Pulpsloitation returns with.. The Gunmaster: Fear of the Reaper!

It's been far too long since I first introduced Pulpsploitation to the world. The debut anthology sprang into the world over three years ago as five authors combined classic pulp characters with exploitation cinema and men's adventures novels to create five amazing stories. I wrote Airboy for the anthology, which also featured Black Bat by Frank Byrns, E.A.G.L.E. by Caine Dorr, Tabu by Steven Gepp and...

The Gunmaster by Teel James Glenn. Novels based on the series were stretch goals of the original Kickstarter for the project. While we weren't able to fund every spinoff anthology, we did meet stretch goal for The Gunmaster. The result is Fear of the Reaper, the first Gunmaster novel. It debuts as an ebook today, available worldwide at Amazon.

Teel talked more about the character and his revival over at Metahuman Press

In addition to the Gunmaster novel, the book also features a reprint of "Back in Business," the very first tale in the Second Life of D.B. Coooper. It originally appeared in The Good Fight 2: Villains, but my tales of D.B. Cooper were always meant to be part of the Pulpsploitation series. As new novels and short stories launch as the series continues, more tales of Coop will appear alongside them.

Head over to Amazon and buy the complete book today!

Adventures on the Homefront now available!

The fourth installment of the Pen & Cape Society's The Good Front series is now officially available!

Head over to Amazon or Smashwords for your copy of The Good Front 4: Homefront. This new volume turns the focus towards the supporting cast of the heroes of thirteen different writers.

My tale returns us to the world of D. B. Cooper, where an aging Coop comes face to face with his daughter for the first time. She's not quite what he expected though and that quickly makes complications in Coop's life!

Check it and the other twelve tales out in print or digital format.

Fathers and daughters and psychic powers (WIP Wednesday)

I just sent off my next contribution to the Pen and Cape Society's The Good Fight series of anthologies. It happens to be the third story in The Second Life of DB Cooper.

Longtime readers may remember the first short about the psychic ex-secret agent from The Good Fight 2: Villains or the second from Legends of New Pulp. This story flashes forward about sixteen years from that second tale and picks up with a fifty-year-old Coop right around the turn of the century.

Like the previous stories, this one is built around a lot of psychic powers with a little weird esoterica in the backdrop. But at its core, it is about the relationship between Coop and his daughter, a woman he didn't know existed until the day she showed up at his doorstep. Like everything else in Coop's life since the day he ditched his old job and hijacked an airplane, it comes with a whole heck of a lot of complications.

I suspect this one will be a bit different than the previous two Coop stories as it hinges much more on hard decisions than the straight up adventure hooks of the previous tales. I certainly had a heck of a lot of fun writing it as I get a certain glee out of making Coop's life a living hell.

I've put the start on a project for Pro Se Productions as well this week. The book hasn't been officially announced as far as I know, so for now, it will be called PROJECT FOXHUNT. It's set at a unique point in history in a unique location and stars a character with some deep esoteric roots that I love. He's a figure I've used in the past but this will be a slightly different take on him. I'll go into more details on it once I get the go-ahead from the fine folks at Pro Se.

I have also started work on a project I've let sit fallow for too long. I had a trilogy of works online many moons ago that I've always wanted to do a complete rewrite on to get them ready for publication. Those stories: Mean Streets, The Long Hot Summer and Suicide Blonde, might be remembered by a few longtime followers of yours truly, but none have been seen for nearly a decade. I have started a ground-up re-write on Mean Streets starting with a new, more apt, title: NML: No Man's Land. I'll cover a few more details on that in the next update.

Today's image is from the other great tale that posits D.B. Cooper as a secret psychic agent of the government, Brian Churilla's The Secret History of D.B. Cooper. That book almost killed my plans for Coop stories when it was released way back in 2013, but while it's a great comic, it's pretty much as far away from my tale as can be possible. Still, dig Churilla's amazing work and if you're interested, pick up a copy at Amazon.

On D.B. Cooper

Treat Williams made an overly handsome Cooper in the 1981 Universal film.

I have a fascination with weird mysteries and strange characters from history. So when a man in 1971 (seven full years before my birth) stepped out of an airplane with a briefcase full of cash and disappeared into history, I cannot help but latch on to them.

Dan Cooper has floated in my head space for years. (The alias D.B. Cooper was never actually used by the hijacker, but is based on poor early reporting.) At one point in my life I thought about turning his later years into a crime series equally influenced by Magnum, P.I. and Spenser. But as the years past and I never put him to paper, I realized I wanted to develop him a bit more than that.

While Cooper was a weird start to the 1970s, much of the decade fell into a lot of interest in weird esoteric nonsense. The government even did psychic research in the era, through a project called Stargate. As I have slowly put development into the psychic side of the Quadrant Universe, the realization came that I could combine the famous hijacker and bits of the historical narrative of psychics in my shared universe and create something interesting.

"The Second Life of D.B. Cooper" follows the former hijacker as he tries to stay out of the sight of his former Stargate handlers and use the money he stole to start a new life for himself. The first tale picks up eleven years later in Key West, Florida, as a pair of figures from his past make their returns.

Of course, I am not alone in using the mysterious figure. From books to comics to film, he has loomed in pop culture. But I hope to make a new mark on a real man that has become far more of a legend.

The tale upcoming in The Good Fight 2: Villains is far from my last tale of Coop and this corner of the Quadrant Universe. In fact, I plan a few more anthology appearances over the next couple years with the character and related figures, one of which I will discuss a bit more early next week.

The Good Fight 2: Villains is available for pre-order at Amazon or Smashwords for just 99 cents. It will go on sale digitally on March 30.

The Good Fight 2: Villains now available for pre-order!

As I mentioned earlier this week, I have a story appearing in the upcoming Pen & Cape Society anthology The Good Fight 2: Villains. I am more than happy to announce the book is now available for pre-order with a March 30 release date. You can easily pick it up right now at Amazon or Smashwords for just 99 cents.

As a reminder, the new anthology is a benefit for James Hudnall, a truly talented comic and prose writer that has recently fallen on hard times due to diabetic complications.

The team rallied to make a great book for him and the illustrious Mr. Mike Baron of Nexus and Badger fame (and now a great prose writer in his own right) was kind enough to deliver a story for our collection as well. Plus a gaggle of other true talents like Scott Bachmann, Ian Thomas Healy, Drew Hayes, T. Mike McCurley, Cheyenne Young and a whole lot of other folks! My own story takes a bit of inspiration from James Hudnall’s ESPers as I introduce my own psychic corner of the Quadrant Universe in the first installment of The Second Life of D.B. Cooper.

So, please go out and pre-order a copy today. We are proud to bring you some great writing and encourage you to help support Mr. Hudnall in his time of need.

Writer's Update for March 17, 2015

It has been a weird couple of weeks, both writing and editing.

My next story release will see publication at the end of the month as part of a new anthology from my friends and colleagues at the Pen & Cape Society. I helped determine the book would be for the aid of one Mr. James Hudnall, the long time comic creator left without a home and job due to the recent loss of a foot from diabetic complications. I provided the introduction for the book and the first of my stories in “The Second Life of D.B. Cooper” series. In the spirit of Mr. Hudnall’s years writing ESPers, I thought writing my own psychic antihero would be perfect for this book. Coop will definitely resurface again in the near future.

My writing has been split between slowly putting Lightweight 11 together while also working on a new anthology project tentatively titled Punchline, that will follow a super-villain through multiple stories. I am hoping to take some time to get them both wrapped up in early April so that I can get everything set for them by the end of May, but we will see how time falls.

I am also editing the first story in a new anthology project with Jim Beard, whose G.I. JOE: Adventure Team: MYSTERY OF THE SUNKEN TOMB you should go buy right now! The first tale is in the can now that sets up that one, so I will probably be sending out some feelers to folks to get that one set-up in full soon.

Today’s image is the classic FBI drawing of Dan Cooper.

Writer's Update for February 3, 2015

I have spent the last couple weeks in between trying to get sites online working on the first story in a new series called The Second Life of D.B. Cooper. I finished the second draft on it just yesterday and it is off to the publisher now. It should pop up in just a few weeks as part of the Pen and Cape Society’s The Good Fight 2: Villains anthology. I missed out on the first volume of the series, but this one was a can’t miss for me, but I will talk more about that in the future.

The new story kicks off a tale that blends my work on Pulpsploitation with the Quadrant Universe and introduces D.B. Cooper in 1982 Key West, Florida. It also touches on psychic mind experiments, mystic esoterica and a few other oddball figures out of weird history.

I suspect Mr. Cooper will see a return appearance before the end of 2015, but I will have to wait on that announcement for awhile.

Now I am hard at work on kicking off the second year of Lightweight stories. Anyone that read the end of Lightweight: Graduation knows exactly how far away from the first year the new story will be. It should offer some interesting conundrums in the life of Kevin Mathis.

A Kickstarter will be on its way for year two in a couple more months, but I plan to finalize all orders on the first year of Lightweight first.

Today’s image is DB Cooper by Brian Churilla. Check out his The Secret History of D.B. Cooper for another oddball take on the mysterious hijacker well worth a read.