Electronic composer Vangelis died yesterday at 79. Best known for his scores for Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, he composed a large number of excellent musical works. My favorite song-period, not just my favorite Vangelis song, is Alpha.
RIP.
Electronic composer Vangelis died yesterday at 79. Best known for his scores for Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner, he composed a large number of excellent musical works. My favorite song-period, not just my favorite Vangelis song, is Alpha.
RIP.
I have a new post on the SLP blog about a time when one of the sharpest and most respected analysts used a conflict setup that could have been straight from a bad 1990s technothriller.
For Fuldapocalypse’s 700th post, I’m glad to have the chance to present something: I have a new book released! Cage Ring Mat: Tales of Martial Arts is currently out in ebook form and a paperback should be out soon. Enjoy twelve tales of organized fisticuffs from the world of The Sure Bet King!
The second and last part of the Sea Lion Press discussion is now up.
I had the great experience of participating in a Sea Lion Press discussion on power, war, and violence in alternate history. The first part has been posted here.
So, the long-feared Russian all-out invasion of Ukraine has begun. I kind of suspected this would happen when A: 75% of the Russian Army, including units from Eastern Siberia, was moved to the border, and B: The Kremlin began making knowingly impossible demands. Frankly, knowing what I know now, it’s kind of miraculous that it took thirty years to get this far.
(And no, Ukraine couldn’t have kept its for all intents and purposes unusable nukes it technically inherited, and it still did the right thing in not trying.)
Fuldapocalypse will continue as normal, as fiction is not real life. I will refrain on commentary as even the well-informed and honest accounts can be subject to confusion. However, I will say that when it became clear that war was inevitable, I made the very deliberate decision to pivot away from my Soviet-Romanian “big war thriller”, and not just because of the general concept or even the area. Having a massive, high-tech, Russian-led army striking against a former client whose only effective resistance is urban and unconventional warfare is a little too on the nose-in fact, the scenario is so similar that you could basically do a find and replace for “Belarus” and “Bulgaria” and change nothing else.
Thankfully, I do have some very good news. The pivot away from that concept to a follow-up thriller involving gambling, mansions, nuclear weapons, and dirty black ops in Southeast Asia with aged characters from The Sure Bet King has gone beautifully. The plot for that has finally clicked, and I’ve been making excellent progress there.
I’m proud to say that my piece on Kirov series villain Ivan Volkov, my favorite alternate history antagonist ever, is now up on Sea Lion Press.
While I’ve previously reviewed it on this very blog, I felt it good to review Red Hammer 1994 on Sea Lion Press. The reasons are:
While 2020 was a bad year for everyone, my 2021 was excellent. I made and released my first full-length novel, The Sure Bet King. It was the most fun I’ve had writing a book-ever. Really, it was a great experience. I got to write in a genre I knew nothing about when I started the blog, and know I could do a 100,000 word book.
Writing it was so smooth and fun that I actually thought I could just go right in to making the next book, which didn’t quite click (yet). But one full-length novel is better than none, and that it was a “pop epic” inspired by the likes of Sidney Sheldon (an author I didn’t know about when I started the blog) and about sports betting (A topic I didn’t know nearly as much about when I started the blog) made it all the sweeter. It really showed how the blog’s diversification paid off.
I actually found that in many ways, writing a big-scale book that took place over a long period of time was actually easier than a shorter, narrower-scope one. I could add varied scenes without having them feel like just padding. Of course, now I have the desire to make a more conventional action thriller…
Merry Christmas and happy holidays from Fuldapocalypse!