Burmese Crossfire Chapter 3

Well, there’s less than a week until Burmese Crossfire comes out.  One last peek before it’s go time. Joe Flanagan was not a man given to many words or noticeable outbursts of emotion.  He was often best described as “laconic,” and he took some pride in that fact.  He was a quiet man, often a gray man, passing unnoticed through the crowd, and he liked it that way.  He and Brannigan were of similar temperaments in that respect, as both preferred the wilderness to the hustle and bustle of the city. Right at the moment, though, Flanagan’s eyes were smoldering, and his jaw was tight under his thick, black beard.  He was not a happy man. He checked his watch again.  He knew he was in the right place.  The Vegas apartment complex hadn’t been hard to find.  It had been a long drive to get there, and now Curtis was late.  He would have let the man make his own way, but he’d been hiking in Utah, so he’d been close enough to swing through Vegas and pick the other man up on the way up to Colonel Brannigan’s place in Idaho.  But they still had a long way

The Guns of Brannigan’s Blackhearts (So Far)

Realized that I could have done this for Fury in the Gulf, but didn’t.  So, with the release of Burmese Crossfire now less than two weeks away, here’s a little gratuitous gun porn covering both of the first two novels in the Brannigan’s Blackhearts series. Chinese Type 03 Commander Esfandiari’s troops in Fury in the Gulf use Chinese Type 03 rifles.  The ones they use are the export variant, chambered in 5.56. Russian Makarov Both the Iranians and the Blackhearts use 9mm Makarovs for sidearms on Khadarkh. AK-12 The Blackhearts go ashore with top-of-the-line Russian AK-12s, in 5.45. (As shown on the cover.) PKP Pecheneg Curtis, being Mr. Machinegunner, carries a PKP Pecheneg on Khadarkh, in 7.62×54. Type 88 The North Korean advisors in Burma carry Type 88 rifles, an indigenous North Korean AK variant. Type 73 light machine gun The Nork advisors also have a couple Type 73s, another indigenous North Korean design. Type 56 The Kokang Army uses various AK clones, the most common of which is the Chinese Type 56. HK G3 Since it is commonly used by the Burmese Army, the Blackhearts go in with HK G3s. Rheinmetall MG3 With a bit more numbers, two of

Burmese Crossfire Chapter 2

The paperback proof is here, the Kindle pre-order is up ($0.99 until Jan 20, when it goes up to $3.99), and here is Chapter 2 to whet more appetites. The unimaginatively-named “Road-House” lay just off the highway, about twenty miles from the nearest town.  It didn’t get a lot of traffic, except for the occasional motorist stopping in to grab something to eat, either at the gas station attached to the “Road-House” or at the restaurant and bar itself. John Brannigan nearly filled the doorway as he stepped inside.  Six-foot-four, broad-shouldered, he retained the leanness and power of a man much younger than his nearly fifty years.  His hair was going gray, as was the thick handlebar mustache he’d grown since he’d retired—not entirely willingly—from the Marine Corps, some years before.  Deep lines surrounded his icy eyes as he swept the interior of the restaurant with a practiced, professional gaze.  This was a man who had never stepped into a room without knowing the layout, who was in it, and how to get out. It wasn’t that he was paranoid.  It was simply a fact that twenty-three years as a Marine, both enlisted and commissioned, had hard-wired certain habits into

Busy, Busy

I know, I haven’t been posting here much.  Need to get on that.  Probably need to do some scheduling. But I’ve been busy.  Very.  I’ve got another new series in the works, and it’s more than a little different from anything I’ve done before.  I’ve played around with military action adventure, horror/fantasy, and heroic fantasy (though y’all haven’t seen that much of that yet).  But this is going to be science fiction. Now, the funny part is that I originally started tinkering with writing, back in high school, with science fiction.  I still have notebooks (somewhere) of notes, starmaps, and starship diagrams from those days.  I had an entire sweeping timeline of wars between alien empires and human-alien alliances.  It was, to borrow a turn of phrase from Nick Cole and Jason Anspach, WingCommanderNotWingCommander with a leavening of StarWarsNotStarWars.  In fact, Task Force Desperate started out as a mil-fic backstory leading into the “21st Century Chaos” that was part of the backstory of what that epic evolved into.  (It isn’t anymore; the Praetorian Series became very much its own thing.) What I’m working on now isn’t that particular epic.  It’s much more “The Clone Wars meets The Horus Heresy with

“Burmese Crossfire” Chapter 1

Roi Tri Somboon Sirpreecha was nervous. It had been a whole fifteen days since he had reported to his post as the youngest, least-experienced platoon commander in the Thanan Phran, the Thai Rangers.  It hadn’t been an easy fifteen days, either.  While the Royal Thai Army provided the Thanan Phran with its officer and NCO corps, many of the men had their own ideas about discipline and responsibility.  He’d long heard that many of the Rangers had been criminals, pardoned of their crimes for joining up, but he hadn’t realized just how shadowy the interior workings of the Thanan Phran could be until he’d caught one of his more experienced and respected Rangers brazenly stealing from one of the villagers when they’d passed through Ban Pha Hi on patrol. When he’d confronted the man, he’d found himself half-surrounded by suddenly surly Rangers, all with weapons close at hand.  He’d held his ground, backed up by Sip Ek Klahan Phonarthit, and the Rangers had slowly backed down.  The culprit, Kamun Amsir, had finally handed the stolen food back to the bent old woman, giving the Roi Tri a smile that promised that he would learn how the Thanan Phran worked, or

Status Update

So, a week and a half after Fury in the Gulf‘s release, I see I still have some learning to do when it comes to making Amazon’s algorithm sit up and do tricks.  Working on it.  There might be a new push just before launching the pre-order for Brannigan’s Blackhearts #2 – Burmese Crossfire next month. As for Burmese Crossfire, it still has one editing pass to go, plus I have to get the preview for Enemy Unidentified done to put in the back. As I’ve been thinking about Enemy Unidentified and the later books in the series, there might be some adjustment in the planned schedule.  There seems to be more of an arc forming in my head, contrary to the original idea for the series.  (I’ve already established some continuity with characters–no, not everybody’s going to survive–so this won’t be quite “’60s TV show episodic.”) With the series sitting where it is, I’m adjusting to an every-sixty-days schedule for releases.  This will allow me to work on a couple of other projects, one of which has already been started.  Not going to say too much about ’em yet, since they won’t be launching for a little while (February

We Are Across the Line of Departure

Brannigan’s Blackhearts have commenced operations.  Fury in the Gulf went live at midnight last night. Iranian Fanatics, American Hostages…And The Clock Is Ticking! The tiny island kingdom of Khadarkh, strategically placed in the Persian Gulf, has swung back and forth between the Saudi and Iranian orbits for years. But when a mysterious force seizes control of the island, executes the tiny Khadarkhi Army, and takes any Americans they can find hostage, it appears that Khadarkh will be an Iranian puppet for the foreseeable future. The politicians are afraid of risking the hostages. And as the Western powers dither, some people start to look for another solution. They find that solution in John Brannigan. Brannigan already has a rep for pulling off the impossible, through a combination of audacity, ruthlessness, and ferocious loyalty to his men. His military service is over, but now he will pick up a rifle again, putting together a squad of mercenaries to land on Khadarkh and rescue the hostages, in a hail of bullets and swift, sharp violence. Brannigan’s Blackhearts are about to strike. “Fury in the Gulf” is the first in a new Action Adventure series by Peter Nealen. “Peter writes brutal, believable action at

“Fury in the Gulf” Pre-order

Brannigan’s Blackhearts #1 – Fury in the Gulf is up for Kindle pre-order on Amazon.  (Paperback is still going to have to wait until release day.) It’s actually been up for a couple of weeks now.  I haven’t said anything about it before now because I’ve been attempting to do something similar to what Chris Fox talks about in this video, attempting to get more organic growth and exposure with Amazon Marketing Services.  Of course, the whole Brannigan’s Bastards vs Brannigan’s Blackhearts fiasco put me back by a week, so I’m not seeing anything like the numbers Chris talks about in that video.  (Admittedly, I’m starting to wonder how much that works with Action Adventure vs Science Fiction & Fantasy.) The tiny island kingdom of Khadarkh, strategically placed in the Persian Gulf, has swung back and forth between the Saudi and Iranian orbits for years. But when a mysterious force seizes control of the island, executes the tiny Khadarkhi Army, and takes any Americans they can find hostage, it appears that Khadarkh will be an Iranian puppet for the foreseeable future. The politicians are afraid of risking the hostages. And as the Western powers dither, some people start to look