No special guest this month, and not really much of a set agenda, which is why I’m calling it the September Peanut Gallery. We might talk war, worldbuilding, writing, or just go off on tangents brought on by audience questions. Bring what ya got.
Rock, Meet Hard Place
So, a couple posts back, I spoke of a 22,000 word story that I couldn’t really talk about. Well, now I can. A few months back, Mike Kupari hit me up with the idea of doing a short story for Baen.com with him, set in the Dead Six universe, created between him and Larry Correia, between Swords of Exodus and Alliance of Shadows, which comes out next month. Being a big fan of the Dead Six series, myself, I readily agreed. The end result is Rock, Meet Hard Place, Part 1 and Part 2.
Book Review: Swords of Exodus
I’ve been waiting for this book ever since I first finished Dead Six. If you haven’t read Dead Six, go do so. Now. I’ll wait. Pretty badass, isn’t it? Well, Swords of Exodus ratchets things up a notch. It has been about a year since Dead Six came to a close. Lorenzo gets pulled out of retirement, first to rescue Valentine from a black site prison (where Val is getting his mind screwed with even more than usual), then to rescue his brother Bob from Sala Jihan, the Pale Man. Things do not go according to plan. The action is, in places, even more intense than in Dead Six. There are full-bore, company-level assaults going on in this book. Both Larry and Mike know their weapons handling, and the tactics are depicted well. Mike’s an EOD tech and a combat vet, and while Larry may not have been military, he’s been immersed in the gun culture for a long, long, time, and has a lot of friends who have worn the green at some point. The book is more than a series of firefights, of course. Val is, if anything, even more messed up than he was before, and is