I’ve loved Lukyanenko’s Watch series ever since I walked past a movie poster for the Night Watch film in 2004 and just had to stare for a couple of minutes, in awe.  This was neat.  There was a terribly long wait before the book upon which the movie was based was released in the U.S., but when it came out, it was worth it.  The sequel, Day Watch, was almost as good.

Twilight Watch and Last Watch followed.  They weren’t as good as the first two, but worth reading. Unfortunately, the downward trend has continued with New Watch.

It is far from a bad book.  It’s definitely worth your time, but only if you really liked the earlier volumes in the series.  The main problem was that I felt New Watch was written just to continue the series, not tell a compelling story.

Filtered through the lens of the supernatural, there are the usual fascinating descriptions of contemporary Russian culture and meditations on its past: things we’ve come to expect from the Watch series.  Discussions on the ethics of power and the place Others should or shouldn’t have in human society?  They’re there, too.  But by now, the author’s gone to the well a little too often on the philosophical issues, and the water’s getting muddy.

Some characters return, like Olga, Semyon, and Gesar, but they lack the bite they had from the previous novels.  They’re mostly window dressing.  A new character, a human policeman (polizei) is introduced, but Lukyanenko doesn’t do a lot with him.  Throughout, the only two characters of real importance are Anton the protagonist and Arina the sometimes antagonist.  There is a third character, the Tiger, but I can’t describe him/her without giving anything important away, so I won’t.

Concepts like the nature of the Twilight and the purpose of Prophets are discussed, but the explanations behind them seem too forced, too superficial.  They needed fleshing out.  Anton has to go overseas in order to learn basic, fundamental things that the Russian Others should have known all along.  An infidelity subplot is hinted at, but goes nowhere and leaves one wondering why it was introduced.

There are flashes of brilliance here and there, like Anton’s precognitive flash and some neat magic tricks, but they’re overwhelmed by an underwhelming ending that hinges on two unfortunate elements: a plot device brought in on the last couple of pages, and a handshake agreement that makes little sense.

Did you like the other books in the series?  Then buy this one.  Just don’t get your hopes up.

Three stars out of five.

I’m changing the blog a little bit.  I can do that, because currently nobody reads it except for a few nice people, and believe me, I appreciate every time you visit.

Anyway, I’m not going to write about writing, so much.  Or about my marketing efforts.  That’s stuff that only writers want to know about, and my intent here is to garner a broader audience.  Honestly, does anybody give a rat’s peepee about my combing through The Indie View for reviewers?  No.  Of course not.  Hell, I don’t want to read about it, and I’ve written several posts about it already.

I like writing about personal defense issues, of which I know a lot.  And the supernatural.  And horror.  And other topics of interest that won’t put you to sleep.

Since 2003, I administrated a current events and politics blog with several writers of varying viewpoints.  Very recently, I closed it.  So I know what it’s like to put words into the ether.

Your visits are always welcome, and your comments treasured.  I look forward to hearing from you.

I love bread.  I always have.  Growing up in Philadelphia, there were always good delicatessens around that served not only delicious cold cuts, but rye bread: the kind with the really soft inside and chewy crust. You can keep the caraway seeds.   Tastykakes (a Pennsylvania-based company that makes Hostess-style cakes) were good, cheesesteaks an occasional welcome indulgence (I always preferred a pizza steak to a cheesesteak because processed yellow cheese food is disgusting), but a slice of rye bread, plain, was a real treat.  No butter, because why ruin a perfectly good piece of bread?

Bread is magic.  To paraphrase Peter Reinhart, a master baker, it’s the story of life and death and resurrection.  The live wheat is killed in harvest, and then it lives again with the use of yeast in dough, and then it’s killed once more in the oven.  It’s a symbol of civilization.

So, over the course of decades, I made my own breads, with varying degrees of success.  I went through bread machines and recipes, trying to achieve artisan-style bread: the kind with the large, irregular holes.  It was a hobby that I’d picked up and dropped in cycles until late 2010, when my wife bought me a copy of Peter Reinhart’s Artisan Breads Every Day.

It was a truly transformative book, and not only taught me how to make that elusive bread with the big holes, but also spurred me on to learn more about bread baking in general.  It also encouraged me to start a blog called Adventures in Leavening.  It documented my early successes and techniques.  I still refer to it from time to time, but I haven’t updated it in years.

I have a toddler son, so I can no longer pursue hobbies the way I once did.  When he’s a little older, he and I will go into the kitchen and make things like yeast doughnuts and breads and such.  We’ll see if he catches the bread spark, so to speak.  It’s likely he will: when I can, I make us ciabatta bread as a treat, and pizza on the weekends.  But for now, my time is not all my own.  My little boy is only going to be this young once, and he’s a great guy to hang out with.

But I will get back to more baking some day.  I’ve got gluten in my blood.

One of the many things that I learned working for a niche publisher was that the vast majority of traditional martial arts are not only a gigantic waste of time, but present a false sense of confidence that can get their practitioners seriously injured.  This includes many of the so-called “reality-based self-defense” arts that you’ll see advertised on-line.

One of the main reasons of this is because most martial artists have never been hit in the face in anger.  Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu expert Carlson Gracie famously said, “Punch a black belt in the face, he becomes a brown belt.  Punch him again, purple.”  Boxer Mike Tyson said something similar: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”  Going back further, there’s the famous quote by Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, often misattributed to Von Clausewitz: “No battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy.”  If you haven’t actually used your martial art against a determined attacker who has no compunctions about putting you in the morgue, you don’t know if it will work or not.  Your martial art is your battle plan.  Can it survive contact with the enemy?

Probably not.  There’s a term in self-defense circles called “pillar assaults.”  I don’t know the etymology of it.  A pillar assault is when your instructor attacks you in a way that makes it most likely for your defensive technique to succeed.  This makes the instructor look good, because he taught you something that works, and it makes you feel good because you just defended yourself against an attack.  The problem is that it presents a false view of reality and builds your confidence on a foundation of balsa wood.  Think of it this way: is your instructor teaching you defenses against wrist grabs and full nelsons, neither of which are common street attacks, or is he teaching you how to avoid being stabbed in the neck with a 99 cent screwdriver held by a teenage meth addict?  Just do a web search on stabbed screwdriver and see how many people are attacked with them.  Then do a web search on injuries sustained by wrist grabs and full nelsons.

Hold on, you might say.  A wrist grab isn’t an attack in and of itself: it’s a prelude to something else!  Okay, let’s look at the entire situation.  If you don’t take an encompassing, holistic view of your personal defense, you’re letting yourself learn from pillar assaults and you’ll fail outside of the gym.  What’s the situation in which someone’s grabbed your wrist?

• A mugging?  Someone after your wallet or purse doesn’t start his assault by grabbing your wrist.  He starts by putting a weapon in your face or hitting you as you walk by or clocking you in the back of the head with a chunk of concrete.
• A street fight?  Someone mad at you for taking his parking space or disrespecting his paramour doesn’t begin attacking you by grabbing your wrist, either.  After the initial shouting and screaming obscenities stage, he’ll take a swing at you.
• A domestic dispute?  If you’re in a verbal altercation with a close someone who’s likely to become violent, you need to get away from that person as soon as you can.  And if you can’t get away, you need to put your hands up to prepare to hit first or block a punch.  What are your wrists doing where someone can just grab them?  

I don’t know who my market is.

That’s okay, but I have to change that.  The story I’m telling with the Armageddon Series, starting with The Blessed Man and the Witch, is going to be told my way, because it’s the kind of story I would have wanted to read.  But I don’t know who I’m telling it to.  Yet.

There are some very graphic, brutal, horror-themed elements to it, so I can’t market it to romance readers.  It’s got a lot of harsh language and a few intimate situations in it, so I can’t sell it to Christian fiction fans, despite the Biblical themes.  I term it a supernatural thriller, but that’s such a broad category as to be almost meaningless.  But it’ll have to do for now.  Perhaps it’s horror.  A lot of thriller readers don’t like their thrills to be too graphic, too…horrible, though.  And, I’ll admit, the fact that the story is told across several characters has made it difficult for some readers to get into.

This problem of finding a market is far from unusual, and every publisher works hard to do it, from the big New York firms to self-publishers like me.  It takes time, money, and a great deal of effort.

Bland platitudes aside, here’s a perfect example:

I publisher I worked for for over twelve years had created its own market from scratch.  Nobody else was doing what they were doing in the beginning.  The company’s founder was brilliant: he identified a niche and filled it.  And for decades, his company was on top.

The whole story of why they’re not on top any longer is not for this blog post, but two major things contributed to knock them off of their perch: changing laws regarding what can and can’t be published in the United States, and the rise of the internet.

The latter was the worst hit, and still is for many non-fiction publishers.  Why buy a book when you can find the information on-line for free?  The internet forever altered the market, and my former employer did not change with the times.  They don’t know who they’re selling to anymore.  They used to do occasional surveys, but rarely changed marketing strategies as a result of the information provided.

So who’s buying their stuff?  Millennials?  The 45-60 age group?  Just men?  Men and women?  And if they don’t know, how do they market to them?

My intent here is not to trash my former employer, but to use them as an object lesson: learn who your market is, or you’re wasting your marketing efforts.  Write what you want to write, and if you want to change the story you want to tell to suit your readers, great.  But you have to know who those readers are.

There are people out there who will buy your book.  They just don’t know about it yet.  Get out there and find your audience.

TL; DR: Learn who it is your book is written for, and sell to them.

In early October of 2012, I published a page-a-week webcomic called Poisoned Eden.  The art for the comic was done by Jason Fletcher, a very talented artist, and I did the comic page layouts, site design, and writing.  In late December of 2013, we published the last page of the first “issue” of the comic, and then shelved it due to other claims on our time.

In many respects, Poisoned Eden is a bridge between my first book, The Ultimate Guide to Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse, and my second book, The Blessed Man and the Witch.  If you’re familiar with all three pieces of work, you’ll definitely see the progression.  In the first book, I set out a framework for storytelling by codifying what you need to do to survive a fantastic scenario (a zombie apocalypse).  In the webcomic, I attempted to tell a more visual story using elements of the zombie theme, the end of the world, and Biblical horror.  And in the novel, I moved past the zombie theme, going straight for an apocalyptic story with Biblical elements.

Another similarity between Poisoned Eden and The Blessed Man and the Witch is the style of storytelling.  In both, the story is character-driven, and the bizarre and frequently terrifying things that happen affect each character differently.  We see the destruction of the world occur in bits and pieces through the eyes of disparate people, though in the comic, the apocalypse is somewhat familiar to most of us: zombies mindlessly destroying society.

In Poisoned Eden, the main characters are all family.  There’s Elise, the Good Mother, who just wants to get home to her baby.  There’s Michael, her husband, stranded half a country away.  He decides to make an empire for himself before everything turns to rubble.  There’s Alina, the Slacker Girl: Elise and Michael’s first child, who runs from danger until she finds she can’t run away when everywhere’s dangerous.  And finally there’s Karl, the Warrior.  He’s Elise’s father, an Amish blacksmith.

I also wrote several original articles for Poisoned Eden, some about zombie survival (the Zombies and the City feature series I’m particularly proud of), some are interviews with survival or combat experts, and the rest are fictional blog posts from someone with the handle of Uncle Phranck.

Uncle Phranck’s story takes some very unusual twists and turns.  It starts out as a young man trying to literally blog a zombie apocalypse, becoming a kind of Matt Drudge for the end of the world.  Once his internet connection fails, he’s forced to go out on his own, and things get really strange from there.  Even if the webcomic doesn’t appeal, you may find Uncle Phranck’s blog series interesting.

Despite that Poisoned Eden didn’t take on the (un)life I had originally hoped for, there’s a lot about it I’m proud of, and it’s worth your time to take a look at it.  Some day, I hope to expand my Surviving a Zombie Apocalypse book by adding material from Poisoned Eden.

But not today.  Now that we’re finally moved into the new house, I can get back to writing the sequel to The Blessed Man and the Witch.

TL;DR: Poisoned Eden is a webcomic I wrote about the zombie apocalypse, with lots of interesting stuff.  And it’s free.  Go read it.