News – updates on books, events, appearances, etc.

The Dragon Award winning novel Gun Runner, by Larry Correia and me, is being adopted into a graphic novel by Hound Dog Media. The writer is the legendary Mike Baron (The Punisher, Nexus) and the art is by Marcelo Salazar.

This is a story about a smuggler crew who specialize in stealing battle mechs and selling them to worlds that aren’t allowed to have them. The book is great. I can’t wait to see it as a graphic novel.

This is going to be awesome. Check it out. There’s even a pledge level to get yourself drawn as a member of the crew.

A true story. 

There once was a spider who climbed into a lush, seven-foot fir tree somewhere in Oregon. This happened sometime in September or October. She wove a small, silken pad deep among the needles and laid hundreds of eggs upon it. Then she spun layer after layer of silk over them, sealing them in a warm, white chamber. Her life’s work. 

Having fulfilled the measure of her creation, she went where all spiders go. But where is that? Are spiders elegant biological machines, or are they living souls? I don’t know. Perhaps at some future date we’ll be blessed to understand such things. 

What we do know is this: as autumn cooled, the temperature dropped below fifty degrees, and her eggs slipped into dormancy. October passed into November. And sometime in the last days of November or early December, humans with chainsaws arrived for the final harvest. 

The tree was cut, loaded onto a truck, bundled into a refrigerated trailer, and shipped hundreds of miles away to a Smith’s Marketplace in Logan, Utah. There is stood with a number of other trees in the area just outside the front doors in the snow and cold and fluorescent lights. How many days and nights it waited there, we don’t know. But one evening, a mother and father and their four girls arrived to find their Christmas tree. 

They walked among the evergreens, feeling for soft needles, breathing in the deep, resinous smells. They found the tree. It was perfect. They paid for it, tied it to the top of their minivan, and drove home over the mountains to the south end of the lake. Then they set it up, the father complaining, as he always did, about the goofy screw-stabilizers, strung the lights, and hung ornaments from past Christmases. The little tree filled the room with warmth, scent, and memory. 

On Christmas morning they came down to open presents. As the sun rose, the light through the front window illuminated the tree. And something was different. 

The branches shimmered. 

The girls peered closer to investigate.  

And found thin silk filaments. Everywhere. And then, to their shock, they saw that the whole tree was alive, moving with hundreds of baby spiders. A small horde that had warmed over the days and hatched silently sometime in the deep night after Santa and Mrs. Claus had gone to bed. A small horde that had then gotten to work—tiny, mad elves weaving their own gossamer garlands through the branches. 

When the girls realized what they were seeing, there were shrieks of horror. Then the father, not knowing what else to do, escorted the tree, its decorations, and mad elves outside into the cold. The father returned, closed the door, and the whole family stood there, looking at the tree out on the deck, a bit stunned.  

All these years later, it’s one of our family’s warm and funny memories. But if you ponder it just a little longer, it’s also one that lingers. 

Are spiders merely elegant machines? Or are they living souls? Do they have claim upon us? Should a swarm of locusts or an infestation of roaches be preserved? 

I will leave such questions to you, Dear Reader. 

In the meantime, I wish you the merriest of Christmases. Whatever you believe or don’t, may you receive a measure of divine light this season—and reflect it, to brighten the world, if even just a little, for creatures both great and small. 

John 

Four days ago I was on my hands and knees in the garden, muttering, “My ring. Where is it? Where is it!” 

I could have been Bilbo out there among the tomatoes. I could have been Gollum—though I’d have to endure a long, worm-filled diet to play that role convincingly. 

I’ve been married thirty-six years to a good woman. You’d think a wedding ring is just a ring. 

But it isn’t. 

Someone memed me Boromir holding up the ring on a chain and saying, “It is a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt over so small a thing.” 

And I thought, how true! It makes me wonder if Tolkien ever lost his wedding ring. 

For two days I searched the ground where I’d lost it—a long hedge of tomatoes and the sagebrush hill behind where I’d tossed split fruit. For two nights I went to bed feeling the absence on my hand, as if something vital had been taken from me. 

Then, with the help of a Garrett ACE 250 metal detector I rented from a fine establishment in Logan, Utah, I found it. 

It was just lying there in the open in a spot I’d checked half a dozen times. The detector beeped. And there it was. 

My precious. My precious, precious reminder of thirty-six years with my admirable wife and our four wonderful daughters. It feels so good to have it back on my finger. 

How strange that so many memories are wrapped up in so small a thing. It almost demands a new story about a magic ring. In fact, the experience might just influence the ending of ASSASSIN. That’s how writing works sometimes—life drops the ideas right in your tomato patch. 

Speaking of ASSASSIN, it is coming along nicely. Ferran and company just turned a major corner with the help of a spunky kid in the city. And there’s an exciting scene coming up where all heck is about to break loose. 

On another note, many of you have asked about GLORY, the fourth book in the Dark God series. It’s next in the queue. I’ll write that climax as soon as I finish ASSASSIN. I already have an opening, a rough outline, and plenty of notes—dogmen, dreadmen, Glories—the works. It’s coming, and I think the revelation of what’s really happening will surprise you. 

Finally, I’m not dead yet, nor am I the fount of all wisdom, but I can say this: spend time with those you love, laugh with them, go on adventures. Because one day you’ll lose your ring—or some other small token bound up with all of it—and know exactly how precious those memories are. 

Peace out, my fellow dreadmen and fell maidens.