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!

Pulpsploitation returns with The Gunmaster: Fear of the Reaper!

Over at Metahuman Press, I made the announcement a few days ago. But the good news is that October 26th will see the launch of the first new title I've published in a year. The Gunmaster: Fear of the Reaper by Teel James Glenn continues the Pulpsploitation series of books with an all new full length adventure of the Buddhist monk sent out to stop the misuse of guns by the world at large!

The tale takes the Gunmaster around the world as he seeks the mysterious Reaper, an enigmatic figure murdering his way through a loose conglomerate of arms manufacturers and dealers. The figure has evil intentions, but his desires go far past simple business! The new adventure brings Darian Poe to wonderful life, plus it introduces the character find of 2018, Majesty Blayde!

T.J. outdid himself with this one, but as a bonus to this and every upcoming Pulpsploitation solo novel, it will also come with a bonus short story. In this case, you will find in the back pages my very first story in The Second Life of DB Cooper, "Back in Business." For anyone that hasn't collected his appearances in the second and fourth The Good Fight collections from the Pen & Cape Society and in Legends of New Pulp Fiction, this is your chance to get in on the ground floor with the character. When I first set his earliest adventures in the dawn of the 80s, I always planned for Coop to have a relationship with the Pulpsploitation line. Now you can start to see the connections build after you've read the amazing new adventure of the Gunmaster.


The book launches October 26th, but head over to Amazon to pre-order your copy ASAP!

Where I've been, or when life comes with no lemonade

This blog has sat fallow for way too long now. After finally getting things up to a regular schedule, life decided to get in the way of everything. Here's a quick rundown of everything that's went down.

• Left one house. Stuck in a no-tell hotel for a little over a month until the next was ready. 
• Picked up a second part time job, pushing my work week to nearly 60 hours.
• Started having seriously bowel pain and bleeding.
• Went through one colonoscopy, bled even more and went through a second emergency colonoscopy the next day. Spent twenty-four hours in the ICU and another five days waiting to learn I was (thankfully) cancer free.
• Found out on the same day I learned I was cancer free that my father-in-law had terminal cancer and attended his funeral two weeks later. 

All in all, it's pretty much been the most disastrous summer I've experienced. And I've had some damn rough summers as of late.

Right now, we're about half moved into a new house with the majority of our stuff still stuck in storage. Coupled with the long work weeks and the storm of awfulness, anxiety and depression, it's been challenging to accomplish anything.

But I am hoping to change that in August. I've got two editorial projects in the works now (Pulpsploitation: The Gunmaster and Dino Force.) They will bring an end to my Metahuman Press label, at least as a full-fledged micro-press. At the current time, I do not have it in me to continue publishing and writing. With that in mind, it seemed clear the editing would have to give.

I'm far from done creating nor will I completey give up on new projects with other writers. But I will be looking into a publishing partner for future projects in the near future.

In the mean time, I will continue to blog here and there, update this with things I like and things I think you should like.

Just keep living life. We've only got a finite time and I for one plan on living mine to the fullest.

Have Gun, Will Edit (WIP Wednesday)

Original Pulpsploitation cover by Nik Poliwko.

Not a lot has changed since my last WIP Wednesday update. Writing wise I'm still slowly working through my Moon Chopper story for an upcoming 70s era anthology.

Editing wise, I'm back hard at work on the first Gunmaster novel by Teel James Glenn. This will be the first Pulpsploitation novel to come following the release of the original anthology a couple years ago. Hopefully it will not be the last, as I have plans for more with my own Airboy feature in the future and I've already solicited input by a few other writers and contributors.

That's it for this time around. My hopes are to finish both those projects by the end of the month, which will mean a very new WIP Wednesday next time around!

WIP Update: early May 2017

Both my writing and editing time have been extremely limited in the last couples weeks. I've started another job outside writing which eats into the few hours I actually have every week. But I have made some progress on edits for the upcoming second book in the Pulpsloitation franchise, which Teel James Glenn looks to be making a rip-roaring yarn.

I have also started the first few hundred words on a novelette for an upcoming anthology being assembled by other editors for Metahuman Press. This will be the first book I won't have a heavy hand in editing for the line, but I am still contributing to the first of the two planned volumes. I've started coding my projects for the year, especially with several of them going unnamed at the current time, so right now this one will just be PROJECT DEMON. It's the most straight up superhero thing I've written so far this year, so I'm definitely excited to see how well it plays out over the writing process.

I have also started edits on the other Dino Force contributions than mine. I will most likely make some changes to the epilogue after I've done so in order to streamline the finish in a slightly stronger light. Of course, Dino Force is still funding on Kickstarter and awaiting your support. If you love superheroes, giant monsters or robot dinosaurs, this is the book for you!

Today's image is from the opening credits of the first show I ever saw with combining robots, The Mighty Orbots. It's an 80s classic that still holds up pretty well these days.

A few words on the future (or, When real life gets in the way)

Don't know the artist to credit on this one,
but she offers a hint on one upcoming project.

In case you had yet to notice, my time posting here on Super Powered Fiction as well on The Wrestling Weekday has grown more limited over the last few weeks. My focus for much of the last three months of last year, January and February have been mostly involved with getting myself into a better place than I have been in quite some time.

I don't talk about depression issues on here often, but with a long family history of depression (including bipolar disorder and borderline personality disorder), I have had particular challenges all through the last twelve months but they were intensified as the year ended as extended family issues seemed to overwhelm everything.

And sometimes something has to give.

In case you don't get my gist, it looks like 2017 will be a very slim year for me.

I do not foresee 2017 as being a strong year for new work from Super Powered Fiction or Metahuman Press. That is not to say I will go without any releases, but I suspet most of my work will be limited to fulfilling prior commitments.

This includes a long gestating shared world anthology based on a distinctly non-Western take on superheroes, a co-edited project that continues my love for weird ideas brought to print and (hopefully) the long awaited first Pulpsploitation novel by Teel James Glenn. It will also include a handful of short stories owed to a few different publishers.

I suspect those projects to take most of the first six months of the year to complete. With the ongoing need for greater attention to home issues, my time writing and editing are far more limited. I plan to see through the release of those works before I start looking into other projects.

Some of the other works I have hinted at in recent months, such as the remainder of F.O.R.C.E, the sequel series Executive F.O.R.C.E. or the fourth volume of Lightweight are still ahead, but they are backburnered. I will give more details on their release as work returns on them.

That is not to say I am without plans. I have a big series launch planned for early 2018, one which I suspect will take up much of my energy in the new year, but one I also hope will change the face of super powered fiction for years to come. But that one is still very far away.

Pulpsploitation: On writing Airboy

This article was originally posted on the official Pulpsploitation site.

All three of these characters will play a
part in future Airboy stories.

Why Airboy?

He certainly isn’t a character that went without a revival in the 1980s. Chuck Dixon and Tim Truman created a rather amazing series at Eclipse (now being collected by IDW) with art by the likes of Stan Woch, Ben Dunn, Ron Randall and Tom Lyle.

Flying Dutchman will be the first other Air Fighter to
make an appearance in the new book.

But that series didn’t tell the story of the original Airboy. Instead it focused on Davy Nelson Jr., the son of the original character and his interaction with a mix of the original Air Fighters and new “ripped from the headlines” adventures. Despite being written by well known Republican writer Chuck Dixon, it was even famous for being the anti-Reagan comic. But while it offered great stories, it wasn’t the take on Airboy I wanted to see.

I wanted to go back to the original, I wanted to make him a fish out of water and I wanted to update the Air Fighters in a very different way.

In my initial short story, Misery and the Airtomb play their part in the first story, but they are really a subplot as Airboy finds himself young and alive again in the early 1980s. He’s immediately thrust into a plot to stop the massive super-weapon that nearly killed him once before.

The tale will hopefully kickoff a new series of adventures starring the high-flying adventurer beginning in 2017.

Pulpsploitation is now available at Amazon.

Great Art: Valkyrie by Bruce Timm

I have to be honest. I've written a lot of public domain characters I want to work on. Whether it be Living Legends, the Pulp Obscura series from Pro Se Press or random short stories like "The Rise of Rulah". I have even started my own take on Hillman Comics' Air Fighters with my Airboy short story in Pulpsploitation.

But I still haven't got to Valkyrie yet. She's near the top of the list of characters I have plans for in the extended Quadrant Universe, but you probably won't see any sign of her until at least late 2017. But for now enjoy this great picture of her battling Misery (a character that does makes a brief appearance in the aforementioned story) by the always amazing Bruce Timm, of DC Animated Universe fame.

What's to come in 2016

I have big plans for 2016 but unlike last year, I am not going to make huge plans months ahead of time. I want to make sure I have work completed before I spend too much time discussing projects. I don't suspect I will have another down period like I did midway through last year, but I also don't want to make a bunch of promises that won't come to fruition.

My first published work of the year should be Flinch Books' Big Top Tales, the release of which is imminent. Edited by Jim Beard and John Bruening, it features original tales based around a 1950s era circus. I wrote a humdinger of a murder thriller starring the trapeze artist, more on which I will discuss when the book finally sees release.

Next up will be Lightweight: Beyond, scheduled for a March release. This should be in the editing stages within the next couple days, so I don't foresee any problems making that schedule. It will also be the longest Lightweight novel so far, at least half a book longer than the previous two volumes.

From there, I have tentative plans for a re-release of Out For Vengeance, the final two chapters of Quadrant (and a collection) and the return of F.O.R.C.E. to publishing over the summer. I also have a couple short story projects that should get finished within the next few months to fill in some anthology appearances I have already signed on to or plan to make. After that, I have a couple novels sitting and waiting on final chapters. Both my 1812 untitled novel and Neo-Tokyo Twin will hopefully be produced in some form this year.

On the editing front, Pulpsploitation should be launching a few new books in 2016, although I suspect they will be closer to midyear. Hopefully if plans go right, I will have a short Airboy novel as part of the expanded line this year.

Over the weekend, I wrapped up my first ever Western tale, a short story featuring the classic comic book character (now in the public domain) Kit West. That one isn't scheduled for release until November of this year as part of the Wild West Horse Opera RPG from Scaldcrow Games, but I had a lot of fun with it and have plans to go back to the Western format sometime in the next couple years.

Clearly, I have a lot still to come in the new year and this isn't even all I have planned. Hopefully I will be able to wrap all of it and produce a whole lot more as the year rolls on!

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.

Meet Mad Maddie

I love mad scientists. Frankenstein and his creation have always intrigued me, but while the monster has found his way into the Quadrant Universe, I prefer to keep his creator long dead. That leaves plenty of room for his heirs though, as I just couldn't create a great universe of super powered fiction without a mad scientist or three.

Enter “Mad Maddie”. I wanted to create a mad scientist and let her tell her own story, even as we can quickly understand she isn't quite right in the head. Too often mad scientists are seen at a distance and I wanted to enter that madness just a bit as I brought her adventures to life in a Short Shot.

Now the Short Shots series was all about ultra-short stories, usually not quite short enough to be called flash fiction but still under 2500 words. Because of the brevity of the stories, while they are 99 cents on Amazon, readers can instead pay whatever they wish on Smashwords.

The story gives insight into both Maddie's past and her future, and introduces her long time rival, Ebony Edwards, agent of EAGLE. (Fans paying attention might recognize that organization from Pulpsploitation and several other stories as the gaps in the Quadrant Universe start to narrow.) If you ever found yourself rooting even a little for the crazy one, give “Mad Maddie” a chance.

Pulpsploitation hits Pulp Fiction Reviews!

The always amazing writer and editor Ron Fortier recently took a look at Pulpsploitation for his reviews website!

He covers all five tales in the novel and raves about Gunmaster, The Black Bat, Tabu and E.A.G.L.E. as well, which makes me proud as an editor. But as a writer, I am always excited to see raves about my own work!

Ron gave a brief synopsis of the story on the site, then said that I am “a solid writer and he knows these golden age characters extremely well and we doubt seriously after reading through the obligatory “sex scene,” many of you will ever consider Davy Nelson a “boy” again.≵ That is great praise from a man with thirty years of writing experience behind him!

Read the full review of Pulpsploitation over at Pulp Fiction Reviews! Pick up Pulpsploitation at Amazon!

Writer's Update for February 17, 2015

Work continues apace on Lightweight chapter 11. The new format of the series will feature three chapters per book on a quarterly pace, so it will be awhile for the next book to be ready. Plans are still in place to fund this year’s worth of books on Kickstarter starting around April. But first I plan to finish chapter 11 and at least a major part of chapter 12 before that happens.

Much of the rest of my time has been spent setting up Pulpsploitation.com and readying that book for publication. I will have more Pulpsploitation in the works as well, but I have a few stories I owe Airship 27 to finish up before I start on those.

Plans for this week are to put more work into Lightweight followed by my long in gestation wrestling story for Airship 27. Once those wrap, I will probably head into a couple other short stories, but more on those later.

Beyond that, I have a Quadrant chapter on the edit table. It will head out in just a few weeks.

Today’s image is 1930s era wrestler Charley Fox, Cleveland’s wrestling cop, grappling an unnamed opponent. Sadly, I don’t go far enough afield in my upcoming tale to include him.

New fiction for 2015 kicks off with Pulpsploitation!

The announcement already went out on Metahuman Press and the newly launched Pulpsploitation.com, but I am proud to announce here that Pulpsploitation is now available in print and digital at Amazon as well as digitally at Smashwords and most leading ebook publishers.

While I am joined by the likes of Teel James Glenn, Caine Dorr, Frank Byrns and Steven Gepp on the inside, it is my tale of Airboy that I am talking about today. While many fans might remember the character from his previous 80s era revamp by Chuck Dixon, my new take on the character flashes the young hero forward thirty years after being left in suspended animation for thirty years! In the present, he meets the daughter of an old friend and the legacy of a great villain, all of which culminates in a massive battle outside Tokyo! It is a rip-roaring adventure that will be just the first shot of Airboy adventure from yours truly! Stay tuned for more news on the character in the coming months!

Pulpsploitation launches February 15!

I am proud to announce that my last Kickstarter project Pulpsploitation will finally make its debut the day after Valentine’s! And what better way to kick off your post-Valentine excitement than with all the sex, violence and action you can ask for featuring classic pulp and comic characters!

Featuring stories by yours truly, Teel James Glenn, Frank Byrns, Steven Gepp and Caine Dorr, the book is packed to the gills with great tales of the Black Bat, Airboy, the Gunmaster, Tabu and E.A.G.L.E. It can be preordered digitally now at Smashwords or stay tuned to Sunday when we will have links to it from Amazon in print and digital formats!

Stay tuned for a world of pulp adventure opening up very, very soon!