Ron vs the Zombie Publisher!

ADVENTURES WITH RON, Part One

So, I have this friend, Ron. R.J. Hore. He’s a nice guy, retired banker, genial fellow. I would see him at Collectables Conventions and Antique Fairs, Farmers Markets, Fleas. He’d always have a table selling his books, often sharing the table with another writer. He had a replica Saber Tooth Tiger skull at his table, that was cool.

Anyway, whenever I saw him, I’d buy one of his books. That’s a thing I do. I buy books by local writers. Small press, self published, whatever. I’m a writer, they’re writers. I want to support my brethren.

The bottom line, I got to know Ron.

Honestly, he’s a pretty good writer, and mostly, I admire his gumption. I don’t think I’ve got the fortitude to sit at tables at these little conventions, hawking my books, watching thousands of people walk by refusing to make eye contact. I’m not really a people person. But I like people who are.

He’s a small press guy, his books are mostly published by Champagne Book Group with editors and everything.

He met the Champagne people when they had a dealers table at a local convention called Keycon, showed them his stuff, and they liked it. The rest is history.

Anyway, one day we were talking, and he had a problem.

It seems that he had a second publisher, eTreasures. They’d published four books for him – We’re Not in Kansas, a stand alone, and a trilogy – Toltec Dawn, Toltec Khan and Toltec Noon.

But he’d lost touch with them. Not replying to correspondence, there were no royalties, no reports, nothing. He was feeling kind of abandoned.

I’m thinking ripped off.

But you know how it is, I have certain skills for solving certain kinds of problems, so I agreed to look into it.

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Hey, I’m back! And I’ve been busy!

Wow. I hadn’t realized I hadn’t posted here in quite some time. It’s been nine months since my last update.  I’ve actually been writing a lot. But it either goes into my hard drive, or it’s posted on Facebook or Medium. I suppose I’ve let the Blog sit a bit.

Partially, it was a sense that I didn’t have much coming out to talk about. I try and get a few books out each year, and use the website and blog to promote them. But that kind of tailed off it felt.  And, to be completely truthful, I don’t think I’ve got much of a readership on this thing. Or any readership at all. Not even when I was posting extremely regularly in prior years. I think that the Internet has evolved, often and perhaps mostly, in toxic directions, and Blogs like this have largely been left behind. There was a time when a good steady Blogger could build up a real following. I don’t think that’s the case now. Certainly, what I was finding was that there were no comments, my comments pages were just drowning in in spam-bots.

So technically, I guess, this is just kind of an accessible memoir. The real shot at building an audience is on social media, like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, social media and discussion forums like Medium, Quora, Reddit, Substack. Most of which I’m hopeless at… but I’m devoted to at least giving it a try. So I’ve written a lot there, to no success whatsoever. But I do get a dozen or so people occasionally reading a facebook post.

Partially, I’ve just being busy with other things, as I’ll be noting.  Let me offer a loose chronological update.

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Race Relations in Current Fantasy

Sometimes modern discussion is simply tiresome. At this point, I’m thinking, in particular, of the band of screeching howler monkeys that constitute that ‘Anti-Woke’ crowd, and their endless, brainless war on anything that offends their delicate sensibilities.

Currently, one of the ongoing controversies seems to be black people in fantasy. Or ethnic representation in fantasy. I suppose it’s a good time to have that discussion, since we have four major Fantasy series currently running on television – The Witcher on Netflix, Dance of Dragons on HBO, the Lord of the Rings spin off on Amazon, and Willow on Netflix.

This is pretty unique, I don’t think we’ve ever seen so many fantasy series on at once, or so much money spent so ambitiously. Good thing, I suppose.

But here’s the problem: There are black elves.

I’m almost speechless.

That’s it.

Black actors getting cast as elves? There’s more to it, the whole argument is over multi-racial casting in fantasy, so we have black and Hispanic and Asian actors and actresses being cast randomly with white actors in a multitude of roles, from townsfolk to elves, dwarves, forest dwellers, soldiers, etc.

This apparently, is the ‘worst thing ever’ and a sign of the imminent destruction of our civilization at the hands of intersectional wokism!

Jesus Christ.

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A Pirate’s History of Doctor Who

July, 2022.  Oh man, do I just suck at marketing and self promotion?  Apparently yes.  Here’s a book that is so absolutely brilliant, so amazing, so revelatory and groundbreaking that it turned into a trilogy all by itself.

So what do we have in the first volume, the early years?

  • Well, now that Jody Whittaker is out of the way, we can give proper credit to Barbara Benedetti, the first woman to play the Doctor, through a series of four, unlicensed half hour adventures in the 80s.  Back when Doctor Who was at its lowest point, with the trial of a time lord, the attempted cancellation, the disastrous first McCoy season, there was Barbara, effortlessly hitting it out of the park.  Go ahead, compare Mindwarp and Time of the Rani to the Wrath of Eukor and Visions of Utomu. I dare ya.
  • The early Super8 film years of fandom and fan films, including a bunch of lost gems, and featuring the Image Makers, Ocean in the Sky and Mission of Doom
  • The early video wave, including the gothic Troughton/Davison crossover Spectre from the Past;
  • The recreation of Tom Baker’s Sontaran Experiment… with Cybermen

* The Reign of Turner and the odyssey of the Federation

  • Vaulkherd, Rutan and The Alliance, the stories of Sharon Horton, the second woman to play the Doctor

*

The Reign of Timebase and the Rupert Booth Doctor, the true Doctor of the 90s, with 12 episodes comprising five stories, plus three shorts

Review – Regenesis

Review – Phase Four

Review – Paradise in Chains

Review – Long Shadows

Review – The Hidden Face

 

Finally, reviews of great overlooked films Resurrenction of Evil,  The Chronotron Effect,  Dealers of Death and Time and Again

Another Pirate’s History of Doctor Who

August, 2022 – Here’s me forgetting to do self promotion.  But featuring….

  • The Complete History of Doctor Who stage plays, including
    • Curse of the Daleks
    • Seven Keys to Doomsday
    • The Ultimate Adventure starring Colin Baker AND Jon Pertwee
    • The Karnak Trilogy
    • Empress of Otherwhen
    • The Bedlam plays – from Planet of Fire to the Dalek Masterplan
    • The Three Trials of Davros
  • The Power of the Daleks, Reimagined
  • Millennium Trap
  • Recreating Masters of Luxor
  • The thirty year Odyssey of Devious
  • The Reconstruction of Marco Polo
  • The Strange Tangle of Copyright Confusion
    • Explaining the lost episodes
    • LEGAL fan films
    • Colin Baker’s The Stranger Series
    • Sylvester McCoy in Do You Have a License to Save this Planet
    • The Brigadier and Sarah Jane facing off the Great Intelligence and the Yeti in Downtime
    • Sontarans and Rutans confronting familiar faces in Shakedown
    • The Auton Trilogy, Zygon, Sil and the Devil Seeds

Holy cow! There’s amazingly good stuff in here. I mean, for a Doctor Who fan, this is all flat out terrific.  I can’t believe I’m the one who wrote it.

The Last Pirate’s History of Doctor Who

September, 2022.  I am absolutely the worst guy for self promotion.

  • The History of the Audio Doctor Who Universe, from Slipback to the Audio Visuals, to the BBV and Big Finish
  • The Story of Doctor Who animation pioneered by fans right up to Lost in the Dark Dimension and the BBC ‘lost serial’ animations.
  • Trident, Doctor Who’s version of Pulp Fiction.
  • The Holly Terror and the Ghost Pirates, Patrick Troughton reincarnated
  • How to Stop a Time Lord, heart from Romania
  • Fire and Ice, and the series that almost was
  • Death Takes a Holiday, featuring Colin Baker, and Gene Genius featuring Sylvester McCoy, blurring the lines
  • The four season epic serial of the Little Red Doctor
  • The brilliance of Velocity

CRAWLING TO THE MOON

BOOK LAUNCH – MARCH 11, 2023

Together with Benny the Antichrist

 

That’s about it for now.  Going to Blog about them later.

Thinking About Audiobooks – Part One

Well, I don’t really listen to audiobooks. Maybe I should. I listened to my friend Julie’s 12 episode Calamity Jane western audio podcast and that was pretty good. So maybe I should give it a shot.

Because Audiobooks are exploding all over the place these days. I’d heard about it the last couple of years, but I hadn’t quite realized how much.

So is this meaningful? Well, I looked up the statistics. And there’s a tangled knot of information. But here’s how I break it down. The US book industry (I’m assuming that includes Canada) is worth about 30 billion dollars in 2019-2020, the last year before Covid. Now of that, the big five book publishers, Penguin-Random House, Hachette, Harper-Collins, McMillan and Simon-Schuster, the guys you find dominating bookstores, represent about 10 billion dollars in sales during this period. There’s maybe another seven billion represented by the big five Educational publishers, the guys who do school textbooks and stuff. The rest, I assume divides up among the small and medium publishers, specialty houses, etc., the small fry.

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