Upcoming short stories

Summer is a time when book sales typically slow down, at least for anything that’s not a beach read. To combat slow sales, many authors have found that it helps to schedule more book releases.

I’m definitely seeing the summer slump in my own sales numbers, but I also happen to have a bunch of unpublished short stories lying around, as well as a published one where the publishing rights revert in September. In fact, I’ve got enough short stories that I can publish one every three weeks from now to the end of summer.

So that’s what I’m going to do. And in order to have enough content for next summer, I’m going to spend the next couple of weeks after finishing Gunslinger to the Stars to write seven or eight new stories. I set a goal a few months ago to write a couple of short stories every month, but I’ve found that it’s very difficult to do that when I have a long-form WIP. Taking a break to pound out a few short stories seems like a much better way to write them.

Here is the release schedule:

  • JULY 24 – “Utahraptors at Dawn”
  • AUGUST 14 – “Welcome to Condescension”
  • SEPTEMBER 4 – “The Open Source Time Machine”
  • SEPTEMBER 25 – “L’enfer, c’est la Solitude”

If you’re subscribed to my newsletter, I do plan to do free giveaways with all of these stories eventually. However, I’m releasing them all at only 99¢ each, and it helps a lot when you read and review them right as they come out. Either way, I appreciate the support.

Also, I’m not sure how this slipped past me, but my short story “The Curse of the Lifewalker” is now available on the Sci Phi Journal! It’s behind a paywall, but you can read the first 20% or so for free. The publishing rights revert back to me next June, so it will be another year before I can indie publish it. In the meantime, the Sci Phi Journal is a great magazine, and you should definitely check them out!

Also, “A Hill On Which To Die” is coming out in a print anthology with Bards and Sages Publishing in the next couple of months! I’ll be sure to let you know when that’s available for purchase.

I’m working on the cover art for “Utahraptors at Dawn,” so I’ll be sure to do a cover reveal in the next couple of days. It’s going to be as fantastically awesome as the title suggests.

Take care!

Only two more chapters!

I’m only two chapters away from finishing the first draft of Gunslinger to the Stars! This book was supposed to be finished a month ago, but life got busy and my chronic disorganization got in the way.

Of course, these last few chapters are taking WAY longer to write than I thought they would, just like all of my books. It’s like Zeno’s paradox for writers: no matter how close you are to finishing the damn thing, you’re still only halfway to the end.

The ending for this book is going to be awesome, though. Truly awesome. How do I know? Because I started this book with Chekhov’s armory, and the only gun that hasn’t been fired is called Charity. Why? Because Charity is the greatest of all, Charity never faileth (even when all things fail), and whosever shall be found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.

So yeah, I’m really excited for Gunslinger. It’s probably the funnest, most entertaining book I’ve written to date. I tell people it’s like Monster Hunter International meets Guardians of the Galaxy. I actually told Larry Correia that at LTUE back in February, and he got a kick out of it.

In other news, I’ve decided to publish a bunch of short stories in the next couple of months. These stories have been out on submission for a while, but it’s time to put them out there for you guys to read.

I’ve decided that any short story market that takes longer than 60 days to respond with a form rejection is not worth my time. If the magazines were the only way to get these stories out, then sure, I’d grin and bear it, but in an age of indie publishing it just doesn’t make sense. Why should I wait three, four, or five months for each market to make a decision? Multiply that by ten or fifteen markets, and my stories can be tied up for years. I don’t need that, and my readers don’t need that either.

Stand-alone short stories have always been hit or miss for me. A few, like Starchild and Worlds Without Number, sell at a small but consistent rate. Others, like Decision LZ1527, haven’t performed as consistently. I’m never quite sure whether to publish a short story as a stand-alone, so I’m going to just throw them all up there and see how well they perform after three or four months. Let the market decide.

As for the ones that don’t perform well, I’ll take down the stand-alones and republish them in bundles and short story collections instead. No sense keeping an individual title up if it isn’t selling. I’ve already taken down a couple of the old ones, which will definitely go up later in some of these bundles. Trouble is, I just haven’t had stories availabe to bundle them with.

So you can expect to see that in the next few months, as well as (hopefully) Gunslinger to the Stars. The first draft is pretty rough, but I don’t think the revision process is going to take that long. Mostly I just need to run it past my gun nut friends to make sure I got all the details right, and find an awesome artist to design the cover.

I’ll leave you with Shostakovich’s Second Waltz, because it’s a fantastic waltz that’s been stuck in my head for several days now. Enjoy!

The American Insurgency, Part 1: Prelude to Civil War

tacticalgadsden1The American Insurgency officially broke out in 2026, as a direct result of Steward vs. The State of California which effectively nullified the 2nd amendment. However, the conflict was rooted in the politics of the previous decade, and the economic realities of the Great Collapse.

Following the election of 2016, the Republican Party split into various regional factions and ceased to be a force in American politics. None of the third parties then extant were able to pick up enough Republican dissenters to challenge the Democrats on the national stage. As a result, the 2018 elections handed the Democrats control of the House and Senate, as well as the White House.

The Great Collapse began in late 2016 / early 2017, when Germany and France fell into recession. The migrant crisis in Europe had reached the high water mark, which along with the ongoing Eurozone crisis propelled several right-wing, Euroskeptic parties into power. Referendums in Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece, and the Czech Republic all resulted in decisions to exit the EU, leading effectively to the dissolution of the union.

Following Vladimir Putin’s mysterious disappearance in April 2018, the Russian Federation collapsed and Russia ceased to exist as a single contiguous country. NATO attempted to safeguard Russia’s nuclear weapons arsenal and oversee a transitional government, but failed as the Russian oblasts either refused to recognize the authority of the Kremlin or were annexed by neighboring states. Poland and the V4 countries formed a competing alliance system for eastern Europe, and the various western European countries gradually withdrew support from NATO as they rebuilt their own national militaries.

As a result of these events, the entire Eurasian continent fell into economic collapse. Insurrections in the Chinese mainland forced the PRC to withdraw from global affairs as the country gradually imploded. Foreign investors lost a tremendous amount of capital. Stock markets across the globe plummeted, the Euro was disbanded, and regional wars broke out in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Levant, and the South China Sea.

The immediate effect of all this was to drive foreign capital to the United States, which was not nearly as leveraged as the Eurasian countries and therefore in a much better economic position. However, the debt to GDP ratio of the United States was already over 100%, and US dollar’s days as the reserve currency of the world were numbered.

But in the short-term, the United States experienced a brief period of economic relief as the rest of the world collapsed. This boosted President Clinton’s popularity and enabled the Democrats to sweep the 2018 elections.

As soon as the Democrats had control of congress and the white house, they pushed a deeply partisan agenda. Abortion laws across the states were nullified by federal law. The federal minimum wage was raised first to $15, then to $20 as the dollar began to plummet. The welfare rolls expanded massively. Hate speech laws were passed that banned any discussion of abstinence in public schools, and mandatory consent classes began as early as grade 5. Christian churches were forced to perform gay marriages, and the movement to decriminalize pedophilia gained significant legal traction.

President Clinton was impeached and thrown out of office in 2021, but the damage had already been done. The Supreme Court was stacked with left-leaning activist judges, who overturned previous limits on federal powers and reinterpreted the US Constitution in ways that effectively nullified it. The rule of law had already broken down with the FBI’s failure to prosecute Clinton in 2016, but new court decisions effectively paved the way for the President to exercise dictatorial powers.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 2026 that the 2nd amendment was not to be construed as an individual right to bear arms, Washington immediately instituted a national mandatory gun buy-back program. Conservatives and libertarians decided they had had enough.

The American Insurgency had begun.

The American Insurgency (Index)

Tactical Gadsden Flag taken from The Art of Not Being Governed and published under a CC BY-SA 4.0 License.

New short story: “The Gettysburg Paradox”!

The 4th of July was kind of crazy for me. Sold fireworks for twelve hours, then put on a fantastic show at the house of my friend and cowriter, Scott Bascom. But yeah, it was pretty exhausting.

However, I found time over the weekend to publish a short story. This is one I wrote two years ago as part of the Short Blitz challenge, and blogged about it here.

Well, it’s available now for your reading pleasure!

Nothing Found

Making Progress

I’ve been making good progress lately on Gunslinger to the Stars. My original deadline for the rough draft was today, but I think it will take no more than two additional weeks to finish it. There’s about four chapters left, and I’m so eager to write the last one that the others will almost certainly fly by.

I’ve also got a short story that should be going up soon. Some of you may remember the cover art I previewed a while ago for “The Gettysburg Paradox.” I’m gettting ready to publish that one, and it should be up over the holiday weekend.

Today is the anniversary of the first day of the Battle of Gettysburg. Some people celebrate the 4th of July by watching Independence Day; I celebrate it by watching Gettysburg. The American Civil War was a true watershed moment for this country and did more to make us who we are than any other war, including the Revolutionary War. Also, it was fought on July 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. As Martin Sheen said in the movie (acting in the role of Robert E. Lee), “God has a sense of humor.”

I’ll leave you with what is probably the best scene from the entire movie: the charge of the 20th Maine on Little Round Top. Incidentally, this is also the opening scene of “The Gettysburg Paradox.”

Take care!

Happiness is always a choice. So is being offended.

Happiness is always a choice. Always. So is taking offense. No exceptions.

Anyone who says otherwise does not want you to be an empowered, liberated human being. They are teaching you to believe that you are a powerless victim, unable to control your own destiny.

There are only two classes of things in this world: things that act, and things that are acted upon. Empowerment is when you give somebody the ability to act for themselves, independent of outside forces. Disempowerment is when you take that ability away.

There is nothing more empowering than to realize that no matter where you are in life—no matter how shitty your circumstances—you can always still choose to be happy.

Happiness is a feeling that only exists inside of you. It is not something external that is forced or bestowed upon you by outside forces. It is wholly internal to your heart and mind. It is a reaction to outside forces—a reaction that you choose to make.

If happiness is not a choice—if it is something over which we have no control—then we cannot have any control over any of our feelings. Our passions are external forces that act upon us, and we are powerless to stop them because our emotional development ended at age two.

Is there anything empowering or liberating about this philosophy? No. Quite the opposite. It debases mankind and makes us no better than the animals. It destroys our agency and makes us slaves to our passions.

Happiness is always a choice.

In a similar way, it is always a choice to feel offended. Why? Because offense is a reaction to external forces, just as our feelings are reactions to external forces. If we cannot choose how we react to the things that happen to us, then we have no agency—no power to act for ourselves.

If taking offense is not a choice, then we are always at the mercy of those who offend us. Forgiveness is impossible because we are powerless to react in any other way. We are, and always will be, victims.

Does this mean that if someone hurts us, it is our fault for feeling hurt? No, because there is a difference between being hurt and taking offense. Hurt is a result of external forces, while offense is an internal reaction to those forces. It is impossible to love someone without giving them the power to hurt you, but how you respond to that hurt is always your choice.

In politics today, there is an increasingly popular idea that being a victim somehow makes you virtuous. This is where intersectionality comes from: so that people can claim to belong to two or three victim groups at the same time. It grows out of the idea that fairness is equality of outcome, and it is completely anathema to the idea of personal responsibility.

What does “responsibility” mean? It comes from two words: “able” and “response.” When you are responsible, you are able to choose your own response to the things that happen to you. You are an empowered free agent, a liberated human being.

Can you see how the modern cult of victimhood completely undermines this? How things like safe spaces, trigger warnings, and microaggressions are all calculated to destroy our individual agency, and thus render us powerless to control our own destiny?

The flipside of the coin of Liberty is personal responsibility. Anything that erases the latter will destroy the former with it, and those who give up their responsibilities also give up their freedom. When we surrender our ability to choose our own response, we are no longer people who act but people who are acted upon.

Brigham Young wisely said:

He who takes offense when no offense is intended is a fool, and he who takes offense when offense is intended is a greater fool.

Offense is not something you are, it is something you take. And it is always—ALWAYS—a choice.

Dear Ms. Reader,

Dear Ms. Author.

I really like your books. I think they are well-written and I enjoyed reading them. (So far, so good, right? Hang on.) However, I have returned them all because you priced them at $0.99 to $2.99, and that is too much to pay for them. I can’t afford to pay that much for a book, even though I liked it. In the future, can you make sure you make all your books free so I don’t have to return them?

Dear Ms. Reader,

Thank you for reading my books. I appreciate your patronage. However, this is why my books are not all free:

What have you done to serve your fellow man?

Sincerely yours,

Joe

Why I need a gun (and you do too)

If you had lived in Germany before the Nazis came to power and a time traveler had told you how history would play out, what would you have done about it?

The nation was reeling from a massive economic depression after a decade of war exhaustion. In this troubled time, a charismatic democratic socialist ran on a platform promising to share the wealth of the top 1% (the Jews) with the rest of the nation. Violent protesters routinely disrupted his opponents’ political rallies. People in general were fed up with the political system and were eager for a change.

Obviously, there isn’t a 1:1 parallel between 1930s Germany and 2010s United States. But let’s take a quick look at some of the policies that the Nazis successfully championed:

  • Nationalized healthcare
  • Centralized education
  • Taxpayer subsidized abortion
  • Government mass surveillance
  • Arbitrary limits on free speech

And finally:

  • Abolition of private gun ownership

Can you see the chilling parallels between what the Nazis did and the agenda that the Left has been pushing for the last eight years?

Right now, the United States is reeling from the deadliest mass shooting in our nation’s history. The perpetrator was a domestic terrorist who pledged allegiance to ISIS, just like the last mass shooting which happened in San Bernardino. But instead of focusing on the radical Islamic ideology that motivated these shootings, the national discourse is focused on gun control.

This is patently ridiculous.

When a teenager commits suicide because of online bullying, is the solution to censor the internet?

When people spread lies and false rumors on social media, is the solution to place general restrictions on the use of social media?

When a battered wife is stabbed to death with a kitchen knife, do we call for regulations on the length and sharpness of all kitchen knives?

When large numbers of people die in car accidents, do we enforce a ban on “high-capacity” cars that can drive faster than 45 mph?

Better yet, do we allow car owners to sue the manufacturer if they ever get into an accident? Correct me if I’m wrong, but that wasn’t in the terms of the last government bail out.

We’ve had this debate over gun control many times before. Whenever we have a mass shooting in this country, the bodies of the victims are not yet cold before all of the old arguments on both sides are trotted out. So let’s go to the moment when the emotions were hottest, in 2012 after the tragic shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary:

In an interview with Dave Rubin, Ben Shapiro later said that Piers Morgan had actually brought one of the kids from Sandy Hook onto the set to come on in the second segment of the show. The kid was in a wheelchair, and Piers was going to use him as political prop to make a cheap appeal to emotion. Of course, after Ben called him out for standing on the graves of children, Piers’s whole debate strategy fell apart.

This is my response, which is currently the top comment on YouTube:

“Do you genuinely believe that your own government is going to turn on you in a way that you require an AR-15 to challenge them?”

Holy flying fuck, Piers Morgan. Do you have no self-awareness at all? You are talking to a Jew, Piers. A JEW. As in, one of those people who were systematically exterminated by a tyrannical regime called the Democratic Soc—sorry, the NATIONAL Socialist German Worker’s Party. Also known as the Nazis, Piers. The Nazis.

You are familiar with the Nazis, are you not, Piers? You know: the smartly dressed German guys with the swastika flags who bombed your homeland relentlessly for 3+ months back in 1940. If I remember my history correctly, you fought something of a war with them, did you not? Or are you as bad at history as you are at US constitutional law?

People like you are the reason I need an AR-15, Piers. Crybullies like you in the mainstream media who stand on the graves of children as they browbeat the rest of us into giving up our rights and liberty, all in the name of leftist ideology.

And you know what, Piers? When I do get an AR-15, I’m going to name it in your honor. I’m dead serious, Piers. I’m going to etch your name right on the barrel. I’ll keep it right next to François, my Mossberg shotgun (which I named in honor of another anti-gun wanker).

And you know what sound it’s gonna make when I fire it, Piers? That “ratatatat” when I pull the trigger?

That’s the sound of Liberty.

Here is why you need a gun:

When the founding fathers drafted the Constitution, they envisioned a political system unlike any other in existence at the time—one where the government exists only by the consent of the governed. This, they rightly believed, was the way to ensure Liberty.

In order for the system to work, however, the people had to be able to live without fear of the State. In other words, the government had to fear the people instead of the other way around.

The Declaration of Independence had already set the precedent that it was the right of the people to overthrow their government if it ever became tyrannical. The only way for that to happen was for the people to have the right to bear arms.

This is why the second amendment is the second amendment, not the ninth or the sixteenth or the twenty-eighth. It’s also why the second amendment never specified what kinds of arms should be allowed. The idea that founders’ original intent was to restrict gun ownership to muskets is patently ridiculous:

In my experience, people who favor stricter gun control laws generally fall into one of two camps: those who are simply afraid of guns, and those who want to vastly expand the powers of the State.

The first camp of people are generally well-meaning, if a little bit sheltered. Most of them have probably never owned or fired a gun of any kind. Their arguments for stricter gun control tend to be rooted in emotion. When a mass shooting happens, they feel like they need to do something to prevent this kind of massacre from ever happening again.

Unfortunately, these people have been spoon-fed lies from the second camp, which wants to disarm the general public NOT to reduce gun violence, but to vastly expand the powers of the state.

These people are fundamentally opposed to the idea of a government that exists only by the consent of the governed. They want to tear down the Constitution because it prevents them from using the power of the State to advance their political agenda. The principle of Liberty is a roadblock to them, and they want to abolish at every turn, not only with the second amendment, but the first, the fourth, the ninth, etc.

One of their main arguments is that there is no place in this country for private ownership of “assault rifles.” The argument is that these are “weapons of war,” and that therefore they have no place in civilian life.

To someone who has never owned or fired a gun, this is a pretty convincing argument. The term “assault rifle” is never clearly defined, but it effectively conjures up all the fears of guns and gun violence that many of these people have. To push the envelope even further, gun control advocates always associate “assault rifle” with AR-15, the most popular rifle in the United States.

The AR-15 is a de-clawed version of the M-16, which (unlike the AR-15) is fully automatic. That means that with an AR-15, you only get one bullet for every time you pull the trigger. AR-15s are most often chambered in .223/556, a round that is smaller in diameter than the most common handgun rounds. The reason it’s a popular weapons system is because it’s the Mr. Potato-head of guns: you can swap out basically all of the moving parts, or build one from scratch. No matter your needs (hunting, home defense, recreation, competition), you can adjust an AR-15 to meet them.

It’s actually not a scary gun at all, if you know how to use it properly. And judging from how many of them are circulating in the market, responsible gun ownership is the rule, not the exception.

Is the AR-15 a “weapon of war,” though? It can be if you want it to be. That’s kind of the point. Remember, one of the reasons for the second amendment was to enable the people to stand up against a tyrannical government. Without the right to bear arms—broadly defined—you cannot have Liberty.

This is where we get back to the Nazis. There is a reason why totalitarian governments always ban private gun ownership before they commit their worst atrocities. In the words of Mao Zedong, “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” When the guns are in the hands of the people, the people have political power and influence over their government. When they lose their guns, they lose that power.

But Joe, do you really fear an American holocaust? Do you genuinely fear that your government is going to turn on you in a way that you require an AR-15 to challenge them?

Yes, I do.

We tend to have this idea that the Holocaust was a historical aberration, a nasty horrible thing that never happened before and has never happened since. That simply is not true. Systematic interment and murder by tyrannical governments is actually the norm throughout history. The only thing that made the Holocaust any different was German efficiency.

Look at the sack of Carthage by the Romans. Look at the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols. Look at all five times that Jerusalem was destroyed. In our modern era, look at the excesses of the French Revolution, the genocide of the Armenians, the British concentration camps in South Africa—indeed, look at the concentration camps IN THE UNITED STATES that were set up by FDR. Even before that, we had our own horrors like the Indian Removal Act and the Cherokee Trail of Tears.

And lest you think the world learned its lesson after Auschwitz and Dachau, read up on the Soviet Gulag and Chinese organ harvesting of political prisoners. There is a reason why the wait time for a kidney transplant in China is so ridiculously low.

The flipside of the coin of liberty is responsibility. In order for a people to be free, they need to take the responsibility of governing themselves. Part of that responsibility is learning how to defend yourself, not only from criminals, but from an overreaching, tyrannical government.

That is why you need a gun: because there is no Liberty without the means to defend it. That is also why I bought my first gun this past week (François) and why I’m building an AR-15 (Piers). Whenever there is a systematic effort to take away your fundamental rights, it becomes your duty to exercise those rights before they get taken away.

Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!

A little family history

Holy crap, it’s been a long time since the last blog post. I wish I could say that things got busy, but the truth is that things just got disorganized. We’ll see how quickly I can put things back in order.

I spent most of last week either working a landscaping job or doing family history. Until now, I haven’t really blogged much about family history, but it’s something I’ve been working on fairly consistently for the past six months. My ultimate goal is to find all my first generation immigrant ancestors, which may well take a lifetime, but I’m off to a decent start:

JV fanThe fan chart shows six generations, starting with me at generation zero. I’ve outlined with a sharpie where all the lines hop the pond. My paternal grandfather’s side (blue) is all from the Czech lands, under the Habsburgs and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. My paternal grandmother’s side (green) goes way, way back to colonial America, with most of the lines still needing to be researched.

On my mom’s side, there are only three lines that go back to colonial America, and those are the ones I’ve been focused on. Joseph Moroni Wight goes back to Massachusetts and the Pilgrims, and has been fairly well documented back to the early 1600s. Nancy Jane Rose’s father was cursed by a Mormon apostle, which is just about the only thing we know about him. He’s a brick wall, but her mom’s side goes all the way back just like J.M. Wight.

The other line is Archibald Benjamin Stephenson, which has some colorful history including a brief stint with the Strangites. Unlike all my other Mormon lines, this one has not been thoroughly researched. I’m trying to find out why that is, and to push back further if possible.

My ultimate goal is to specialize in early American research, from the original colonies to the pre-Civil War era. With family history, you really have to be a jack of all trades and a master of one. I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the basics, but I still have a lot of work to do before I develop any sort of mastery.

Of course, my work with family history isn’t going to replace or supersede my writing. If anything, it’s feeding into it. There are tons of interesting family stories I’m uncovering through this research, which makes for excellent writing material. For example, my 6th great uncle Lyman Wight once looked a murderous mob in the eyes and said: “shoot, and be damned.” I’m definitely working that into Gunslinger to the Stars.

So that’s what I’ve been up to. There’s a chance I may branch into historical fiction as I get more involved in family history. For now, all of the story ideas gnawing at my head are science fiction, but who knows what will happen in the future?

I’ll leave you with a little something from the Austrian connection in my family history: Roses of the South by Johann Strauss.