The past brings a new Second Life! The Good Fight 5: The Golden Age is here!

The Good Fight 5: The Golden Age came out last week. The book features stories with a pulp twist and set in the time period between the 1930s and 1950s. I was happy to be back for this one, though the nature of the book meant much like the third volume of the series, it didn't exactly work for a new story of The Second Life of D.B. Cooper, a character I always like to go back to in these volumes.

This time around though, it seemed like a great time to give a prequel to that series. Thus was born my story "The Second Life of Grigori Yefimovich Rasputin."

I thought about putting Mignola's Rasputin here,
but he looks nothing like the real thing. So here's
Riley Rossmo's version from an equally oddball
take on the character. 

Grigori popped up in the first of Coop's story back in The Good Fight 2: Villains. His connection to Coop has never really been made clear, but the legendary Mad Monk now gets to live his own second life in a story set in the late 30s.

Though he's probably best known these days as a character in Hellboy, Rasputin's place in Russian history is the stuff of legend. The stories of his powers are all over the place and the insanity surrounding his death makes it clear he's just the kind of guy to have another life after the Bolshevik Revolution. Now he's in America, on the trail of a mysterious threat in a small Washington town.

I've always loved the legend of Rasputin. Much like D.B. Cooper, his legend is larger than reality and that makes him a perfect figure for super powered fiction. Yet more often than not, he's played usually as a villain or at best, an enigmatic meddler. Yet history showed him to have some history in Russian democracy, which certainly seems a noble cause to any American. I built my take on Rasputin with that in mind. After twenty years traveling the world, he's a very different individual, a man with a noble heart but a willingness to do bad things for the good of all.

The story serves as a prequel to the three existing Coop stories, but it will also have ties to an upcoming project as well. But I'll talk more about that in a future column.

The story's appearance in this volume will now serve as something of a bittersweet point in my career. The volume features the first Pen & Cape Society story by James Hudnall, a true inspiration to me as a writer. Sadly, it will also be his last as he passed away last month at the far too young age of 61. I knew James only through a few brief encounters online, but his work on ESPers directly inspired the idea of a psychic D.B. Cooper. I will talk about the meaning of his work more in a future column, but his death leaves me heartbroken for what could have been.

You'll be missed, Hud.

Catching up is hard to do! (WIP Wednesday)

You might have noticed my complete disappearance from blogging in the second half of January. It was not without good reason as I struggled to get things up and running with Patreon stories through a seemingly never-ending fight with sickness and general malaise. I used the time to get closer to back on track with all my projects so that I hopefully can keep steady releases throughout 2019.

A lot of focus went into making sure the next month's stories are ready or close to ready to go for their impending release. The Patreon site now comes with a handy image to let everyone know the release dates for the next couple months and this will update once a month to keep the schedule out in front of me.

It's nothing fancy, but it does let everyone have the dates for the impending releases of the next two Lightweight chapters as well as the first stories in Shockwave and the second volume of Quadrant.

I also used that time to wrap up a story for the new Pen & Cape Society anthology due in just a few months. I'm not going to reveal the nature of the new anthology or the story until the book is officially announced, but I will say it continues to develop the Secret Life of D.B. Cooper series without featuring Coop himself.

Right now, I've got a couple super-secret projects in the works, one on a tight deadline I'm not sure I'll be able to finish and another long in production and looking to finish by the end of the month. Plus I'm continuing edits and writing on the upcoming Patreon stories as I work to keep well ahead new of my new biweekly schedule.

Hopefully, this blog will be back on a semi-regular schedule for the foreseeable future, so you don't miss out on what's happening out there in the fine fine world of the Quadrant Universe!

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!

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.

Post-NaNoWrimo, pre-2018 shenanigans! (WIP Wednesday)

It was a crazy November. I wrote the first two-thirds of my new urban fantasy novel, the first book in a series I plan to call The Graymalkin Chronicles. It's been interesting to drop traditional super-heroics for this one, even if my character does have a decidedly superhero origin. Like many characters, Xander Graymalkin's origins were from short stories and comic pitches I wrote back in the 90s while still in high school. And like Lightweight before him, he's vastly changed since that origin. I'm still very excited for this tale to see the light of the day, but my plans are to hold off on publication of most of my work until the second half of next year. I will likely also shop the series around to a few publishers as well.

That move has been a long time coming, but with the closure of Metahuman Press, it feels like the right time to find others to publish most of my works. My hope is to start moving away from self-publishing on all my writing outside two core series.

Those series are Quadrant, which I will talk about more down the line and Lightweight. As I showed off yesterday across social media and on this blog, the next chapters of Lightweight have started as my new short story project. I'll be writing each chapter as a standalone, just as I did with previous volumes. I will likely alternate those stories with other shorts as I go along, but I am hoping to prep a new Lightweight by that aforementioned second half of next year.

I also quietly completed the third story in The Second Life of D.B. Cooper series. This one takes place way later in the continuity of Coop than the previous stories, but does build upon the first story as published in the Pen & Cape Society project, The Good Fight 2: Villains. I'll have more information on the project once I've confirmed a home for it, but I loved coming back to Coop after a couple years away.

Today's image is taken from the Graymalkin board on my Pinterest. It features one of the creatures that will make their presence known in that upcoming book, as drawn by a talented artist named Abigail L. Dela Cruz. Check out her great Tumblr.

Looking back on 2015

To say it has been a bumpy 2015 for myself and Super Powered Fiction is probably under-stating the issue. With two massive server failures from two different providers, I lost the original site that ran for years (including all its archives) and was forced to relaunch in January, only to have to move the contents of the site a few weeks back to a blogspot server after my second provider fell in with the same conglomerate of crappy service as the first one. With our new Blogspot home finding us more readers than ever before, the plan is to stick around here for awhile, but don't worry as SuperPoweredFiction.com will continue to point this way for years to come.

Hospital selfie.

Outside of server troubles, I have had my own issues with blocks and fumbles. My original plan for 2015 was to produce several books under the umbrella of Times Past but most of those plans fell by the wayside as I started to fight health issue after health issue. I started the year with a nearly debilitating case of the flu, followed by perhaps the worst bout of depression I ever faced and then a neck surgery that literally came out of nowhere at the beginning of July. That left me off of work for two months, but with limited time up and around I also had limited time writing until a few weeks after the surgery. Once I was up though, I was re-energized in my writing, producing a handful of new short stories and finally kicking off the third volume of Lightweight, which I would bring to Kickstarter a few weeks later.

But I still managed to get a few things out in the calendar year. Most of them were short stories, both in my own anthologies and a few compiled and published by other folks.

Legends of New Pulp Fiction is here!

I think it seems apt that I started 2015 with my first DB Cooper story in the benefit anthology The Good Fight 2: Villains with the Pen & Cape Society and that I am ending 2015 with my second DB Cooper story in another benefit anthology, Legends of New Pulp Fiction from Airship 27.

Tommy Hancock is a lover of pulp fiction and a purveyor of great stories through his Pro Se Press. But health issues derailed much of his life in 2015 so friend and fellow publisher Ron Fortier started to assemble authors of pulpish fiction to contribute to a benefit anthology. What he got is certainly the biggest book I've ever been included in. With over 700 pages and 62 stories, this thing is a tome. And every dime of the profits for it will go to the medical expenses for Tommy.

Wrapped in a cover by the immensely talented Douglas Klauba, Legends of New Pulp Fiction contains my story "Miami Heist." The tale takes Coop out of the Keys as he is sent on a simple transport run that goes very wrong. Instead he finds himself in shoot-outs, high speed chases and battling threats he can't talk his way out of even with his psychic nudge.

Eagle eyed readers will also see several names familiar to Metahuman Press anthologies, such as Teel James Glenn, Terry Alexander, Jim Beard and Lisa M. Collins mixed in with talents like Richard Byers, Van Allen Plexico and Win Scott Eckert. Plus illustrations from dozens of great artists like Gary Kato, Ben Dunn, Mal Earl and Silvestre Szilagyi.

Check out the full press release from Airship 27 here. The book is currently available from Amazon in print and as a PDF direct from Airship 27. Make it a late holiday gift for yourself and help a good cause, won't you?

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.