First, the news. I'm hard at work on the third book (fourth if you count Sword of Order) in the Warrior of Souls series. I still expect to release in October, probably toward the end of the month. I ended up having to go out of town for work this month, so that might eat into my schedule, but I'm determined to finish it, because that's what I promised!

I'm sponsoring a giveaway with several other authors for a Deadpool prize pack. Now, I've been a Deadpool fan, even before the movies were out, so I think this is a pretty cool giveaway. Click the image below if you're interested in joining for a chance to win.

So, some stuff. Working on Book Three of the Warrior of Souls series. I'm trying to gauge how long to make the series. The next 1-2 books will determine this. I can probably wrap the series up in 2-3 more books, or I could choose a different path and stretch it out longer (this doesn't mean I'm going to pad the books or anything, this just means a much longer story arc with lots of new characters, powers, threats). If you've got a preference, now is the time to speak up!

I've got some ideas for some other series. I'd like to start a superhero series, a fantasy series, maybe litRGP, maybe harem. I've started on a book where a man wakes up in a dungeon and has no memory of who he is or what he's doing there (yeah, cliche, but I've always liked it), and he must find his way through it. Too many ideas and not enough time. Or motivation. Motivation is hard to come by. One day you feel like you want to write twenty books, the next day you wonder why you bothered in the first place.

It's the little things that help. For instance, I had only 2 reviews on one of my books. One was very positive, one was negative. The positive one disappeared. That means Amazon deleted that reviewer's reviews (they do this sometimes, if someone leaves too many positive reviews). So that left me with on single bad review. That bummed me out. You've got to understand, reviews are like unicorns to authors. You basically get 1 review for every 150-200 book sales. Reviews are important because there are certain promotional services you can only use if you have a certain number or average of reviews. Without promotional services, we can't get eyeballs on books. No eyeballs on books means no sales. No sales means you are not making any profit. Not making any profit means you are paying for covers, editing, proofreaders, marketing out of your own pocket. Paying for that out of your own pocket means no money for electricity or clothes. No food and electricity means you die naked, frozen to death in a corner.

So, as you can see, reviews are important. Back to the story - so I had one bad review on a book. I'm totally fine with bad reviews. If you didn't like it, you didn't like it. My wife likes fish. I don't like fish. She doesn't like Star Wars. I love Star Wars. I like horror movies. She won't watch them.

This morning and I woke up to a new positive review. It said "keep going". That was enough to motivate me to get back to work, after a hard week of work.  See, I work a full time job and bust my butt at it about 50-60 hours a week. I can only write in my free time, but sometimes I'm too drained and just want to rest. But when I get a fan email or a positive review, it rekindles the fire. So if you have an author you really enjoy reading, be sure to drop them a line or leave a review or just give them a little nudge or hug or something, because writing is really hard work, and sometimes people get worn down or depressed, and one little bit of kindness is all it takes to jumpstart their creative energy.

A promotional video for Curse of Souls.

Boom. Blam. Pow. Zap. Curse of Wolf is now available on Amazon for a special release price for National Superhero Day. If you like vampires vs werewolves vs humans powered by spiritual energy vs ghosts vs humans wearing advanced armor vs invaders from other realms vs...well, you get the point.

Book Two of the Warrior of Souls series is with the editor now. It's looking like a late April release date. I'm shooting for 4/28, which is National Superhero Day.  Why National Superhero Day? Because I consider the series to be a cross of the superhero and urban fantasy genres. Think Hellboy, or Blade, or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Most series dealing with demons, vampires and shifters have humans as the hapless heroes. I wanted to create universe where the humans used technology, magic and special abilities to fight back. They aren't powerless. They also aren't always the good guys.

Keep an eye out in the coming weeks, I plan on doing a cover reveal and when the book releases I'll probably run a few Amazon giveaways like I always do on a book release.

Okay, so like I said in a previous blog post, you can't talk about books all of the time. And since I have a platform, I'm going to talk about whatever.

I'm a big fan of Alien and Aliens 2. I rarely watch movies more than once, but I've watched these movies many times. Alien is the epitome of space horror, and Alien 2 is the epitome of space action/adventure (and is also very good at horror). Most the following movies were forgettable, but I'll give some props to Alien 3 for being unique. I couldn't even tell you which movie was watch concerning the following Alien movies. I thought Alien V Predator was decent, but you didn't care one bit about the humans, yet the movie focused on...the humans.

Prometheus was an...okay movie. I didn't loathe it like some people. If you treat it like a sci fi exploration film, it is fine. The problems start when you get involved in the "man vs creator" questions. Most people don't watch Alien movies to ponder who created us, or how life comes about, etc. The "alien" feels tacked-on, as if someone said "we need to link the Alien franchise to this movie so we get more moviegoers in the theaters!"

Now, I'm sure there is all kinds of blog posts explaining who the giants are and lore and mythos, but I'm not concerned about it. I'm just going by what I saw in the movies.

So this brings us to Alien:  Covenant. Another sci fi movie that felt like the Xenomorphs were added just to sell tickets. This movie once again wants to be a message about the chicken and the egg or God versus Man. The entire concept of the movie bothers me. Xenomorphs were created by David? That is extremely...lame. This whole time I was operating under the impression they were some unknown species that was the scourge of the universe, and frequently wiped out whole alien civilizations (and bumped heads with Predators). Now *this* is a movie that could ruin your childhood. It's like if someone woke up at the end of a Michael Bay movie and there were no Transformers...it was all just a dream.

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1. It felt odd that we keep hearing about the colonists but never see them.
2. They go down to the planet immediately without analyzing it at all. The ion storms were obviously a huge problem that no one bothered accounting for. No drones or scanners launched? There could be microbes on the planet that could wipe out everyone on the ship (and hey, that sort of happened).
3. The "white" aliens were more durable than xenomorphs. It took a lot of firepower to put them down. I'm going to assume the weapons used were not nearly as good as the ones employed by the marines in Aliens. Maybe civilian models.
4. No one seems very impressed by an alien ship. "Hmm, what's this?" "Looks like an alien ship, I guess." Have humans already made contact with alien races in this universe?
5. Did it bother anyone else that Tennessee was willing to crash the ship into the planet because he was worried about his wife? Also, he took the ship below the tolerance level, and everything was fine. Guess Mother is terrible at calculations. Also, the rest of the crew goes along with it far too quickly.
6. No one really seems impressed by the massive blue man group piles of bodies outside.
7. Shaw's death. Flashbacks to Newt's and Hick's throwaway deaths from Alien 3.
8. They are willing to throw away all of their equipment in the storage bay, just to get rid of the Xenomorph. They are still going to need that stuff when they get to their new planet. Why not just put on those suits and go into an airlock? The "open certain doors while locking others" was working well (yeah, I know, you need a big finish, so that would have been a boring ending).
9. Was not a fan of how the white xenomorphs emerged from their hosts (this one is just nitpicking).
10. Was not a fan of how the xenomorphs erupted from their hosts as mini-mes. What happened to chestburster form? It's just like a tiny adorable alien that somehow grows into adult form in 5 minutes. The xenomorph in Alien evolved quickly, but not THAT fast.

11. Of course the David reveal wasn't very shocking. But David sure can change clothes fast.

As much as I'd like to see more Alien movies, at this point I think it's futile. Alien was the epitome of horror. You aren't going to top it. Aliens covered the action aspect to perfection. What's going on now seems to be trying to fill in backstory that didn't need to be filled, and coming up with new ways for people to die. But if they keep making them, I'll keep watching. I'm just that much of a sucker for the concept.