First, A Wonderful Month for a Quest Giveaway.

A while back, a friend of mine, Phillip Carter, wanted to make a short story collection for Halloween, Sci-Fi Horror. At the time, I was writing Office Maxi, and I had these weird fiends that would make a great creature feature that harkened back to the Crypt Keeper cackling with some horror related pun. I also wanted to get into the backstory of one of the characters. Thus, I wrote The 505 Lus3r, my story in the collection.

This particular story does have a little bit of autobiographical information in it. I had a beat-up Saturn that I used address lettering for houses that you can buy at any Home Depot to put 505 Lus3rs on the back. It was a reference to an informal gathering of folks who were interested in technology. We’d formally meet at the mall, but we were all friends, most of us working in the same call center.

We needed a name for a group to post meeting times online, I believe it was Yahoo groups, but honestly, I forgot. And so our friend group became the 505 Lus3rs. 505 being the area code of Albuquerque, and loser being that we were all the dorky kids in school that ended up hanging out in all night coffee establishments and goth nights at the club.

It was fairly innocent, post high school to early twenties thing and ever since I put those address lettering on my car to designate myself as a 505 Lus3r others followed suit. It kinda helped that my friend did it too (I don’t know if it was his idea or mine), but since we had it, and we were strangely one of the cool kids in that scene (don’t ask me how, I’ve never considered myself cool, slick, or any adjective in that manner), others did it too.

I know we were the cool ones because we had developed hand signals to let each other know where we were going after club because our usual spots would eventually get overwhelmed by the greater goth community. I’d literally hold my middle finger down to make the letters VI for Village Inn. We even had one for Flying J.

That same year that we had those adornments on our cars, we decided to go to Defcon, the annual Hacker convention in Vegas less because we were hackers and more because it was a giant nerdy party. We caravanned with three or four 505 Lus3rs cars. I’m sure my Saturn parked in the hotel parking lot of Defcon put me on FBI watch lists and raised questions due to the obscurity of the reference, but rest assured America, the 505 Lus3rs, at least my friends, were no more a threat than a frat.

We did pull a few stunts like photoshopping ghosts into pictures of the railyards in Albuquerque or trying to sell our roommate on ebay (FYI: human trafficking is against ebay policies, but strangely, they did not cancel my account for the violation), but overall we were just nerds with a counter culture punk rock aesthetic.

Farhad, the character in the story, would have been a member of that group, and just like the folks in that group, we often schemed about ways to make money using our tech skills. A friend of mine and I created a site call aaronreview a couple months before epinions came out and did it better than us (we were trying to invent online reviews before online reviews were a thing). Another buddy of mine, (not a 505 Lus3r), but with the same sense of humor and I created Two Dudes Trying to Make a Buck dot com, where we said we are selling nothing, but maybe if enough people give us money, we’ll give one lucky person a photocopy of Henrik Ibsen or perhaps something else from the corkboard (but not Batman). (Yes, we did make money. No, not enough to make the news).

So, while the creature part of the story is purely fictitious, the 505 Lus3r part is a window of what it was like to be young, nerdy, and working thankless jobs that sap a little of your soul each time to clock in, and trying to find that better way and just as it had in my real life, landing me in places that I’d least expect.

I also want to point you in the direction of Philip Carter’s substack. He has an entire post about when you are supporting this book, you are supporting humans. There are 5 human writers, a human cover artist, a human interior artist, and human editor for the book. So, if you want to support humans, it’s a good book to get.

You can also check out a sample of my story from the book.

Get Macabre Multiverse today here or by clicking the lovely cover art below:

Book Swaps

The following authors are kindly sharing my books with their readers. Show them some love and click on their links.

A mismatched band of thieves, assassins, and a reluctant mage sets out on the ultimate heist—to retrieve the legendary Gilded Dagger before it falls into the wrong hands. 

Read the Gilded Dagger today!

The Dead Lands are no place for the living.

Read The Dead Lands today!

Ludovic Stone was the arms-bearer and right-hand of Archmage Alastor an Ulbrecht and Sorceress Lianna; protecting them throughout the years from political threats and standing by their side through the hardships they faced due to their stature.

Read The Void today!

What if people destroy reality?

Read Splitting Skies today!

Uncertain survival has become the ethos of many citizens in Venezuela under the rule of a vicious regime, while foreign corporations are stripping out the country of a prized, strategic resource for an intergovernmental military alliance.

Read Unbroken Strife today!

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