The Gladiator Journalist and Other Murderous Flora
Jul 16, 2024 2:35 pm
Before we start, help me keep the lights on by checking out these free Fantasy and Sci Fi Books.
Today’s the day! The Gladiator Journalist and Other Murderous Flora is finally available in paperback, hardcover, and audiobook! The talented Rebecca Woods is back to narrate the audiobook for this third installment of the series, and this book is the best one yet.
Now that we’ve finally gotten here, I think I can finally reveal to you my grand design for the series. I wanted to hold off revealing this information so I don’t spoil the first two books. So, if you haven’t read them yet then close out of your browser, and start reading because I will be talking events from the first two books (promise not to spoil the third).
The idea for the series came to me way back when I was writing my dissertation defense back in Albuquerque probably around 2009 or so. I forget the day but I remember being in a large brown chair in my living room with a dog on my shoulder (he was a black Schnauzer Lhasa Apso mix who liked to sleep on the back of the chair with his head resting on the shoulder). I was in an MFA writing program and I had to pass this test to get permission to move on to the dissertation part of my degree.
Since it was a creative writing program, a lot of it was about my process and so forth, easy stuff to write for a writer, but then I got to this question where I had to write down 5 story ideas. I forget the other 4 (though I’m sure they are lurking somewhere on my hard drive, as I don’t delete anything), but there was this one that stuck with me for a long time.
The original idea I wrote in the defense was something about portals opening up all over the world and orcs flooding through. I even painted a scene where a bunch of people in a SCA mock battle saw the orcs and pulled off their foam ready for a fight. Sound familiar? Yep, without knowing, I gave my future self the plot of Orcs in Portland without even knowing it.
Fast forward to years later, when I lived in the Twin Cities, we were watching The Shannara Chronicles. It was your typical hot fantasy people swords and sorcery series. One thing that struck me about the series was the fact that it was our world, but far in the future after the apocalypse to where Earth had become a fantasy world. I was watching The 100 at the time which had a similar theme.
I read a couple of the Shannara books as a kid and don’t remember the world being ours in the future, but I was also a kid. It may have just been lost on me. I do remember other series or books though that created a fantasy world out of are own. Even the Wheel of Time kinda does that. It’s not Earth per say, but you get the sense that before the breaking of the world, it was a pretty advanced society, and the Wheel of Time TV show has flying cars in the pre breaking of the world scene.
The point is that there is a lot of fantasy out there that is set in our world, but after some calamity that had turned it into a fantasy world. After watching The Shannara Chronicles and seeing things from our world being the ancient land that people forgot, I really wanted to tell a story about the calamity that broke the world rather than the world that came after. Fast forward to the summer I lived in Oregon, and I had an idea for a three-year-old in a barbarian’s body, and I finally had a story to act as my inciting incident for the calamity story).
That’s why at the end of Orcs in Portland, I have an event so big, there is no going back to the real world. Earth is irrevocably altered in the events of the book. There is a trope in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer series, where even though the whole school is almost eaten by monsters, life continues like nothing happened. I wanted to see what happens when life can’t continue like normal. There is no next school year.
I wanted the Misfits of Carnt series to be the point of no return, the calamity that breaks the world, and the story of the world that is forged afterwards. In the third book, that world is starting to take shape, our world is dismantled, and a new one starts to rise.
It’s also way behind schedule. I had a fan ask me how many more books there will be in the series, and they said something to the effect of please don’t say there will be 14 because I will hit you. I responded with I don’t know, maybe 7. Unfortunately, I have even less of an answer to that question after writing the third book.
The kinda cliffhanger ending (it’s really a scene during the credits ending that let’s the reader know there is more story to tell) for the third book was supposed to be the ending of Orcs in Portland. However, there was some story elements and character development that I had to get through to get there.
What that means is that there will be a book 4 in Misfits of Carnt, and more, but I won’t drag it out unnecessarily. The story will end when its ready to end. For now, please enjoy the third book in the series which is truly the best one yet.
Also, for those of you who really like Jenny, she’s gonna get her own book series about her rise to power as a Moon Mage. I realized, looking back at my Three-Year-Old is a Barbarian that I made a big mistake in having two chapters about Jenny. At the time, I just wanted to give her a little backstory, let the reader know that she was a victim too, and not a cartoon villain.
However, those two chapters really slowed down the pacing of the book, and I’ll probably leave them out of future editions. They won’t be gone forever though. My plan is to use them as the first two chapters of a book series completely about Jenny. As for when that will happen, I don’t know. I do this part time during my free time and since I don’t have unlimited time to just write books all day maybe you can help me decide what to write next:
Thank you for being here, and I hope you enjoy reading The Gladiator Journalist and Other Murderous Flora as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Making bills and earnin’ like a baller with l33tskillz4va’s crypto fast cash is not what happens in this book!
But there are killer trees and bloody arena battles. What more could you want? Except sex. That happens too.
It also resolves plot points like certain characters stuck in a painting and what's Petra’s mom doin’ at that volcano, yo!
I mean I guess there’s stuff like personal character growth and human connection and all that warm, squishy stuff.
But did I mention sex that happens in this book, and magic, swords, battle axes, battles, and plenty limbs being chopped off?
Oh yeah, it’s all in the third Misfits of Carnt!
Book Swaps
Some authors who are kindly telling their readers about my books, so I'm telling you about theirs:
What kind of life will we find in the depths of Europa’s oceans? What kind of life will we allow an AI with human level intelligence? The ten stories in Sapience: A Collection of Science Fiction Short Stories explore these questions and many more.
Michael Turner, the most popular food blogger in the world, has been unable to get his life back on track ever since being overtaken in the ratings by new upstart food designer Amy Williams. And now he is faced with the daunting challenge of taking her on in the annual televised top chef competition and the ignominy of losing his long-held crown to her in front of an audience of millions.
Get Post-Molecular Comfort Food Here.
Mr. Turner is well off owning his own tech company, and on the side, he is a popular paranormal investigator. He is furious with his son for eloping with a Hartwell of all people. Snobs, all of them!