Fable Siegel, is almost certain to see the light of day, and maybe even a related project that’s got me super excited.

And if there’s enough time/willpower left when it’s all said and done, I’d like to add two more stories to Shards of Shadow so that the full story can be told.

You good people kept me afloat this year. I’ll do my best to prove myself worthy.

Thanks for reading!

Heads up! At the beginning of the year I said it was the year of six, and I would release the sixth entry in each of my three main series. We’ve already seen The Coin of Kenvard and Contaminant Six. Now it’s time for the final release of the year! Nova Igniter.

Nova Igniter is book six of Big Sigma! It is available for pre-order now, and releases October. 27th! Here’s the blurb.

When you’ve lived a life like his, the last thing you want is for history to repeat itself.

Lex has teamed up with mad engineers, clashed with technology-obsessed terrorists, and faced murderous robot hordes. He’s even traveled through time. He has skills no one in history has ever had.

He’ll need them.

Devastating cyber-attacks are targeting him. His closest allies are nowhere to be found. Ominous threats from his past seem to be leaking back onto his life. With the help of an off-kilter ship AI and his ex, Lex will have to get to the bottom of it all. If he doesn’t, the galaxy’s days are numbered.

This one was a challenge to write. If you’ve read the story this far, you’ll know that Lex’s life has twisted and turned in some really bizarre directions. Since it was my goal to make this one (potentially) the final entry in the series, I needed to find a way to tie up as many loose ends as possible.

Writing a book is difficult enough, but it gets even more difficult when potential violations of causality enter the fray.

If you want to read the latest adventure for Lex and the gang, pre-order it today and have it the moment it releases!

At approximately 4pm on Sept. 11^th, 2020, my mother passed away. Like too many in our nation and world right now, COVID-19 took her from us. She was a few days past her 68^th birthday, and had been fighting cancer that had found its way into her lungs. She was the very definition of high risk, but that does not soften the blow. As I write this, my father is still fighting his own COVID-19 infection. His prognosis is better, but we are taking nothing for granted.

It seems proper to take some time to talk about the woman my mother was. Mom was the second oldest of five siblings. She had a rare life, by today’s standards. My father was her only husband, and she was a stay at home mom for me and my two older brothers, Mike and Anthony. Mom was absolutely everything a mother should be. Not just for me and my brothers, but for everyone she met. As Mike said during our last conversation with her, Mom was the mother of the entire neighborhood. People all over town called her mom, from other people in my class in school to grown men who worked in the autobody down the block. To some she was Lillian, to most she was Susan. To almost everyone, she was Mom.

She was, in a word, Momnipotent.

Our door was always open. Food was always on the table. More than one friend of ours, lacking a place to stay, found a home in the Lallo Household. One friend, when he slashed his hand on a piece of broken glass, came knocking on our door. He didn’t call an ambulance. He didn’t go to the doctor. He went to Mom Lallo. (At the time, he thought she was a registered nurse. She was not. Mom had just grown adept at patching people back together thanks to having three sons and two younger brothers, each with varying degrees of bone headedness.) Another friend, who had just returned from a tour of duty in the air force, arrived back in town at 3 AM. He didn’t go to his own house. He came to ours, because he knew we would answer, and that he could get something to eat and crash on the couch until his folks woke up.

Mom’s cooking was the stuff of legend, not just in quality but in quantity. She made homemade popcorn in a frying pan. One batch was approximately half a paper shopping bag. That stuff fueled every party I could remember from when I was barely able to walk until I graduated college. People still tell stories of the time a handful of my brother’s friends stayed over and she made a pancake breakfast for them. Over a hundred pancakes. She had more specialties than I could possibly list: Pepperoni-Bread, Pecan Pie. Mincemeat Pie. Chili. Rice Pudding. Her breaded, fried chicken cutlets were the standard by which all others shall be judged.

One of the last things I said to her was that I owed literally everything to her. Not only did she make me, she installed the software that runs my brain. In a time before the internet, she instituted the “Let’s Look it Up” policy whenever I asked a question she didn’t know the answer to. We had an old set of encyclopedias, and any bit of curiosity would lead to a mini-research session. It trained me to seek answers rather than simply shrugging and remaining ignorant. It made me curious. Hungry for knowledge.

Until a few years ago, the family had some land in Vermont. We would spend every August up there, even before a house was built. We would literally sleep in a barn. No TV. No radio. Just wilderness, campfires, and family. In order to make bedtime something of an event, Mom would ask us to come up with things we would like to hear a story about. Ostensibly it was for all of us, but my brothers are three and seven years older than me, so I dare say they were past the point of bedtime stories when this was happening. We would pick all sorts of topics for stories and she would put them together into a bedtime story, a new one each night, starring ALF (from the 1980s TV show). Completely improvised. It was my first introduction to building a story. That is a skill that has served me well. And because of that, even if you never met her, if you know my books, you know my mother. Her fingerprints are everywhere. She helped name characters like Oriech and Halfax. She actually typed some of the early pages of a book I’ve yet to publish, back when I wasn’t a good enough typist to do so myself. She also wrote stories of her own.

There’s a reason why the brightest and most nurturing character in any of my stories is called “Ma.”

Chronicling Mom’s virtues is an impossible task. The list of things I want to say about what she did for us keeps growing with every new sentence I write. Mom’s scavenger hunts she would put together for Easter morning. Her New Year’s Eve tradition of making a new appetizer every hour until the ball dropped. It doesn’t seem fair that a withering illness and a pandemic should rob her of so many years, and rob the world of her presence. But if one measures one’s life by the impact one has upon others, Mom lived a hundred lifetimes. She will live on in the hearts and minds of everyone who met her. And I can only hope that my brothers and I can pass on her lessons with half the skill and grace with which she taught them.

Goodbye Mom. Thanks for everything.

Folks, it is finally here. Contaminant Six, the sixth (and final?) entry in the Free-Wrench saga. Pick it up wherever ebooks are sold!

This one was a doozy to write, but before I dig into that, here’s the blurb again:

The fug that poisoned the world has struck the Wind Breaker crew.

After years of daring escapes and dangerous capers, it was only a matter of time before Captain Mack’s crew felt the sting of the toxin that blankets their continent. They must split up, seek the aid of old rivals, and brave secret facilities to find the substance that may be the key to recovery.

Join Nita and her friends on what may well be their final adventure.

Contaminant Six is the sixth novel in the critically acclaimed Free-Wrench series of steampunk adventures.

And final?

Now, if you’ve been paying close attention, you’ll notice I typically include (and final?) every time I talk about this one. The purpose of the Year of Six was to close up shop on my three main series to make room in my schedule for something new. If you’ll forgive the talk about how the sausage is made for a moment, rare is the series that endures in popularity year after year. Typically, for each new entry in a book, there are at least a few readers who won’t follow along to pick it up. (We call this “decreased read-through”, for those of you interested in the lingo.) So each book tends to make just a bit less money than the one before. Add to that the fact that each new book is just a bit more difficult to write, thanks to growing lore and continuity that needs to be maintained, and a long series can be a real struggle for someone trying to make a living.

I hate that “profitability” has to be a part of the equation, but this is how I pay my bills, and it hasn’t been getting any easier.

BUT! I’d never rule out the possibility of more stories in the future. Short stuff on my Patreon is almost certain. And new novels could certainly come along. But those will be later. Once I’ve (hopefully) stabilized my income with some fresh blood.

The Bumpy Road

As long as we’re talking about finances and difficulties, buckle up while I talk to you about the journey this book took. To paraphrase a spooky lady from a horror movie, “The way this book walked was thorny, through no fault of its own.”

We’ll begin with COVID-19. This book was written entirely during the pandemic. Ostensibly, my job is one of the safest and least effected one could hope for. I sit in my office, typing away regardless of rain, snow, heat wave, or pandemic.

But I do not live alone.

I live with my brother, his wive, and his son. My brother Mike works for New Jersey Transit. He is considered essential (because he helps keep the trains running, and the trains get the other essential workers to work). He is a conductor/ticket collector, so he can’t very well work from home. My sister-in-law works from home, but she’s got meetings, she’s got phone calls. She can’t be taking care of the kid all that time. This means, at least a few hours a week, I’m taking care of the kid. And at any given moment, I might have to drop in for a few minutes. It’s a small, but non-zero distraction from the writing. But I budgeted my time and pressed on.

Because of the intense times we’re living in, I didn’t feel comfortable pushing this book into the hands of my full list of Beta Readers, so this one was lightly revised before heading to the editor.

Once I got the book back and got the excellent cover by Nick Deligaris, I put it up for pre-order and started the sale. Except… Amazon wasn’t really interested in showing the cover… For like 10 days. It turns out, when there’s no image on an Amazon Product listing, folks assume it’s broken and don’t click. Advertising is tricky enough to do well when your store link actually looks like it leads to a product. When it looks like it’s broken, it’s more or less a waste of money to run ads. So I lost two weeks of advertising time.

There were more problems. Personal problems behind the scenes which are ongoing. I’ll share the details when we learn how they’ll end. But things have been hard.

But we made it! The book is here! I hope you like it.

Now all that remains is Big Sigma 6… Then? Well, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

A fan of mine contacted me a few days ago to let me know that an author had a series of books that seemed a little too similar to mine to be a coincidence. I fully expected to go check them out and discover that they were just the standard hero’s journey fantasy tale, a situation where someone else followed the same tropes as me just as a thousand had before. I’m not a big enough author for someone to plagiarize my stuff. But I was curious, so I went to check it out.

And… I mean… Well, you be the judge.

Here’s The Book of Deacon (Book 1):

Myranda Celeste’s world has been built on a legacy of bloodshed. For more than a century, her homeland the Northern Alliance has fought the Kingdom of Tressor in what has come to be known as the Perpetual War. While her people look upon the conflict with reverence, Myranda’s hate for the war has made her an outcast.

When she finds a precious sword among the equipment of a fallen warrior, she believes her luck may have changed. Little does she imagine that the treasure will draw her into an adventure of wizards and warriors, soldiers and rebels, and beasts both noble and monstrous. The journey will teach her much about her potential, about the origins of the war, and about the threat her world truly faces.

Will Myranda unlock the secret of bringing peace once and for all, or will the world be lost to the Perpetual War?

Let’s compare that to The Eternal War (Fate Chronicles Book 1)

The world is blanketed in snow and death…

The Eternal War continues to ravage the land while mighty forces clash in a never-ending struggle for dominancy.

Laura Stillwater, a young woman who wants nothing to do with the war, is ensnared its wake. She becomes an integral part of its outcome after discovering a magical staff hidden beneath the snow. The staff is sought by many dangerous foes, forcing Laura into a deadly hunt. Along her journey, she meets powerful allies who show her the ways of elemental magic.

Follow Laura’s adventure as she struggles to defeat powerful enemies and change the world.

Now, I mean… That’s pretty similar, but I wasn’t exactly breaking ground with the plot of my book. And the name and weapon are different. Let’s just take a peek inside.

Take a look at the side by side of the first few paragraphs (you’ll want to open in a new tab for all of the literary goodness). That’s mine on the left.

I mean… you know… It could be a coincidence. Maybe the other book covers will differentiate his series.

Clearly an original story! His anthropomorphic character appears to be a badger, not a fox. What about the next one.

Oh, hey! There’s something in his books called “The Drakaran.” Not the D’Karon, like in mine. Though the cover seems to depict a battle against the raised dead like in The Battle of Verril. Moving on…

Whoa! He seems to have some sort of a fire elemental in his, too! And book four has Deadly Diplomacy, does it? The Chosen take the roles of Diplomats in mine, too. I bet Book Five is just as good!

… Now wait a minute. My book five is called “The Crescents” and this one’s called “Mystery at Crescent Islands”? And there’s a red dragon and a green dragon hanging out. And the green one is in armor.

I’ll be honest, I’m a little hurt that they didn’t rip off book 6. I was rooting for “The Doubloons of Karnved” or something.

I guess I’m going to have to do something about this, but it’s just so bizarrely entertaining to me.

UPDATE: I have been in contact with the person responsible. The books have been taken down and I’ve adjusted the post to remove explicit mention of their name, so that this doesn’t follow them around unnecessarily.