What the Hell, Dude?!

Well...I've been busy being retired. I don't work for anyone anymore. Not one hour, not one bit.

Weirdly, I'll often find myself worrying about something. And when I sit to pinpoint the source of my worry, I realize that it's a stubborn and persistent form of guilt that I'm not working. At such moments I'll wonder what the Hell is wrong with me.

I worked for decades. I worked constantly for my parents as a kid and never skipped a beat as I entered adulthood and continued to do so. Unlike so many lazy bastards I have met over the years I never shirked the opportunity to engage in labor of any type that would keep a roof over my head and food in the pantry. There have been so many losers I've encountered who would do anything at all to avoid working.

That said, being at the beck and call of a petty supervisor or a sadistic manager was often difficult for me. I suffered for quite a lot of my years as a worker from having a white-hot temper and enough physical strength to hurt people with my bare hands. Some days it was a close call to resist the need to lash out and find myself arrested (again) for giving in and beating someone.

I don't have to worry about that anymore, because I'm retired. Facing down abusive employers and willing to go to violence over it is no longer a possibility. And, yet, these nagging feelings of guilt keep cropping up at the weirdest times. Sometimes they'll linger in my subconscious to the point where I'll dream I'm working again: as a letter carrier, on a loading dock, clerking in a grocery store, running a bookshop, cutting and assembling pool covers...whatever.

What the Hell?!

And each time this pointless guilt gnaws at me I will realize that it's from the effects of more than five decades of being conditioned to work for slave wages and to obey orders. They drill that into you from the day you are grabbed up and sent to school, and throughout the years you toil as a servant. It's something you're just supposed to do.

These days, I take that guilt and bludgeon it, or choke it until it expires, or stab it in the face, or pour gasoline over it and light a match. But like some kind of rotten ghoul it pulls itself together and comes creeping up on me again and again. Repeat, kill, repeat.

So, what I try to do is stay busy doing fun stuff. I read a lot. I hike and camp. Spending time researching places where we can vacation is a big pastime for me.

But what I really want to do is find that silver bullet, that wooden stake. Because feeling guilty for not working after five decades of that shit is unfathomable. Maybe the knockout punch for that asshole will come the next time I climb a high mountain or kayak a wild river or hike a wilderness trail or return to Yellowstone or take that trip to Florence, Italy.

We'll see.

In the meantime...to Hell with work.

Some things I've done this year because I have no nagging job, no reason to hear an alarm clock, no desire to so much as recall what it's like to commit labor under orders:

 

No Glacial Time for Me.

Weird.

Here I am retired, tons of time on my hands, and I neglect the old blog.

In my defense I have been busy. Hiking, gardening, writing. Also, after our West Virginia vacation (I'll post photos) I got seriously sick. I was sick for weeks. Better now, but it was a horror show.

I've been going through old photos, planning a big trip for next year. Yeah, I know how that goes. Carole and I planned a huge, detailed, complicated trip for this past Spring that was completely botched by Covid-19. But we make more plans anyway. What we hope to do is take some excursions farther afield. At his moment we're looking at Colorado. About a 50-50 chance of that being our destination.

Carole has never seen Colorado. I've only been once, but it was an extended trip and I experienced a lot. One place that I visited that I know she'd love is Rocky Mountains National Park and the adjacent town of  Estes Park, Colorado. Both are her type of place.

At any rate, these are my current musings and this is our thinking for next year when Carole will be very close to retirement herself.

And this is the photo of one of the vistas that made the biggest impact on me when I was in Colorado eight years ago.

This is a glacial moraine. It sits on the flanks of Longs Peak, the highest summit in Rocky Mountain National Park (14,259 feet above sea level). We weren't climbing to the summit on this day, but to a place called Chasm Lake about 2,000 feet or so below the summit. We still had a few miles to go when we stopped at this spot.

I need to try to impress upon you the scale of the landscape here. This is a glacial moraine. A localized glacier once sat at this point and this was its terminal reach. It sat here puking up boulders and rock and soil and sand that it had ground up for thousands of years. And then it melted completely away, revealing this big wall of what is, essentially, glacier vomit. That wall of rock and dirt is huge. Those trees at the base down there are not tiny shrubs. The hills beyond would be considered mountains here in the East.

Another reason this panorama is imprinted on my mind is that it is where I discovered that I am susceptible to altitude sickness. Two years before this trip I had specifically climbed several peaks in Yellowstone over 10,000 feet above sea level to find out if I got altitude sickness, or not. I was pleased then to find then that climbing a summit of 10,500 or 10,700 feet was, to me, no different than hiking up a 6,000 foot mountain here in the South. And so I had concluded that I wouldn't get altitude sickness.

I was wrong. That malady hit me with both fists precisely at this point. I think we were around 11,200 feet here. Up on a big plateau ground out by that dead glacier. I was nauseous, dizzy, addled; my head ached. In fact, the more we pushed on, the worse it got. The weird thing was that I began to babble complete and utter nonsense and realized that I was doing this, but couldn't stop. My hiking companions should have--in retrospect--forced me to turn around. They suggested it, but I refused, wanting to see Chasm Lake in the worst way. So I pushed on. I recall not being with either of them as I clambered up the final wall of rock that served as the dam for Chasm Lake. I was on my own.

At any rate, the pure enormity of the landscape out there is essentially beyond description. You have to experience it.This was a single mountain. Huge like a god. Bits of it so impressive that I was held in place, shocked by the mass of it all.

I want to go back. This time I'll train better and do more to acclimate myself before tackling altitudes over 11,200 feet. (I do fine below that.)

I'm looking forward to it.

A week later, deep in the Weminuche Wilderness of the San Juans.

Stalking the Cooperative Vulture.

I've been enjoying a lot of outdoor activities lately. My son and I head to the high country often to go hiking. My wife and I have been doing a good deal of kayaking locally. And of course when no one else has the leisure time to go with me, I go off by myself. I take advantage of most of those days to go hiking, generally within a drive of anywhere from half an hour to as much as three hours.

Today I fell back on the old standby activity, hiking at Crowders Mountain State Park. My main purpose was to hike to the summit of Crowders to see if I would have the opportunity to photograph Turkey vultures. They're one of the most common large birds around, and they use the cliffs and thermals around the summit to launch themselves into the sky to scan for the scent of carrion.On a sunny day it's hard to miss them at either of the two peaks in the park, Crowders and Kings Pinnacle.

I have to say, it was a hot day for hiking. I arrived at the trailhead at about 10:00 am. The lot was about 2/3 full, and it's a vast parking area. There is very good reason that local hikers refer to it as "Crowded Mountain". On some days you can encounter as many as 100 people arriving at the summit every hour or so. Today wasn't quite that busy, but nearly so.

After reaching the top and toweling all of the sweat off of me, I staked out a shady spot at the edge of a cliff and began to take landscape photos and to scan the area for signs of vultures. One of my friends, writer/photographer Michael Hodges had suggested a lens to me: a Canon 24mm pancake lens. He told me that photographs taken with it would "pop", and he wasn't kidding. It captures crisp, colorful, brilliant images. This was the first time I'd used it other than to take a couple of test photos. Michael was spot on.

I stayed on the summit for about three hours taking photos, drinking lots of water, and enjoying the views. The people arrived and left at a steady pace. Sometimes it got quite noisy, then the voices and music would subside as the numbers of people dwindled. (I never have figured out why anyone would bring music with them on a hike. I find the idea pathetic.)

Over the course of my time there I took well over 200 photographs of the crew of Turkey vultures who passed in front of and above my patch of rocky cliffside. I think I'll salvage about a dozen images good enough for me to add to my online portfolio of photos that I sell through some online purveyors of stock photos.  Every month I make a little more than I did the month before. It has become my part-time job. A job, for once, that's fun (aside from writing).

Say what you will, they're actually quite the majestic bird in flight.

I don't know if this bird is just old, in the midst of molting, or the victim of a tussle. It seems healthy and flew and cruised the thermals as well as the others. But it looked rough.

Aside from the Great blue heron, the Turkey vulture is my favorite bird to photograph.

Michael was right. That lens makes the image really stand out.

Messages Both Intended and Subconscious.

I was thinking of my writing output recently and what it's about. I recall a couple of writers I spoke to over the years mentioning that even if you don't actively want to engage in delivering a message, you still often do. That is, even if what you intend is to deliver pure pulp fiction, or just an entertaining yarn with no undercurrent of philosophical or political content, your subconscious dictates that you will do exactly the opposite.

What struck me in thinking specifically of my novels and stories was of how many of them deal with racism. Sometimes with intent, but often just a product of ideas percolating out of the subconscious and ending up on the pages.

The only time I actively wrote a book with an intentional undercurrent of commentary on racism in the USA is my book THE EMISSARY. I wanted to write about the subject in a way that I could treat with it over the course of a story in a horror novel. What I wanted to do was actively write a book with an overt delivery of the problem of racism in the US.

But many of my other books have dealt with some aspect of racism, which I think is far and away the most awful part of our national history. It's always there, and won't go away, existing persistently decade after decade since the times before our nation even existed.

Years ago I was writing zombie novels. And while on the Internet to promote one of those novels I went from bulletin board to bulletin board to make connections and see how I should go about promoting my books there. What I thought I would find I did not, and what I did discover horrified me. Pretty much every public bulletin board devoted to zombie fiction onto which I logged was weighted heavily with racists, many of them neo-Nazis. These guys would post links and you'd find yourself looking at boards promoting hatred and white-race "superiority". I saw vile imagery and threats of violence and extermination spelled out in plain terms.

Frankly, after that, I didn't want to write anymore zombie novels and decided not to engage in promotions of my work on any of those boards. When one of my publishers asked me to write them another one I at first refused. But then I recalled a short story that I'd written that had later been produced as a comic story. The idea of turning it into a novel had occurred to me for years but I had never followed through. I agreed to an advance and set about writing it.

Thus was born the expansion into novel of my short story THE NEW ECOLOGY DEATH. I thought about what I wanted to do with it. I never once mentioned racism or anything directly related to it. I set about burying any mention of anything attached to the subject in an atmosphere both cold and hopeful, and also cautionary.

But two things that I actively did was make all of the principle characters Jews. And I took guns and gun-play totally out of the picture so that I would rob the reader of what I have come to think of as gun-porn. There is the reference to distant gunfire once in the book, and an actual scene with a firearm is played out near the very end with unintended consequences. I specifically set out to create a zombie novel with almost none of the plot elements that most racists lust for in their zombie novels. I made it so that the tables are turned and the setting is one in which zombies are all but defeated and are only a marginal and fading threat. The main characters are a Jewish family. There are almost no guns, and none of the jargon that gives gun-loving racists a specific thrill (which I am convinced is sexual).

It was the worst-selling book I ever wrote. I don't know how many copies it sold, but not many. It never came anywhere near to earning back its advance. The only feedback I ever got on it was from a couple of racists raging about how there were no guns in the book.

Someday I'd like to get it back into print. Of all of the books I've written, I can think of nothing in it that I'd want to rewrite. It was pretty much everything I wanted it to be and which I set out to do. So getting it back into print would be easy on a technical basis (no rewrites). I'd just need to figure out how to get it into the hands of the right audience.

We'll see.

THE EMISSARY. A horror novel wherein racial and sexual hatred manifests itself as lycanthropy.

DEADLOCKED, a novel with major elements of race, philosophy, struggle, and hope.

My out-of-print THE NEW ECOLOGY OF DEATH. Returning to print one of these days. Maybe this year. (But maybe not.)

A Retiring Fellow

Some years back I got a friend request on Facebook that surprised me. It was from a well known movie producer. Now, this had nothing whatsoever to do with my movie deal with Warner Brothers at that time (for my novel, THE FLOCK). At least I don't think it did. It was never mentioned.

I enjoyed corresponding with him from time to time, and I always got a kick out of his posts about has fascinating career and how he ended up producing movies. And he had great stories about famous writers, directors, and actors who had created the movies he produced. He was the kind of interesting and famous friend you never think you are going to make on Facebook.

After a couple of years, though, he began to complain that he had too many Facebook friends and that he was going to start paring down the list. I seem to recall he had a couple of thousand at the time which actually isn't all that many in the scheme of things. What he said he wanted was a few hundred people that he felt made his experience on Facebook fun, and with whom he could actually exchange ideas and stories.

He was one of the very few people on the platform that I worried about not seeing anymore. But he would text me from time to time to assure me that I'd made the cut. This went on for about a year as he shed friends.

One day he started up a conversation about work. Retirement came up. I was still several years away from retirement. Close enough that I could taste it and wanted the day to come so that I wouldn't have to punch a clock and stress myself out by keeping myself from punching managers or supervisors. I mentioned to him that I thought everyone should be given the opportunity and pension to retire by age 50. I thought that was a reasonable amount of time to toil away for the capitalist system and then kick back and enjoy twenty to thirty-something years of fun.

This idea upset him. I mean...he actually got angry. I never would have figured it, coming as he did from the counter-culture of the 60s and early 70s. But it did piss him off.

A few days later I noticed that I was no longer on his friends list. I suppose at that point he must have been actively looking for reasons to shed anyone and everyone to get down to his magic number of Facebook friends of 400 or so. In the end, I didn't make the cut, as he had put it. I must admit that I missed his stories. He was pretty cool.

I finally did retire. Being retired is glorious. Fuck working. If you don't have to work you shouldn't do it if it's making you miserable and you have the means to give up your job. I worked from my teens until I was 62 years old. That was freaking long enough. I know lazy bastards who do things like leech off of their parents and make their wives support them. I've always worked. For the past ten years that I did work all I could think of was making sure that I could retire at 62. I was freaking finished.

And I think of my old Facebook friend and I wonder what it was about the idea of people being able to retire on a government pension at 50 that pissed him off so much. Maybe he was just a right wing curmudgeon with the aura of the counterculture about him that was totally false. I'll never know. Not only did he cease to be friendly with me via Facebook, he subsequently died.

No, don't ask who he was. It doesn't matter, now, and I'm not going to mention it. If his name wouldn't be familiar to you, the films that he produced almost certainly would have.

As for me, I freaking love being retired. I have time to have fun. I don't stress out over getting up before light unless Carole and I are going on a trip, or I'm going to drive to a park to go hiking or camping or kayaking. I can stay up half the night working on a new novel. I can plan out an ad campaign for my novels. For years I talked about planting a garden and never did. Now I have and we harvest vegetables from it almost every day.

Fuck it. That famous producer was wrong. I was right. Retirement is amazing. You don't have to sit on your ass and wither away or become stupid in front of the television.

In fact, I wish I'd been able to do this at 50 instead of 62. Or earlier.

Fuck working. I hiked ten miles, saw three waterfalls, a mountaintop, deer, a wild turkey hen with eight chicks, and rhododendron in full bloom everywhere along the waterways. I didn't punch a clock. It was a weekday. There was no schedule. I did whatever the heck I wanted to do at the pace I wanted to take.

My favorite view of Stone Mountain while being on Stone Mountain.

Seven of the eight wild turkey chicks I saw.

The mother hen.

One of thousands of rhododendron blossoms today.

A small cascade above a larger waterfall.

What a Weird Freaking Year.

In late 2019 Carole and I were busy making all kinds of plans for 2020. I was already retired, Carole had plenty of vacation leave built up, money was not an issue, our travel trailer was in good shape and I had just paid cash for the best motor vehicle we have ever owned.

We had planned out a number of vacations starting with our Springtime journey to Florida to seek out the giant freshwater springs there and to kayak and snorkel the clear spring runs and deep headsprings where millions of gallons of fresh water come rushing to the surface from limestone aquifers. We had reserved all of our campsites, paid for each spot, and had toted up and bought everything we were going to need and use.

Then, a month before the trip...coronavirus shut down the nation.

And this was only the most bothersome bit of the strangeness of this year. A President who seems to be loathed by anyone with the capacity to think. A hatred that goes far beyond even the rage I used to see aimed at Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, or George W. Bush. This is something that seethes and boils and threatens to turn into revolution. Yeah, laugh if you will, but if things get much worse...well, then think again.

I've lost track of the numbers of people filing for unemployment benefits. Almost every working person I know has either lost their job, or has seen their hours cut to the bone. No benefits remaining. No insurance left. Nothing in the saving account but dust and despair.

2020 was supposed to have been the fist big breakout year of my retirement. Alas, no. I am reminded of the cautionary quote often credited to John Lennon: "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." Yes, Johnny, my sad, murdered friend, that is indeed a reasonable definition. This year has proven it out.

We all spent weeks and months locked down. I made do with trips to the grocery store, the hardware shop, and many walks around my rural neighborhood. There was no traffic on the streets. We even stopped hearing motor and tire noise on the Interstate two miles away. The skies ceased to buzz with the scrape of jets against the clouds. Sometimes it was so silent that when I sat in our two-acre yard I thought I was off in one of my wilderness areas.

During all of this Carole and I planted a garden. I did a lot of yard work. The one-mile jaunts around our giant rural block became routine. My hair grew into a great, gray, bushy mess. I longed for a trip to the barber.

Now, things have loosened up. Five or six jets a day now growl across the heavens. We can hear traffic from I-485 again, but still not as heavy. Fortunately my son and I can jump in that new truck and head to the mountains for hikes to see landscapes and forests and wildlife. And, thus, the eye-candy for the photographs I present now. I just bought a few new lenses for my also-new camera. Buying a new camera and lenses does not mean you suddenly produce finer photographs. There's a learning curve with new equipment just like there is with anything else. I'm still trying to fine tune how to use them effectively. I'm getting there, but I'm not totally happy with the results.

And so, here are some photos from my third trip to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park since the lockdown was partially relaxed. It's beginning to look as if they may be forced to reenact that lockdown. Infections are soaring. Death rates from Covid-19 are pushing higher. Our plans were to fly to Italy next year to visit Florence so that I could knock that visit to see Brunelleschi's Dome off the old bucket list. But the EU distrusts us so much that they don't even want infected US citizens coming over there.

Damn.

2020 keeps delivering unfortunate surprises. What nightmares is it holding in reserve?

I don't know why beautiful butterflies are attracted to fresh horse poop, but they are. I also don't know how this ant climbed aboard this butterfly's wing, but she did.

These turkeys were in the Oconaluftee section of the Park.

Westerners don't see a big deal when it comes to witnessing an elk in a National Park. But the ecosystems here in the east haven't had them for hundreds of years. They've reintroduced them in North Carolina. They started with 40 or so elk in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Since reintroduction I've heard varying accounts of the numbers there now, but 250 or so seems to be what I hear most often. They're obviously spreading out. I used to see them only in Cataloochee, but these were photographed in Oconaluftee at roughly 2000 feet above sea level in the fields there. We ended up seeing almost twenty elk on Tuesday.

This elk we saw on Balsam Mountain at roughly 5000 feet above seal level. This was in a heavily forested area with only a few patches of grass and no fields, at all. The elk are obviously filling up all ecological niches they once inhabited.

The habitat is obviously good at Oconaluftee and the Qualla.

Audio Books

One of the last bits of reluctant advice I received from one writer was to have my books adapted to audio. "Audio books often outsell my ebooks," she told me.

So, one of the first things I did after that was look into the process. Very little effort was involved with it, once the task of conceiving, plotting, writing, and editing the novels (that's always a lot of effort). I did as she had told me and after figuring out how it works I jumped in, both feet.

I've been lucky landing excellent voice talent to read my books. Five have been done, with one having been held up in production for some reason and has yet to be released. Beyond that one glitch, it has been a relatively easy process, and sales have generally been better than I had figured.

Here is a listing of the four books that have so far been completed and released. (Still awaiting the approval of DEADLOCKED).

In no particular order they are:

FOUR FROM MANGROVE, my collection of four short stories of high fantasy, all set within the mythical city-state of Mangrove.

 

THE COALITION Zombie Trilogy. My three novels of the tales of Ron Cutter surviving in his post-apocalyptic world of zombie pandemic (now under one cover).

THE EMISSARY: A Novel of Fantasy and Horror. Set in Elijah, in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, Martin and Amy Braun find themselves surrounded by hatred manifesting itself as lycanthropy. All while trying to protect a mysterious foster child who may be an herald for that event, or somehow there to save them from it.

WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman. An affliction has struck a tiny few of humanity, giving them superhuman powers. The government steps in and recruits each of them as protectors of large urban areas around the nation. Once your powers manifest themselves you either work for Uncle Sam, or Uncle Sam puts you away. This is the autobiography of one such hero, Billy B; in his own words.

Advertising.

I talk with a lot of other writers. We always ask one another about advertising and various methods of promotion. Some of the authors I converse with over this topic claim that they do well with advertising on Amazon.com. It makes some amount of logic, as Amazon is very close to becoming a publishing monopoly. They do seem to control access to the marketplace in all other ways, so why not advertising, also?

However, after years of trying out various advertising campaigns at Amazon I have never encountered a situation wherein I profited from putting my money there. That is, no ad campaign returned to me even as much money as I put into it. The opposite was almost always true. If, say, I put $400 into an ad campaign I might get $150 or $200 in cumulative sales over the course of the campaign. Only once did I squeak out a tiny bit of profit from an Amazon ad push, and only by a few dollars.

So, for me, advertising on Amazon is a complete waste of my money, my effort, and my time. My last bit of money spent there advertising my work was, in fact, the last money I will ever spend there for that purpose.

That is all.

I'm not sure why, but my COALITION: Zombie Trilogy is the best selling of all of my books since I republished a number of my titles after regaining publishing rights from a former imprint. It has done well in ebook format, but dollar-wise is doing even better in audio book sales. WORKING CLASS HERO has the edge in total ebook numbers, but the audio of that book isn't nearly as high in sales.

Sales.

As I figure out the details of promoting books online I find that I have learned a few tricks that push my sales up a bit. One line of advice that I got from another writer was to use a service that adapts your books to audio without having to spend any money for production. All you do is audition voice talent, pick the person best suited for the job (there is an amazing amount of voice talent in the pools) and the production is out of your hands other than delivering the manuscript and approving the audio versions. After that, the audio is passed through another round of professional editors who clear it for audio publication.

I have been surprised at the sales of the audiobooks. All I have to do is promote my novels as I normally do, and the audiobooks tag along, sometimes outstripping the ebooks in dollar sales, if not actual numbers (since audiobooks are more expensive than ebooks).

It's part of the massive learning curve of having to promote my fiction rather than leaving it up to a traditional publisher who might be incompetent at the task, or who doesn't care (sometimes both). I may not be great at promotions at this point, but I'm better than I was at it, I'm still learning, and I definitely do care.

****

Here's a question and answer bit I did at a website concerning my superhero novel, WORKING CLASS HERO. I'll be adding the second book to that series very soon, and have plotted a third book. If sales and/or my desire to continue warrant, I'll be doing more in that series. I like the characters and I enjoy the act of creating new stories in that world.

Q&A for my novel WORKING CLASS HERO.

Yeah, baby.

STORY BUNDLE!

Best selling author and publisher Kevin J Anderson, and founder and tech writer Jason Chen have been putting together book bundles to sell as a way to create author promotions and charity donations. I was happy to have my first WORKING CLASS HERO: The Autobiography of a Superhuman as part of his Superhero book bundle. I get to be a part of an effort to aid a good educational charity, and to join with a group of other fine authors all spinning yarns about super-powered people.

So, if you want a way to land a whole lot of excellent reading, plus help out a good cause, all at a super-bargain price, grab one (or all) of these book bundles!

Explanation and link below.

THE UP, UP AND AWAY SUPERHEROES BUNDLE

The Up, Up and Away Superheroes Bundle - Curated by Kevin J. Anderson

If reading is your kryptonite, I've put together a superpoweredStoryBundle—thirteen books with marvelous heroes, supervillains, secret identities, mutant powers, and extraordinary gentlemen (and ladies).

In curating this batch, I included my novel Captain Nemo—one of my favorites—the life story of Jules Verne's fictional friend, who fights pirates at sea, is marooned on a mysterious island, finds a passage to the center of the Earth, crosses Africa in a balloon, and builds the extraordinary sub-marine boat, the Nautilus.

Dean Wesley Smith presents a brand new book featuring his popular and unnaturally talented character Poker Boy. Heroes comes in all shapes, sizes, and personas.What makes a hero super? Mark Leslie's collection Nobody's Hero contains seven stories that explore what makes a hero.

A power she doesn't want. But everyone else does.In Robin Brande's Dove Season Marnie has a secret she's been able to hide from the world for years. But now she's been exposed, and her worst fears are coming true.What does the government want from her? To use her as a spy? A weapon? A warrior? She's not made for any of those.But Marnie can't resist the forces who are after her, any more than she can resist using her power.

Matt Forbeck's Brave New World: Revolution: In a world in which supers either work for the government or are thrown into prison, the legend known as Patriot is finally caught and will soon be executed for his crimes — unless his friends in the rebellious Defiance can break him out!

In Jon Mollison's Overlook, nothing's more dangerous than an invisible man… Matt Ward's Cynetic Wolf: An immortal government, half-human oppressed masses, and a young hybrid whose existence threatens everything the cyborg overlords built since the world ended.

In Lucas Flint's The Superhero's Test, seventeen-year-old Kevin 'Bolt' Jason must learn how to control his newly discovered superpowers to protect his family from asupervillain who seeks to destroy him.

What happens when you find out that you suddenly have super-powers is that Uncle Sam makes you an offer you can't refuse. That's Working Class Hero by James Robert Smith. In Fid's Crusade by David Reiss, we see that in the end, it may take a villain to save the world from those entrusted with the world's protection.

The Enlivening by Ashlyn Frost—She's his Frankenstein and now it's time to pay. Tina Glasneck's Hellbent features a hammerless Thor, a devious plan, and a destiny to thwart. And in Jeremy Flagg's Morning Sun: Before joining the Nighthawks, thirteen outcasts fought alone. Their paths should never have crossed. As the Children of Nostradamus come into their own, they have to ask: does having superpowers make them heroes?

You'll read these faster than a speeding bullet. (Sorry, the groaners just write themselves!) – Kevin J. Anderson

* * *

For StoryBundle, you decide what price you want to pay. For $5 (or more, if you're feeling generous), you'll get the basic bundle of five books in any ebook format—WORLDWIDE.

•             Captain Nemo - The Fantastic Adventures of a Dark Genius by Kevin J. Anderson

•             Cynetic Wolf by Matt Ward

•             Working Class Hero by James Robert Smith

•             Dove Season by Robin Brande

•             The Superhero's Test by Lucas Flint

If you pay at least the bonus price of just $15, you get all five of the regular books, plus eight more more books, for a total of thirteen!

•             Playing a Hunch by Dean Wesley Smith

•             Fid's Crusade by David Reiss

•             The Enlivening by Ashlyn Frost

•             Nobody's Hero by Mark Leslie

•             Morning Sun by Jeremy Flagg

•             Overlook by Jon Mollison

•             Hellbent by Tina Glasneck

•             Brave New World Revolution by Matt Forbeck

This bundle is available only for a limited time via http://www.storybundle.com. It allows easy reading on computers, smartphones, and tablets as well as Kindle and other ereaders via file transfer, email, and other methods. You get multiple DRM-free formats (.epub, .mobi) for all books!

It's also super easy to give the gift of reading with StoryBundle, thanks to our gift cards – which allow you to send someone a code that they can redeem for any future StoryBundle bundle – and timed delivery, which allows you to control exactly when your recipient will get the gift of StoryBundle.

Why StoryBundle? Here are just a few benefits StoryBundle provides.

•             Get quality reads: We've chosen works from excellent authors to bundle together in one convenient package.

•             Pay what you want (minimum $5): You decide how much these fantastic books are worth. If you can only spare a little, that's fine! You'll still get access to a batch of exceptional titles.

•             Support authors who support DRM-free books: StoryBundle is a platform for authors to get exposure for their works, both for the titles featured in the bundle and for the rest of their catalog. Supporting authors who let you read their books on any device you want—restriction free—will show everyone there's nothing wrong with ditching DRM.

•             Give to worthy causes: Bundle buyers have a chance to donate a portion of their proceeds to the Challenger Center for Space Education!

•             Receive extra books: If you beat the bonus price, you'll get the bonus books!

StoryBundle was created to give a platform for independent authors to showcase their work, and a source of quality titles for thirsty readers. StoryBundle works with authors to create bundles of ebooks that can be purchased by readers at their desired price. Before starting StoryBundle, Founder Jason Chen covered technology and software as an editor for Gizmodo.com and Lifehacker.com.

For more information, visit our website at storybundle.com, tweet us at @storybundle and like us on Facebook.

Thirteen great superhero novels!