Black Friday special: Duck Man Walking Free

This Friday, Nov. 28, is your opportunity to use the immortal "Duck Man Walking" as your gateway into the Myke Phoenix universe - Free! Free! Free!

How do you trust a guy after he’s tried to kill you a few times? That’s the dilemma facing Myke Phoenix, superhero extraordinaire, in “Duck Man Walking.”

One of Myke Phoenix’s most impossible foes, the half-man-half-duck Quincy Quackenbos, is released from prison. Rumor has it that after years of trying he cracked the code and has developed the formula that can kill Myke Phoenix.

Are the rumors true? Or is Quackenbos telling the truth when he claims he’s turned his back on his criminal past? Find the answers mere moments from now in “Duck Man Walking,” just a click away.

BONUS: Two stories for the price of one. This special double-sized ebook also contains the chronicle of the very first time these two adversaries met, “The Strange Ultimatum of Quincy Quackenbos.” There’s no better time to introduce yourself to the Adventures of Myke Phoenix!

This is a pivotal episode in the wild dodecology Myke Phoenix: Year of the Dinosaur. Ask your Kindle app if Myke Phoenix is right for you: Claim your Black Friday freebie of "Duck Man Walking."

Free entry into Myke Phoenix universe

There are now several ways to sample the world of Myke Phoenix without risking your hard-earned Federal Reserve Notes. You have always, for example, been able to sample Our Best Hope: The Origin of Myke Phoenix by joining my mailing list, which also entitles you to regular updates from Astor City chock full of valuable clues to upcoming adventures. You can do that here.

But now you can download the first three breathless stories in the Year of the Dinosaur dodecology via Kobo, for free. Yeppers, hard to believe, but now you can have The Song of the Serial Kisser, Firespiders and Invasion of the Body Borrowers on your Nook or iPad or Aura or other .epub reader for the breathtaking price of zero dollars. You risk the chance you will have so much fun you'll invest your hard-earned pennies on other Myke Phoenix material, but that's all. Here's a link to all of the available Myke Phoenix material on Kobo.

(At some point Amazon's vaunted price-matching system will kick in and Kindle app users will have the same opportunity, but as of this writing this is an offer exclusive to Kobo.)

You can also follow these first three stories via Wattpad, if you don't want to download the stories.

Of course, my fondest hope is that you'll be motivated to spend the $4.99 to download Myke Phoenix: Year of the Dinosaur for Kindle or Kobo, or perhaps even to buy the massive 572-page paperback from Lulu or (coming very soon) Amazon/CreateSpace. But first you might want to see if it piques your fancy, and that's the point of this permanent-free offer. Go check out one or more of the first three stories in this 12-story arc, on me. I hope you like them! Thanx.

Launch day - Myke Phoenix: Year of the Dinosaur

For nearly two decades Myke Phoenix has protected the people of Astor City from the forces of evil in the world, battling crime bosses and costumed villains and strange creatures who want to rule the universe. But lately it’s been quiet in the old town – almost … TOO quiet!

“Lately it’s just been everyday crooks and the occasional mobster,” Paul Phillips (Myke’s everyday alter ego) says one night. “It just seems like we don’t need Myke Phoenix anymore.”

But then —

A bizarre lunatic starts kissing the women of Astor City at random. A fire-breathing spider the size of an elephant wreaks havoc downtown. Aliens land in a hill outside town and start borrowing people’s bodies. An old familiar villain returns and holds Paul’s wife, Dana, hostage on a dark and stormy night. Another old familiar villain, half man half duck Quincy Quackenbos, goes straight and is kidnapped after being released from prison.

Suddenly Myke Phoenix was working overtime. Could it be the work of his old nemesis, the evil talking dinosaur, Deinonychus?

In a story that evolves over the course of 12 episodes – mainly because your humble narrator liked the sound of the word “dodecology” – the protector of Astor City fights the fight of his life with a growing cadre of strange and wonderful new friends. By the time the story rumbles to its jarring conclusion, the lives of Paul and Dana Phillips have been changed forever – nor will Astor City and their world ever be the same again.

This massive volume collects the 12-part series that rebooted the story first told in “The Adventures of Myke Phoenix,” with a special bonus story (“A Myke Phoenix Christmas”), author’s notes and other fun content.

If you like superhero stories that don’t take themselves too seriously, if you like your adventures told with a dash of whimsy, you’ve come to the right place. Join the Myke Phoenix revolution with this baker’s dozen power pack.

Click here to download it for Kindle apps. Here is one version of the paperback. Wait a few days for other options.

3 things to know about the next Myke Phoenix adventure

OK, four – it's got an awesome cover, as people who subscribe to the Astor City Beacon already know.

1. This is the beginning of a saga within a saga that leads into the next Myke Phoenix saga.

2. The original Firespiders had two giant spiders that breathe fire. This one has several more, as you read in the prologue excerpt the other day.

3. The most important plot twist does not involve the firespiders. Well, it does, but not directly. Well, maybe directly. (Why does the cover feature a woman's silhouette?)

I believe you'll find this one will be worth the extra month's wait.

The accidental book cover

Willow and Dejah were wrestling, as dogs and puppies are wont to do, and I grabbed the camera to see if I could get them in action. For the most part, the session was a failure. They wouldn’t turn their faces toward me, and just as I clicked the photo they would move. Wrestling dogs don’t pause to pose.

When I looked at the dismal results of the session, however, one shot popped out at me – the puppy, caught in mid-snarl in a blur. It was not long after she’d had emergency surgery, and she still was wearing the cone that protected her stitches. Through the blur you could see her eyes, wide with the frustration of wanting to get to Willow through the cone.

I knew I would be writing a story about a man who makes the transition from one life to the next and becomes a puppy trying to solve his own murder. And an ebook cover was born.

Sometimes artwork is the result of painstaking planning and careful thought. Sometimes you get lucky.


The Puppy Cried ‘Murder’ is available now at an ebook distributor near you.

Release party: The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur

Today at last, at Amazon and Kobo, you can snag a tale decades in the making – the legendary Myke Phoenix adventure, The Puzzle of the Talking Dinosaur.

It was a cast of a dinosaur foot that resembled the impossible cast made from a footprint of the invisible monster in the classic science fiction film Forbidden Planet. But this cast was on display in a “Dinosaurs!” exhibit at the Neville Public Museum in Green Bay, sometime in the late 1980s-early 1990s.

At the time I was tinkering with the idea of creating a superhero series, and every hero needs an arch-nemesis. Here was an ancient creature built for speed and craftiness, armed with a deadly-looking talon on its feet so formidable that the beast was given the name Deinonychus – the terrible claw.

Read more here.

Duck Man Walking

Is a 10,000-word adventure a long short story or a novella?

I really don't know for sure, but whatever you'd like to call it, it's here: For Kindle and for other electronic reading devices.

As I said on Facebook this morning, if you buy only one ebook about a superhero and his half-man-half-duck nemesis who may have developed a secret formula to kill the superhero, let it be this one.

The market has spoken

The idea behind charging $1.29 for my marvelous Myke Phoenix single adventures was to differentiate these tales from the 99-cent crowd. There are several thousand boatloads of 99-cent ebooks out there. In my humble opinion you’ll definitely get an extra 30 cents more excitement out of a Myke Phoenix yarn than from the average 99-cent investment.

Well, the market has spoken. From the results of my experiment, the going rate for a 10,000-word adventure story apparently is 99 cents, the lowest price the builders of the ebook infrastructure will allow. And that does make sense in hindsight; no matter how amazing the quality I try to inject into these tales, the quantity is still a long short story or a very short novella.

Thusly, effective immediately that’s the price of a single Myke Phoenix story, except of course for Our Best Hope: The Origin of Myke Phoenix, which is available for free when you subscribe to the occasional Myke newsletter Astor City Beacon. As for the 99-cents price point, think of it as $1.29 worth of entertainment for 23 percent off!

So here is The Song of the Serial Kisser, the story of an odd maniac who can’t stop sneaking up on women and planting an unwanted warm wet one on their lips – and what happens when a vigilante crowd decides to teach him a lesson. Now a mere 99 cents at the Amazon Kindle Store and Kobo (for Nook, iPad, etc.).

And here is Firespiders, the saga of the fire-spitting giant spiders that interrupt the calm of Astor City as only fire-spitting giant spiders can do. An astonishingly low 99 cents at Amazon and Kobo.

In this corner is Invasion of the Body Borrowers, the eerie tale of zombification and visitors from beyond the stars that has fans of 1950s science fiction screaming for more. Comic books aren’t 10 cents anymore like they were back then, but you can find this thriller at Amazon and Kobo for less than a buck.

And of course there’s the latest installment, Night of the Superstorm. It was supposed to be a three-hour river cruise, but it turned into a tense night in an abandoned mansion haunted not by ghosts but by – well, you’ll see. Again, just 99 cents at Amazon or Kobo.

Coming up March 3 is Duck Man Walking. One of Myke Phoenix’s most impossible foes, the half-man-half-duck Quincy Quackenbos, is released from prison. Rumor has it that after years of trying he cracked the code and has developed the formula that can kill Myke Phoenix. Are the rumors true? You’ll find out March 3 for the impossible price of 99 cents.

The folks who have discovered Myke Phoenix tell me they’re having as much fun reading the stories as I have writing them. Want to join that crowd? You look like someone who enjoys smiling and being entertained. Just click on any of the links above to get started.

Released: Night of the Superstorm

The storm of the century strikes Astor City, just after Dana Dunsmore embarks on a three-hour riverboat cruise; with her are the boat’s skipper, the first mate, a millionaire and his wife, a stunning blonde who looks like a movie star, and a professor.

“Oh my stars,” Dana said to herself. “I’m Mary Ann.”

The latest Myke Phoenix adventure is here.

Read more.

Catch up with Myke Phoenix

The first Monday of the month is when a new ebook adventure of Myke Phoenix arrives, and this month is no exception. Night of the Superstorm will be available at Amazon and Kobo Monday morning.

It's Gilligan's Island meets Key Largo, only instead of Edward G. Robinson waiting upstairs for the skipper and friends, it's ... well, find out for yourself.

In these final hours before the big reveal, you have time to catch up to this little saga. I've designed Myke Phoenix to be a quick read – at 10,000 words, these are basically graphic novels without the graphics, pulp fiction without the pulp (because, of course, you need paper to have pulp – or, actually, vice versa – and these are ebooks).

So here's your chance to grab the new adventures of Myke Phoenix:

• The Song of the Serial Kisser for Kindle or other ereaders.
• Firespiders for Kindle or others.
• Invasion of the Body Borrowers for Kindle or others.
• Then, come Monday, there'll be links to Night of the Superstorm for Kindle or others – actually, you can pre-order for non-Kindle today and save a step Monday.

I am spending the weekend finishing up on the fifth chapter in this current series – which means the new adventures will officially have one more full-length story than the originals – Duck Man Walking, which features the return of the legendary villain Quincy Quackenbos, as you've never seen him before. But that's a tale to tell on March 3; this is February.

You've been waiting for the perfect time to check out the proverbial Myke Phoenix revolution. This is a pretty good time right here!

Pre-order 'Night of the Superstorm'

Night of the Superstorm, a k a The New Adventures of Myke Phoenix #4, is now available for pre-order at Kobo.com for those who read with iPad, Nook, or any other non-Kindle device. Amazon does not yet allow pre-orders for indie authors, so Kindlers will have to wait.

The story will be released Feb. 3 in exchange for your hard-earned $1.29. Here's the blurb for it:

The storm of the century strikes Astor City, just after Dana Dunsmore embarks on a three-hour riverboat cruise; with her are the boat's skipper, the first mate, a millionaire and his wife, a stunning blonde who looks like a movie star, and a professor.

"Oh my stars," Dana said to herself. "I'm Mary Ann."

The storm wrecks the ship on Big Island, where the refugees find their way into a deserted mansion – and there a criminal genius is searching for hidden treasure with his gang of hoodlums. The refugees' only hope – though they little suspect it – lies in the fact that Dana is married to the man whose alter ego is Myke Phoenix, protector of Astor City and force for good in the universe.

This is the fourth episode in the New Adventures of Myke Phoenix, the monthly series  that brings you pulp fiction without the pulp, graphic novels without the graphics, and the inevitable triumph of whimsy over the bad guys.

Pre-order Night of the Superstorm here.

Kick the procrastination demon in the butt once and for all

When last we met, I mentioned that this is the year that my little superpowered friend Myke Phoenix will be making a monthly appearance to thrill and entertain you. I also mentioned that has been my goal for the past two Januarys (Januaries?), and the best I was able to produce was two stories in January and February 2013. Fun stories, but only two.

Why do I feel more confident the third time’s a charm? It’s over there in the right column, where it says “Myke Phoenix Adventures for Kindle.” You’ll find links to the four ebooks that are already available, along with a list of the next six in the series, with specific release dates the first Monday of each month.

Last year I based my goal-making on a concept summed up by Julia Cameron, who said, “Secrecy is the first law of magic.” I’ve found over the years that telling other people the story, before I’ve written it down, expends some of the creative energy that otherwise would be spent wordsmithing. I thought for once I would keep that energy packed inside until needed to unleash a story, then reveal my plan by unveiling a magical story every month until people began to understand, “Oh! This is a monthly series! How cool.”

The problem there? Well, March 2013 came and went without a new Myke Phoenix story, and then April, and May, etc., and no one noticed because no one knew the stories were supposed to be coming. This year (and from now on) I am setting a specific deadline for each story and sharing it with anyone who cares to know. It’s worked grand so far: Next month’s tale is drafted and going through final tweaks, the March and April adventures are plotted and being written, and I know generally where the stories go for the next six months after that. I’ll even let you know that I plan to compile these 12 stories into a print and ebook collection in plenty of time for Christmas 2014 gift-giving. There. Now the pressure’s on me to deliver, which is the same as last year, but now I’ve raised your expectations and I’m accountable to you, too.

As if to affirm that this is a better approach than conjuring magic in secrecy, my old friend Wally Conger has just released an amazingly insightful little package called Operation Hulk-SMASH. It’s a short and to-the-point primer subtitled “Harness Your Green Rage Monster To Build Rapid Business Success.” Wally doesn’t waste a word in encouraging his reader to stop diddling around with those dreams and just get started turning them into reality. I’m pleased to say that building accountability into the system is part of his formula – but I’ll let you find out for yourself. Click here to grab Operation Hulk-SMASH and start tapping its wisdom within moments.

Wally has a knack for getting straight to the point and driving it home. As I prepare to build the Myke Phoenix series, I’ve recently read a number of great books about branding, including Platform, No Brand is An Island, and Write. Publish. Repeat. All of them feature great suggestions that expand on concepts I’d already seen in Wally’s short and to-the-point primer called Breakneck Branding.

I heartily recommend Wally’s new effort for anyone who feels stuck in the water and wants to give their project a swift kick in the right direction. And know that as you keep up with Myke in coming months, the protector of Astor City owes a debt to Operation Hulk-SMASH for helping to keep its author motivated.

Prologue to ‘Night of the Superstorm’

Night of the Superstorm is due for release Feb. 3, 2014, and it is on schedule, Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. Here is how it all starts in this story I’m calling “Gilligan’s Island meets Key Largo.”

Read more.

Released: Invasion of the Body Borrowers

No one really thinks of themselves as evil, not even beings from another planet who turn ordinary humans into zombies.

Read all about the new Myke Phoenix adventure here.

Or if you are already sold, simply click on the cover or here to buy the book for your Kindle for an incredibly reasonable $1.29.

Progress report

I have three creative projects currently in process. The first is this blog; I aim to communicate with the outside world from this mysterious location between my ears, with a goal of sending a message daily at least weekdays.

Then there's the continuing adventures of Myke Phoenix, stalwart protector of Astor City. Conceived nearly a quarter-century ago, Myke finally was revealed to the world in 2008. I began churning out new adventures early this year for Kindle, two new stories within three weeks. The next batch will probably come out in a flurry, too.

Finally, there's Uncle Warren's Attic, the podcast. Been 80 of 'em. I don't want to produce an 81st without plans for more beyond that. Working on that. No, really.

On the side there's the day job, and the animals, and the yard work. I can't use them as an excuse for any lack of visible progress because last summer, when we moved twice and built a house, I managed to write a novel (also available for Kindle, by the by).

A friend of mine left a simple motivating comment not too long ago during a dry spell: "Writers write." I call myself a writer. So I'm writing. By the way, if you call yourself a writer, you should be writing, too. Today and every day. It's easy to call yourself a writer. But what have you written?

The one in which I reveal I needed my books most

I know how you feel. That's the whole point.

Dirty little secret?

I wrote Refuse to be Afraid because I was tired of being stuck because of fear. Same old, same old, and I knew it was because I was afraid – afraid of stepping forward, afraid of rejection, afraid of consequences, afraid of this goofy economy, afraid of losing freedom – and I needed a pep talk.

In the midst of writing out those fears and trying to cope with them, I found – just like a cliff I fell off as a child – that the things I feared weren't nearly as formidable as they seemed. When you control your fear instead of letting the fear control you – when you refuse to be afraid – the rewards can be enormous, especially in terms of peace of mind.

I wrote A Scream of Consciousness because I was tired of living aimlessly, watching brainless TV shows that I immediately forgot – or surfing the Internet. I told myself I was educating myself, but I rarely took action about what I learned.

An exuberant aging folkie named Barry McGuire and a 350-year-old book by a Jesuit priest taught me concepts about living in the moment that I had to share.

Funny thing – when I put my little self-pep talks out to the world to share, I discovered I wasn't the only one who needed to hear those messages. When a friend tells me how Refuse to be Afraid served as a reminder to stay calm during tough times, I realize we all face moments when fear threatens to immobilize us, and we all let our consciousness drift.

What's keeping you from going forward? Maybe the first thing you need to do is write yourself a pep talk. Don't worry about building an audience – or even if anyone will ever read it – just write what you need to hear. You may find – as I did – that you're not alone.

(And if you want to buy my books as examples of what I'm talking about, I certainly won't object.)

Uncle Warren's Cyber Monday Blowout

Here's your chance to have the books, the music and other odds and ends for Cyber Monday.