Fantasy Noir or The Maltese Falcon with Monster Girls

I've always been a fan of noir, and the older I get the more I think I appreciate the grim attitude and sense of corruption bleeding around the edges of smoke filled back alleys and luxurious parties. It just makes good fiction. Among my favorite works are classics by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, and of course my introduction to them was through film and the amazing Humphrey Bogart first, I didn't read the books until quite a bit later.

So when my friend Jason King asked a few of his author pals if we would be interested in writing stories set in his world of Valcoria, I thought sure - IF - I can still do it my way.

As luck would have it, Jason was actually kind of hoping that we would take his premise and run with it and help him flesh it out a bit, as it turned out he was very happy with how we did things and especially with my novella - because my story kept growing - he changed up a bit for the next book he has coming. So this isn't just a bunch of screenshots of stories set in his world, these are integral points in the ongoing series, so I'm excited for that. Especially since I went all fantasy detective noir with my story - Jia  For Luck.

In the world of Valcoria, Jia is another name for magical power, people have a Jia of Strength, Intelligence, Power, Magic's etc etc
My world weary protagonist, Tam Zphinx, isn't so blessed with anything except perhaps an amazing amount of luck considering all the trouble he gets into, throw in some gorgeous dames and monstrous killers and you've got a winning combination.

Here is the Table of contents
Prologue
Ice Witch, James Wymore
Vaekra Take Me, D.J. Butler
A Dream of Clouds, Mathew Cox
Interlude 1
Tremors Within The Storm, Daniel Swenson
Thought Power, Sarah E. Seeley
By Blade & Blood, C.J. Workman
Interlude 11
Just Breathe, Holli Anderson
Jia For Luck, David J. West
Epilogue

Oh and just like I used Jia from Jason's stories my good friend Dave Butler used Vaekra Take Me as his title, that being one of the swears, Jason incorporated into the books, funny thing is, I actually thought about using that as my title, until realizing Butler already did!

Anyhow, check it out if you're so inclined, this 22K novella is my last release for 2017!
Available here

and if I had to do a one sentence description of my story, I think I'd go with
The Maltese Falcon with Monster Girls. 

Progress Report

Wow! November came and went!
While I did not officially join the NANO club, I did hammer out more than 50K words in November, but sometimes its a little hard to tell.

I'm still tinkering with a project - it is not yet titled, but it is a novelization within a series of a popular game. It is supposed to be out next May - but I don't know more than that really. 


When it comes to my own stuff, I had an 80k (very) rough draft for what was going to be the sequel to BRUTAL titled FIERCE and I decided I didn't like where it was going, it was a fine story but it was not the next step in the progression of the overall saga, so that has been shelved and restarted fresh. 44K so far and i'm hoping to finish by the end of December so I can have a January release. I'm really planning on going big guns for 2018.

2017 has been so successful for me and I want to keep all that moving on the uptick.

I am also behind on at least two Porter projects - Book 3 in the Dark Trails saga - You Only Hang Once and a shorter Lovecraftian standalone Let Sleeping Gods Lie.

Both covers are done - along with a mess of others I'm still writing, but those are priorities along with the Brutal trilogy.

But of course I can never just stick to one thing and finish it, can I? I also did 5k on a piece I'm calling Wine Dark Sea = imagine Hunter S. Thompson going to the vanishing Aral Sea hunting for evidence of vampires in the wake of the collapsed Soviet Union - its just weird wild fun. Unknown when I'll finish it, but so far its been a blast.

Pulp Stories Galore!

October has been pretty good to me so far, not too hot, not too cold and books and books and more books are coming!

So, quite a few short stories of mine came out this month and it was a surprise.

All right, I knew this one was coming, I just wasn't sure when it would drop but Story Hack #1 is here! It's full of great pulpy stories and the man behind it Bryce Beatty, is going all out on the art!

I could n't be more pleased with both the cover and the interior art. I love this rendition of Porter Rockwell he has for it! My tale is UNDER THE GUN a creepy weird western about a possessed gun. Check it out!

The next one was a big surprise as I thought the anthology had just vanished into thin air, but Rogues Blade Entertainment which put together some top notch Sword and Sorcery collections a few odd years ago kinda went into hibernation.

I'm very pleased to see that Jason Waltz has awoken and is putting out material again. This one is the Challenge: Discovery collection. This one was begun in 2010? and features quite a list of S&S and has my tale THE SERPENTS ROOT about a thief who will do anything to save her sister, even facing down the dreaded cockatrice!
This pic of the cover is sans text, and I really wanted to share it because all of our stories were supposed to be inspired by V. Shanes art work. So I added in panthers to a story that hadn't had them before.


And another surprise is the Pulp Rev Sampler this was a collection asking for short pieces in the pulp revolution vein.
All of them are supposed t be under 2,500 words so it is literally a sampler. I turned in one titled Wings in the Night, it does say from the forthcoming Walking Through Walls and that's my bad it should read Gods & Robbers, I screwed up but such is life. It is a never before released story, so that' cool.

Its a glimpse into the escape of a prisoner and ties into some things I had previously written in The Mad Song collection and its all part of a bigger work I have planned, set in the same world as BRUTAL albeit quite far away from that setting.

In any case, hope you'll check them out while you're waiting for more novels.

All the best
David

Grimtoberfest Has Arrived

Grimtoberfest is here and I have joined the dark horde of grimdark fantasy writers in doing an siege on our own pocketbooks with this joint slashing of prices on our respective books.

I've got my own novel BRUTAL cut down to .99 cents for the next few days. Check out the rest of the catalog from these rogues HERE


p.s.

I should also mention I've re-released a collection under the pen name that some of you may already be familiar with - what was Whispers of the Goddess has been rebooted under the James Alderdice banner as The Slayer

I just wanted that to be clear, so nobody grabbed the book twice. I meant to add another Tyr story to the collection but just didn't quite get around to it - this has been a hard month for writing and I'm still way behind.

Til next time

David

All the Cons

I didn't get much writing done this last month, as I had two cons I was at as a guest, Salt Lake Comic Con and the first annual Snake River Comic Con.
Salt Lake is great as it is so big and has some phenomenal guests and I always enjoy being there and hanging with friends and meeting new people, but at Snake River I had one of the best times with friends in forever.

Me and the Space Balrogs (D.J. Butler, Jason King, James Wymore, Holli Anderson and Daniel Swenson - not pictured Bob Defendi and Craig Nybo) spent a whole lot of time together laughing and selling books and speaking on panels and then we even got a makeshift game of Dungeons and Dragons together for Holli's benefit - she had never played before and I gotta tell you I haven't laughed so hard in a very long time. It was a great con and we met some great people and I can't wait to go back next year.

So I'll throw in a swath of pics from both. Here ya go.

Walking Through Walls

A writing experiment I did across 2014-2016 was  Walking Through Walls, an ongoing fantasy noir serial that ran in Utah Geek Magazine. My tale ran for the first 13 issues and came out to just about 30K words. Not too long, not too short.

I was sitting on it for awhile but with the relative success of BRUTAL and my pen name of James Alderdice, I decided I might as well release Walking Through Walls too just to build up a backlist for the fantasy based pen name.

It is set in the same secondary world as BRUTAL but is centrally based in Tolburn, the biggest dirtiest city in that world, whereas BRUTAL is taking place in a dirty backwater far removed from the rest of the goings on. There are no character crossovers or mentions yet, maybe just some very simple geographic references - And I don't even have an official map made up yet.

In my mind it is a prequel of sorts to something I have been working on for ages and brainstorming that I'm calling GODS & ROBBERS.

I looked at the project as a writing exercise since I had to come up with a quick tale of around 2,000 to 2,500 words an issue and hook the reader each time, have a wrap-up but also a cliffhanger for the next chapter. It was fun but perhaps lacks the flow of a novel. Most of it is first person featuring a character named Kenaz, who is no secret prince, no chosen one waiting to be called forth, no great fighter, no man of means or anything special, but he can travel outside his body and gather information. So that's his semi-criminal profession, but then he gets wrapped up in a job for multiple employers that all conflict with one another and that's where he gets smacked with a fistful of trouble.

Toward the end though I really wanted some scenes with a side character so the narrative drifts from first person to third and back again. Probably not the best format and definitely something I won't do for the continuation of the Gods & Robbers saga.

I've been having it available at 2.99 but think I'll do a promotion to .99  for Walking Through Walls by the weekend just to give it a little more traction. So if any of you feel like checking it out, that'd be great. And as always reviews are forever appreciated.