The Dire Book Cave

Ric Croxton of The Book Cave Podcast interviewed me the other day, at length, about the Dire Planet trilogy and pumped me for information about upcoming Dire Planet novels. You can listen the interview here.

Dire Planet Compendium #7: The Hilt has Turned

Many Martian tribes play a game called mupleg in which opponents stand across from a sword on a spindle, which is attached to a variety of ropes wound around that spindle. The opponents pull at the ropes attempting to turn the hilt in their direction and halt the spinning so that they can leap forward and grab the sword. Unlike the Muvari tribe, who plays with a dull edged or a wooden sword, the galbran play the game with a real sword and the spinning edge can sever finger and limb if a player is unfortunate. A player is considered to have the advantage if the hilt is turned in his direction and from thus springs the phrase 'the hilt has turned'.

Copyright 2010 by Joel Jenkins. All Rights Reserved.

Pick up the Dire Planet books at Amazon or PulpWork Press.

Dillon and the Pulp Fiction Review

Scoot on over to the Pulp Fiction Review site and read Mr. Ron Fortier's Review of Derrick Ferguson's Dillon and the Legend of the Golden Bell from Pulpwork Press. Mr. Fortier seems to like it.

Dark Worlds Five

Here's the cover of Dark Worlds #5 with another awesome M.D. Jackson cover. This will be coming at you this summer chock full o' cool stories.

One of those cool stories will be Against the Gathering Darkness, recounting the story where famed Native American gunslinger Lone Crow meets up with Wyatt Earp in Alaska while searching for a missing archeologist doing field work for Miskatonic University.

I've had one previous Lone Crow story published in How the West was Weird. If you haven't picked up a copy of that you can grab one here.

Dire News for the Dire Planet

Sometimes when a writer gets caught in the muddle and muck of battling through the writing process strange things happen. In this case the strange thing results in both good news and bad news for fans of the Dire Planet tales.

I was hoping that the latest (fourth in the series) Dire Planet, which I tentatively titled Lost Tribes of the Dire Planet, would see print by the end of this year. However, it will not see print this year, but has been rescheduled for 2011. Also, the name of the novel has been retitled to Strange Gods of the Dire Planet.

The good news is that hot on the heels of Strange Gods of the Dire Planet will be a fifth Dire Planet novel entitled Lost Tribes of the Dire Planet. This is projected for release in 2012.

How far along are these projects, you might ask? I've finished the first draft of Strange Gods of the Dire Planet and am about 20,000 words (approximately 1/5 of the way) into Lost Tribes of the Dire Planet.

Beyond 2012 I'm not making any promises or predictions. However, I can see the possibility of a sixth (and maybe final) Dire Planet novel: Immortals of the Dire Planet.

Devil Take the Kindle

My hard-boiled horror thriller, Devil Take the Hindmost, is now available on Kindle for less than a buck! If you've got a Kindle pick up a digital copy now. Heck, at that price even if you don't have a Kindle you may want to pick up a copy.

The Secret Life of Love and Bullets

By now, perhaps, you've heard about the latest PulpWork Press release, Love and Bullets. Maybe you haven't heard about its secret origins. Before it became a full length prose novel it was originally developed as a comic book entitled Code Name: Black Widow, and I've prevailed upon author Percival Constantine to share some of that artwork with me and also a copy of that original comic book script, which you can download here.