Author Archives: otomo

Cover Reveal: The Fight For Rislandia

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I’ve been working my TAIL off this year producing a lot of books, getting everything going. One of my main goals for 2018 was to be able to see The Adventures Of Baron Von Monocle into a trilogy. It’s been my best seller so far, with For Steam And Country winning an award for CLFA Book Of The Year, Knight Training (novella) becoming a #1 Amazon Bestseller, and The Blood Of Giants becoming a #1 New Release. It’s a wild ride… kinda like flying on an airship in a fantasy land!

We’ve seen Zaira get thrust into a world and a war and have to step up in the face of danger. We’ve seen her adventure and try to save her land from the out of control Wyranth soldiers, gone into a berserker rage from their super soldier serum. Now… Zaira has to become a leader in the face of war.

And here’s the cover:

As it appears, this book takes a bit of a darker turn. It’s the middle of a war. Zaira isn’t just fighting for her life, but the lives of all Rislandians.

The Fight For Rislandia will be released sometime around the end of September. I’ll have a final date shortly. For now, catch up on the series. Click on the book cover for the amazon link:

Book One:

Book 1.5 (Novella from James’ Perspective):

Book 2:

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Love Everybody Always

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Kanye West earlier this year really changed my life. When he came out with several tweets urging people to say I love you, to make love the new normalized instead of hate, that spoke to me. That is Christ’s message in a nutshell and that is how we’re going to make a long-term impact that goes beyond just now.

Fights online, mobbing and attacking people… what does that do? One, it just makes everyone involved angry and resentful. Two, the optics of the situation are so bad that the person you’re mobbing against usually comes out with a bigger and stronger base of support than before because normal people tuning in see the ugliness that’s going on.

I saw Bob Goff speak last night, and his message too is to love everybody always. It’s a powerful message and he’s an extremely charismatic speaker. But it means working on it in earnest. It means reaching out. It means trying to act in good faith love and caring about people.  And not just people who it’s easy to care about. It’s simple to care and love your friends. We’re called to love people who disgust us, who make us feel weird to be around. That’s the hard part.

A movement I started has really turned into an online outrage mob, one like I’ve seen several times in different arenas from politics to sci-fi. It’s really easy to get sucked into it. It’s really easy to go out there and attack and not realize you’re part of something that’s snowballing into nasty comments, death threats, etc. We don’t see it because one, usually the direct people around us aren’t engaging in it to that extreme, and we don’t see the overwhelming combined effect it has on a person. It’s hard to notice until it happens to a friend, or to you.

For a movement to thrive and move forward for what it’s intended (any movement), it’s going to have to be about more than hate. It’s going to have to drop the hate entirely. I call on my friends, fellow creators, fans, and everyone to look at things this way:

  1. Don’t go on YouTube streams and descend into smack talk about people / gossip. The streaming’s fine, but keep it topical. It’s a bad look to have hours of content saying bad things about individuals.
  2. Watch what you post. Think about the person you’re posting about. Are they in a position where they’re hurting and you’re just making it worse?
  3. Look at your actions. Are they out of love? Can you truly say that? If it’s not, it needs to be reevaluated.

Think about it. Think about people you’re outraged at or hate. Say “I love ______” aloud. It’s weird, isn’t it? But it needs to be done. This is the only real way to affect change for the positive.

And if you see something, speak out. Say “we shouldn’t be doing this guys.” When one person does it against a mob, it’s hard. If a lot of people do, the mob is no longer a mob. It goes away.

I’m definitely guilty of not loving everybody always, but I’m doing my best to try to make a difference. We’re never going to be perfect as humans, but the least we can do is try.

Zaira and her crew try very hard to love her people, and even her enemies as she seeks a cure for the giant’s blood serum withdrawals in The Blood Of Giants. Check it out here.

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Hit By A Hacker Attack

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Over the weekend, you may have noticed my site went down. That’s why there was no blog yesterday or the day before.

What happened was, someone hacked into my hosting account. They purposefully took down the website and tried to lock me out. I had to go through a number of hoops yesterday to restore the account, and I believe we are safe again with precautions I’ve now put into place, but it’s very disconcerting, especially given the timing of the attack.

If you look at last week, I wrote a blog calling out a certain “game designer” and on the other front, the comic book movement I’ve been integral in getting going both took more heat than ever before — with a bunch of randos coming out and blasting me and others personally– and blew up internally with an outrage mob which isn’t healthy at all.

I don’t know who the culprit is, but it’s likely from one of those groups, and I know the attack means I’m very well over the target, and what I’m doing here is VERY effective.

On my front, I’m keeping my head down, trying to get projects done. I have a lot to push forward especially in the next couple of months and I need complete focus in order to get everything done. There’s a lot of fun books coming and I can’t wait to show them all to you.

For now, make sure to read and check out The Blood Of Giants, the sequel to my award winning steampunk novel, For Steam And Country. Book 3 is going to be hitting soon to complete a trilogy and you’ll want to be caught up as the action’s getting VERY intense for plucky young Zaira and company.

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Did Zoe Quinn Defraud Kickstarter Backers?

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Yesterday the internet started blowing up at Chuck Tingle, the silly erotica author who we all know from his ridiculous book titles. At the beginning of 2017, he partnered with Zoe Quinn to make a video game based on his book series. They did this on Kickstarter and raised about $85,000. All looked okay for the first year of waiting… but curiously, updates stopped coming to backers at January 2018.

Customers started to ask Chuck Tingle what gives.

Bizarrely, Tingle started to lash out at fans, sending weird all caps rants that he has nothing to do with any video game and that they shouldn’t be bothering him.

But if that’s the case, what happened with this kickstarter? There is documentation online where Quinn asks Tingle if she can make the game, he says yes, and the kickstarter’s theme looks very in line with his properties. It’s all very odd.

There must have been substantive pressure put on Quinn by Tingle and fans from this because she eventually addressed the matter by making a rambling tweet thread about it:

This is the interesting tweet, in which Quinn admits she blew through all the money on the kickstarter. She doesn’t elaborate how, and why it would cause such a problem when it vastly exceeded the goal. Didn’t she know how much it would cost to make this? It’s very odd, and the game itself didn’t look to have much depth to it or appear to be something that would take all that much time. This was a silly thing after all. So how two years and $85k later can someone go broke and “still be working on it” with absolutely nothing to show to backers on progress?


Instead of owning up to her having spent the money and not made the game, she immediately went to identity politics. This is a standard way for her to operate and for the SJWs in all entertainment industries when they fail to deliver products because they are typically focused on themselves and not actually producing their content. We see this in comics with B. Clay Moore’s comic Kickstarter where he also ran out of money to produce the book. The stories are the same, there’s always a lot of excuses. Is Quinn even a minority or a marginalized person though? She brags on the same thread about having a book tour and a hugo award nomination. It seems like the establishment cultural elite have completely accepted her… despite her failure to deliver. And with the amount of press that Polygon and others gave to hype this video game, you’d think they’d be slightly concerned for their readers that they pushed into backing this? I’ll hold my breath waiting for an article on this from them.

It’s conjecture as to what Quinn did with the money or if she will ever deliver a game at this point, but if I were a backer, I’d be livid. Especially given the next posts where she says she’s too busy vacationing overseas and having fun and talks about how great her life is despite the “trolls” by which she defines as customers who want their product she didn’t deliver:

 

Remember, if you want a product that you paid for and didn’t get, you’re sapping her joy in bad faith.

What a bizarre world in which we live. And remember, this is who DC Comics now hires to make their books. People who are mired in identity politics who hate their own customers. How much longer will DC last?

I produce what I say I’m going to produce, by contrast. Flying Sparks is already done. I’m waiting on some of the high rezz file and we’ll be getting to the printer immediately. There won’t be a long wait for this book. You can still late back on IndieGoGo here. You’ll see what professionalism and real delivery looks like by contrast to the above.

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The Breitweisers Back Out Of Convention Because Of Unsafe Environment

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Conservative creators have had issues at conventions for about a year now. It started with Worldcon 76’s unwillingness to protect me despite the fact that I had credible threats against me, which I sent to them and, instead of taking actions to help authors creators, they banned me because of my outspoken political views.

This opened a cascade of conventions treating professionals on the right side of the aisle as inhuman:

  • Actor Kevin Sorbo was threatened that he was not allowed to attend East Coast Comic Con because he was friends with Sean Hannity.
  • John Ringo was removed from ConCarolinas after they refused to keep him safe from SJW attack mobs.
  • Larry Correia was removed from Origins Game Fair, despite having a very popular RPG coming out for his books, because of SJW hate mobs descending on him.
  • Jeremy Hambly, known as The Quartering, was sucker punched at GenCon by an extreme left wing activist game designer. GenCon started banning people who even asked them questions about the incident from their chats, and they went on to promote the game by the designer who punched him during the convention, instead of taking action to remove the threat.

The message is clear: conventions are not safe for conservative creators, the attempts to keep us out and away from meeting and interacting with fans is escalating toward violence, and conventions actually take the side of the violent perpetrators rather than the professionals who are just trying to sell books.

It’s making it nearly impossible to have public appearances.

Meanwhile, the creators on the left who say the most horrific things, threaten violence online, rile up hate mobs are all treated as if they’re the most important people in the room.

It’s no wonder Mitch and Elizabeth Breitweiser, creators of the very popular Red Rooster comic, feel like they will be unsafe at this con that’s coming up, especially given strange videos on the internet by people who are saying they’re going to “confront” comicsgate creators. There’s a cosplayer who uses her entire twitter account to threaten harassment of right wing pros, and let’s not forget last year when industry professionals themselves threatened Richard C. Meyer to try to harass him out of New York Comic Con.

Conventions need to step up their commitment to authors and creators, because we are the draw. The fans want to see us, to hang out with us, and we want to give back to the fans as well. But in this environment where conventions won’t even acknowledge the threats and violence done to this side of the political aisle — seeming to take these positions because they agree with violence or worse being done to us — it’s making the environment worse. Convention organizers need to step up and say they will protect all guests from violence and harassment, no matter the political persuasion, and make clear statements so fandom can be safe for us in the future.

In The Blood Of Giants, Zaira Von Monocle travel to a foreign continent and finds  the environment is anything but safe. But she has no choice to remove herself because her kingdom back home is on the line if she doesn’t find a cure to the strange super-soldier serum the Wyranth have been ingesting. Read the book here and see what everyone’s saying is my best book to date.

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Will SFWA Act Like A Professional Organization This Time?

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Last week saw the end of my Flying Sparks IndieGoGo campaign, which has now made over $28,000. As a single work graphic novel, it by itself makes more money than most members of SFWA have made in writing in their entire lifetimes. Under the rules of the guild, a single qualifying work of $3,000 or more is needed to prove professional standards for an active membership.

Last December, I applied to SFWA based on other qualifications which were true and correct. The guild at the time decided to find an obscure rule which says they can not admit someone for “any reason”, and turned the guild from a professional organization, to a in-club of political shilling and a personal private club for a few of its members who hold personal animus against me over my political outspokenness.

They’ve had new board elections since that time, and so I decided with the close of the Flying Sparks campaign I would apply again, and see if they will act like a guild for professional writers this time.

It’s important that they do, because they represent as a group the science fiction publishing industry at large, I say industry, not “writing group” as this is supposed to be a club where it’s sales-based, to show that someone is actually making a career of this and to uplift other writers making careers of this, because it’s hard enough out there. I am doing this. I am succeeding despite several people trying to hold me down, to force me out of writing, to force me out of publishing, and blacklisting me.

SFWA’s membership committee must act right this time if they are to continue to be a writer’s guild in the future. End the personal hate nonsense and let’s move forward as professionals.

We’ll see how this goes. My application should be very quickly read and approved given how well I’m doing in the industry.

In the meantime, read my new book, The Blood Of Giants. It’s the best book I’ve ever written, is already getting great reviews, and is pure fun in the way science fiction is supposed to be. Check it out here.  And make sure to leave reviews!

 

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The Anti-ComicsGate Industry Surge Is About Harassing And Scaring People

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I was shocked yesterday to see the attack on Alterna Comics, a small independent comic creator on the East Coast. They’ve been innovating within the industry by bringing back newsprint — making comic books affordable for everyone. I pick up their entire line and it’s usually between $6-10 a month just because of their titles being $1.50 each. It’s amazing!

They’ve been an apolitical group, really focusing on creating great comics in 3 different genres: sci-fi, horror, and an all ages line. It’s been really great all the way around. Best part is they’ve been working with smaller creators who don’t get political in their work, so it’s been a breath of fresh air compared to the rest of the industry.

The industry can’t have that!

Yesterday, editor Jennifer de Guzman from DC Comics came after a SMALL PRESS INDIE PUBLISHER (emphasis intentional because this is mind-boggling), attacking him on twitter for NOT DENOUNCING READERS.

I’m serious. This is how far the comic industry has gone. She sicced him good, and riled up several other comic creators to say how disappointed they were in Alterna Comics for the simple act of producing comics, sticking with their guns of being politcs-free, and catering to readers. Alterna didn’t endorse any movements, they didn’t say anything that would signal one way or another, they weren’t even rude to the attacks on them, they simply said they value all readers who buy their comics.

And shouldn’t they?

Not in SJW world. SJWs would rather not have readers if they’re not the approved people, that’s been the whole point of comicsgate all along. Half the country doesn’t even have a single book by the big companies that is geared toward them. They don’t have a single representative within the writing community at these companies, and when one is outed, they never work there again.

Alterna simply says “we just are here to create comics. We love comics. Comics are for everyone.”

And that’s a major problem to the point where these SJWs have to shake them down.

They showed their true stripes this last weekend with this, and with a Marvel/DC artist sending pictures of his butthole publicly to Ethan Van Sciver and tagging him. This is the most unprofessional, disgusting industry where people would do that. These aren’t fans fed up with bad products, these are the top professionals trying to abuse and hurt people because they don’t like that there’s alternatives coming up to the work they’re putting out. They’re running scared and they’re getting abusive.

And they don’t seem to have anything else. All they have now is to try to harass us so hard that we disappear. What they don’t realize is, we’re not going to. It only makes us stronger. We are not afraid of them. We are comicsgate.

If you like my articles, make sure to check out my work Flying Sparks! It’s done lettering now and I’m waiting on the print and the stretch goal interior cover and it’ll be off to the printers. When that happens, store’s going down. Get it now!

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We’re Getting Too Big – They’re Coming Hard For Us

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But we need to hold our ground. Think about this: it’s been four months with more than a dozen wildly successful crowdfunded comics. This does not happen in crowdfunds, comics do not get this kind of publicity on average, the industry is shaken.

None of them can believe it. They keep trying to write this off as a one off fluke, or some sort of cash grab by people who won’t be able to deliver — but they’re making these excuses because we are making waves in culture more than ever before, and we’re on a precipice of busting up their already failed monopolistic system in the industry.

Most of you have already seen how there was a coordinated assault the last couple of days, just as Mitch Breitweiser’s Red Rooster and my Flying Sparks were coming to closes. Do you think the timing is coincidental? There’s no way it is. The attacks look scripted and coordinated. I believe it’s a matter of time until we find a Discord channel or Facebook group where these angry pros hang out and talk smack about smaller indie creators doing their thing. I believe we’ll even find directives to try to discredit us and hold us down from the highest levels. Remember, it’s not that long ago we found the facebook group where pros from Marvel/DC/Image/Valiant and others were conspiring to harass and goad Richard Meyer into throwing a punch at NYCC so he would be deemed violent and banned forever.

Everything the SJWs say about us is actually true about them. SJWs always project.

They are the ones trying to harass smaller creators out of the business. They’re targeting minorities and women in our movement especially because they can’t have the identity politics narrative evaporate on them. As our movement grows and expands and includes a lot of REAL diversity (including that of thought and opinion) it’s only going to get worse. They’re only going to lash out harder. It’s going to get nasty. Prepare yourself, and remind yourself it’s not personal — these people are scared that we’re usurping their careers and livelihoods, and for good reason with the support we’ve garnered from readers.

But we have the advantage. We have the tactical strategies to win. We have the products that are going to be fun. We have the moral high ground as well.

In the coming days, make sure to keep that moral high ground. Treat people with respect and love as Edwin Boyette likes to remind us. Do what you can, but don’t be afraid to defend yourself and your friends either. There’s going to be divisions between us as well, but we can’t let them overcome what this movement stands for: changing comics and culture for good.

If you didn’t back Flying Sparks yet, it’s still open on InDemand. I’m away at a wedding so I can’t do the print run until next week. You’ll have a little bit, but I’ll be closing out orders of T-shirts, Posters, and Hardcovers within just a few days. Check it out here.

And head onto my youtube and watch the Lunch Stream with S. Misanthrope. Nerkish is guesting today! Like, share, subscribe!

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This Is It. The Last Hurrah!

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For Flying Sparks that is.

It’s been a wild ride on this indiegogo campaign. I could have never expected receiving this incredible level of support for my comic, Flying Sparks.

It really is a testament to this movement and how we’re changing the industry. Most crowdfunds for first time indie comics creators are barely able to get 100 backers, we’re approaching 600 as this camapign comes to a close. Why? Because people want fresh, fun superhero stories without a heavy-handed political agenda condescending them as readers.

And I’ve provided that.

Flying Sparks has the superhero for marvel and dc. It has a rich, deep world which will only expand in years to come because you’re demanding it. I’m going to bring you the best characterization in the business with intense personal moments that matter, that develop characters, and that are up there with the epic superhero battles in drama. The folk helping me with proofreading at the end of this campaign are telling me this is an awesome set up to a world, and already they can’t wait for more.

Please as you go out today, tell your friends about Flying Sparks, that it’s the last day for the campaign, that we can finish strong and have a real shot at hitting that $25,000 stretch goal for the cool character bios. This Is going to be a really fun story and I am truly humbled that you guys have made it possible for me to start a professional career in comics. I have a lot in the pipeline already as a follow up and this is only going to get bigger and better.

Back Flying Sparks today!

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Projects Update

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I’m keeping myself very busy and got a lot going on. I posted this to my Facebook Group yesterday (join up!) so if you missed it, here’s where everything’s at:

Status updates:

Novels:
The Fight For Rislandia: Complete
Justified: Complete 
Reach For The Stars: First Drafted
Alt-Hero Novel: 35% Edited
Sanctified: 15% first drrafted
The Stars Entwined 2: Outlined

Short Story Collection: Needs 1-2 more shorts written before releasing

Comics:
Flying Sparks: Dialogue revisions done, waiting on last 1/3 for lettering, art done.
Flying Sparks volume 2: needs dialogue revisions, art done.
The Ember War: Issue 2 of 5 in coloring. Issue 3 being pencilled.
Dynamite Thor: Layouts being done. Script half drafted.
AI Wars: 3 pages done, first issue of 4 scripted.
Clockwork Dancer: 2 pages done, first issue of 4 scripted.
Astormancer Pisces Manga: 10% scripted, art concepts done.

Tentative release schedules:
Sept: The Fight for Rislandia, Ember War IndieGoGo
Oct: Alt-Hero Novel, Flying Sparks out to backers.
Nov: Short Story Collection

For now make sure to back Flying Sparks on IndieGoGo. Only a couple of more days to go and we can push this higher!

 

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