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Okay, so I'm not exactly sure how to start this, so I'll just dive into it. Maybe I'll clean it up later, maybe I won't, we'll see how it goes. Keep in mind this is a blog that almost no body reads, and is updated even less that that.
We're going to be all over the place on this one, but the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so let's go.


I just published my ninth novel. It's the ninth in a series of works called 'Smokepit Fairytales.' 


Spoiler warning for books that have been out for a few years.

This saga begins with a Lance Corporal, Hank, and Corpsman, Doc, who are stationed in Camp Pendleton who are sent to fight in Iraq to fight Iran who had just invaded the country. Now, I've never given any hard dates in the books themselves, but to put a date around it, the characters are excited to go to Iraq and finally fight ISIS, only to be disappointed when they find out it's Iran. So probably around 2015. In this story, Hank and Doc are dating strippers who work at the Purple Church outside of Pendleton, and Hank's lady of the night, Kennedy, is a first generation American from Iran. Anyway, the Marines head to Iraq, and hang out at an airport by the Euphrates for a few months before they get a chance to engage the enemy. I bit into the fight, while they're still in Iraq, Hank, Doc, and a few other Marines get trapped in an ancient Sumerian temple that's loaded with tricks, traps, and puzzles, and everyone dies, except for Hank and Doc, who accidentally become immortal, though they don't figure it out until much later. They eventually hook back up with friendly forces and keep fighting until they push into Iran where Hank and Doc are caught in a blast, and declared dead on a helicopter. A year later they wake up in military hospitals and besides some muscle atrophy, have made a full recovery. So much so that they still have their tattoos. While they were in their comas, a race of alien refugees arrived at Earth's doorstep seeking a new home. The aliens, which I called Virescent, which is a term for the word green, look just like humans, but they have green skin, vampire fangs, live for a thousand years, and photosynthesize. Since the Virescent's like the sun, a lot of the settles in Southern California, and Hank starts dating one of them, while he and Doc struggle with substance abuse, PTSD, and survivors guilt. 


Five years after that, Hank's married to a Virescent named Penelope, and then Hank and Doc are sent to Latvia to train with NATO for a few months when Vladimir Putin decides that the rest of Europe should be part of Russia. The Russians, also had Virescents in their ranks and used their technology to make giant robots to use as super weapons. The Marines don't have these mechs and have to fight them on foot with the occasional help of close air support. After a bit of fighting in Latvia, the Marines conduct an amphibious assault on Saint Petersburg, in the winter. Yes, they invade Russia in winter. It goes as bad as you think it does, if not worse.


It goes so bad in fact that the Marines not only stop seeing the enemy, but loose radio communication with the outside world. A convoy is sent to NATO headquarters to figure out what's up, but that convoy comes back with radiation poisoning and all soon die. The Marines left decide to walk, sail, ride, back to California. On the way back, everyone dies or is lost besides Hank who discovers that in his absence Penelope had given birth to his son, but sent him to space with a friend so he didn't die when the bombs fell.


Thirty years later, Hank and Penelope's son, Thatch, is a sergeant in the Marines stationed on Mars. America, which is just Mars now, is still engaged in a naval war with the Russians on Venus. Earth had been declared a no-go zone due to the perceived high levels of radiation. Most of humanity is living in space colonies floating around the solar system. Thatch and his friends spend their time either on ship, doing shady things in port, fighting the Ruskies, or hanging out at the barracks mad at their boy or girlfriends. That is until word comes down that the Russians have a weapon that could destroy all life on Mars, and they're being called to go stop it. Spoiler alert, it's a zombie bioweapon.


Thatch and his friends did such a good job destroying the weapon that they're all promoted and send to Headquarters Marine Corps in New Annapolis. While they're there, the commandant (the general in charge of the whole of the Marine Corps) throws a silent coup by setting up the death of everyone in the line of succession above him. Thatch discovers what happened, and he and his friends have to go kill the president.


As you can imagine, killing the president doesn't make one too popular, so the gang runs away and become space pirates. This too is unpopular, and while a life on the run isn't glorious, it's still a life. A series of bad decisions lead to a series of even worse events, and Thatch's pirate fleet is enemy number one across the solar system. At the end of a monumental naval battle that leaves the near entirety of naval known naval forces in existence destroyed, two of the pirates escape and crash land on the only place where they wouldn't be hunted... Earth.


That's the first six novels in a nutshell. I'm not going to go too deep into the new ones right now, because people are still reading them and I want them to be able to do so with all the surprises that come with that. They've stuck with me this far, they deserve it. 


That being said, I worked for a few years to hammer out the next trilogy of books to drop all at once. Book 7 released on Nov 10th, 8 on Dec 1, and 9 on Dec 15th... 
and if you're an underground author like myself, you know how busy and frustrating releases can be. Marketing and advertisement are 100% in my hands; that's making social media connections, arranging podcast appearances, reaching out to media outlets, et cetera. It's enough to want to climb a building and scream until your lungs bleed. I just wrote a book, isn't that enough of an endeavor? Why do I have to do my marketing myself too! Oh what a cruel world! Well, I'm not a marketing expert, but I have been doing it anyway for a number of years, and I'd like to share with you some of my experiences of what works and what doesn't, and hopefully that can help you out a bit if you share my dilemma. 


Talking about how cool you are only seems to be a reasonably perusable method of expansion if:
A: The public at large has already deemed you cool enough to talk about yourself like that.
or B: You're extremely fuckable and you're marketing strategy is going to evolve around sex appeal.
The point is, someone else has to assign coolness to you. You're not Napoleon, and as such, you can't crown yourself emperor. When I see people hyping themselves up, I'm happy for them for having that level of confidence, but when I check their Amazon reviews and the only five star one is one they wrote themselves, and other two are negative reviews, that all but guarantees that I won't be reading their work. Reality has to be faced. You can only toot your own horn so much before people stop listening to you. Ask yourself, do you believe any creator when they talk up their product? How about when a nonaffiliated party does it? You're a lot more likely to be intrigued by something if someone who has nothing to gain from advertising it is the one talking. If you haven't guessed yet, part of your strategy NEEDS to be getting other people to talk about your work.


One of your first thoughts may be just giving away your book to people in hopes that they'll talk about it. It could be to friends, family, the couple of f-list celebrity "friends" that you have, or influencers who may rally around your cause. 
I'm not going to tell you that this is a waste of both time and money, but I will say that your contacts have to be better than mine. 
Outside of a small group of close personal friends, no one I've given my books to has even cracked them open, and the few that have, aren't on social media, so while you still may want to do this because you want them to read your story, from a marketing standpoint, this is all but futile. This leads us to strangers on the internet, and thank GOD for them. Indie authors on social media are the leading champions of propping up other small press writers. We know what it's like to not be able to get attention for our work and will relentlessly get word out for other writers. Granted this is tiered like anything else, but it's better than nothing. One trick that is somewhat effective is reading and reviewing other people's books so that they might do it in return. Now, this isn't a sure fire method. Most people will block you if you ask them to read your book in exchange for reading theirs, so you have to just read and review their book in hopes that they'll do it for you in exchange. That tends to work better for people who have around the same size following as you, so if you review someone else's book, they may or may not reshare your post, or shoot it to their stories, that's 50/50. Even less so will they return the favor, and that's a lot less likely to happen if they have a significantly larger following than you. No matter what you do, this method's a long shot. But for your best chanced of success, find another author who is about as active on the platform as you, is in the same genre, writes at the same level, writes with the same intensity, shares a lot of other people's works, and for absolute best chances, someone who has less than half the amount of followers as you. You can shoot for the stars on this all the way up the chain, but let's be honest about the human condition, you need to make someone else feel important for them to be about your work (Which is why that magazine or newspaper isn't answering your emails, you're not important to them.) Then, don't tell them that you're going to get their book, just buy it, then read it, then leave them a five star review on both Amazon and Goodreads (No one's going to reciprocate this action if you tell their their book sucks), then make a post about their book telling everyone how much you liked it and make sure to tag them. That's your dice roll there.

Since I mentioned newspapers, local newspapers are looking for things to write about that happen in the community. Have you ever picked up a newspaper.... Oh I'm sorry, I forgot it's the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty One...
Well, papers still publish online and their articles can be read there, and sometimes they'll have slow work weeks like anyone else and need something to write about. That's where you come in Mr or Mrs nobody. Go to the paper's website, don't click "Contact us," find a journalist and send them an email directly. Tell them a bit about yourself, what your books are about, and low key hint that you're God's gift to mankind, just don't say that verbatim. If you're lucky, they'll get you a spot in the community section, and your 60 year old neighbor, who still reads a physical newspaper will say something to you while you're at the post office. Now this one does fall into the clout category, because while you were featured in a paper, it's still the paper for podunk nowhere USA where you live and few if any sales are going to be generated from that unless your book takes place in the local area.
You can also reach out to bigger print media outlets, but unless you already have some level of notoriety, you're probably going to get left on read. A tactic you might employ is finding journalists that would write about the things you're trying to promote, and adding them as friends on facebook or instagram or wherever, then woo them for a couple of years with memes and cheerful comments on there posts, and if you're REALLY lucky, they'll not respond whenever you say anything about your books. I know that seems bleak, but seeing the little "read" note under a message and KNOWING they have no intent on throwing you a bone is SO much more satisfying than firing off an email to a stranger and wondering if it even got delivered. The good news is, you're not guaranteed to completely fall on your face with that one. Personally I did manage to make a friend of an editor at Coffee or Die magazine, and he threw me a bone and put my book Smokepit Fairytales in their 2020 holiday gift guide, which might not sound like a whole lot to you, but I appreciated it. 

Moving on, in this endeavor to grow your contacts list you may be temped to participate in follow loops on instagram. Don't. If you don't know what a follow loops is, that's when a bunch of people who have no interest in each other arbitrarily follow each other so they'll get followers, then they put each other on mute and never again interact with said people, or buy, read, and review their books. This is ultimately harmful for the creator as while it may boost your follower count, your overall interaction will go down. And that again may result in all the people who followed you to unfollow you as soon as you follow them back.

There's also other people's podcasts that you can go on. Most podcasters are looking for guests and all you really need to do is contact them about coming on and they'll set it up... provided that they're on your popularity level, and like most casts, have 10 repeat listeners. Most podcasts of consequence are invite only, and unless you have an IN, well, good luck getting a foot in the door unless you have a COMPELLING personal story, which circumvents the reason you'd want to go on the show in the first place because they'll want to talk about YOU, not your book. My own personal side tangent here:
I started my podcast Tripp's Smokepit so that I could talk to writers about their books and not just their personal gimmick. And though my show's long form, I DO make an effort to either talk about the author's story, or writing process, or talk shop if I'm talking to an author that episode. And I do that because almost every other author I've heard on another podcast, or most of the one's I've been on myself (Which isn't THAT many, and is more often than not someone who stops making shows shortly after I'm on) are talked to by a host who hasn't even read the book in question and the host is more interested in talking about WHY the book was written, and the author's exploits as a human. Personal examples would be me talking about being in the Marines for 11 years, fighting in Afghanistan, drinking too much, and pounding quiff. Like, yeah, I know that I'm the best space shuttle door gunner on the planet and I got that position because I single handedly saved America from Godzillabinladen, but I'm here to talk about the book. Can we talk about the fucking book? Damn this blog is getting pessimistic.


Let's move on to something that does actually work, but only if you've got more than one book published, and the first one was GOOD. Enroll your book in Kindle unlimited, and set up a week where the ebook is free, preferably a few months out. You may or may not post about it on social media, but let's be honest, if anyone who follows you on instagram actually gave a shit, they'd have already bought your book, reviewed it, and told all their friends about it. You've got those people in the bag, you're looking for spreading the word here. But instead IG or facebook, find a newsletter that promotes books. Book Rebel is one of my primaries. It costs about 20$ for them to feature your book, but they DO put that book in front of people who will actually read it. Now some of these people will go and buy the physical book instead of getting for free, but the ones who do get it for free, will still have to purchase the rest of your series if they enjoyed the first one. It's kinda what your teachers said drug dealers would act like. That first bit's free, you gotta pay for the rest.


That free little bit is where you hook people. 
That's why you need to take the podcast and guest spots where you can, because a lot of the time, people aren't going to go straight for your book. They're going to find you interesting in some way shape or form and then they'll head towards your work because of who wrote it. This comes in especially handy if you've got well presentable tits and like to show them off on the internet. Notice I didn't say big, or even nice, just well presentable. It might also benefit you if you're Spec Ops and you can get someone to ghost write a book on your behalf. Seriously, I don't think I've seen a single memoir by a special forces dude who actually wrote the book themselves. Like, seriously. They'll say they wrote it, but that part that says "With the help of" or just "And" under the writing credit means the "author" just slapped their name on it.
There's also tons of online writing conferences that you can attend, and pick the brains of smarter people than I on how to market yourself, and endless vlogs, blogs ran by people who are just full of rainbows and sunshine. Sure, they might write generic tripe with the appeal of a vampire obsessed, know it all, nineteen year old girl who won't shut up long enough for me rub my genie lamp and wish to replace her with a sleep paralysis demon, but they have presentable tits, and therefore if you can woo them into looking at your book, you might get a few sales out of it.


Anyway, dear reader, I hope this helped out a bit. How? fuck if I know. I'm just ranting, and kind of writing for the sake of writing. If you've made it to the end of this tirade, thank's for being here. If you've got something you want me to talk about, either shoot me an email, or DM me on something and I'll get to it.
And remember that you're not alone in this WTF of a situation trying to get your work out there. Failure isn't the end, it's only over when you give up, so don't give up, keep pushing, and maybe you'll get that stroke of luck you need to branch out. 
And for you disliking that last sentence because you've made it and you think that it takes more than luck to get ahead, well, first off, shove a cinderblock in your dick hole, then blow your fucking dad. Hard work and dedication will absolutely buy you a ticket, but luck wins the lottery. Some people just need to keep buying tickets, and you're a fucking cock sucker for speaking down to people who are trying to learn the game while you guessed (Yes, GUESSED, or maybe even were GIVEN) the winning numbers.

To my other indie, underground, and small press authors who weren't lucky enough to benefit from nepotism; I wish you the best in every aspect of your life. May fortune and mercy grace your soul. And I'm going to try to keep up with this blog better, so ask me something, or tell me a story in the box below and let's get this rolling.



-Tripp

​Before I get started, I want to let you know I opened a submission box on the main page of this site. If there’s anything you want me to tackle, let me know over there. Even if you think it’s dumb, it’ll get back to you how I can. That and content is content.
 
My wife’s been watching that show Sister Wives, it’s about this Mormon Polygamist family. This guy had four wives and a literal bus load of kids, and it’s super wholesome, granted it IS tv and we only see what they want to show us, but it looks like they’re happy and well to do. But there’s something about it that irks me, and I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I can put it in the ball park of resenting the upper class, or at the very least, happy families. Though the more I thought about what I was feeling, the less I’d want to be in that kind of situation.
I grew up with pretty big family on both sides. Granted I don’t talk to my mom’s side of the family, at all, including my mom, because while they’re not in a cult, they may as well be, and they take religion way too far. Like, egregious zealots, I wasn’t allowed to watch The Wizard of Oz because the villain in it promoted witchcraft, kind of zealots. Like I had to hide Def Leppard CDs because they were too hedonistic. For those of you who are too young to know Def Leppard, they weren’t egregious at all. Hell, I remember one time somehow I got ahold of a Steve Martin DVD and it ended up in the trash with “Jesus is King” carved into the back of it with a steak knife… then pretty much everything me, my brother, and sister just got for Christmas was burnt in the back yard to “purify the house.” That was around age twelve or thirteen. I remember that being not too long after 9/11 so that age range sounds right. Anyway, needless to say, we didn’t get out much while I was living with my mom. And none of that family did anything besides sit around tables and fires and have deep philosophical discussions about how dinosaur bones are the corporeal bodies of the demons God kicked out of heaven. These were accompanied by nightly sermons from someone in the family misusing biblical versus to slander the other people who may have been orbiting our lives, or to demonize the things we enjoyed. Nothing was safe. Not the books we wanted to read, music we wanted to listen to, our friends at school, or even what we wanted to do when we grew up. A special target for my mom’s side shit talking sermons was my dad, who according to my mother, sold drugs for cartels so that he could make money to buy guns, to sell to run a whorehouse. Everyone and everything about the world was wicked and evil and fell short of God’s graces. Slander wasn’t the end all be all it turns out, I remember at one point I had done some odd jobs around the neighborhood and saved enough money to buy a cheap motorcycle from someone down the street. When I say cheap, I mean that I got ONE of the pistons working with the help of my dad when he could sneak by without my mom knowing he was there, and that bike got me out of the house at the rocket speed of thirty miles an hour. I came home from school one day to find that it had been sold, and I never saw a cent of that. Then when I got ahold of a regular bicycle, that got chained up in a shed, and the keys were mysterious lost. Needless to say I haven’t talked to anyone in that side of the family since I was eighteen, and I hadn’t said anything to them willingly since about thirteen, which was roughly five years after my parents divorced. Nowadays, there’s a couple of those cousins I’m friends with on facebook, though they found me, and I haven’t actually seen them since they were like two. But I do have to admit there’s a bit of resentment when I see them post pictures of the big family, that treated my siblings and I like dirt, taking them on cruises, spending what looks like quality time with them, and not being giant, raging, redneck, fuck faced, cult, cunts. 
My dad’s side was, is, a lot different. They’re religious, and for the most part tea tootlers, but they’re good people. Though I do suffer occasional bouts of eyerolling with that side’s cousins as well. Now, I love my dad, he’s been there as much as he could be, but on top of his love for putting his dick in crazy, I do think he was too young to have kids, and he hadn’t figured himself out before trying to start a family. He was that 1990s guy, recently single in his late twenties, dressed to the nines, and driving a muscle car around the city hunting for strange, while us kids got to live in my mom’s prison. The rest of my dad’s family didn’t seem to have that problem. From what I could tell, they got their shit together relatively young. I mean that as in I have one cousin who got a Mercedes for Christmas when she was sixteen, a full ride to college, had a cushy banking job when before she was twenty-five from my uncle’s connections, and frequently vacations in Europe. And for all you vets out there, she’s the kind of person who will write company newsletters in November displaying the valiantly of our men and women in uniform and she wears Navy Pride on her sleeve, despite not ever so much as met a recruiter in a mall. That and she’s one of those types that won’t drive twenty minutes to see you while you’re on leave and haven’t been in the state for two years. Then we have another set of cousins, who ‘earned everything they got.’ And I mean that as in when one of my cousins was in high school, he bought a two-thousand-dollar camera with money he earned himself… by selling the clothes he got for Christmas on eBay. Now, granted his photography is mediocre at best, but he was taking pictures in nightclubs in Havana at nineteen. It, at times can be hard to look at younger people in my own family, who seem to be a lot more well off just because they had parents who gave enough of a shit about them to set them up for a good life. Granted, none of any of the cousins mentioned have any idea what fun is, they’re abhorrently boring, snooty, and in general not the kind of company that I would keep. To use an analogy, they’re overproduced soap operas, and while not enviable in the slightest for their substance, I do have to admit that I’m jealous that my show, that’s on the same station didn’t get the budget or producers to hit the ground running. 
With my homelife being what it was, when I turned eighteen, I packed my things and moved to Virginia Beach to finish out my senior year of high school. I was living with an aunt and looking into going to college because that’s what my aunt was pressuring me to do, but I spent most of my time running around with a girl I met at church and boning on the beach. I went and took the SAT and started applying to schools, but since I’d never cared about school, and neither of my parents cared enough to encourage scholarly learning, my grades were too terrible to even be considered. I figured that maybe I’d have to go to a community college first to bump myself up in the social standings, but since my aunt was about to move to Japan for my uncle’s PCS, I was about to be homeless. Now, I could, at the time have gone back to Ohio and lived with my mom’s family while I went to school, but I’ve already established their character, and that wasn’t an option. On top of that, I’d rather sell myself into slavery than ever step foot in Ohio again. There was also the option of going down to Florida to live with my dad’s family, but that never panned out. Keep in mind, this was 2006. Iraq is not only in full swing, but it’s plastered all over the news. Fallujah was in recent memory, we all knew there was still a war happening, and I figured joining the Marines was as good as an option as any. I went and found a recruiter and signed up to go fight. 

​When I graduated, I went to the First Marine Division at Camp Pendleton, to work the print machines. Fortunately for me, most of the unit was in Iraq, and there were need of photographers, so I got handy with a camera, which enabled me to get out off the building and go hand out with the grunts. Around this time, I got Jodied. My VA Beach lady friend decided that she liked the idea of being with someone who seemed to have a brighter future, and had enough of his parents cash, to taker her out and do all the fun stuff in DC, and shacked up with the first guy she ran across in her first semester at George Mason, which she got into with daddy’s investment banker money. Admittedly it’s kind of hard to stack up to that when all you have to offer is parking lot sex and Tricare. Which now I’m glad she’s happy, but I didn’t take it well at the time, and I was a total cunt about the situation.  Also, for the fans of my books, this person is who Satin was loosely based on. Break my heart in real life, I will you in a book. 
Anyway, back to the subject of this, resenting the well to do. I was stationed at Camp Pendleton, went to Afghanistan a few times with Seventh Marines, hopped over to a MEU (Ship deployment), and was a complete heartbroken hedonist when I wasn’t deployed. It turns out dating is one of the hardest parts of being a Marine.

​ All my friends at home, my cousins, the people on the street I’d meet out and about were all out having functional social lives, and dating whoever they seemed they wanted. I, on the other hand, seemed to always have a problem with this. While I didn’t have too much of a problem getting laid, it was hard to find or maintain a relationship because of my work. If a girl wanted to hang out on Thursday, I’d have to say no because for some stupid reason the entire Marine Corps locked up and cleaned until midnight on Thursdays. Or if a girl would ask if I wanted to make plans for the weekend, I’d have to tell her no, because I was going to be in the field for a month. Or the ever present “I’m sorry, I’ll be on barracks duty, sitting here watching paint dry.”

​Now I can’t exactly blame these twenty-something year old girls for not wanting a relationship with someone who’s just not going to be around, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t suck, and my love life was effectively reduced to chicks who were okay with dingy hotel room one-night stands. Side note, I have never had an STD, and I’m shocked, considering how many randos got rawdogged in the beds of Ford Rangers in Oceanside parking lots. Again, I was living in the barracks, and I haven’t quite found anything that dries panties as much as saying, “How about your place, I live on base.” Believe it or not, “Let’s just do it in the truck” is leaps and bounds more desirable. Long story short, don’t get mad at Marines for bumping uglies with the local population in an Arby’s bathroom, more often than not they can’t afford a hotel, and the chick who still lives with her parents is above sneaking into base and banging in a barracks room, which by the way a Marine can get demoted for. Also, here would be a good place to point out that I don’t know how many times I’ve been scoffed at for being an Enlisted member of the military. Everyone thinks that there must be something wrong with you for having joined not as an officer. For these reasons a lot of Marines will give up on the indigenous wildlife and retire themselves to dating female Marines, however, this is not without its issues. 
If your girlfriend has slept with fifty guys in the past, but you’ve never met them, that’s not a real issue. Those other guys may as well be figments of your imagination. However, if she’s slept with fifteen, and ten of them are people you either work or drink with, you inevitably end up hearing a lot of stories about someone else fucking your girlfriend. That takes its toll. Now let’s say you can get over that, that doesn’t alleviate the relationship problems that come with non-military women. I was dating this other Marine; things were going well, we’d been together for the few months I’d been back from my first deployment to Afghanistan, and I thought things were going great. That was until I got send to Mojave Viper, a month-long pre-deployment training exercise in Twentynine Palms, where amongst other things, you don’t have cell service for a month. The training evolution goes as it does, and when we got back to main side, I tried to call this girl, and she didn’t pick up. I took a shower, and my team drove back down to Pendleton, and I still couldn’t get ahold of this girl, until a couple days later when I got on Facebook and she had changed her relationship status to “Married” and it wasn’t to me. There was another woman who, to use a loose term, I was “dating.” We were doing alright enough, nothing official, but we were always with each other, going out and seeing movies, or driving around and talking about life, or getting food, or whatever it you want to call it, and we were also doing the nasty in the barracks. She starts pulling away, not as fast as it would have been in a break up, but since we weren’t dating my “What’s going on?” questions were met with “Nothings” and “Don’t worry about it, things are fines” until it devolved to just talking in the Smokepit and she’d show up wearing another unit’s shirt, and Brown University hoodies. Now, I can’t say for sure what that was about, but considering that she wasn’t in the unit whose shirts those belonged to and besides boot camp, she hadn’t set a foot on the east coast, I can make some inferences. 
Now, with all this, I wouldn’t change anything about my past, even if I could. Without my past the way it was, I wouldn’t be able to make the art I make, nor would I be able to write the books I do. If I wrote at all, it would probably be either “non-fiction” narratives that jerked myself off, or even worse, ghost writing for spec ops dudes, jerking someone ELSE off. The butterfly effect is real, and every little thing adds up to who and where you are right now. Sure, if I was raised a bit better, I might be in a better financial standing, but the cost of that seems to be that I would be boring as shit and a drag to hang around. If I hadn’t gone through the relationship problems I did, and learned the lessons I did with shitty twenty-something year-olds, I very well may have settled for some ill reputable skank, instead of having the awesome wife I do now. And I wouldn’t know any better to appreciate things if they were just handed to me for free.
To the young Marines out there, sitting on a bench in front of the barracks, reading this on your cell phone, burning your fifth cigarette when you only came out for one; don’t be discouraged because your life didn’t start off well. This is America, and you can start from shit and build an empire out of it. It just might take you a little longer to get there, and in the end, you’ll be glad you took the journey you’re on now because you’ll have actually learned something valuable from your struggles, and you’ll be less likely to fall when faced with the perilous. Not everything good comes from suffering, but everything worth appreciating does. And don’t be jealous of the people with money from good homes, at least until you can find ONE worth sitting down and having a beer with.

Warning, this is going to be crass. 
 
School’s been shit the last few weeks, unless you live in Saudi Arabia (It’s under Iraq), you know that the Corona Virus as murdered everyone’s schedules. Whether that’s warranted or not is a discussion for another day, but I’ve been having to do my schooling online, much like pretty much everyone else in the country. I understand the need to flatten the curve, and that there’s no such thing as a well-timed emergency, but fuck dude. I have a hard time learning online as it is, but the school’s implemented a system where we still have all our lectures via the video conferencing platform Zoom. We’re having class at the same times, but instead of going somewhere to have human fucking being teach me something, I get to look at a little square on my computer. Now, this wouldn’t be too much of an issue if the classes were formatted to be video based, for instance Simon Whistler’s podcasts (all of them), PBS’s It’s Okay To Be Smart, and Kathrine Green’s The Art Assignment are all absolutely amazing learning tools. However, a lecture meant to be given in person over video chat is nothing short of godawfull. I know that my professors are not to blame, and I do not in any way shape or form hold it against them. We’re all victims of circumstance here, and I’m sure they’re just as frustrated with everything on their end as I am on mine. 
One of the adjustments that’s been made has been turning to writing a lot more papers to absorb the material, as well as in lieu of in class discussion we read up on something and post out thoughts on the class’s in house forums. Which leads us to today. One of my classes we were to listen to a podcast, or read the transcript and respond to it with a short paragraph and talk amongst ourselves what we thought went into it. 
 
Link to the podcast here: https://www.mapping-access.com/podcast/2020/3/16/episode-25-contraarts-access-with-emily-watlington
 
 
The episode introduction read as such: “The podcast about disability, design justice, and the lifeworld. This show is about the politics of accessible and critical design—broadly conceived—and how accessibility can be more than just functional or assistive. It can be conceptual, artful, and world-changing.” 
 
In the interview, Emily Watlington, who suffers from Lyme Disease, talks about making art more accessible to people with disabilities whether it be not being able to see certain art because it’s in a place that’s not wheelchair friendly, or if the person’s blind and needs someone to tell them what’s in front of them. I didn’t hold too much issue with her or the host, besides a bit of agonizing over being too privileged, but the associated links to other artist mentioned on the podcast pissed me the fuck off. I may or may not be in for some heat for this one, but here’s my response:

“It’s hard for me not to be apathetic about this subject matter. Before I start digging into this, I’m going to preface with stating that I don’t have any cartilage in my knees anymore, I have disconnected tendons in my ankles (The corrective surgery has a 20% success rate), my tinnitus is so bad that sound rarely wakes me from sleep, and if you want to have some real fun, go look up mental effects of long term malaria medicine usage. I’m constantly in an extreme amount of physical pain, so, please don’t think that I don’t at least understand the disability aspect of the subject matter of the podcast and the linked article “Disability and the Politics of Visibility.”
All of this came off to me as “Poor me.” I understand the struggle, however there was nothing brought forward that suggested overcoming adversity.  Yes, stairs suck, and so does sitting down, because it feels like there’s a knife in your kneecaps, when everyone else moving around, but I also know that the world doesn’t revolve around me and besides what’s dictated by the Americans with Disabilities Act, they don’t need to, and I would only be slowing people down by demanding their help.
In the podcast they mentioned Shannon Finnegan who’s work centers around making art that focuses on accessibility and disability culture. Finnegan’s work is abhorrently privileged. She hosted a protest of the Vessel at Hudson Yards, which is a series of 154 interconnected stairways. The protesters all signed forms that stated they won’t enter the structure. Her website bemoans that the Vessel is touted as ADA-Compliant, as there’s an elevator, but her problem is that the elevator doesn’t give the participant the experience of the structure, which is just climbing starts. This is kind of like writing a hate letter to Lady Gaga because you’re deaf and can’t hear her music. Do you know what disabled people want? It’s for everyone else to treat them like the didn’t have one. As of right now it’s 8:30 and I want to get this in by 9 so I’m not going to put a lot of research into this, but a five minute scouring of the internet looking for what her actual disability is bore no fruit, and maybe I’m wrong about this and she’s got spondylitis or narcolepsy, but I HATE when people who are not in a certain demographic use said demographic as a political tool.
Moving on, Emily Waltington seems like she at least has her heart in the right place, but she doesn’t seem to understand that no art is for everyone. Art doesn’t have to have a message, but it really should. And if there’s a message, there’s an audience, and if there’s an audience, it’s geared towards the people who would appreciate it. For example, there’s a song I like called The Mariner’s Revenge Song, by The Decemberists. It’s a long, acoustic ballad about a boy in the age of sail who’s mother is wronged and left to die by a scoundrel and then he goes on a eighteen year journey seeking revenge. The music in wonderful, the story is dramatic, and it feels good when I put my hands on the speakers as it plays. Now, a deaf person will never hear this song. If the lyrics were to be transcribed, they might read it, but even if they liked the poetic form it took, half the meaning is gone as it’s in the music. 
Look, we live in an age where there’s something for everyone to enjoy, but it’s not the artist’s responsibility to provide that. The artist’s job is to create the art they want to create, whether it be high society fine art or painting flowers on gourds to sell at the craft fair. It’s on the viewer or listener to find the art that moves them.” 
 
Shannon’s self righteous bullshit here: https://shannonfinnegan.com/anti-stairs-club-lounge-at-the-vessel
 
After the rant, another article about Andrea Crespo, who self identifies as, and I quote, “transgender dicephalophilic person with a diagnosis of Asperger syndrome,” was refered to me. Dicephalophilic, means that he identifies as a conjoined twin.
Yes.
That’s a thing.
This dude has a BFA from the Pratt Institute and his art is subpar to that socially awkward weeb you hung out with in middle school who only drew furries and never got any better at it. I’m serious. His (Yeah, I know he identifies as “they,” and I normally respect that, but FUCK this guy) parents must have donated so much money to that school that they were able to hire Jeff Bezos as a barmaid. 
 
 
Link: https://www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews_features/qa/i-am-stuck-this-way-likely-for-life-andrea-crespo-on-conjoined-twins-christianity-54758
 
My response to that reads as such:
 
“I don't know what's going on with Andrea Crespo. They (?) identify as dicephalic parapagus twins, even though there are pictures on the internet of the person and that's clearly not the case. I hold issue with that as it takes away from people who struggle with actual physical and mental issues. Say for example there's someone somewhere who suffers from gender dysphoria (which is a recognized condition by the NHS), and that person wants to reveal themselves for who they are on the inside. If they see someone like Crespo identifying as a conjoined twin for no apparent reason than to bring attention to himself, that's going to be harmful because it delegitimized the struggles of people who are already in the categories society deems as "other." Crespo also self identifies as having Aspergers, which again, is a real thing that someone can't just going around saying they have because they feel like they do. There's an entire field dedicated to research Aspergers that's trying to understand, and if possible prevent it. I know people with Aspergers and they don't just go around telling people they have it every chance they get. I know I don't know everything about this person, but from what I could find since tonight, I'd label Crespo as a shameless attention whore who need a  gimmick because their actual artwork in uninspired, aesthetically unpleasing, low quality tripe, that if is to be considered worthy of being displayed at the Loius Vuitton Foundation, without a exuberantly generous donation from mommy and daddy, we might as well quit because art is dead.”
 
 I'll let you know if I'm still in school next week.
​
Art’s dead.
Democracy was a mistake.
Fuck you.

Alright, so let's talk about the music I was listening to when I wrote Six Pistols and a Dagger, Smokepit Fairytales Part VI. But first, a little in-depth background behind character development.


Before we go any further, SPOILERS.

On top of being a continuation of the journey the characters from Chainsmoke Your Problems Away, and Mourn the Liquid Dew of Youth, Six Pistols and a Dagger is a reflection of the life of Edward Teach (sometimes recorded as Thatch), who you might know better as Black Beard, and Shakespeare's MacBeth. Now, I have been planning this plotline for a hot minute. In the second installment of Smokepit Fairytales, when Penelope tells Hank that she's pregnant she says she's thinking of naming him Edward Thatch. Yes, everything that happened in the previous two books were building up to this book.
Another little fun fact for you, in real life Black Beard was hunted down by a Lt Maynard and killed by one of his men who history only remembers as "A highlander." Sources differ on the fight where Black Beard died, but he was shot eight to twenty times and stabbed at least twenty times, then kept fighting until a highlander came up from behind him and cut off his head. Yeah, I didn't make that up. Google that shit. There can be only one. Another note on that is O'Con's main men are McCloud and Ramirez. 

Short rant there, let's get into the mood music. 

Jolly Roger, Roger McGuinn

A simple song about piracy and life dedicated to committing grand larceny on the high seas.

​I’m not going to lie, sometimes I miss living in the barracks. Now before you get started on inspections, cleaning, the lack of cooking methods, small ass fucked up rooms, the heat and AC being out, people being able to come into your room and fuck with you at any hour of any day, and idiots being idiots, and the general lack of freedom, let me elaborate on why.
I don’t sleep much. Even if I’m in bed before the sun goes down, I usually lay there until after midnight just staring at the back of my eyeballs. More often than not I opt to try to something proactive with my insomnia, usually something art or book related, unless I’m just not feeling it in which case I dive down the YouTube rabbit hole. I also like to drink. I’m perfectly fine either throwing them back with people in a bar or downing it while I’m alone at home working on a project. 
The issue is, I don’t have anyone to talk to around here. I live in a nice house, but it’s out in the styx. They just put in a convenience store, but besides that and the church, the closest anything is at least a fifteen-minute drive, and even that’s just gas stations and a McDonalds. There’s not a whole lot about the Marine Corps I really miss. I was there for the clowns, not the circus. What I miss about the barracks, the only thing I can come to think of, was going outside at literally any hour of any day and find someone in the smoke pit to bullshit with for a while. I love my wife to death, but I’m convinced she’s part Koala because she sleeps twenty hours a day.
I only have one drinking buddy that lives around here, and he comes over every now and again, but besides that most of my friends in the area are a two or three hour drive away. Then after that the rest of them are in a different time zones. It’s not that I don’t have friends, it’s that I don’t have any around here. And even if I did, what are most people going to do when you text them “I’m bored. You wanna hang out?” at midnight on a Tuesday?
I think that’s why I go live on Instagram so much. I just want someone to talk to about dumb shit in the middle of the night.
I do have my buddy Chuck coming up later this week though. He’s gotta be my favorite house guest, especially when it’s just him. We sit down in the garage, crack open every beer I could find within a thirty-mile radius, crank up the music and rock out until the some comes up. More than once I’ve only gone to bed because my wife comes down stairs at six am and tells me I need to be functional when she gets home from work in eight hours. Fun fact, if you take an electric guitar, that’s plugged in, and play music on your phone and stick it to the pickup, it’ll transfer through to your amplifier. 
 
 

Alright, so I asked what you’d want to hear, or read, me rant about, and frankly, I’m underwhelmed because apparently, only smartasses answer anything. Then again that’s nothing new. This is, of course, the internet.
But before we get into that I want to talk about going LIVE on Instagram. As you may know, I usually go live on the weekends and converse with either my buddy Doc or whoever shows up to chit chat, and we go all night with it. Last night, for example, we started at around ten and went until three in the morning. I think that’s been good for engagement. But I’ve been thinking about starting a weekly show at a set time during a reasonable hour with prearranged guests. For example, maybe If I get finished reading someone’s book or if someone has a sweet art project they doing or whatever other dumb shit people talk about on podcasts, we’ll sit down and talk about it for a bit. A lot of people seem to want to take that kind of content off-site, which is fine if that’s what you’re into, but I’m wanting to do it on Instagram where it’s accessible to everyone. I’ll fill everyone in when I nail that down better.
But anyway, down to y’alls’ dumbass suggestions for topics.

Immigrants taking your jobs:
Check it out man, Jose the roof builder getting hired to do some work instead of you isn’t Jose’s fault. Report your employer to the IRS because that shit’s illegal and your boss will get busted for it. Jose’s just trying to get along, your boss is the asshole, and he needs fucked. So, fuck that asshole and call the IRS.
Second note on immigration, I think we should weld the borders shut. Not just from Mexicans, but Canada too. And we should probably stop letting Asians, Africans, Europeans, Aussies, Kiwis, and Indians over too. Like, we’re full dude. There’s already too many people here, and on top of that we’re literally living in Nazi Germany Kentucky and it would be irresponsible to let anyone come to America while DRUMF is president because he personally hand-built a concentration camp in Michigan and is sending all the undesirables there. It’s pretty brutal, look it up. It’s called Detroit.
Speaking of government fuck ups though, Carl asked about the government. Look, the government’s fucked. I love my county, but Washington DC is something else completely. They put the CUNT in country. And I know this going to veer off into an attack on voters instead of the “leaders” of the nation, but most of voters are fucking idiots. If you honestly believe that democrats and republicans aren’t two heads on the same snake, congratulations, you’ve been successfully brainwashed and you apparently didn’t understand a damn work of 1984. Historically Republicans have been WAY worse about taking gun rights away that Democrats and Democrats have enacted far more egregious legislature aimed at minorities. There’s a reason Droney McPeaceprize was also called The Deporter in Chief. And what’s worse is that Donald Trump on policy is JUST as bad as Obama, and the only reason you actually think he’s that bad is that he handles his own twitter. Okay, “That bad” might have been a little off. They’ve all been that bad. You can come at me with how any of them are different when you show me that they voted against increasing the DOD budget  AND show me how they’re actively trying to imprison people who voted to maintain the Patriot Act, which by the way Biden helped lay the groundwork for in the 90s.
Vote third party.
Anyway, speaking of the average American voter being a fucking moron, let’s talk about keeping your kids home from school when they’re sick. Look, I get it, the state wants your kids there so they can fill them full of shit like “Columbus was a good dude” and “The government’s not out to get you” and “There were no racists in the north prior to 1860 and people up there totally weren’t also complicit in slavery because their entire economy was driven by outsourced slave labor and the entire fucking war was just Virginia’s fault” but if your kid’s sick, keep them home. I know you didn’t vaccinate your crotch goblins because that dumb slut Karen you went to high school with roped you into a “Multi-level marketing campaign” and she says that vaccines have heavy metals in them and will make you kid magnetically attracted to semi-trucks and your kid will be smeared on the pavement like an opossum just because vaccines cause autism, but Karen’s a dumb fucking bitch. If she weren’t, she wouldn’t be trying to rope housewives she went to high school with into pyramid schemes. Stop listening to her, and get your kids vaccinated. I know that even with the shots kids still get sick. That’s a condition of being human. But if that disgusting thing you call a child is gushing snot out of its nose like Niagara falls and sneezing on everything spreading germs like Saddam Hussien trying to kill the Kurds, leave your kid at home. Don’t have a baby sitter? Lock the door. Not hard. I know you didn’t prepare for this when you either got pregnant when you were sixteen or when you knocked up your cousin at prom, but it’s not the rest of our faults that you can’t control your shit. Stop pushing your chemical warfare spreading demons at us. I would rather you just mail me anthrax. And speaking of spreading germs, quit worrying about the Coronavirus.
Look, all you fucking generation Z zoom zoom zoomers do is cry about how much you hate everything, millennials don’t shut the fuck up about either going to Iraq (Yes millennials are turning forty) or how much they hate boomers, and you boomers need to just fucking die. Well here’s the solution people. CORONA VIRUS. It ONLY kills old people. God is LITERALLY giving us a gift with this. If you’re under 60, apparently all the virus does is give you a cold for a week or two. Why is everyone so upset about this. You pray to GOD that the boomers would just die off but you bemoan the method in which your wish is granted? What did you WANT to happen? Were snakes supposed to kill them? Was ISIS supposed to make a resurgence and then infiltrate America and slit your neighbor Getrude’s throat just so she doesn’t vote Republican this year? Look, dude, embrace the virus. Fuck, if you’re between 18 and 40, go GET the virus, stop washing your hands after you shit, and just rub your hands and tongue on everything at Walmart, and all of your boomer problems will solve themselves.
And yes, I left out Generation X, but they haven’t done anything since Limp Bizkit broke up. They did a thing or two for the nookie then they’ve spent the last thirty years crying about Cobain even though Nirvana was a shit band for shitty people who couldn’t appreciate what a good time they were actually living in. If Generation X wants to talk, they should have taken care of Iraq the right way in Desert Storm instead of putting off so millenials had to do it for them. And while we’re on that note, nobody wants to hear you say “Back in my day.” Like yeah, dude, we get it, you and your ways are irrelevant because you couldn’t evolve with the rest of society.
THE FUTURE IS NOW OLD MAN!

Rant Alert, if you don’t want to listen to me complain for three pages, the playlist is down where the videos start.
​

I smoke. I smoke a lot. I smoke so fucking much that the amount of nicotine required to give me a buzz would kill Dale Gribble. On top of that my casual drinking is roughly on the same level as a Russian construction worker on holiday in Vegas. There’s been a number of times where I was just hanging around a bar trying to enjoy myself and someone wouldn’t leave me alone so we’d end up doing shots and they’d end up half dead in the head sick with alcohol poisoning while I ordered another glass of rum and walked outside for a cigarette. But let’s be clear on something, I don’t abuse alcohol. I teach it a fucking lesson. But we’ll save drinking stories for another day, today we’re going to be talking about chain smoking your problems away.
            To say that tobacco is a stable of military culture is to say that the Pacific Ocean is slightly moist. The thing that plays into that, which most civilians seem not to be aware of, is the overbearing amount of downtime and colossal strain of boredom that comes with the monotony of having nothing to do. Say for example there’s a unit that gets every task they’re responsible for completing in the week accomplished before noon on Tuesday. They’re not going to just be let go. The two most likely things that will happen are being sent to clean something, even if it doesn’t need cleaned, or put on standby, which is just being sent to hang out somewhere until you’re needed. There were times that lasted for weeks when I was attached to infantry units where the schedule was get up for a formation that was held at five in the morning, then go hang out in your barracks room until about six that night. If you have a job that can be done in the rear, things aren’t often much better. Mechanics who get their shit fixed, administration people at smaller units, warehouse workers, if their tasks are completed, they still have to be available in case something comes up. Then if you’re deployed to a combat zone it gets worse. From what I’ve seen the standard schedule for a day with an infantry unit, you know, the guys that are fighting the damn war, is eight hours on patrol where something may or may not happen, eight hours on post just watching the desert with literally nothing else to do, and eight hours of rest to get anything personal one might need done. Such personal things include weapons maintenance, eating, cleaning and organizing gear, personal hygiene, and maybe even sleep. And keep in mind, you’re on the other side of the planet, it’s not like you can just go home. And this keeps up for at LEAST six months, if you’re not part something that might be filed under “The invasion.” Then God forbid you end up on ship where if you don’t have a job related to keeping the ship running, or you’re not pulled to be an auxiliary cook or cargo handler you have literally not a damn thing to do. 
Then if you’re not deployed, and you’re single, you live in the barracks and there isn’t anything really to do there either and since you make less than twenty thousand dollars a year you either don’t have a car or it’s a piece of shit and you don’t want to risk it breaking down on the side of the highway trying to get somewhere. That and your plans for the night are to get so drunk you forget how to speak English and you wouldn’t make it past the MPs at the gate anyway and the closest bar is a sixty dollar taxi ride because they built the base you’re stationed at in the middle of fucking nowhere so locals wouldn’t complain about detonating thousand pound bombs, shooting rockets and artillery, and conducting live fire machine exercises at all hours of the night.
So where does that leave you?
The smoke pit. The authorized smoking area outside the barracks, on the FOB, or if you’re on ship down at RAS Station 5 colloquially referred to as the smoke deck. You’ve got all kinds of time to burn and nothing to do beside smoke cigarettes to pass the time. 
These Smokepit end up serving as a forum. People from all over your area come here to burn off a smoky treat and shoot the shit with whoever will listen. They’ll share stories, laugh at jokes, bemoan their lovers, and they’ll do it happily to someone new who hasn’t heard it before because they’ve already told their squad mates the same story fifteen times and they’re tires of hearing about it.
I drew a lot of my stories from things I’ve heard in smoke pits. Hell, my working title for Smokepit Fairytales was “Tales from the Smokepit.” I added the Fairytales later due to the fact that most of what you hear there is embellished bullshit someone said so that a stranger would think they’re cool.
When I was in the Marines, I was a cameraman. If you want to get technical, officially I did everything in the field besides photography. I was an illustrator (drew things), a reproduction specialist (printer monkey), videographer, and a psychological warfare specialist (Psyops, messing with people’s heads), but I was never officially a photographer. However, photographers were the only people who actually went out do to shit in my field, so I picked up a camera, learned how to use it, and on three of my four deployments I held a position of a photographer. And that was the best job in the Marine Corps. Infantry guys only see infantry stuff, mechanics only see mechanical things, and artillerymen only see cannons. As a photographer I’ve managed to see it all. And a lot of it came from convincing someone that they needed pictures of something that was happening and going along for the ride. I wiggled my way onto my last three pumps that way. Sort of. Anyway, it’s gotten me to where I wanted to go. But with all that bouncing around, comes the burden of always being the new guy everywhere I went. People don’t like new guys or attachments, which I was both, when what you’re doing is dangerous or complicated. Being new, you don’t know how things are done the way they do them, you don’t know the people, and they see you as extra baggage. This is where I would strategically use cigarettes to fit myself into whatever hole I needed to be in.
            Say for example I show up somewhere new. That unit is already a tight knit group and they don’t know you from Adam. They have no reason to want you around, and no reason to trust that you’re competent enough for anything besides maybe being an extra body to stand watch. The second part of fitting in these situations is knowing how to use the machinegun and being able to carry as much shit on your back and keep up. I was never a good runner, but I could haul a hundred pounds of gear and ammunition, on top my own weapon, ammo, camera gear, and body armor up a mountain like no one’s business. The key I found to getting that far in though was smoking. If someone from the unit walks up to the Smokepit and he didn’t have his smokes on him, or he was out, I could become his new best friend right then and there. I’d bum them a smoke, and in turn they’d stand there and smoke it while they talked to me. All of a sudden, I’m not a stranger anymore. Granted it didn’t always work, and it took me some time to figure out how to do it, giving people cigarettes makes you a friend. Hell, come to think of it, out of my core group of what I’d consider good friends there’s only one who either didn’t meet in the Smokepit or was roommates with. And that other guy was on three deployments with me.
            Anyway, those relationships I built with tobacco, or maybe better phrased as the relationship I built with cigarettes themselves is one of the reason I chose to make the covers of my books look like packs of smokes. Lucky Strikes, Camels, Chesterfields, Marlboro Reds, Newport Blues, and Marlboro NXTs respectively.  
            And speaking of books, let’s get to the mood music behind Chainsmoke Your Problems Away. I wrote that, as well as Mourn the Liquid Dew of Youth, and Six Pistols and a Dagger all together in 2016 and 2017 while I was stationed in Twentynine Palms. Some of the stories inside are embellishments of things that happened while I was there, but the majority of it was taken from my days with the 11thMarine Expeditionary Unit in 2011-2012. As with my first book, only a handful of the stories depicted actually happened to me, the rest all came from things that I had heard on the Smokepit or things I’ve seen happen to other people, you know, besides the core plots of fighting space Russians and their zombie viruses, overthrowing the government, and turning to a life of piracy.
            Inside these three books there is an internal playlist that comes from the songs the characters hear and sing inside the books. The sheet music for that is in the backs of the books the song happens in. You can listen to that on Spotify or download it from iTunes. Here’s a link where you can listen to it for free on this website.

https://www.smokepitfairytales.com/music.html


​Here is the music I listen to while writing Chainsmoke Your Problems Away. These are the songs that best reflect the internal mood to the songs.
Also, from here on out, Spoiler Warning.
 
Life on Mars, David Bowie.
The first obvious thing is that the characters are stationed on Mars, and this book’s about life. The second thing you may not have noticed was in the chapter where Glædwine (The girl with the mousey hair) is introduced at the Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps, she’s reviewing an incident where sailors got into a barfight in a dancehall while in port. She hooked to the screen, but the video is a frightening bore that she’d seen a thousand times or more. 

​Singapore, Tom Waits.
Singapore is a magical place. As a matter of fact, its name mean’s Lion City. Lion city is the main colony the character make port in. It’s just as wild as Thailand, but just a little bit cleaner. There’s a real place there named Orchard Tower, that incoming sailors call the Four Floors of Whores, because while the upper part of the building is an apartment building, the first four floors are all whore houses thinly disguised as bars. This is a golden little open secret about the place, because even if you don’t pay a lady of the night for her services, the drink are terribly cheap. You can get hammered while your buddy goes out back for a blow job and between the two of you, you only spent thirty bucks. I remember when I was there, I was drinking dollar liters of Tiger beer and one of my shipmates asked to borrow a few bucks so he could go get a hand job. I lent him the cash and went back to drinking. When we got back to ship I asked him for the money back, he insisted that he’d get it to me later. Later never came. For a while I would see him and say “You owe me twenty bucks.” Twenty bucks isn’t a big deal. If he asked to have it, I probably would have given it to him, but he asked to borrow it, and I liked giving him shit. Eventually “You owe me twenty bucks” turned into “You owe me a hand job.” A couple weeks later that guy’s nickname was Hand job for the rest of the deployment. Moral of the story, don’t borrow money in a brothel.

​Lay It Down, Ratt.
This is a great song to listen to while driving around the desert in a Corvette at two hundred miles an hour. It’s also a good song to have stuck in your head while rawdogging randos. If there was enough room in a corvette to bone in, well Whitesnake would obviously trump Ratt, but this is a close second.

​Every Rose Has Its Thorn, Poison
There’s a lot of emotional trauma and heartbreak in this book. I wanted to challenge myself to write a story that was anti-romance. There’s a million and a half romance novels out there on the market. I wanted to write the exact opposite. Romantic relationships in the military are hard on a good day when both people care. And when it doesn’t work out, you just have to internalize it and move on.

​Hellraiser, Motorhead.
Thatch, Stockton, Chuck, and McKenzie are hell raisers in every sense of the word. And sometimes it feels tough to them, but they haven’t gotten enough of it. Being in the fire and the heat only adds to the effect.

​Asian Hooker, Steel Panther
Remember what I just said about Singapore? 

​Kitchen Ace, Andrew Hulshult
This song is a metal cover of a song originally from the game DOOM. Doom, if you haven’t played it is about a Marine killing demons on Mars. Thatch and the gang are Marines stationed on Mars who go up to capture a Russian Bioweapon that turns people into demonic zombies. This song is rip and tear.

​I Sawed the Demons, Adrew Hulshult
Same as above.

​Barracuda, Heart
This one’s reflective of Thatch’s tumultuous relationship with Samum.

​I’ve Seen That Movie Too, Elton John
Another one referring to Thatch and Samum’s relationship. Crazed star crossed lovers who don’t buy each other’s bullshit.

​Party in the U.S.A., Miley Cyrus
By this time in the story, Mars is the USA, and when they’re not on ship, these characters are partying. That and this is one of the greatest party songs ever made. Fight me.

​Alert! Metal Gear Solid Soundtrack 
There was a good amount of sneaking around on Volgograd trying to either get into the hospital or away from it, and this song brings back memories of playing MGS and sneaking around trying not to get caught by the guards.

​Hang’em All, Carpenter Brut
Electronic music that’s got an ominous tone. I think this would have fit while the Marines’ ship was going down and they were boarding the Russian vessel.

I’ve heard a lot of authors talk about how their friends and family don’t support their work. I would like to think that wasn’t a universally applicable statement, however I do feel it when someone says something relating to that, and I see it mentioned enough to know that it’s a thing people struggle with. It happens to me too. The vast majority of my group of friends and family haven’t even picked my book up. My dad’s read my first three books, but put hasn’t picked up the fourth yet, and that’s been out for a minute. He did tell me that he sent my first book to a prison library though. A guy he used to work with has been an inmate since the nineties and I guess they trade books. From what I understand I’m popular on death row at the Florida State Prison. My sister has also read my books, and apparently the crew on her C-130 really enjoyed them. Family wise though that’s it. My aunts, uncles and cousins seem to be completely disinterested. One of my aunts dismissed my first book as smut when I asked her about it. That struck me as a little off, as immediately prior she was regaling me with the all the insights of the Game of Thrones and Fifty Shades of Grey book series. Part of me was disappointed, but I did take solace in that someone who enjoyed the never-ending monotony of A Song of Ice and Fire and the outright tripe that is Fifty Shaded of Gray for their grittiness, violence, and overt sexual actions couldn’t even stand to read through the first few chapters of my work. Personal friends haven’t been much better. I’d say that I have four friends that read all six of my books. Two of them are amazingly supportive, one of them read them and told me he loved them then moved on with the conversation, and one friend keeps trying to tell me about things she read in the books that I didn’t write in the damn things. I really do appreciate everyone who’s taken the time to sit down and read what I’ve wrote, but the majority of those people are strangers on the internet. I do find it a strange phenomenon. There are a lot of supper supportive people out there that have never met me in person. And if you want my opinion, I think that’s better than the alternative. I wrote my books for people who have been in the same kind of struggled I’ve been in. My target audience post 9/11 combat veterans. What do upper-class, house wife, aunts know about trying not to get killed 24-7 for months on end only to come home and not be able to turn off that part of the brain since it’s been on so long. How are snooty, overprivileged cousins who know that one day they’re going to be rich off inheritance supposed to relate to staying at a bar all night until your pay posts and you can close your tab because you don’t want to go back to the barracks and stare at cinderblocks until you go insane? What do the people who partied hard in high school, peaked at nineteen, then had six kids before they turned twenty five and are stuck in middle America with some bullshit job know about attempting to form meaningful relationships with people you only get to see two or three times a year between training and deployments that usually crumble so you’re left to adapt to living the life of one night stands and drunken escapades. THEY DON’T. If you’re writing just for your friends and family, then why bother put it out to the world? If that’s the case, go to Kinkos, print off a few copies and give them to them. You didn’t grow up with your parents or their generation, and your siblings, cousins, and friends from your home town probably had completely different lives after you moved out and started your own life, and they just can’t relate. The good news is, there are people out in the world that think like you and want your work to relate to. The only issue with them is finding them and getting your work to them. Strangers praising your work on the internet is the greatest thing that can happen. Think about it, they don’t owe you anything, you’re not paying them to say the things they do, they have literally ZERO reason to give a flying fuck about you and your work. So, when someone does say something good about your work, they mean it. They have nothing to gain from telling you that they enjoyed your book, or art, or music, or whatever it is. Savor the strangers on the internet.
Alright, this was supposed to be a completely different rant, so you can probably expect another one coming up later tonight or tomorrow.
Appreciate the people who appreciate you.

So, I’m going to double hit this one. I’ll get to the playlist in a minute, but I’m going to vent about something else first. Well, two things actually, “Best Selling Authors” and “Combat Veterans.”
I follow a lot of indie authors on Instagram, and they have a varying amount of success. Some of them write amazing work, but don’t market themselves well. Some are absolutely kicking ass at putting themselves out there, but their books suck. For the most part, if I hated an author’s book though, I just don’t review it. Call it professional curtesy if you want, but I wouldn’t want someone highlighting my work as tripe, so I try not to do it to other writers. Well, at least not indie writers, we’re all in the same boat and something egregious would have to happen for me to get on Instagram or Facebook, wave a flag, and declare Shithead McIlliterate over here can’t write for shit. I will however knock the shit out of more famous authors. They have a platform and can take it. Case in point, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green is an Absolutely Unremarkable Plight on Literature. Fucking godawful. Maybe it’s just me but I don’t want to hear a forty-year-old man in a happy marriage with kids write a novel about a bi-curious, teenage, lesbian’s menstrual cycle. That and the story was predictable, and bland. 
Fight me.
But Hank Green is every level of successful, and I watch most of his Youtube videos, even though I don’t agree with him on a lot of things. I still respect his opinions because he’s thought them out, and I think his heart’s in the right place. And even thought his book is a best seller, it wouldn’t have been if he wasn’t already famous. I don’t think him, or his brother for that matter, have any business in the literary community. 
Now this leads me to the first real point in this rant. Stop putting “Best Selling Author” in your bio if you aren’t one. This isn’t out of spite, I’m trying to look out for you here. I follow a lot of authors on my writing account, most of that’s just following for the sake of following. On my main page however, I’m specific with who I follow. If I’m watching you, it’s because you’re doing something right. However, I often find myself looking at someone’s profile that was suggested to me and their headline is “Best selling author.” At this point I get curious and check them out online, and they’ll have one book out from four years ago that has three reviews on amazon. One review will be two or a three star review, the other will be a one star, and the five star review that is there was blatantly posted by the author of the book. Now I think the author’s full of shit and there’s no way I’m going to follow them, much less buy and read their work. Unless you can put what list someone ELSE has deemed you a best seller on, don’t tell me you’re a best seller. 
It’s disingenuous. 
And speaking of disingenuous, let’s talk about you fuckers calling yourselves “Combat Veterans.”
Look, I get it, you’ve gotta hustle and any edge you can get is worth the cut. But if you’re not a combat veteran, don’t fucking say you are. There’s a difference between having been in the military (Veteran), having deployed (still just veteran), having deployed to a combat zone (You might be able to put “OIF” or “OEF” before the “Veteran” part, but that’s still veteran), and having been shot at and returned fire (This last one would be “Combat Veteran”)
It is OKAY to have been in the military and not done anything. It’s okay to have been deployed and stuck on an airbase as a clerk or a cook or a mechanic. But just because you were deployed to a combat zone, that doesn’t mean you’re a combat veteran. Hell, you could have been infantry and out on patrol every day, but if you didn’t actually see combat, you’re not a combat veteran. Stop telling people you are. Combat is a lot like sex, the people you hear talking about it the most have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about. Remember that kid in middle school who said he’d had sex with like a hundred girls? That’s you if you’re doing this, and If I see it, I just assume that you’re starving for attention, and the only interesting thing that ever happened to you was spending seven month in Al Asaad or Leatherneck eating at the DFAC and pushing paperwork. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Hell, write a book about working on HMMVs or helicopters and being frustrated that you’re not going outside the wire, or about standing duty as a gate guard in Twentynine Palms checking IDs for four years. There’s gotta be something interesting that happened there, and I’ll read that. Just don’t fucking lie to us about what you’ve been through.
I read this one book that the author marketed as memoirs about being wounded in Fallujah then being harassed for being too sexually active. When I read the book, turned out she chipped a tooth or some shit in Fallujah eight YEARS after the battle, then she started fucking her boss and his wife started stalking her. 
Don’t feed me bullshit to get a few bucks out of me. I’m trying to read books written by sincere authors. Let your work speak for itself. Your work might not be for everybody, and again, that’s okay. Hell, there are some people I tell not to read my books because I don’t think they can handle jokes about catastrophic anal bead malfunctions in the first chapter.
Alright, enough ranting, let’s get to the Paragon of Man’s mood playlist. Also, I really meant for that whole rant to be about a paragraph long, but this blog is called “Rants” for a reason. 
 
Spoiler Warning for the Paragon of Man after this.
 
I didn’t start writing the third book for a couple of years after the first two. It was later 2016, or maybe early 2017. I was stationed in Twentynine Palms and wrote most of that book in my barracks room when I wasn’t busy trying to break the world record for most alcohol consumed in one sitting. And to be completely honest, I don’t remember writing the first draft. I don’t remember most of 2016. In face I have a friend in Houston I visited in 2018 who had a lot of my art on their wall and I recognized that the work was mine, but I didn’t remember painting them.
 
However, the writing playlist survives, and I can tell you about the moods they set.
 
Jūrā gāju naudas gūt, Teiksma
I’m not sure what the actual lyrics to this are. I know it has something to do with being lost at sea though. It’s melancholy melody fits that mood.