J. Manfred Weichsel's Blog, page 7

Last Chance to Get Ebu Gogo on Kindle Unlimited

As many know, Amazon requires a book to be published exclusively on Amazon in order to be enrolled in the Kindle Unlimited program. I have decided to take my books wide, meaning to publish them on multiple platforms, which means that I will be pulling them out of Kindle Unlimited one by one.

Ebu Gogo is leaving Kindle Unlimited on February 11, just one week from today, so if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, this is your last chance to download it for free. If you download the book now, you will still be able to read it for free after February 11, but if you wait until then to download, you will have to pay $3.99 like everybody else.

And seriously, if you are a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you read my blog, and you haven't read Ebu Gogo yet, what are you waiting for? Ebu Gogo is a crazy jungle horror-adventure unlike anything you have ever read!

The above links go direct to Amazon.com. If you are an international shopper and want to go to the Amazon store for your own country, here is a universal book link for Ebu Gogo.

And finally, Tales to Make You Vomit: Kittycat Massacre is almost ready. It is going to be my scariest book by far. I can't wait to share it with all of you later this month.

If you haven't bought Tales to Make You Vomit: She Was Asking for It, it's still only $0.99 on all major stores except for Kobo which wouldn't publish it because it is too extreme, so please get it now! 

TALES TO MAKE YOU VOMIT IS LIVE!!!

I am excited to announce that Tales to Make You Vomit: She Was Asking for It is live on all the major online stores that haven't rejected it, except for one which is still making up its mind.

If you want to read my latest book, I would strongly recommend buying it now before they ban it completely, because this one is extremely controversial. In fact, if you want to make sure that they can never take the book away from you, then I suggest ordering it in paperback form from Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

This is the universal book link, which will allow you to buy the eBook from the retailer of your choice.

Here is the direct link to the eBook in the US Amazon store, as I know that some international shoppers who buy at the American store can't use universal book links. 

I am currently working hard editing Tales to Make You Vomit: Kittycat Massacre. My next blog post will be about a month from now when that book is live, assuming it doesn't get banned everywhere. 

Please read my latest book, please rate and review it, and please let all of your friends know about it. I want to keep on writing Tales to Make You Vomit, because I know that the Librarian has many more books in her library, so I really need this one to be a hit right out of the gate.

Announcing Tales to Make You Vomit

I am so excited for my next book, a short read titled Tales to Make You Vomit: She Was Asking for It.

In the Tales to Make You Vomit series, a ghoul called the Librarian has a library of the most disgusting, revolting books in the world. There is nothing the Librarian loves more than for people to throw up, so she uses various schemes to get people to read her books, so she can make them puke their guts out.  

The first book in the series, She Was Asking for It, deals with the disgusting sex lives of failed Hollywood actors. It is a revolting, nauseating book with no socially redeemable qualities. You're going to love it. 

Tales to Make You Vomit: She Was Asking for It is all written and edited. I hired horror artist Skin Cube to do the cover, and I love what he has come up with so far. It has a real EC comics feel with a modern vibe. 

I am going to release the book the last week of January in order to steer clear of all the holiday craziness and to avoid competing with what is sure to be a heavy news cycle leading up to the presidential inauguration. That's not a political statement. It's just a fact that when people are reading the news, they are not reading books.

The second book in the series, tentatively titled Kittycat Holocaust, which I am currently writing, should come out a month after the first. I hope this series is a hit because I really love writing these little gross-out stories and I want to be able to continue. It is important for writers to write what they really feel, and when I look at the world around me right now, I feel nothing but disgust.  

If you haven't already, be sure to check out my books Ebu Gogo and Five Maidens on the Pentagram! These are the universal book links, so if you are international they will take you to your own country's Amazon store.
And to keep up with everything I am doing, please sign up for my email list HERE.

Five Maidens on the Pentagram is out

 

Just dropping a line here to tell everybody that my new novel Five Maidens on the Pentagram is out. Actually, it came out mid-September. I just never updated my blog. The truth is, I have no passion for online communication and prefer to express myself through my fiction. But I could at least announce when I have a book out on my own blog. There's really no excuse. 

Anyway, you can find Five Maidens on the Pentagram here: https://amazon.com/dp/B08HZ9VBPF

Ebu Gogo is out

My jungle adventure novel Ebu Gogo has been out for three weeks now and is still selling steadily. If you haven't read it yet, you can pick up a copy here: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B088RHFW5Z

New short story

My latest published short story is also my first. In April of 2018 Millhaven Press published the first story I ever got paid for in Millhaven's Tales of Wonder Vol. 1. That magazine issue is now sadly out of print, but the story has just been reprinted over at the Fabula Argentea blog.

The Funniest Story Ever Told is still one of my favorite stories, and it is more relevant today than it was when it was written. Please check it out here: https://fabulaargentea.com/index.php/article/the-funniest-story-ever-told-by-j-manfred-weichsel/

Amazing Facts About Human Evolution

Scientists estimate that anatomically modern humans, or Homo sapiens, have been around for 200,000 to 250,000 years. Scientists also estimate that humanity’s longest lasting extinct relative, Homo erectus, lasted for somewhere between 1.2 and 1.8 million years.
This means that, if you take the most conservative estimate for how long modern humans have been around and the most liberal estimate for how long Homo erectus lasted, Homo erectus lasted nine times as long as modern humans have been around. And even if you do the reverse, and take the most liberal estimate for how long modern humans have been around and the most conservative estimate for how long Homo erectus lasted, Homo erectus still lasted a whole lot longer than when we have been around.
This is significant for two reasons.
The first is that right now, there are a lot of people out there fear-mongering about the impending extinction of mankind. But, if you look at basic statistics and facts regarding species in the genus of Homo, we are a very young species. We are not going away anytime soon.
The second is that in the 1.2 to 1.8 million years that Homo erectus lasted, they never even learned how to create fire. Instead, each tribe of Homo erectus kept a stick with a burning ember at the end, and they used it to start fires when they needed them.
If a Homo erectus tribe’s burning ember went out, they needed to search for a fire to light a stick and create another ember with, and if they couldn’t find a fire the tribe died. There is an amazing French film about cavemen called Quest for Firewhere this is the plot. The entire film is in a caveman language invented for the movie by Anthony Burgess. It’s totally weird. 
But my point is that humanity has accomplished an incredible amount in a very short period of time. In just under a quarter of a million years, we have not only discovered how to create fire, but we have developed complex languages, built civilizations, and invented amazing technologies. At the rate we are going, just imagine what we will have accomplished once we have been around for 1.2 to 1.8 million years.
My novel Ebu Gogo is coming out sometime in late April or early May. It has human evolution and genetic anthropology at its core, although it is much less positive and uplifting than this blog post. If you want to be notified when Ebu Gogo comes out and receive other author updates from me, please join my MAILING LIST. 

Introducing Corona-Chan

I hope that everybody is keeping healthy and safe during the Coronavirus crisis. When the lockdowns first started an author I know named David V. Stewart put out a call for submissions for a free anthology of stories to help people who might be under lockdown and not able to afford entertainment. I submitted a few previously published short stories as did a lot of wonderful authors, many of whom I know personally. It took Dave two days to put the anthology together and get it price matched for free on Amazon. The result is Corona-Chan: Spreading theLove: Infectious Tales of Fantasy and Suspense Designed to Spread the Pulpdemic.
This is a truly amazing anthology with stories by some of the best authors working today, including yours truly. And, it is absolutely free for the duration of this crisis. Once the crisis is over, the anthology will be gone forever, so please pick up your copy today.
My two stories that appear in Corona-Chan were both originally published in Cirsova Magazine in summer 2018 and spring 2019. Cirsova is the most culturally important magazine of short fiction being published today, and out of all of the publications my stories have appeared in, this is the one that I am the most proud to be a part of. I have a brand new South Seas island adventure story called The Scent of the Yaka Aka Yo that is scheduled to appear in the May 2020 issue of Cirsova, so please keep an eye out for it!
When you read my two stories in the Corona-Chan anthology, I want you to notice something about them, that although they were both originally published in the same magazine less than a year apart, they are both completely different from one another. In fact, they read like they could be written by two different authors. This is by design.
There are a lot of authors out there who only write one thing, and who turn out the same book over, and over, and over again. This is not who I am or who I aspire to be. I like to read a lot of different kinds of books, and I like to write a lot of different kinds of books, too. I like to play around when I write, to experiment, and to try out new things. I try to surprise myself when I write, and I hope my writing surprises my readers as well. There is a lot of joy, I think, in being surprised.
This is why I decided to follow up my last book, Expedition to Eden, which is set in the Biblical Garden of Eden, with Ebu Gogo, a novel that has human evolution and genetic anthropology at its core. When Ebu Gogo comes out in late April or early May and you read it, I think you'll notice that just as Going Native and Warrior Soul are completely different from one another, that Ebu Gogo is a completely different book from Expedition to Eden. It is funnier, weirder, and absolutely horrifying. There is a lot of action in Ebu Gogo, but it is less the swashbucking kind of action found in Expedition to Eden, and more the visceral and heart-pounding kind. 
As of this writing, I have finished the manuscript for Ebu Gogo, sent it to my beta readers, and have hired an amazing cover artist with an extremely NSFW gallery.
If you want to keep up to date on what I am doing, including being notified when Ebu Gogo and the next issue of Cirsova are out, please sign up for my MAILING LIST. 


Thanks for reading, and I wish you all the best of luck during the lockdown.

What is an Ebu Gogo?

For the last couple of months I have been talking excitedly to everybody on twitter and on my email list about a new novel I am writing called Ebu Gogo. Now that the writing phase is complete and I have moved on to editing, I thought I would take a moment to tell everybody about my book and to explain what an ebu gogo is.
One of my favorite quotes about my writing comes from a review by Tara Grimravn of my now out of print short story collection Going Native and other stories. Grimravn writes about me: “He's something akin to a chaos magician, who uses whatever is necessary to get the job done and cast his spell, easily switching between belief systems and moral principles as needed to tell the story he wants to tell.”  
This is a very astute observation and something about my work that I think goes over a lot of people’s heads. I don’t necessarily write stories from the perspective of my own beliefs, rather I pick a belief system that I want to explore in my work and then run with it to see where it leads me. This is why I am able to follow up my last book, Expedition to Eden, which is set in the biblical Garden of Eden, with Ebu Gogo, a novel that has human evolution and genetic anthropology at its core.
Ebu Gogo is a jungle adventure novel about cryptozoologists in an Indonesian rainforest searching for a species in the genus of Homo that is rumored to exist there. During the course of their adventures, they solve a number of mysteries regarding the origins of Homo sapiens and about our extinct relatives.
In 2004 archeologists on the Indonesian island of Flores dug up a fossil of a three and a half foot tall adult in the genus of Homo. The archeologists continued to dig in the area and found many more fossils, all adult, and all between three and four feet in height. They realized that they had discovered a new extinct species in the genus of Homo that was, as hard as it is to believe, a dwarf species. They named this new species Homo floresiensis after the island where it was discovered.
Scientists have hypothesized that hundreds of thousands years ago, long before human beings existed, some Homo erectus traveled across the sea from Asia and wound up on what is now called the island of Flores in what is now called Indonesia.
Through an evolutionary process called island dwarfism, these Homo erectus gradually reduced in size until eventually they became an entirely new species. Island dwarfism is when a species arrives on an island and, due to environmental factors such as a limited food supply, evolves to become very small. The phenomenon of island dwarfism has been observed on islands all over the world.  
It’s pretty weird that archeologists discovered an extinct species of dwarfs, but what is even weirder is that natives on the island of Flores tell stories of little people who live there, who they call the Ebu Gogo.
Ebu gogo, in the language spoken by the natives of Flores, means “people who will eat anything.” In the stories the natives tell, the ebu gogo used to sneak into native villages from the jungle and steal their crops. So, the natives devised a plan to exterminate them.
According to native folklore, the ebu gogo did not wear clothes, so sometime in the mid-19thcentury the natives gave the ebu gogo clothes as a gift that were made of a flammable material. The ebu gogo were very excited to receive clothes and eagerly put them on and went back to their cave.
Then, the natives went to the cave where the ebu gogo lived and set them all on fire. But, the natives say that the ebu gogo didn’t completely die out, but that some escaped and went deeper into the jungle where they still live to this day in deep underground caves.
This is real science and actual folklore, and it has caused some to speculate that the Homo floresiensis did not die out, but that the species is the same as the one the natives call ebu gogo, and that this ancient species in the genus of Homo lives to this day deep within the jungle on the island of Flores. This is the basis for my upcoming jungle adventure novel Ebu Gogo.
Scientists have reconstructed what the ebu gogo looked like, and you can see an NSFW model of a female HERE and an SFW bust HERE. 
In my novel, I have modeled the ebu gogo off of the two scientific models above. For me, the distinguishing facial features are the lack of a chin, the sloping forehead, and the broad nose.
I have also added a number of features to their appearance that come from native folklore. For example, in native folklore the ebu gogo are covered in fur. In my novel, I have made their fur orange like an orangutan’s. Also, in native folklore the females have enormous breasts that hang below their waists and swing back and forth like pendulums when they walk. Their breasts hang so low that when the females run, they have to throw their breasts over their shoulders so that they don’t get in the way.
I have also invented a number of details of my own about the ebu gogo. In my book, it is the females who are the warriors, while the males are too immature and stupid to do much of anything. Also, in my book the females carry wooden stone tipped spears, which they throw overhand like javelins.
Of course the real distinguishing feature of the ebu gogo, and the reason for their fame, is their short stature, and I have made my ebu gogo very, very short.
So that is what an ebu gogo is. As of this writing I have finished the manuscript, hired an amazing cover artist with a very NSFW gallery on DeviantArt, and am currently in the editing phase. If you would like to get news from me, including being notified when Ebu Gogo is released, please join my newsletter HERE.