Current events

A New Interview – Shameless Self Promotion

This is an interview I didn for Bill Hillman’s ERBZINE – the largest Edgar Rice Burroughs fansite in the world, covering Tarzan, Mars, Venus, the Inner Earth, the Land that Time Forgot and many more.  Bill, as it turns out is practically a neighbor, living only a couple of hundred miles away.

I grew up with the pulps, reading Tarzan, John Carter, Conan, but also Lovecraft, Asimov, Clark, Heinlein and many more, and I found different things to love about each of them.  This interview talked about my growing experiences with Burroughs and his exotic worlds, particularly Barsoom, the strange turns I took as a writer and explores my career from that perspective.  Anyway, check it out.

PART ONE

ERBzine 7856: Valdron Interview

PART TWO

ERBzine 7857: 2 Valdron Interview Part II

PART THREE

ERBzine 7858: 3 Valdron Interview Part III

ERBZINE ARTICLES

ERBzine 1402: The Fantasy Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs by Den Valdron

TORAKOR OF MARS

ERBzine 1580: Torakar of Mars Intro & Contents by Den Valdron

Shameless Self Promotion – The Mermaid’s Tale Youtube Review

Someone passed this on to me.  My book The Mermaid’s Tale, got a review on youtube.

I had no idea.  I thought this might have been a person I met at CanCon.  As it was, it turned out to be a complete stranger.

Spoiler Alert – She liked it!

The Mermaid’s Tale by DG Valdron (non spoiler) – utterly unique and underrated dark fantasy – YouTube

I went and thanked her for the review, a week or so ago.  She seemed thrilled.

Anyway, feel free to look it up.

And if you like the review, hit ‘like and subscribe’ – she seems like an interesting thoughtful person and she’s got lots of other interesting things to say about writers, culture and life.

In Defense of Kathleen Kennedy

If you listen to youtube, you’ll discover that Kathleen Kennedy is the worst person who ever lived.

Seriously, it’s between her and Hitler, and Hitler is old news.

She’s the woman who ruined Star Wars, and Indiana Jones, and Willow maybe, and possibly all of Disney including, the Marvel universe, Pixar, Bob Iger. She may well have single handedly destroyed Hollywood with WOKENESS and may be on the verge of taking down all of Western Civilization and turning us all into race swapping, transgender, feminist, gay, disabled communists.

Probably not, but the way people have been ranting for years on end, you have to wonder.

Well, let me step up and take a run at this hysteria. I give you: The Defense of Kathleen Kennedy.

The story is that Kennedy was an assistant to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas who treacherously flattered her way into power at Disney. George Lucas sold Star Wars to Disney and he arranged for Kenney to run things, confident that she’d carry out his vision.

Then she stabbed him in the back, stuck women in everything, made them gay and lame. For no good reason, she raped all your childhoods in her quest to bring Wokeness and Feminism to an innocent world. And totally destroyed … Everything, everywhere, and all at once.

Give me a break,

This whole ‘anti-woke’ stuff is getting tiresome, and it’s been a long time since it’s been useful.

Look, she’s not a monster. She’s not Hitler, she’s not Harvey Weinstein. She’s just a person.
So let’s take another look.

Kathleen Kennedy has actually been around for an incredibly long time. You look at IMDB, and she’s got a lot of credits, and a lot of very good movie credits. Well over a hundred producer credits, going back 40 years – Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Schindlers List, Bridges of Madison County, Back to the Future. You name it. Protégé of Lucas and Spielberg.

Good movies – if you’ve seen a movie in the last half century probably it was one of hers.

So what went wrong?

I’m going to commit sacrilege – when she took over Lucasfilm, she inherited a dog.

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2023 Writing Wrap Up

Writing Accomplishments and Non Accomplishments

Well, here’s the year end writer’s status report. There’s nothing much to say, really. You don’t have to read this. Every year, around New Years, out of some masochistic impulse, I do a review of my writing activities and accomplishments for the year, and my plans for the next year. Sometimes I’ll go back after writing one of these things, and measure myself against previous years activities and plans. So in the spirit of talking to my future self, here’s the roundup for 2023.

Early in February, I re-released the Mermaid’s Tale. This novel was originally published in 2017 through Five Rivers out in Ontario. They did print, ebook and audiobook editions. Five Rivers closed down in 2020, and rights reverted back to me.

I sat on it for a few years. I had hopes of finding another publisher, or an agent for it. No luck. So, basically, I decided that if I couldn’t take it anywhere, I might as well get it back into the world, so I re-released it under my own banner.

Apart from that, very little of my work got out in the world. I did do a lot of writing as always. I think probably a couple of hundred thousand words worth.

* Two Novellas, 27,000 and 40,000 words;

* Several short stories and a script, probably collectively another 50,000 words;

* Some work in progress stuff for upcoming collections, 40,000 words;

* Alt-History fanfic stuff (don’t judge me) maybe 60,000 to 70,000;

* A lot of short essays, mostly posted on medium or facebook or on my blog, no clear idea – anywhere from 50,000 to 100,000.

A lot of writing, and almost nothing to show for it. Rather disappointing.

There were actually a lot of books that I was going to complete and release this year that just didn’t get off the ground:

* An adult/erotic novel;

* A couple of erotic short story collections (it was going to be one, but I had enough material for two);

* A vampire novel;

* A slasher collection/novel;

* A nonfiction book about Starlost;

* A Cthulhu/Atlantis style spec essay book;

And I was hoping At Bay Press would be releasing Twilight of Echelon this year.

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Thoughts on this Writing Business

Recently, I came across a year end wrap up by Ron Vital, a writer. Basically, he’s been working at this writing thing pretty hard core. And he’s been doing annual wrap ups, providing detailed breakdowns in terms of his expenses, his sales, his sales breakdowns and his marketing and promotional efforts going back six or seven years.

In some ways, we’re pretty similar. We’ve both been self publishing for about the same length of time. We’ve both kind of had this lead time of the first few years not making very much. We’ve both moved up dramatically in sales in the last few years. We both write and publish a mixture of fiction and non-fiction. We both have a lot of books.

Where Ron differs from me is that he’s much more meticulous about keeping track of what he’s spending and how, what he’s trying, where the money is going, and whether it produces a return. He’s also deliberately investing more and heavily into selling his books.

Now for me, I pretty much do no marketing at all. No bookbub, no book funnel, no amazon ads, facebook ads, no newsletter, etc. etc Certainly not in the methodical and meticulous way that he does it.

So here are the awkwards. He is heavy duty working at marketing, to the point where for most years he went heavily into the red. His last two years, he netted a profit of about $25 and then $500 (mostly by reducing expenses).

But we made about the same amount of money in terms of gross sales and revenue. Actually, I think I’ve consistently done better. Not necessarily by huge gigantic increments. But in terms of grosses, I think I’m about $500 to $1000 ahead.

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SUNDAY BOOK LAUNCH – THE TOLTEC CONQUESTS

Sunday, November 19, 2023, from 2:00 to 3:30 pm

4th Floor, Artspace Building, 100 Arthur Street, Winnipeg

BOOK LAUNCH – THE TOLTEC CONQUESTS by RJ Hore

TOLTEC DAWN, TOLTEC KHAN and TOLTEC NOON

Sponsored by Fossil Cove Publishing and the Manitoba Writers Guild

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Conventions Update

THE WORLD FANTASY CONVENTION in Kansas City is coming up. Kansas City is actually in Missouri, a fact which provides me with no end of bemusement. I’m looking forward to it. I’ve been to several World Fantasy Conventions over the years, but too irregularly to do much good. I’m trying to make it a steady thing.  This should be a good Conference, good people, and maybe I’ll make a mark. I’m actually part of the programming, I have three items:

* Mythology & Fantasy of the Fox; 4PM Friday – with Alyc Helms, Kij Johnson, Rena Mason and Gillian Pollack. Hopefully this has nothing to do with what the Fox says. The Fox in literature and myth is one of the classic tricksters – a powerless, marginalized underdog who manages to triumph and overcome, not through power or strength or even courage, but through sheer cleverness. For the powers that be, for the establishment and social order, the Fox is a subversive, a deceiver, a persecutor and a thief. For the marginalized and underdogs, the fox is a hero. Everyone admits the fox is a clever beast, anti-social, revolutionary, and damned sexy. In my writing, many of my characters are ‘foxes’ – tricksters who survive by being smart.  I’m really looking forward to this panel, and a discussion about ‘trickster’ characters in folklore, modern culture and writing. Oh, and I’ll give away a book to an audience member as part of the panel.

* Reading; 5PM Saturday – I have half an hour to do a reading. I’m going to regale the audience with tales from Twilight of Echelon, short stories and vignettes based on the retro hallucinogenic works of artist Robert Pastern. Echelon is a world, or perhaps a reality, or perhaps something completely different, right next to our own, where everything familiar is recast and distorted as surreal and mysterious, and where the lost members of a human colony struggle to maintain their identity, unsure if the Earth they remember still exists, or if it ever existed.  Again, I’ll give away a book.

* Autographs – I’m also doing the Autograph session, along with everyone else. Honestly, in terms of fame, I’m a Z-list kind of guy, but I’m always startled to discover someone out there has heard of me and actually brings a book to sign. Typically, what I do, is just set up a display of a dozen of my books, relax and chat with anyone who stops by. If someone wants to buy something, I’ll sell it to them. If I like them, it’s free. I usually bring up a handful of books and make sure they find good homes before the convention starts.

This is actually my fourth major Writers Conference/Convention this year, and honestly, I’m glad I’m coming to the end.  I’m starting to get worn out.  For the record, this is what I’ve been up to.

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Why Would Aliens Come Here?

This is not going to be a rant about how tosh humanity is, although we are pretty tosh.

This is going to be a relatively thoughtful meditation on the universe, how big and vast it is, and the easiest ways to achieve a goal, which often doesn’t involve a journey of a thousand miles.

Everyone knows what the Drake Equation is, and everyone’s heard of the Fermi Paradox. If you haven’t, go look it up, I’ll wait here.

Boiled down to the basics, the Equation suggests that the Universe should be brimming with intelligent life. The Fermi Paradox asks the question, if that’s the case, where is it?

There may well be life elsewhere in the Universe, possibly in great profusion. There may well be intelligent life elsewhere in the Universe, lots of it. We don’t know for sure. So far, we’ve got a sample size of one, in both categories. But the sheer profusion of stars with planets suggests that regardless of whether it’s likely or not, it’s not impossible.

I think though, that we overlook the vastness. Sure, there are a hundred billion stars, give or take, in this galaxy alone, and there are millions and billions of galaxies. Count those numbers up and you can go a little crazy.

So why haven’t we been visited? Where are they? The UFO folks will say that they’re here. The Ancient Astronaut folks will say that they came and went.

But most likely, no. They aren’t here, they weren’t here, and odds are they’re not going to be showing up, for the simple reason that they don’t actually need to make the trip.

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Home Invasion Blues

I had an interesting experience yesterday. A friend of mine called, her neighbor and reported her brother in her yard and she was afraid to go home.

Her brother is kind of rough. Basically, drug addict, indigent. He’d been married, had a job, a kid. Lost it all. Beat and gaslit his wife, abused his family, he found something he liked better and his life spiraled down.

My friend, his sister had tried to help him, had tried to maintain a relationship with him. But as he went on, he got more and more unstable and potentially violent. The last time he showed up at her place, he told a story of ripping off his drug dealer’s cash, and in turn his drug dealer beating him up and stealing his phone and ID, and she’d spent half the night driving him around. It wasn’t getting better.

So, I judged she was right to be worried. I told her to pick me up when she came in from work, and I’d go with her to her house.

I figured that even as potentially violent and unbalanced as he was, having a full-grown male there, even one as inoffensive and docile as me would deter any potential violence and keep things even. And if there was violence, I’d probably handle it directed at me better than she would.

I suspected that I was going to be stuck in a great deal of someone else’s drama. That wasn’t really appealing. But you look out for the people you care about.

So, she picked me up, off we went to her house.

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Ron vs the Cover Monsters!

ADVENTURES WITH RON, Part IV

Ron and I had his four books ready to go, except for … everything.

A book isn’t just a manuscript. You need an ISBN registration, you need a cover, you need a back cover blurb and material, an author’s bio, an author’s photo, copyright information. We needed this stuff called Metadata – a long description, a short description, a one line description, something called BISAC, something else called SOE (search engine optimization).

Basically, after the big monolith of the manuscript itself, we also needed to build all the little tiny pieces of text that would go into the book and its online prooofiles.

Ron’s Toltec books were a trilogy, so we thought it would be a good idea to include adverts in each book of the trilogy for the other trilogy books. That turned into adverts for all of his books. And the idea of adverts suggested that we should include blurbs and art for the adverts. And the Adverts section needed to be slightly different for each of the four books. So a lot of work to keep track of.

If all this strikes you as bearing a passing resemblance to this thing called work? Yeah.

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