Defying Fate Is Live, and Discounted!

Showtime!

Paradox Book 3 is ready for download–and discounted to $2.99 for a limited time.

Ike has ventured out on his own, now. He’s got a great head start, but still a lot to learn. A good deal of his college years are spent helping Coach Stauchel transform the Pumas into a winning team, but he still finds time to juggle love interests (“spinning plates”), begin designing a small warp generator, and prepare to fight in WWII. Unfortunately, some of those preparations will propel him into a future conflict on American soil.

This promotion is not without its hiccups already. Some folks I was hoping would help spread the word have ghosted me. There is a mix-up with one of the promoters. And, despite the early success of the first two books in the series, getting reviews has been like getting RSVPs for a Joe Biden rally.

Nevertheless, I expect good things. The hero is an adult, now, as are my loyal readers. And there’s a nubile blonde on the cover (which I’m revealing for the first time here…I think). If Defying Fate does really well, I’ll save screenshots and share the news once the numbers are in.

Thanks to everybody who buys my books, and extra-special thanks to those who rate and/or review.

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Buy it everywhere else!

Paradox Chapter Reveal: Easy Times

In the previous chapter reveal, I mentioned why some chapters needed heavy tweaking and sometimes I had to write entirely new transitional chapters while making Paradox (paid link) episodic.

Here’s the new opening chapter of Book 3: Defying Fate:

We exited the church from youngest to oldest—Debbie, Lana, Wyatt, Me, Mami, and Dad. Well, it seemed to be in age order, anyway. Technically, Dad and I were the youngest, We wouldn’t be born for decades, but my mother and siblings didn’t know that.

Okay…biologically speaking: they weren’t really my parents and siblings. “Dad” was really my uncle. I was not related to Mami other than through unofficial adoption, and not related to the kids except through Dad. Confused yet? Just wait.

Other people, dressed in their Sunday finest, smiled and bid us goodbye, tipping hats or waving. Mami responded to each, cheerfully. Dad tipped his own hat and replied as if conserving the energy it took to move his mouth. Debbie would have taken off running to who-knew-where, had her older sister not held a firm grip on her hand.

We strolled across the parking lot to Dad’s yellow ’37 Cord. Dad opened the passenger door for Mami. Then came one of those fascinating feminine maneuvers she was so adept at: she whirled so that she faced away from the open door and fell slowly backwards into the seat. While on the way down, the hand not holding her purse reached around behind her and pressed against the fabric of the new dress Dad had just bought her, sweeping it over to pull taught against the back of her thighs right before her rump hit the seat. It was timed perfectly so that her hand cleared just before getting caught between the car’s seat and…ahem…her seat.

I herded the kids into the back seat behind Dad, then I climbed in behind Mami. Dad cranked the engine to life.

“Sweet music!” Wyatt exclaimed, grinning at the Cord’s bass rumble.

As with most of Dad’s vehicles, the Cord’s powertrain was far from stock, and almost 50 years anachronistic. He and I had built the engine and transmission in 1986, in a garage at Texas Station—one of Dad’s many properties scattered strategically across the post-Industrial Revolution region of the space-time continuum. He sunk it in gear and got us rolling.

Mami leaned across the front seat and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you for taking us to church, my love.”

He turned his head and grinned at her.

Dad didn’t care for organized religion, But he did care for Mami, and was willing to sit through Sunday services to please her. I found myself wishing, for the thousandth time, that he would give up his other lives, his mistresses, all his mad scientist schemes, and just settle down with Mami. Keep her happy full-time.

At this point in my life, I could understand him wanting to have a life and a squeeze at every time-space coordinate. I was spinning plates of my own, by then. But if Mami was ever to find out Dad was playing house with other women, it would break her heart.

She half-turned, craned her neck, and made eye contact with Wyatt, who sat on the edge of the back seat, his hands gripping the front seat on either side of Dad’s neck.

“You are just like your father,” she said. “You both like loud things.” Then she tried to imitate the exhaust note with her voice.

My sisters giggled at her impression, but Wyatt rolled his eyes. My Spanish had improved to the point I could follow these conversations without missing anything important.

“Oh, are you too grown up for my engine noises now, Mijo? It wasn’t that long ago when you would laugh, too.” She tried some more sound effects, then turned to her daughters and declared, in English, “The only difference between men and boys is the eh-size and expense of their desired toys.”

Lana and Debbie giggled some more. Maybe they understood everything, maybe not—but they knew Mami was acting silly and teasing Wyatt.

Dad arched an eyebrow and threw a sidelong glance over his shoulder toward me. We exchanged a grin. The Cord purred along at 70 miles an hour.

“Vroom! Vroom!” Mami continued, and apparently her sound effects were never going to get old for the girls.

 

 

When we arrived at the Orange Grove, Dad parked by the front porch and asked me to put the car away. He walked around to open Mami’s door and give her a hand climbing out.

Wyatt let himself out, then held the door open for his little sisters.

As my family went inside, Dad turned back toward me as I slid behind the wheel. “Meet me at the temperature wheel when you get changed?”

I nodded, and steered the Cord over to the enormous building comprised of several garage bays and a few aircraft hangars. Bays in the building were kept locked, ostensibly to discourage any thieves who ventured all the way out to the Orange Grove to see what they could steal. The more compelling reason was that Dad kept some stuff here that had not been invented or manufactured yet. I parked and locked the swing-up garage door before strolling to the hacienda to change.

It was hot at the temperature wheel and Dad probably wouldn’t ask me to meet him there if there wasn’t some maintenance required. I dressed in my “greasies”—jeans already so stained by petroleum products that they shouldn’t be worn in public, and an equally ruined sleeveless shirt (“undershirt” at these coordinates, “muscle shirt” or “wife-beater” in the era I came from).

As I drew near to where the temperature wheel and generator (really an alternator) were housed, a rhythmic scraping/grinding noise grew more prominent in the ambience.

The outer building looked like a large barn, but once inside, it was obvious that it had no roof—flat or otherwise. All it had was a fairly narrow arch spanning from one wall to the other. The sun shone directly down into the vast space. Lining the walls were sturdy steel shelves loaded with banks of nickel-iron batteries, each larger than a footlocker. The huge alternator sat at the south end of the structure, turning quietly while providing electricity for the hacienda and the rest of the estate. Attached to the power source was a gearbox. The spinning shaft driving the gearbox extended through a hole in a small greenhouse in the center of the huge “barn.”

I entered the greenhouse and the sweltering heat blasted me. Dad was already inside, sweating buckets. What drove the shaft was the temperature wheel. The outer band of the wheel was composed of multiple airtight tanks, with pipes leading like spokes from each tank to a central hub surrounding a circular housing from which the shaft extended. The top third of the wheel extended up through a slot in the greenhouse roof, rotating under the arch across the top of the barn—so that it was always in shade, but exposed to the breeze. The bottom of the wheel sat in a metal trough full of water kept hot by the ambient heat of the greenhouse. Inside the tanks and pipes of the wheel was freon—which transformed from gas to liquid form just from a few degrees change in temperature. It was heated into light gas form down inside the greenhouse, expanding up through the pipes into the tanks. Up in the shady breeze, the gas cooled inside the tanks, transforming to heavier liquid. The weight of the liquid caused gravity to pull the tanks back down, and the wheel turned. It rotated slowly, but with massive torque. The torque was overdriven in the gearbox so that the alternator spun fast enough to generate scads of electricity.

The scraping/grinding noise was loud here inside the greenhouse. Dad, dressed much like me, stooped over next to the central housing, opening a toolbox.

“Okay,” he said. “This should go quick with both of us. You know what that noise is?”

“A bearing gone bad?” Even without him honing my mechanical aptitude over the last several years of relative time, I would have known the sound was caused by friction, and the repetitive nature of it meant it came from a rotating part.

Dad tapped his temple and nodded approvingly at me. He looked up at the bright sky visible through the slot in the greenhouse roof. “Now, we could wait until after dark, when this thing stops spinning anyway, but who wants to do this at night? Engage the clutch, if you would, Ike.”

I pulled a large lever from vertical to horizontal, and pinned it in place to hold it down. As the clutch engaged, the wheel spun faster, while the shaft spun slower and came to a stop after a few moments. The awful noise stopped with it.

Thankfully, the bearing for the wheel itself was fine, or we would have had no choice but to work on it in the middle of the night. That wheel was going to spin as long as the sun and breeze caused the temperature disparity. There was no stopping it until after the temperature disparity ended.

Inside a cardboard box decorated with black handprint stains was the replacement roller bearing, which Dad had already packed with grease. Dad and I chatted while we worked together to get the old bearing out and this new one in.

“What did you call your pals there at Poly, again?” Dad asked, with an amused expression.

“The Tumultuous Trio,” I said, also amused, just thinking about my college roommate and the two other upperclassmen who had begun football training camp hazing me, but had since more-or-less welcomed me into their clique. “Wherever they go, it’s like a storm hits whoever is there.”

“Rowdy, I guess?”

I chuckled. “Well, there’s Bartok—offensive lineman. Intelligent enough, but still…yeah, rowdy. He’s about the size of Godzilla. His footsteps make the ground shake. He also likes to mess with people. Has a dry sense of humor.”

“Big corn-fed boy,” Dad remarked, nodding, still amused.

“And my roommate, Gartenberg. He’s like the straight man for the other two’s comedy routine, quite often. Zeppo or Gummo, I guess, playing off Chico and Harpo.” I considered this assessment for a moment, then corrected myself. “Well, sometimes he can be like Groucho, actually. He’s got a dry sense of humor, too. Vicious wisecracks and comebacks, sometimes. Probably the smartest guy on the team.”

“What position is he, now?”

“Flanker,” I replied. “He also plays guitar and sings. He introduced us to this beatnik bar not far from campus. Weird crowd—they snap fingers for applause instead of clapping. They’ll actually sit and listen to freestyle poetry and seem to enjoy it.”

“It’s gonna get even weirder in the ’60s,” Dad said. “You’ll see.”

“Then there’s Kiley,” I continued. “Linebacker. Solid muscle—including between his ears.”

Dad grinned.

“A redneck, with cowboy hat, cowboy boots—the whole rig. He’s the most hilarious of all, but I wouldn’t say he even has a sense of humor.”

Dad cocked an eyebrow at me.

“As near as I can figure,” I said, “life for him is just one ongoing phallic comparison chart.”

Dad busted out laughing. He didn’t do that very often.

“Gartenberg said one time that Kiley isn’t even human—he’s a walking, talking penis. And…yeah…he might be right. Outside of football, penis size seems to be all he thinks or cares about.”

Still chuckling while recovering from his guffaw, Dad remarked, “And he’s got the biggest one ever, I’m sure. Seven feet long, or so?”

“Oh, nobody in the whole history of penises was ever hung as heavy as Kiley,” I assured him. “Just ask him—he’ll tell ya. It would shatter his whole world if he ever found out different. I mean, he literally seems to have no other interests in life. Gartenberg and Bartok are hot-rodders. But ‘hot rod’ means something else entirely to Kiley.”

Dad shook his head. “On a serious note: isn’t it amazing that most young men knew how to work with their hands once upon a time? Get past 2000 or so and they can’t even change a tire or give a jump-start. Cruising, racing, wrenching—it was all part of the culture. Then somehow it went to playing videogames and surfing porn. Yay, progress.”

“I know which culture Kiley would find superior,” I quipped. “But yeah: the most popular hobby, by far, is modifying cars. Roomie’s got a T-bucket. Bartok’s got a chopped-and-channeled ’49 Mercury.”

“Classic lead sled,” Dad declared, nodding, still grinning.

“They were talking smack about the Studebaker, so we drug it on out to a lonely road nearby, and I blew their doors off. I guess that’s part of why they eventually seemed to give me some respect.”

Dad sobered. “Remember what I told you about keeping a low profile.”

“Yes sir. I sandbagged so that I just barely beat them. Wouldn’t let them look under the hood. I explained the fat tires by borrowing your cover story about secret research-and-development prototypes.”

“Don’t ever forget we’re taking a serious risk,” Dad said, frowning now. “The Erasers don’t just come after troublemakers who split the timestream. They murder temporal fugitives, refugees, temporal tourists…anything they find that doesn’t belong, they eliminate. I still don’t know how they found you in St. Louis, and that goes to show you they have resources we don’t understand, yet.”

The Erasers had murdered my biological family back at my native coordinates in 1988.

Back in the future.

“The continuum is a gigantic haystack,” Dad continued. “The TPF…the CPB…they have limited resources and can’t find every single needle. We don’t want to help them get lucky.”

TPF stood for Temporal Police Force, which Dad once worked for, but deserted to become a time-space fugitive. The CPB was the Continuum Protection Bureau—the TPF’s parent company. The Erasers were an elite, clandestine hit team from the TPF.

“Hot-rodding is good,” he continued. “Playing football is fine. Those help you blend in—to a point. But if too many people find out how fast your car is, that could start a buzz. If that buzz reaches the ears of somebody working for the CPB, your new identity will be targeted. And if there are photos of you available, that just makes it easier.”

I skipped Picture Day every year in high school, at Dad’s urging, so there would be no visual reference of me in the yearbook. I was in the group photo of the football team, but Dad had somehow gotten access to the negative before printing, so that there just happened to be a blemish in the film where my face was.

Dad and I had built the Stude together. The suspension and powertrain were composed of parts from decades in the future. It was much, much faster than any other street legal vehicle at my adopted coordinates…with the exception of Dad’s ’41 Willys. So much faster, that anyone with knowledge of a particular data set might decide it was an anachronism, and that its owner was a person of interest.

 

“Yes sir,” I replied. “I was careful, like I said. And I’ll stay careful. But how many CPB assets would even know enough about street racing to…if they somehow learned everything about it…decide the Stude doesn’t belong where and when it is?”

Dad shrugged. “Probably nobody—though there is this tool called the Internet. You may have heard of it.”

The Internet and World Wide Web were unknown to Joe Public at my native Coordinates, and earlier. But I had been introduced to it in trips to BH (Brazilian Highlands) Station in the 2000s.

“Okay,” I said. “But wouldn’t they have to know a lot even to research the right information online? I mean, they’d have to know smoke when they see it, before they start looking for the fire.”

“Listen, Hero: this is not a situation wherein you want to live out on the edge, seeing how much you can endanger yourself and get away with it. You might be able to step out to the very edge of the cliff and not fall over, but you need to stay far, far away from the cliff so no bad actor can push you over.”

When he called me “hero,” it was best that I just kept my mouth shut and listened.

“When you’re young and in great shape, you assume you’re invincible,” Dad went on. “But the Cabal has assets that can kill you like that.” He snapped greasy fingers to make his point. “When you don’t even know you’ve been targeted. Don’t ever try to defy Fate. Do whatever you can to avoid even drawing her attention.”

It was normal for Dad to personify fate. He spoke of it as he would some heartless, sadistic femme fatale.

Dad might be eccentric by some measures, but he was far from delusional. Neither was he superstitious. Yet he believed there was some supernatural or paranormal being who shadowed his every step, waiting for opportunity to pounce and visit disaster on his life. By escaping to different coordinates, Dad made it harder for that entity to track him. And me.

Sometimes I found myself adopting that same personification of Fate. Especially when I thought about my past life.

***

We got the new roller bearing in and put the machinery back together, then returned to the hacienda to clean up for supper.

Mami had roasted a chicken, fried potatoes, baked bread and sauteed vegetables. Again, out of respect for her beliefs, Dad said a prayer of thanks and asked a blessing on the meal, to a God he didn’t see as merciful, like she did. He might not have even believed He existed—though he did occasionally mention God, in a speculative way.

“I heard the Germans attacked the Russians,” Wyatt said, around a mouthful of potatoes.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Mami warned him.

Wyatt swallowed his food and said, “I thought they were allies.”

Dad nodded. “The USSR was part of the Axis for a while. Remember: they both invaded Poland.”

“Why did the Germans attack them, then?”

“It was bound to happen,” Dad said. “One of them was going to betray the other one, sooner or later. Hitler wanted to strike first, before Stalin’s numerical advantage could be fully brought to bear.”

“Why?”

“The National Socialists want ‘lebensraum‘,” Dad said. “Space to live. They need real estate for their population to grow, so their empire will last a thousand years—and they think the best lebensraum is to their east. The International Socialists, on the other hand, want the entire world under their system, as Marx envisioned it. Expanding into eastern Europe is a good start.”

Wyatt looked confused. “If both Germany and Russia attacked Poland, how come the Allies only declared war on Germany?”

Dad smiled at his son. “I want you to remember that question. Almost nobody has the guts or the brains to ask it. Maybe one day we’ll have the answer. And the answer might just be the same answer for most of the other questions about this ‘great crusade’.”

“Are we gonna join the war, Daddy?” Lana asked.

Dad nodded. “Yup.”

“Why?” Mami asked. “It has nothing to do with us.”

“Roosevelt wants us in the war against Germany,” Dad said. “Just like Wilson did last time. He’ll figure out a way to get us in it. Remember: Germany isn’t the only Axis country. But they are the only ones living with the consequences of us joining the last war against them. Not everybody has learned that lesson the way they did.”

“You think I’ll be old enough to go fight the Germans when it happens, Dad?” Wyatt asked.

Mami gasped. “God be merciful! Why would you even ask that, Mijo?”

“You won’t,” Dad said. “And be careful what you wish for.”

“But didn’t you fight in the Great War?” Wyatt asked.

“No.”

“But where did you get all your scars?”

“Never mind that.”

“Will Pedro have to go fight the Germans?” Lana asked, with a concerned glance at me.

“Let’s pray he won’t,” Mami said. “And enough of these war rumors. Let’s talk about something pleasant and enjoy our time together.”

When we had finished supper, Dad gave Mami a shoulder massage while she supervised Lana and Debbie doing dishes, Wyatt went outside to lock the chickens up in the coop. When he returned, he switched on the radio in the parlor. After some humming and whining, we could hear the Ink Spots crooning “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

That seemed to be the sentiment of most Americans at the time. And Mami.

Dad had been trying to dissuade me from military service. For now, football was enough to slake my primordial attraction to combat. And I didn’t doubt his warnings about Vietnam and the conflicts that followed. If Wyatt stayed in his native timestream, he would probably be sent to fight in Korea—which became the first obvious sacrifice of American blood on the altar of globalism. But I still felt a compulsion to be a fighting man.

Mami turned and gave Dad a wistful look. He took her by the hand and led her into the parlor. I drained my glass, set it on the counter next to the sink, and followed them.

My adopted parents danced as if they were the only two people in the world. Mami looked like she was in heaven, Dad looked pretty content, too.

The song ended and Artie Shaw’s “Frenesi” wafted out of the radio speaker. Now they laughed together and moved to the faster beat, with dance steps Mami had helped teach me.

I strolled to the library, retrieved a pulp magazine I had left there, returned to the parlor and sat on the couch to read it. While our parents danced, Wyatt brought in the components of a model airplane and resumed building it on some old newspaper he spread on the hardwood floor. When finished with the dishes, the girls also joined us in the parlor.

We all amused ourselves in different ways, but the whole family did it all together, at the same time and place. We preferred it this way. How different this world was, to the one I was born into!

The DJ read the script for a Blue Coal commercial, before playing the next record. The music got Mami right into the groove. A big, booming rhythm section blazed a boogie-woogie foundation and she shook her hips to the pounding beat of “Drum Boogie” by Gene Krupa’s orchestra. Debbie began laughing at Mami’s gyrations. Soon Lana joined in, clapping her hands in merriment. Even Wyatt began to snicker.

“Laugh it up, funny boy,” Dad told Wyatt, guiding Mami around the floor.

Watching games on TV was my preferred way to spend a Sunday evening—or playing videogames when it wasn’t football season. But I never felt as good after one of those entertaining Sundays as I did after times like this.

I bid my family goodbye a little later—taking Dad’s Packard, which I had used to make the jump here to the Orange Grove. When I had driven far enough along Dad’s private road that I wouldn’t be visible from the house, I engaged the warp generator.

Knowing what to expect made the jump seem like no big deal, but I experienced the same queasy feeling, the same brief visual distortion and sucking away of sound. When all my senses rushed back to normal, I was outside 1960 Bakersfield on a Friday afternoon.

I drove through town to the house I had lived in through junior high and high school. My Stude was sitting in the driveway. I parked the Packard in the garage.

Salvatora came out to greet me. I threw her up in the air, caught her, then bear-hugged her while blowing fart-like sounds against her cheek. She protested, but laughed despite herself. She was another of Dad’s kids who assumed I was her brother. Not half-brother or step-brother—the bona fide article.

Salvatora was five years old, now. I had been so busy doing my own thing that I hadn’t thought much about her. To see her innocent face was to feel joy. She had been speaking in full sentences for quite a while and seemed pretty bright.

“Guess what we finally got?” she asked, leading me by the hand inside the house.

“Mumps,” I guessed. “Measles. Chicken pox!”

She grinned and shook her head. “A television!”

“Wow,” I said. “Dad finally gave in, huh?”

“Well, he did something to it so that Mom can only watch certain shows. And I’m only allowed to watch when Mom or Dad let me. He wants me to read, and to play outside when I don’t have a new book.”

“What an ogre!” I said, tickling her.

Angelina came around the corner from the living room, greeted me with arms extended and a high-pitched squeal. “Welcome home, my college scholar!”

She was a Sicilian woman who spoke English with a heavy accent but was easily more gorgeous and shapely than any Hollywood starlet. Out of loyalty to Mami, it had been difficult for me to accept her being with Dad. Mami was still Mamita, and always would be, but Angelina eventually won me over. I shouldn’t think of her as “one of Dad’s mistresses.” She believed she was his wife. His only wife.

“Hi Mom.” I gave her a hug, lifting her off the ground, but quickly set her down, feeling a bit guilty and weird for noticing how attractive she was.

“I didn’t know you were coming back this weekend,” she said. “And so early! Please tell me you didn’t speed all the way to get here.”

“My classes ended early today. I wanted to check in on some of my friends. Go cruising tonight and tomorrow.”

She glared an icy look at me, placing one hand on her hip. “What a thing to say!”

Salvatora bit her lip and grimaced. “No Isaac, you came here to see us.”

“Okay,” I said. “I came here to see you.”

Angelina looked nothing like me, with her dark hair, dark eyes, and dark complexion. But surprisingly few friends or neighbors ever mentioned it. I did bear a strong resemblance to Dad, so maybe folks assumed his genes were dominant in me. For her part, Angelina never referred to me as anything other than her firstborn son. She had been conspiring with Dad and me to perpetrate my cover story for so long, she might have forgotten it wasn’t true.

Looking at Salvatora, it was easy to assume we were siblings, since she had high cheekbones like me and a (less-pronounced than mine) hump on the bridge of her nose.

“When is your father getting back?” Angelina asked.

“I assume tomorrow night. He’s been working on a generator at one of his properties.”

She nodded. She knew he owned lots of real estate and spent a lot of time at different places running different business ventures. That was technically true, just as my comment about fixing a generator technically was. What she didn’t know was that his properties were at several different coordinates in the continuum, and he had a diverse harem scattered around time and space with them.

I sometimes speculated that Angelina came from a Mafia family. It might explain why she didn’t ask questions about Dad’s business and would probably take what secrets she did know (like about me not being their child) to her grave.

We ate supper at six, like normal. Then I drove my Studebaker down to the Strip.

With windows down and rock & roll blaring from car speakers, I joined the unofficial two-way parade forming at dusk along the main drag. Most businesses were closed, but the business of youth was just getting started. Nearly every teenager in town was cruising the Strip just like me.

Of course, I was still a teenager too, even though off to college during weekdays. I was rare for being a college student back home this time of year, and also rare for being alone in my car.

Every teenaged boy with a functioning automobile and a driver’s license was piloting something up-and-down the Strip at some point that night: hot rods, lead sleds, street machines…or sometimes cars borrowed from parents. Those without wheels, or too young to drive, crowded in front and back seats around somebody who could. They joked and yelled to each other through open windows; leaned against fenders in parking lots shooting the breeze; sat in their cars at Burger City or other drive-ins eating and drinking sodas. Most of them were cheerful. Some were rowdy.

I took in the scene academically at first. Dad once quoted an old axiom about eras and generations to me:

 

Hard times create strong men.

Strong men create easy times.

Easy times create weak men.

Weak men create hard times.

 

Back at my native coordinates, weak men controlled society’s institutions. Having visited the relative future from then, I knew that those weak men would, in fact, create hard times. But in 1960 Bakersfield, we enjoyed unbelievably smooth sailing.  Strong men had survived the Great Depression and World War Two, then built an idyllic paradise for their children to inherit.

Bakersfield was what it was because of the exodus of migrant workers escaping from the Dust Bowl a generation ago during the privations (some with natural origins, but most man-made) of the New Deal. Most of my carefree teenage peers were children of desperate men who had to scrape and claw their way to a living, who usually couldn’t afford a car of their own, much less burn gas on purpose cruising. And they had worked too long of hours on the farms and oil fields to party every Friday and Saturday night.

The word “teenager” wasn’t even invented until my adopted generation came along, with their allowances, their own cars, freedom from labor in the family business, and a still relatively free market dreaming up all sorts of products that catered to their every whim.

My analytical train of thought kept getting interrupted by people waving and calling to me from open car windows. I hadn’t been gone so long that they had forgotten who their starting quarterback had been. I waved and called back.

Most of these offspring of Okies had their car radios tuned to KUZZ, which played country-western, honky-tonk, and rockabilly. I was one of the rebels, who preferred Ross “the Boss” Beaucamp and the records he spun on KDIG.

“Dig it on the K-Dig,” Ross the Boss was saying, as I eased to a stop at a red light. “Elvis Presley may be gone with the draft, but his tunes still send us. Now I’d like to remind you—”

A blue ’55 Chevy pulled abreast of the Stude and I could feel somebody staring at me. I turned my radio down to hear the Chevy’s engine as I craned my neck to look. By the sound, the overhead-valve V-8 was a little warmed-over. I also heard Charlie Rich trying to sound like Elvis singing “Lonely Weekends.” Obviously, the son-of-an-Okie at the wheel had his radio tuned to KUZZ. He and his passengers regarded me with stony faces. He revved his engine. I stared back and revved mine. I recognized the driver and one passenger from somewhere. Maybe they had been sophomores or juniors during my senior year.

Neither of us said a word to each other. We didn’t need words to know that when that light turned green, we were gonna floor the gas and see who could make it to the next red light first.

The light turned green. Our engines roared. The Stude squatted down and shot forward, laying twin patches of rubber as I banged through the gears. The Chevy was outclassed in every way. Even the rear end was a one-legger. He just couldn’t match the power I applied to the pavement. I blasted through two intersections before a red light caught me and I had to brake hard, setting the Stude down on its nose at the crosswalk. I checked the mirror. The Chevy decelerated rapidly and screeched around a corner onto a side street. As it turned, an arm shot out the window, flipping me the bird.

“Yer mama, Jaeger!” a voice echoed down the street.

I guess not everybody who remembered me was a fan.

A yellow ’48 Ford rolled to a stop next to me at the stop light. A chorus of voices cheered. Melvin Jurado and some other Pachucos I remembered grinned at me.

“What’s up, Jaeger?” Melvin greeted.

“Mel!” I called back. “Long time no see!”

“I’m glad I was here to see that,” he said. “Kenny’s been bragging about that ’55 ever since you left town, man!”

“It turns corners behind me and sneaks away real good,” I replied.

He nodded with a toothy grin.

The light turned green and we eased through the intersection, keeping pace so we could carry on our conversation through our open windows.

Melvin pointed at the pimple-faced boy in the passenger seat. “Man, I was just telling him when we saw you: can’t nobody in town beat you. You’re still the champ!”

“You still running a flathead?” I asked, knowing the answer already from the sound.

“Yeah, but I’m building an engine I got from the junk yard. You just wait, Jaeger: when I get everything ready, I’ll come looking for you!”

“Okay, Mel. You better weld your doors on.”

“You wait, Jaeger—you’ll see. Hey, watch out for Pierce! Last we saw him he was hiding in that alley beside Wheeler’s!”

Pierce was one of the cops who prowled the main drag on weekends, looking to hand out citations to young people doing what I had just done.

A few more minutes and I became separated from Mel in the traffic. As I passed Burger City, somebody cried my name. I craned my neck to scan the parking lot as I passed. My eyes barely had time to register a waving arm and long blonde hair.

At the next opportunity, I whipped around and headed back toward Burger City. I parked right next to the convertible Buick the blonde was leaning against. Two other girls were with her and they all covered their mouths and tittered, glancing at me and each other. The blonde looked familiar but I couldn’t place her.

“Mule Skinner Blues” was blaring from all the radios turned to KUZZ. I shut down the engine, opened the door and walked over to the girls. Their nervous mannerisms intensified as I drew close.

“Hi,” I said.

The blonde bit her lip, smiling, looked away, then met my gaze. “Howdy, Ike.”

The closer I got, the younger she looked.

The other girls greeted me, bashfully, but I concentrated on the blonde. “Do I know your name?”

In the lights of the Strip, I thought she blushed. “It’s Dinah.”

“Your face looks familiar.”

“I’m Kip’s sister.”

“No kidding? Oh, hey. No, I see the resemblance,” I said. “I remember, now. How old are you?”

“Fourteen. How old are you?”

I exchanged small talk with her and her friends for a few minutes, but then found somewhere else to be. They were just too young.

I cruised some more.

This was the social network in postwar America. There was a sort of addictive zeitgeist to it, too.

The cheery, boisterous vibes were infectious. Everybody was here to socialize and have fun. Some pursued fun by street racing. Some by pulling pranks on others. Some by gossiping. But by far, the most popular way to seek fun was by flirting, and making time with the opposite sex.

Nobody batted an eye at all the money or time being wasted. The country wasn’t in a depression or fighting a war—just the opposite. Nobody was worried about where their next meal was coming from, or if they or their fathers or brothers might be killed overseas. The worst problems in this universe would be getting grounded, suffering a flat tire, or failing to find a date.

Easy times.

Brenda Lee’s “I’m Sorry” warbled out of radios all along the street until I got to Hep Shakes—Burger City’s primary competition. There, radios were turned to KDIG. I parked and strolled over to the pay phone. I called Blanca’s house and got her mother, who told me she was out.

I approached the walk-up window, dodged a car-hop, and heard Rosie and the Originals’ “Angel Baby” blare out of the nearby radio speakers. It was then that I noticed about half the crowd at Hep Shakes was Hispanic.

The world stopped as every Chicana sang along, and every Chicano either sang or bopped along, too. It was like a trance or something.

On Oldsmobile pulled up to an order stand. It was packed full of Latinas, and every single one of them was singing “Angel Baby” along with Rosie. They remained in the car and made no move to get out until the song was over. Then there was a collective sigh, the doors opened, and the girls spilled out. Three of them mobbed to the restroom, jabbering all the way.

I ordered a strawberry shake and a burger with fries, thinking I might take them inside and sit in something besides the Studebaker’s seat for a while. Once at a booth, I watched the scene outside. Now “Alley Oop” was playing and nobody was in a trance. The girls returned from the bathroom and I recognized Fatyma Benavides.

She was a year behind me in school, and a Top Tier scorcher. Blanca was also Top Tier, but with facial features that had a streetwise, cruel quality to them. Fatyma’s beauty struck me as of a more innocent, vulnerable flavor. I had wanted to ask her out for years, but we had never been between romances at the same time. I thumped the plate glass window with the heel of my hand until I got her attention.

She stopped in her tracks while, looking irritated, she turned to face me through the glass. She showed me the FGGE (Female Glare of Guarded Evaluation) before recognition registered on her face.

“Ike Jaeger?”

I wiped my mouth with a napkin, got up from the booth, and walked outside to meet her. That she waited for me was a good sign.

“I did not know you were in town,” she said as I approached, with a musical lilt in her voice.

“Here for the weekend,” I said. “What are you up to?”

She shrugged. “Me, Delores and the girls are just hanging out.”

“Ain’t that kinda’ crowded?”

She clasped her hands behind her back and twisted at the waist so that her shoulders rotated one way, then the other. Her head was tilted slightly downward but her eyes rolled up to stay fixed on my gaze. “Why it is crowded?”

I had learned the customs and rituals of postwar cruising pretty well over the last few years.

Not everybody wanted to admit it, but everybody who wasn’t already dating somebody hoped to meet somebody and hit it off. (Of course, some who were already dating wanted to meet somebody new and jump ship.) Some were lonely. Some were hurting or humiliated from a break-up and didn’t know what to do by themselves. Some were jealous of friends who were with somebody, or of the person dating their crush.

Pride and yearning met at the intersection of Irreverence and Hilarity. Most amorous teenagers at these coordinates masked their insecurity by hanging out with a group. They covered their desperation with forced mirth. They laughed at everything—including a lot of stuff that simply wasn’t funny. That was all part of showing the world that they took nothing seriously. To be without a date was pitiful, they assumed, but to be sad or angry about it was worse. So they clung to their cliques and pretended to be above it all. Everything was funny, and they fed off each other’s fake amusement. Sure, we don’t have dates—because it’s just not that important to us! Can’t you see that we’re just enjoying life? Why—you don’t want to go out with me, do you?

Still, some were, due to various circumstances, unable to cruise as part of a group. The bravest of them came to Cruise Night anyway, alone. Girls rarely did anything alone, but once in a while, they put themselves out there with no backup. As a rule, such girls were Tier Three and lower. But a bad breakup or other scenario could make even the most attractive girls desperate. They would use timing and trajectory to cross paths with a boy or group of boys, hoping one (the “cutest” one, of course) would make a pass. But she had to be cool while presenting herself as bait. The safest demeanor to adopt was distraction. She was just so preoccupied with walking to some destination (or ordering a shake and fries, or window shopping at a closed store, or making a call from a payphone) that she wouldn’t even notice if you didn’t chat her up. And if you did feed her a line, she might even pretend not to hear so you’d have to repeat yourself.

Cruise Night was kind of like a talent show, but everybody was performing from a repertoire of just three or four types of acts.

I didn’t mind coming alone—not because I was necessarily brave, but simply because I knew from experience that the stigma of being dateless was self-imposed and mostly imaginary. As long as you weren’t creepy or awkward, or clueless at talking to girls, getting dates was easier this way. It would be even easier for solo girls, but fear and self-awareness kept most of them from taking the easy path.

“Well,” I told Fatyma, “I have an empty passenger seat. Not crowded at all in my car.”

She cocked her hips and twisted her mouth in a sort of skeptical smirk that suggested I wasn’t trying hard enough.

“You hungry?” I asked.

“For why?”

“‘Cause I was about to have a bite. You could have one with me, my treat, and maybe go for a ride with me afterwards.”

“The slick football star,” she said, with a grin that was now hard to read. “This is how you pick up all the college girls?”

“Naw. For them, all I have to do is show them my advanced anatomy textbook and wiggle my eyebrows. ”

“Ai-yai-yai!” She seemed to be genuinely amused, now.

“How ’bout it?” I prodded.

“I could eat something, I think,” she said.

I opened the door for her. We went inside and she joined me at the booth. After she had ordered, I asked, “So what happened to what’s-his-face?”

“You mean Juan? Broke up,” she replied with a win-some-lose-some gesture. “Where is Blanca?”

I shrugged. “I called. She wasn’t home.”

She nodded. “She could not shut up about you for a while. Now she say it is not so serious.”

“I guess it’s not.”

“You do this so much? Date girls you are not serious with?”

“Don’t tell me Fatyma: you’re one of those chicks who demands a proposal before you’ll agree to a first date.”

Her guarded expression finally lightened up and an easy smile spread over her face. “No. I am not so strict. Not always.”

“Are you gonna be tonight?”

“I am here talking to you, no?”

“Okay. Live a little.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“You just did.”

She rolled her eyes and shook her head as if exasperated. “Why me?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, why me? All the other girls in the car. All the girls on the Strip tonight. Everybody knows all the gringas would jump to ride with you. Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“For real, Ike. I am serious. You never ask me out when you were at the school. But now you do. Why?”

“Because you’re not with Juan. Or Luis. Or Mianjel. You were always with somebody.”

“Me?” She shook her head and her already dark complexion got darker. Like she was blushing.

“I saw you walking from school once, my junior year. I saw in my rear view mirror—I had already passed by. I thought, ‘I should go offer her a lift. I should U-turn and go back and offer’. But I thought, ‘Nah, just keep going… ‘”

“You did not!”

“‘Nah, that’s a creep move—it’ll scare her. Well, she’s walking alone, so maybe she’s between boyfriends. Nah, I don’t think she likes gringos.’ So I just drove on down the street.”

“Between boyfriends!” she cried, covering her mouth and taking a swipe at me. She wanted to feign outrage, like I had just called her a slut, but was having a giggle fit.

“I figured I’d see you at your locker the next day during passing period, as usual, and I’d make the offer that day. But when I saw you, ol’ Luis was talking to you, and you were making eyes at him.”

“What? No. Nuh-uh! You are too much a liar, Ike.”

I placed one hand against my chest and held my other hand up so that the palm faced her. “Cross my heart. Scout’s honor.”

“You are playing with me, I think. Really, Ike? You swear?”

I showed her my index finger, put on a solemn expression, rose from the booth, and marched to the juke box. I dropped a dime in, selected “This I Swear” by the Skyliners, and watched her as the record began to play. She busted out laughing when she recognized the song, then shook her head at me as I returned to the table.

I’m pretty sure she was flattered, but concealed it under a big show of disapproval because I was acting silly.

And I was. But girls liked silly behavior in certain contexts.

“So, you were scared of Luis?”

“I didn’t think you would just dump him for me,” I said. “Would you have?”

“Well, it is nice to know you are not so arrogant,” she said.

The ice broken, we chatted until finished eating. Her amigas took turns strolling by on the walkway outside, smiling, waving, or winking to her as they passed, but hardly acknowledging me. They eventually crammed back in the Oldsmobile without her and rolled out onto the Strip.

After I paid for our food and drinks, we walked together out to the Stude. We didn’t hold hands and she didn’t take my arm. She seemed comfortable with me by then, but I didn’t think she’d appreciate me trying to move that fast.

I opened the passenger door for her and she climbed in. I went around, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine.

“This is the loudest car in California,” she remarked. “I always hear when you are in town—even miles and miles away.”

“Part of being the fastest is the noise.”

She nodded and pursed her lovely lips. “You are maybe a little arrogant, I think.”

We made a couple circuits of the Strip, then I stopped for gas.

“How you doing?” I asked Fatyma. “Anything you’d like to do?”

“Like what, Ike?”

I shrugged. “Bowling alley’s open. Golden Gate Golf. Or I could take you home if you’re bored or turning into a pumpkin.”

“Why do boys say that?” she asked. “Cinderella no turns into a pumpkin—her carriage does. And I am not bored. I have fun.”

“Okay,” I said. “You wanna cruise the Strip some more?”

She shrugged. “Is there somewhere else you want to go?”

“We could always go to the submarine races.” I watched her for a reaction.

“If you want,” she said, fluttering her eyelids.

I left the Strip and set a course for the river.

Fatyma was pleasant company. I liked that she would wave to friends in other cars, but didn’t try to make a big production of it to catch everybody’s attention…like cheerleaders and others would do. It was a shame I hadn’t been able to date her in school.

The traffic thickened as we got close to the Point. When we reached the river bank there were at least a dozen cars parked already. I prowled around looking for a spot, with my headlights off. It wasn’t cool to sweep your lights over other cars, or park too close to somebody else.

Again, I considered the historical/generational lottery. Nobody there and then needed to worry about finding a job, but 20 years before, that was a big concern. Nobody had come to the Point because they were shipping out tomorrow for overseas and this might be the last time their sweetheart ever saw them again—though plenty of that had happened 15-18 years ago. Nope—they were parking here simply because they could and they wanted to.

I didn’t want to be a weak man, but I sure loved living in easy times.

“Why do you call this ‘submarine races’?” Fatyma wondered. “Because submarines come down the river at night? You buy tickets?”

Was she really so innocent? “I dunno.”

“Oh, you know very well what happens here, I think, Isaac Jaeger.”

“I know people who come watch them seem to really enjoy it.”

I pulled into an empty spot, engaged the emergency brake and killed the engine with the transmission still in gear. Without the rumble of my engine, the night fell quiet. I turned the radio back on, softly, hoping Ross the Boss would help me out by setting the right mood. A commercial ended and he spun “Stay” by Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs. That wasn’t too far off the mark.

“So you want to ‘really enjoy’ this night with me, Ike?”

“Don’t you want to enjoy this night?”

“Maybe if the submarines have a very close, exciting race. Should we walk down to the water for a good look, maybe?”

“Knock it off,” I said. “What do you call it, anyway?”

She giggled, then said, “I always hear it called ‘Lovers’ Lane’.”

“You’re not so innocent,” I said.

“I am not?” Fatyma was a goddess in broad daylight, but the moonlight really enhanced her beauty. She didn’t have to try to look cute, but when she did, it was overwhelming.

The Zodiacs’ lyrics couldn’t have been timed better:

 

Won’t ya place your sweet lips to mi-i-i-ah-ah-ah-i-ine?

Won’t ya say you love me…all of the ti-ah-ah-ah-i-ime?

Stay!

Whoa-wo-wo-yeah just a little bit longer…

Please!

Please, please, please please, tell-a-me you’re goin’ to!

 

I scooted out from under the wheel, close to her. She scooted along the bench seat toward me.

“Isaac?” She bit her luscious lower lip and appeared almost bashful for a moment.

“What’s on your mind?”

“I have something to tell you.”

“Tell me.”

Her eyelids drooped as her mouth drew so close to mine that I felt the heat of her breath. “I would have dumped Luis for you, I think.”

Ross the Boss provided the mood music while I got caught up in a starburst of passion.

Easy times, indeed. Life was so good, it felt as if the easy times would never end.

Housekeeping

Happy Friday.

The issue with the “Subscribe” feature still isn’t resolved yet. To put it briefly: i’s not as easy as a few mouse clicks. Because of my schedule, it might be a week or two before I can dedicate enough time to fix the underlying problems, then this particular problem itself.

Once again, I apologize to everyone who attempted to subscribe but couldn’t. Hopefully this problem won’t exist too much longer.

An Interview with Milton Lane

By THE INFAMOUS REVIEWER Gio 🦀


Q1: what was the initial motivation to write Island of The Lost? And what or who influenced the final product?


ML: Before I had started writing Island of the Lost my ambition was to write an urban fantasy novel. At the time I was reading the Monster Hunter series by Larry Correia (paid link) and wanted to try my hand at the genre. As I was fleshing out the story and the world I soon realized I didn’t have the skills to tackle a story of that length and scope. In the end I shelved the idea, kept the notes for the world I had built, and set about writing a smaller more contained adventure. Island of the Lost was the result.

Hannibal Harken started out as a character who had built a legend around himself seeking out the weird and magical, cataloging what he found, and creating a vast encyclopedia to pass on that information to others. In the original idea he was a bit of a character who would be referenced but never appear. His journal entries would have appeared in the appendix of the book and would have served as a means of providing world building and lore without dumping all that information in the middle of the narrative. This idea is why Island of the Lost starts out the way it does.

In the end I would have to say there are two main sources of influence on this novel. I’ve always loved the 1920’s – 1940’s style action hero and Harken was meant to fit into that mold. I wanted the main character to be in a similar vein to Indiana Jones and Rick O’Connell. But it wasn’t until I was introduced to Doc Savage via Razorfist’s video on pulp characters that Harken really coalesced as a character. The Man of Bronze really is the first Superhero and the gold standard for this type of fiction. To understand what makes Doc such a pulp icon helps a writer understand the genre.

My second influence would be the Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. I loved the worlds they created in that series and it has served as inspiration for the world Harken and his friends inhabit.


Q2: are The Island of the Lost and your other (cyberpunk) novel your very first official publications?


ML: The Island of the Lost and The City Beneath the Eye (paid links) are my very first official publications. I have written quite a bit in the past. From short stories as a kid to a book trilogy when I was in early college. Telling stories has been a passion of mine for a while, though it was only for friends. Until recently I saw writing as a fun hobby but not something I would do as a profession. It wasn’t until Razorfist put out that Iron Age video that I decided to throw my hat in the ring and start creating for others’ enjoyment.


Q3: this book went through a ‘revision’ as stated under the book description on Amazon. Can you share with VP what exactly was revised and why?

ML: Oh yeah, the book went through a major revision! When I first started writing and connecting with other people on X/Twitter I became aware of what Brian Niemeier calls ‘Self-Publish Syndrome’. Self Pub opens the door for everyone to put together a novel and publish it through Amazon no matter the quality. Because of this, self published works carry a stigma of being poorly edited, poorly written garbage. I was determined to avoid that stigma, then fell face first into it.

As I finished the first edit on the manuscript, I knew I needed an editor to polish this story as much as possible. At the time I had let one of my coworkers know I was working on a novel and was looking for an editor. He had a contact that had spent over twenty years as a technical writer and this person had spoken about moving into editing as a side hustle. He put us in contact and we worked out a nominal fee for an editing pass of my manuscript. It was more affordable than some of the editing rates I was seeing at the time, so I went for it.

I got the manuscript back and there were a ton of corrections and suggestions made. At the time I was very pleased with the results and set about fixing the issues the technical writer had found. After the revisions I did a two more editing passes, confident I was well on my way to avoiding the pitfalls of self publishing.

I was riding high right after publishing, too. The initial reviews were positive, and I made more sales than I expected. Then the critical reviews came in. The reviews weren’t negative but they were brutally honest. Throw in a few direct messages from fellow writers who reached out to offer me some advice and one thing became clear: the story was good but the manuscript was a mess. Readers mentioned issues such as grammar, sentence structure, and pacing. From an outsider’s perspective it looked like I had just thrown my book out into the world without getting it into the hands of an editor.

This was a gut punch. Here I am asking people for their money and delivering a substandard product. It had to be corrected.

By this time I had made better connections in the Iron Age/Small Press/Pulp Rev circles. I had made a connection with a fantastic editor by the name of Daniel Riley who was working on editing my second novel. I was so impressed with his work and his dedication I sent him the manuscript for Island of the Lost while I got City Beneath the Eye ready for publication.

I figured, how many corrections could my manuscript really need? After all, I wrote a rough draft, did one round of edits, got an ‘editor’ to make corrections, then did a second and third pass. The problems should be few and far between, right?

Boy, was I wrong. Daniel took that manuscript behind the woodshed. He was absolutely brutal with his notes and corrections. Seeing all those notes was a humbling experience. But I was happy to see him tear it apart like he did. By being unrelenting in his edits, Daniel showed me he cared deeply about making my story the best it could possibly be. And the results speak for themselves.

The new version has been revised top to bottom, is leaner where it needed to be leaner, and is fleshed out in areas that needed some extra attention. Without Daniel’s edits my manuscript would not be at the level it needed to be.


Q4: we are seeing a ton of sword & sorcery in the indie circles at the moment, followed by sci-fi and some cyberpunk. But what I really think needs more of a ‘revival’ is the golden age pulp writing like you brought in The Island of the Lost. Do you think you could be the one carrying that torch, or do you feel like your heart is more into sci-fi  and/or cyberpunk?

ML: I do feel like classic adventure fiction has a lot of potential for a revival. Though I don’t think I’ll be the torchbearer to lead it. I see myself as following a path already laid out by other Indies who have worked hard to figure all this stuff out. Brina Williamson’s Merona Grant novels are in the same vein and from all accounts are very good. I also think Cirsova and Story Hack Magazine have published some pulp adventures as well. I’m sure there are others who have already published works. People like them did all the heavy lifting to create an environment for others to be able to successfully publish and start finding an audience.

For a proper revival I think it would take a Lester Dent or Walter B. Gibson type to succeed. Someone who knows how to spin a yarn, has the right combination of lived experiences and imagination to draw from, and can put out several adventures a year. I’m not sure who can pull it off, but I’m sure someone can.

To be honest, I feel like I’m still finding my feet as an author. The City Beneath the Eye is an outlier that I half stumbled into while trying to make a short story for a magazine submission. I don’t see myself doing much more in the cyberpunk genre but I have some plans for various books that would fit Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Science Fantasy as genres as well as more adventure fiction.


Q5: what I found refreshing is that your MC doesn’t get romantically involved with any of the female characters in the story. Nothing wrong with romance per se but sometimes these relationships feel forced or very routine-like. Was that something you intentionally avoided?


ML: Not getting the main character involved in a romance subplot was a conscious decision. I don’t find anything wrong with romance but it certainly didn’t fit here. When formulating Hannibal as a character I wanted him to walk the line between being a gentleman and a hell raiser. The kind of man who could navigate the complex social structures of high society by day and go drinking with the lads at night. With that in mind I wanted him to take a more classic approach to romance. Rather than the ‘Love interest of the Week’ where Hannibal shacks up with a different woman at the end of the book similar to a character like James Bond, he is very much a Gentleman in search of his Lady. I may introduce a love interest in the future, but I’d rather it be one important character. Someone who compliments Harken well.


Q6: are the places and locations listed in this story entirely fictional?


ML: The places and locations in this story are largely fictional but do pull greatly from real world locations that I’ve been to. The Invincible is similar to the Lusitania and Titanic while the Island has geography similar to the U.S. East coast. Though the layout of the sunken bay in the fourth act combines elements from Hanauma bay in Hawaii as well as fuel piers and stations I’ve seen.


Q7: not sure why, but as I was reading the dialogue, I just kept hearing the characters’ voices in an Irish accent. In your vision, what would these characters really sound like?


ML: When creating the characters I tried to ‘cast’ them with actors to give me a clearer mental picture of how they looked and talked. And, by referencing actors from various regions, I was able to solidify each character’s voice in my head. For instance: Hannibal Harken, to me, speaks with a received pronunciation style upper class accent, while Lord Blackwrym speaks with the accent of British aristocracy. The characters of Annabelle, Magnolia, and Sam speak with a southern drawl while Colin O’Shea has an Northern Irish accent. Javier, the man from nowhere, speaks with a generic American accent.


Q8: speaking of language, I believe that for this retro pulp style to really work, prose is crucial. One slip and modern euphemisms can make the whole thing collapse. I was really surprised that you really made that conscious effort to keep it all rooted in that wholesome prosaic style of the great pulp classics. How did you manage that in such a brilliant fashion?


ML: Like you, I hate modern talk in my period entertainment. I find it to be lazy on a scriptwriter or author’s part to add in that kitschy way of speaking that is so prevalent in everything today. If I’m playing Red Dead Redemption I don’t want Arthur Morgan sounding like a guy from a 1990s action movie. If I’m watching Lord of the Rings I don’t want lol-so-random Joss Whedon style snark. I want the creator’s best attempt at authenticity.

Its’ with that mentality I approached the dialogue in The Island of the Lost. I wanted people to speak as authentically to the period as possible. To achieve this I made a conscious effort to keep modern vernacular out of my story. This was a challenge as it took several passes to catch innocuous but modern idioms that would pull the reader out of the narrative. In the end I’m satisfied with the results though I know I’ll have to study more period literature and prose to sharpen the dialogue for future adventures. Thankfully one of the authors I follow on X/Twitter posted a link to an archive of pulp magazines so there’s plenty of material to learn from and enjoy! I wish I could remember who it was so I could thank them publicly and one day buy them a whiskey and cigar for the treasure trove of pulp goodness.

Q9: what can we expect in the foreseeable future from Mr. Lane the ‘classic pulp fiction writer’? Are we going to see The Adventurer back in action soon? I know it’s very easy to take the wrong turn with a character: write too much of the same stuff and people will say it got boring. Write a totally different story and people will say that the new stuff lost its original appeal. Can you disclose anything you are planning, now that you’ve made some true fans of this whole universe?


ML: For the foreseeable future it’s going to be self-publishing novels and honing my craft. I still have half a million words of writing to ‘get the suck out’ so to speak in regards to writing as a profession. Even if I’m producing novels entirely on my own I want to hit a professional standard. I’m comfortable telling stories that top out at 60k – 100k words which is close to the standard pulp length novel. I’m also looking to produce more short fiction and long fiction as I continue to grow as an author.

As far as what I’m working on, I have two books planned for this year. The first is a second Hannibal Harken adventure titled The Terror Beneath Mt. Misery. The outline is complete and work has already started. The other book I hope to have written, if not fully published, is a second book in the Cyberpunk dystopia of Salvation titled ‘Upon the Streets of Salvation.’ That book will complete the thematic arc of the first book and finish the duology.

I plan on doing more Hannibal Harken stories. Ultimately, my long term goal is to hit a professional level of 2.5k words a day and 200,000 words written a year. Once I hit that level I’m confident I could do one or two adventure books a year to a high standard. Like the classic pulp novels that inspired Harken’s world these will be serialized adventures rather than a series. I want each book to be a self-contained adventure that an interested reader can pick up and enjoy without reading everything that came before.

I am conscious of how difficult this type of writing can be. Go too far in one direction and you get formulaic and stale, drift too far in the other and you lose what made readers love your creation. My goal is to tell interesting tales of high adventure set in a world influenced by pulp and high-fantasy. With each novel a reader comes away satisfied by a story well told and leaves them dreaming of what else is out there just waiting to be discovered.


Tell us what you think in the comments, and subscribe for more great reviews and interviews with independent authors!

Fallen Crest Abbey by James Krake

An inside look by INFAMOUS 🦀


“They fought for themselves and others but paid the ultimate price. They have been buried in the southern cemetery of Fallen Crest Abbey”


There is this author/youtuber I’ve been following now for some time by the name of James Krake. Although known mostly as a cyberpunk genre writer, Krake also runs a webnovel on Royal Road titled The Undying Emperor. This novel departs a good deal from the typical genre Krake is known for. I won’t spend too much time suggesting our readers to start following The Undying Emperor, though they should, for it is truly a marvelous work of sword and sorcery fiction extravaganza. But what I really want to zero-in on is the short story within this webnovel; a true ‘hidden gem’: 

Fallen Crest Abbey.


INFAMOUS: what is Fallen Crest Abbey and what inspired this story?

Krake: Bram Stoker’s Dracula actually. I like exploring form and genre and a gothic horror epistolary story intrigued me. That started the series of questions I had to answer in order to make a satisfying story that would actually matter to readers of my webnovel. I’ve been doing a good deal of thinking about how sci-fi and fantasy should be incorporating matters of faith, so I wanted to take a look at some of the religious aspects of this fantasy world.

INFAMOUS: I’ve read both of your published cyberpunk novels and follow The Undying Emperor on Royal Road, but to me it is in Fallen Crest Abbey that I sense a new level of maturity from you as an author. Do you agree?

Krake: Fallen Crest Abbey was written to have a different tone and feeling to it. I’m not sure I would call it ‘maturity’, but it’s certainly different. The novellas I am writing in 2024 should feel closer to how Fallen Crest Abbey came together, and next year I have a stand-alone I’ll write which should be a full novel length experience that’s even better.


INFAMOUS: sometimes this question gets thrown around a lot: will we ever see the likes of a new Tolkien, or a new Howard, or a new Lovecraft, in the realms of indie authors? I think we have, in the works of British writer R. V. Mills. But when I read Fallen Crest Abbey I see that same ‘sparkle’, that same unrelenting and unapologetic quest–albeit under a different writing style-for new legends in the making. 

Is that something that you have been aware of at all?

Krake: The problem, I think, is that those names became those names because they were able to influence people. They had an impact on future literary endeavors the way Doyle did (or further back, Shakespeare). So, I don’t think the question today is “will we see somebody who writes as well as so-and-so?” but will that person get noticed? Just looking at the numbers, and the advantages today, there are probably MANY people better than Tolkien, who simply haven’t gotten the reverence because society is more connected, critical, and quick to move on.


INFAMOUS: speaking of legends, there is a creature we’re introduced to in FCA called a ‘grendel’. I found some of his features most fascinating. Would you share with us how this grendel came about?

Krake: Beowulf, mixed with my approach to trolls that tries to portray them as early hominids. I coaxed up the legend the way I felt people would rumor-monger around a campfire and indulged the horror aspect it can create.


INFAMOUS: one thing that I loved about Fallen Crest Abbey is how most chapters open with a formal letter written by one of the characters. It really is an effective way to set up a certain mood and pace. Was this a conscious decision or did it just develop that way as you wrote the story?

Krake: It was how I initially conceived of the story, because it posed a technical challenge. I had to figure out how to explain the plot beats, endear the characters, and keep everything well paced, despite using journal entries, letters, posted bounties, and any other ‘record’ that I could come up with. A large reason I became attracted to the idea was the challenge of ending the story, and writing it, without the structure of the story itself giving away the ending.

INFAMOUS: can you disclose future projects-if any-related to Fallen Crest Abbey? What about future works not necessarily related to FCA?

Krake: Well it’s clearly part of The Undying Emperor, which is mostly a life story, hero’s journey of conquest. That has a particular genre to it, however. The world itself has possibilities far beyond what befits essentially a YA action story designed for weekly releases. This year I’ll be writing a novella that is to be like a mix of Romeo & Juliet with The Count of Monte Cristo, taking place in the same world, and I’ve got the start of a novel that started from the question “What if The Odyssey, but the main character couldn’t fight? Can a scholar be a good protagonist?”

On a more immediate horizon, my next paperback release is just around the corner, keep an eye out for Low Key Connections, a Narnia-style isekai. Light hearted, fun, and also high action.


Follow here to not miss out.


Well folks, there you have it. In a world of TikTok, instant gratification, and low attention span, supporting authors like James is important to keep good story-writing thriving. If you’re reading this, most likely you already know that there are great authors out there who deserve recognition and that, sadly, reading books in general is dwindling in our society. 

Support these writers, support books, support Virtual Pulp! 

INFAMOUS 🦀


Click to read Fallen Crest Abbey:

 

Island of the Lost by Milton Lane – a Review

Review by INFAMOUS 🦀

 

When I first decided to review this I was a bit nervous. What made me feel that way was the disclosure found under the book details on Amazon:

 

“Paperback and ebook editions have been revised and updated following customer feedback as of 31 OCT 23.”

 

To me that was an instant red flag as the term ‘revision’ these days can mean anything in a book. What was revised exactly is something I will further discuss with the author in an upcoming Q&A interview, so stay tuned.

By the time I was done reading, however, I knew this was going to enter our 5-star elite club here at VP! This novel absolutely delivers everything you would expect by looking at its cover (fantastic cover, by the way!). All my fears wiped away, Milton Lane absolutely crushed it by bringing back a traditional pulp classic genre that is authentic, respectful of those authors who pioneered the genre, and keeping a fine balance between fantasy trope injected with an acute sense of realism.

After surviving the mysterious sinking of the ship The Invincible, former Naval Officer Hannibal Harken (a.k.a. The Adventurer) finds himself stranded on an uncharted island with a group of other survivors. Now, facing not only the natural adversities that the island itself poses, but also some not-so-friendly locals, the Adventurer must rely on his skills, intuition, and a few unexpected friends, to survive and get back to civilization.

Pretty simple concept, and yet SO easy to bungle up if the writer doesn’t do his homework. Fortunately in The Island of the Lost (paid link) this is not the case. Far from it!

Lane is able to capture that retro pulp style we got to know in Doc Savage, Solomon Kane, and even The Shadow to an extent. The story moves along nicely beginning to end, the prose is classic 1930s-40s style with rich and witty dialogues. 

The characters are not dull and predictable. In fact, although there are a few good looking female characters featured, our main character does not get involved in a romance, or ‘demand’ a heartfelt kiss from the girl before going on risking his life. Not that there’s anything wrong with romantic tropes, but as an astute writer you also gotta know when this would aid the story or  simply feel too forced while doing nothing to propel the main narrative.

Last thoughts that really bring this review to a positive conclusion: this story is self-contained. It has a 1)beginning,  2)bridge, 3)climax, and 4)conclusion. You don’t have to wait for the next book in the series to find out what happens, yet, at the same time you hope there will be more adventures facing the Adventurer so that we can join him amidst strange lands, strange peoples, and the pursuit of TRUTH!

Back to the Roots

This post was originally written on June 5 of 2021 and sat unedited, unpublished, and forgotten until February of 2024. Several paragraphs are deleted, a couple added, and a couple sentences tweaked. Other than that, it’s a reflection of my mental state after an extremely bad year on multiple levels. More importantly, it represents a reevaluation and rededication of Virtual Pulp.

 

Neither this blog, nor the Two-Fisted Blog, were originally intended to be political.  But I don’t subscribe to the typical center and center-right attitude of ignoring problems in hopes they will go away; and that the power of positive thinking will fix everything. (That’s probably a Boomer and Silent Generation subset of center-right, specifically.)

All that it takes for evil to prosper is for good men to do nothing. My parents and grandparents, plus their peers, did nothing, and here we are.

“Cancel culture” isn’t new. It’s just at the point now where it can no longer be ignored. It was there when I was young. It was worse when I finally got into the book biz. I self-censored to an extent. When I did get political, I watered it down. Also, I was colorblind in those days and had an outlook on race that was more wishful-thinking than the cynical (brutally honest?) observations I now make.

But it became obvious that the dominant ideology was not even content to let people like me simply exist, harboring different opinions we avoided expressing. If we didn’t adopt their Narrative and Agenda, they intended to silence us. And since our parents and grandparents allowed them to hijack the reins of power, they have the means to silence us. If we didn’t become active sellers of their perversion; their disinformation; misinformation; deception ; and outright lies, they would take our voices away. They started doing it in a subtle fashion, with their thumb on the scale of algorithms to ensure nobody could stumble upon what we had to say. For those of us who outflanked them and found an audience anyway…well, they had to step up their efforts, to censorship, banishment, and beyond. And center/center right people, it turns out, don’t care about losing the culture, as long as as bread, circuses, and convenience are doled out on demand. Long-term oblivion for the culture and civilization as a whole is nothing to worry about, as long as their immediate gratification is catered to.

So anyway, the middle of the road was no viable option.

I could take the ticket and hope the Machine cut me some slack. Join the echo chamber about how racist America is; how we need more sexual degeneracy; how gender confusion, in all its forms, is psychologically healthy. Maybe if I put enough of that into a novel, they’d take their thumb off the scale and let it find an audience. Amazon reviews in the thousands! My book cover on the “also bought” lists! Parity with the talentless hacks who have “made it” because the thumb on the scale benefits them. Maybe, in fact, it would hit the NYT Bestseller list. A million-dollar book deal. Maybe it would get made into a movie. I could quit my day job and write for a living…

And then, overwhelmed with shame and disgust at myself, I’d probably look for some quick, painless means of death.

Obviously, none of that was gonna happen. So if I’m gonna get the raw end of the stick no matter what, other than bowing to Mammon, then why am I showing restraint? That’s when I started letting it all hang out–in my books, and on this blog.

The last however-many-posts I had written were all political–probably going back a year or two…or more. On the one hand, what’s happening to my country is too serious to ignore. On the other hand, all my ranting is just futile screaming into the void. Aside from the satisfaction of getting stuff off my chest, what good has it done? What good can it do?

Not that I’m done ranting about “politics.” My worldview has changed since I was a boy; but my Quixotic nature never has. But for now, I’m weary. I’m exhausted from having the Globohomo Narrative rammed down my throat whichever way I turn. I’m exhausted from scouring the alternative niche sources of information to find the truth, so that I can be outraged and infuriated by the extent of injustice, hypocrisy and downright evil that is encroaching on everything that was once good.

Over the years, there have been a few different contributors to this blog. Until Gio came on board, I was the only one still contributing with any modicum of consistency (sporadic consistency, you might call it). I don’t blame my fellow bloggers. I’ve considered closing up shop several times in the last few years.

Blogs were becoming passe` right about the time I got mine. I don’t know what the latest secret sauce format is now. The Internet gatekeepers make it nearly impossible to find any information not twisted or fabricated by Globohomo and its army of obedient useful idiots.

I can’t save the world. Can’t stop any of the idiocy or perversion going on around me. But I’m gonna do something for my remaining time in this world. And some of it I’ll do right here at Virtual Pulp. It’s not gonna be ranting about politics every time something infuriates me, or that’s all I’ll wind up doing…again.

God willing, I’m gonna write more books. And graphic novels. And, with Gio’s help, review some good books by other authors. And blog about other stuff, that will perhaps give me and you both some escape from the dystopian shitshow we live in.

And maybe (if I can find a payment processor that won’t eliminate my ability to buy or sell due to wrongthink) I will finally turn my “Books” page into that online bookstore I’ve long wanted to start.

Here’s my unilateral covenant with my readers & followers:  I plan to speak the truth as I see it, judiciously, but I’m not gonna engage in the backbiting, pissing contests, and character assassination you may have noticed happening among non-woke creators, lately. In fact, I plan to write my next post on that very subject.

I hope to provide consistent, relevant content for my original audience, and grow that audience. I encourage you to post comments, ask questions, join discussions, and contend with us, if you feel it’s important. Use the comment form to suggest reviews, or inform us of relevant new developments on our side of the pop cultural divide.

If you like the sound of all this, subscribe to the blog. The subscribe widget is on the upper right of this site. If you like what we’re doing, why not click that button?

– Hank

UPDATE: The Subscribe widget is not functioning right now. My apologies to everybody frustrated by this. It will be repaired or replaced as soon as possible.

Man of Swords: The Eye and the Dragon – a Review

By THE INFAMOUS REVIEWER GIO

 

Note from THE INFAMOUS: this is the first of a 6-part review series that will cover each tale included in Man of Swords by R. V. Mills. I feel that Mills is the most exciting fantasy pulp writer of the last few years and his latest publication deserves a thorough breakdown which would be impossible to achieve in one single review. Hope you guys will tag along for the ride and enjoy this as much as we will!

 

 

“Through spilt milk of stars, whirls of worlds most wondrous, spirals of splendour spinning atop the fingertips of Gods, through void unimagined he raced to straits and reaches never by mortal seen.”

 

If this short tale does not find an initial overwhelmingly warm reception from a majority of readers, I will understand why. Let me explain.

This is the opening short story of Man of Swords (paid link), and it takes us back to a time of a young Rhoye before he was even called as such. This is not a very story-driven tale and that’s why some folks might find it too slow or even downright boring. Not much happens if you’re expecting epic battles, sword fights, or the rescuing of damsels in distress.

Basically this is about young Rohye’s initiation, the quest to find his identity as a man, and for the most part the story will take us into a world between reality and dream (I wonder what Uncle put in that drink they gave Rhoye!). 

Under the watchful eye of the old Shaman, young Rohye goes up the Mountain to sit in a cave where all sorts of lucid dreams will take him through a trippy interdimensional experience. 

Nothing makes sense on the surface but that’s the nature of dreams after all. It’s hard to deny traces of E. A. Poe and H. P. Lovecraft here.

Despite the slow pace, what makes this a must-read is its prosaic style. Mills is a master of the English language and this is a perfect example of it. It is a delight to read the beautiful words that create this world of visions and dreams. You feel transported to a dream world along with the main character and get to experience the ethereal realms young Rohye visits. THAT, my friends, is worth taking the time to read this opening act! 

It’s not always about the well-choreographed fight scenes or the intricate subplots. Sometimes you just gotta let the magic of exquisite prose take you to another realm!


Our series will continue in 2 weeks with part 2 of 6: “The Knight Who Would Not Kneel”