ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Weston Ochse is a former intelligence officer and special operations soldier who has engaged enemy combatants, terrorists, narco smugglers, and human traffickers. His personal war stories include performing humanitarian operations over Bangladesh, being deployed to Afghanistan, and a near miss being cannibalized in Papua New Guinea. His fiction and non-fiction has been praised by USA Today, The Atlantic, The New York Post, The Financial Times of London, and Publishers Weekly. The American Library Association labeled him one of the Major Horror Authors of the 21st Century. His work has also won the Bram Stoker Award, been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and won multiple New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards. A writer of more than 26 books in multiple genres, his military supernatural series SEAL Team 666 has been optioned to be a movie starring Dwayne Johnson. His military sci fi series, which starts with Grunt Life, has been praised for its PTSD-positive depiction of soldiers at peace and at war. Weston likes to be called a chaotic good paladin and challenges anyone to disagree. After all, no one can really stand a goody two-shoes lawful good character. They can be so annoying. It's so much more fun to be chaotic, even when you're striving to save the world. You can argue with him about this and other things online at Living Dangerously or on Facebook at Badasswriter. All content of this blog is copywrited by Weston Ochse.

Thursday, March 15, 2012

Best in the Series - Science Fiction Review

Don Damassa's review of Blood Ocean can be found here.

"There's a fair amount of quasi-martial arts violence and a moderately puzzling mystery, but the real merit of this particular novel is the fine writing and the evocation of the protagonist's subculture. The best in this series that I've read so far."

To put that in perspective, this is the eleventh book set in the Afterblight Universe. Here's what I said in my last primer where I described trying to be a part of it early on:

As promised, here is your third and final primer for Blood Ocean. If you haven't read the first one, which discusses the Pali Boys, you can find it here. And if you haven't read the second one, which discusses character and setting, you can find that here

So why did I write this? I mean besides the fact that I'm getting paid a fine sum of English pounds with worldwide distribution of a beautiful-looking paperback book. I can't include that in my reasons, because I never knew any of that when I first pitched Abaddon when they first started out way back when.

I don't know where I was at the time, but I do remember that I heard about a new publishing house called Abaddon Books and asked for their bible about Afterblight. I sent a quick pitch, and I mean quick, and I got back an email from Jon Oliver, then Editor-in-Chief of Abaddon, now Editor-in-Chief of both Abaddon and Solaris, that he was intrigued about the idea and would I send him a full pitch, which has a sample chapter as well as a chapter by chapter outline. So I found myself working on this for about a month. In fact, I finished the pitch while I was in a hotel room in Alexandria, Virginia, working on my laptop while the Steelers beat the Colts in the Superbowl.

My pitch at that time was about Native Americans in the Southwest, who must team up with an L.A. gang of biker samurai to fight off the Radiant Dawn - the white folks who want their blood. It was a damn good pitch. I sooo wanted to write that book. But the problem was that every Tom, Dick and English Harry submitted a pitch about Native Americans too.

Needless to say they didn't need me.

So I did what every other writer would do in my shoes... I sulked and wrote something else.

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