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The latest in the HELLStalkers action-adventure series is finally here! HELLStalkers: Dark Night in Caracas takes the HELLstalker team to Venezuela to investigate the latest possible incursion by transdimensional monsters into our reality.

Here’s the summary:

No sooner has HELLstalker One returned from their search for the missing scientists in Antarctica that they are thrown immediately back into the fray. There’s a possible new incursion they need to investigate and this time it isn’t in some secluded location out in the ass end of nowhere, but smack in the middle of a highly populated area that spells trouble for Captain Stone and his team.

A video showing strange, alien creatures rampaging through the ruins of a massive apartment complex reminiscent of the Walled City of Kowloon has hit the web and is gaining more visibility by the minute. Darius Trent, director of the Cerberus Project, believes it to be genuine and he’s sending the men and women of HELLstalker One south to Caracas to investigate without permission of the Venezuelan government.

Stone will need to get his team in, neutralize the threat, and get out again before their presence is discovered. The creatures they’ve come to face, however, have other plans for how this showdown will end.

Get your copy in the or visit the to reach the usual vendors!

I’ve partnered with Book.io again to bring you all another limited digital NFT collector’s edition of one of the Templar Chronicles novels, this time book six, Fall of Night.

Details:
Mint Time: Tomorrow, 5 PM EST, 21:00 UTC, May 29, 2024.
Chain: Cardano
Edition: Collectors Ebook
Series: Living Author 2.0
Volume: 530
Price: 110 ADA / 89 ADA with The Heretic and Gutenberg Bible
Purchase Limit: 5
Unique Covers: 139
1:1 Covers: 48

My Readers/Fans are a crucial part of my writing career, and it drives me nuts that current means of reaching and interacting with you is so hit or miss. There might be 3000 of you following my feed on Facebook or Twitter but only a tiny fraction of you will see anything I post thanks to the algorithms that control who sees what.

If you took the time to follow me, you should be able to see what I post without jumping through hoops.

Which is why I’ve opened up a new reader community on Ream that I’m calling the Imaginarium!

Ream has two very cool methods of interacting with me and keeping up to date on what I’m working on and releasing next.

The first method is to just become a Follower of my profile. It’s totally free and that will get you access to my community posts and my production diary, where I detail what I’m working on and what’s coming down the pipeline in your direction.

All you need to do is navigate to  and click the big purple Follow button right under my logo. 

I urge everyone interested in my work to do that, because that way you’ll be guaranteed to get an email notification every time I update the community page and you won’t miss out on some of the cool announcements and projects coming this year.

The second method gives you even deeper access to my world, with some awesome benefits that go along with it. Ream offers you the ability to pick a paid tier (much like Patreon does) that charges you monthly for greater access. 

Want Early Access so you can read the rough drafts and production notes on my latest projects? Choose the Early Access tier for $5/month.

Want to get an ebook each month from my extensive backlist library, plus early access? Choose the Ebook of the Month tier for $10/month.

How about getting a special, limited edition signed paperback with exclusive cover art for every new release, plus early access and the ebook of the month? Choose the Signed Exclusive Paperbacks Tier for $25/month.

I’ve also got higher priced tiers for those wanting direct access for monthly Zoom calls and help from me as your personal writing coach for $50/month and $100/month respectively.

In other words, if you want to take a deep dive into what I create and enjoy access to projects long before anyone else, you’ve got a way to do so!

I can’t wait to starting using Ream and connecting with my readers the way I’ve always longed to do so and I hope you’ll join me over there at the level that is right for you.

Remember �� hop on over to , hit the purple Follow button, and then choose a paid tier if you want even more access.

I have a lot of shorter works, both novellas and short stories, where it just isn’t feasible to pay a narrator to produce them as audiobooks. Given the technology has reached the point where I can record and produce audiobooks without a full sound studio, I thought I’d try my hand at recording and releasing some on my own.

The first two selections �� audio productions of my short stories Carrion Man and Down Among the Bosnian Dead �� were launched via my Shopify store this morning. They’re just $3.99 each and are delivered as mp3 files as soon as the purchase is complete.

Final edits are underway for the third installment in the HELLstalkers series, Dark Night in Caracas. This installment was co-written with Brandon Steward and it’s packed full of the high octane action you’ve come to expect from this action-adventure series.

The preorder page will be up soon!

On Friday,I’ll be minting the NFT edition of Judgment Day in partnership with Book.io.

As all of the other books have sold out very quickly, I expect this one to do so as well. We’re minting 530 ebooks with 139 unique covers and 48 rare 1:1’s. I handled cover art duties once again, with covers in the following categories: Templar Squad, Boggarts, Demon Streetwalker, Phantoms of Poveglia, Council of Nine Acolytes, The Ritual, Grand Master Deveraux, The Bell Tower, The Forsaken One, and Possessed Gabrielle.

The first time I caught Covid-19 was in April of 2020.

You remember those days, don’t you?

People were getting sick all across the world, but no one knew what to do about it. Here in the United States, President Trump declared a national emergency only a few weeks earlier on March 13th, the response to the pandemic was slow, to put it kindly. Disaster declarations were being made in state after state and deaths from the virus and its related symptoms were steadily increasing all over the country, and reported on daily.

Families could only watch as their loved ones succumbed to this insidious virus. Hospital staff were overwhelmed. Morgues were so full that bodies were being stored in parking lots in refrigerated trucks.

I mean, how could any of us forget?

Vaccines were still eight months away.

Millions died.

I caught Covid the second week of April of that year and was bed-bound for about three weeks. I had significant chest congestion, extreme fatigue, fevers, and I lost my sense of taste, to name a few of my symptoms. Thankfully, despite being diabetic, I never reached the stage where I needed to be hospitalized or put on a ventilator.

After a time, I recovered and got back to work.

Work for me was toiling away in the word mines.

I’d spent the twenty years prior to that point earning a living as a writer of commercial fiction. Specifically, genre fiction. I write urban fantasy, horror, and supernatural thrillers for the most part and my work has been published by major New York publishers like Simon & Schuster, HarperVoyager, Gallery, Tor Books, and Harlequin/Gold Eagle. My work has been translated into six languages (Italian, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, German, and Russian) and has been nominated multiple times for major industry awards, including the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award. I’ve hit the New York Times, USA Today, and Der Spiegel bestseller lists. At the time I caught Covid, I had sixty-some odd books published and had sold more than a million copies of my fiction.

All of that came to a screeching halt when the first of my Long Covid symptoms appeared two months later. One day I woke up and I was plagued by a host of symptoms that seemingly came out of nowhere. Dizziness, vertigo, memory loss, difficulty finding words, difficulty finishing sentences, extreme fatigue (and I mean extreme �� walking up the stairs to the second floor of my home was utterly debilitating), loss of taste, loss of smell, brain fog, confusion, forgetfulness, muscle aches, joint pain, headaches. The list goes on.

The cognitive issues were the worst and if my wife wasn’t experiencing something similar from her own case of Long Covid, I might have thought I was going crazy. Thankfully, we had each other and our mutual support helped us navigate the difficulties ahead.

We didn’t know it then, but those difficulties would continue for the next three years and they still continue, in part, today. (For the record, I also caught Covid a second time in June of 2022, which was much easier than the first time because of vaccines and anti-viral therapy.)

In the past, I’d had no trouble sitting down at the computer and dashing off a few thousand words of fiction per day. Do that for a few months and you’ve got a book. I had done it before, dozens of times.

Long Covid put a stop to that.

Suddenly, the blank page was a near impossibility. The words simply would not come. When it comes to my fiction, I am a meticulous planner and so I knew exactly what had to happen in every single scene of the book that I was working on at the time �� I had it all written down on individual index cards per scene, for heaven’s sake! �� and yet I could not string more than a couple of words together at a time. Full sentences were pretty much beyond me, never mind paragraphs or a complete chapter. A book was a literal impossibility.

I was fifty-three years old with a family to support and I was suddenly staring down a piece of cold, hard truth that for me was utterly horrifying �� I might not write another book ever again.

I had what amounted to a chronic, debilitating illness. There was no way I could go back into the marketplace and work a full-time job for someone else. I quite simply didn’t have the physical stamina to make it through an hour of work, never mind a full eight-hour workday.

Terrified doesn’t do what I was feeling justice.

I have always preached that a writer shouldn’t edit their work while they are writing, because switching back and forth between the right side of your brain (the creative side) and the left (the analytical side) can cripple your creativity. Finish the work, get all the words for the rough draft out onto the page, and then turn on your inner editor to clean it up, has been my motto for years now.

To my surprise and amazement, Long Covid did not impact the analytical side of my mind. I could edit written work just fine; I simply couldn’t create it from scratch. I’d been supplementing my writing income with coaching and freelance editorial work for years at that point, and that became my family’s saving grace. I wasn’t able to produce any new books, but I could help others do so and so I threw myself into doing that with a vengeance. Now don’t get me wrong �� I wasn’t going to get rich any time soon. Editing pays less than writing does, but at least I was bringing in enough to keep us afloat.

In late December of 2021, my Long Covid symptoms went away. I worked feverishly for six weeks and managed to write a novel that I owed to one of my publishers.

A week after I finished, the symptoms returned.

Back to editing I went and there I stayed for two-and-a-half years, unable to write anything of my own but doing everything I could to help my fellow writers�� projects shine. It was gainful employment, for which I am very thankful, but it was also terribly frustrating, and, dare I say, demoralizing that I couldn’t write. I planned multiple projects during that time but didn’t have the cognitive ability to bring them to fruition.

My book sales dwindled month after month and my fans began to drift away without anything new to engage them in this 8-second attention span world we live in now.

Then, in August of this year, I had a stroke.

The clot that caused it was identified in the MRI report as being “age indeterminate.�� It could have been there for years, for all I know. Or it could have been new. Studies are starting to show that Long Covid sufferers often form micro-clots in their bloodstreams. It is my opinion that all those micro-clots got together, decided to have a party by forming one big clot, and caused my stroke. No real way to tell, but that at least makes sense to me, where so much of what I’ve dealt with over the last three plus years does not.

My stroke caused me to lose control of my right leg, gave me terrible headaches, and left the right side of my face swollen for several weeks.

It also gave me back my ability to string words together on the page.

I discovered this by accident one day while still in the hospital for rehab. I was editing a manuscript for a client and was trying to figure out how I would start a given chapter that just wasn’t working right. I wasn’t certain my idea would work so I started typing it out…and to my utter surprise, it worked. Not the idea, that required a few more runs at it to get right, but the writing itself. It was clunky and needed editing, but ALL of my first drafts need that. (I call them vomit drafts for a reason!)

The words flowed, the sentences hung together properly, and I was able to write several hundred words at a go before tiring out.

Since getting out a rehab I’ve been working every day. Earlier this week, I finished the 65th novel of my career. It took me far longer than any other project ever has �� two years and seven months, to be exact �� but I finished it. Edited it. And turned it in to my oh-so-patient publisher.

And, if I do say so myself, it’s pretty good.

It’s been seven weeks since my stroke. I still can’t walk all that well and the headaches haven’t entirely gone away, but whatever Long Covid did to my brain, my stroke seems to have fixed. I can’t explain it. Not even going to try. But in an incredibly odd way, I’m thankful that I’ve had to go through this.

I survived my stroke. I have my writing mojo back. And I’m planning on telling as many stories for as long as I possibly can as a result.

I hope you’ll come along for the ride!

Continuing the release of NFT editions of my Templar Chronicles series from Book.io, next up was Infernal Games. As with A Tear in the Sky, the exclusive cover art for this edition was created by yours truly and I’m proud of the variety I managed to bring to the table with this release.

For this edition, we offered 530 ebooks, with 139 unique covers and 48 1:1 ultra rare covers, and the entire offering sold out in a couple of hours. As usual, copies are now available on the secondary market via the .

WTF is The Taternomicon? The Taternomicon is an anthology of stories from a group of ’s first “living�� authors, pitting their series characters, or personal universes�� against the overpowering essence of potatoes. Monsters, smugglers, Elder Gods, a wizard, and so much more. It is the perfect mashup of horror, fantasy and nonsense.

Paul Jenkins () has been creating, writing, and building franchises for more than 25 years in the film, graphic novel, and video game industries. Paul is an NYT bestseller, has been nominated for two BAFTA Awards, and received the PRISM award for contributions in storytelling. He is the creative force Bitcoin Origins.

Tom Leveen () is an award-winning novelist and Bram Stoker Award finalist with nine novels. He’s written for the comic book series SPAWN and is currently writing fiction in the Battle Tech universe for Catalyst Games labs.

Joseph Eleam and Tim Canada ( and @TCanada88) are to be held responsible for the adventures of The Wizard Tim. They wrote the first fiction story to be published by and it is VERY fitting that Tim reprise his adventures in the first fully original anthology published by .

Joseph Nassise () is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling writer, editor, and writing coach. He’s the author of more than sixty titles, including the Templar Chronicles series, the Great Undead War series, and the Jeremiah Hunt trilogy. His book THE HERETIC was the first title by an NYT bestselling author to be published by and so there was no way he could avoid pitting his character against�� spuds. It was in the stars.

is an award-winning, bestselling author with so many credits in so many genres it’s difficult to keep track. He’s currently writing and designing and writing role-playing games for Lex Ocultum. His novel Silver, which was one of the top bestselling books of 2011, can be minted through . Steve and author David Niall Wilson also collaborated on a weird western novel with everything from the devil’s gunfighter to the first woman Lilith and her crow men as characters that has become something of a cult classic. Now he has turned his acerbic wit to the PUNishment of potatoes��

Jon F. Merz () is a bestelling author with over 60 titles under his belt. And that belt? It’s a fifth- degree black belt in Togakure-ryu Ninjutsu�� In this very book, his vampire character Lawson is FIXXING potatoes. Seriously. You don’t want to miss this�� Jon is also in pre-production of a TV series based on this same series, though I do not believe potatoes will be involved. David Niall Wilson (@CrossroadPress) has written more than forty novels and collections. He’s won the Bram Stoker Award twice, been president of the Horror Writer’s Association hit the USA Today bestseller list and written for Star Trek, Stargate Atlantis, and White Wolf’s World of Darkness. He is the owner of Crossroad Press Publishing and is personally responsible for forcing perfectly talented authors to write about potatoes so that this book could exist.

!!! FLASH SALE !!!
"The Taternomicon is an anthology of stories from a group of ’s first “living�� authors, pitting their series characters, or personal universes�� against the overpowering essence of potatoes. Monsters, smugglers, Elder Gods, a wizard,��

�� Book.io (@book_io)

Those who had the foresight to grab a copy of the NFT editions of The Heretic and A Scream of Angels will be getting a surprise today as I airdrop the NFT edition of A Tear in the Sky absolutely FREE to their Cardano wallets.

As with the first two books, this NFT edition is coming courtesy of Book.io, with 1425 numbered ebooks of various scarcity, with 123 unique covers and 59 1:1 rare covers.