Doug Goodman's Blog, page 10
March 31, 2020
Get Your Mind Outdoors with Zombie Dog 2 – Free This Week!
How has your week been going? As we settle into this new, temporary normal that is the current state of things, I hope you are safe and sane while staying at home (and if you are one of the essential employees, thank you for your extra work and sacrifice). To help with stay-at-home, Dead Dog is free this week only (Monday to Friday). This is the second book in the Zombie Dog series. Cadaver Dog was free last week.
I like Dead Dog for these quarantimes we live in because this book lets you stay indoors while getting your mind outdoors. Half the book takes place in Big Bend National Park. If you haven’t visited, Big Bend is wide open and spacious and starkly beautiful. It’s one of my favorite National Parks.
Angie and Murder are in Big Bend helping the park locate a lost backpacker who may or may not have been taken by zombies. Dead Dog is my “western” zombie book. There’s plenty of horses and a cowboy or two. And at least one zombie-hunting dog…
I hope you have a good week, stay safe, and stay positive.
March 24, 2020
Cadaver Dog Free This Week
The first book in the Zombie Dog series, Cadaver Dog, is available for free this week on Amazon. If you can’t get outside this week due to the coronavirus, take a trip to the Sangre de Cristo mountains in Colorado and help Angie and her zombie-hunting dog, Murder.
As the first book in the series, this one is all about starting that relationship between handler and working dog, and how you use that relationship to benefit society. How do you train a dog to track zombies? Well, as the book blurb says, it’s just like training any other working dog. It takes patience, persistence, and consistency…and not to be afraid of zombies.
I hope you take a chance on Murder. He is an exceptional dog, though a little weird, but he’s great at what he does. Cadaver Dog is free March 23 – March 27.
March 17, 2020
Free Books in March and April
I’m not going to recap all the details. There’s a virus derailing our day-to-day lives. In my family, my wife and kids are home, and I will be teleworking for the foreseeable future. One of the questions is what to do at home with the extra free time. Personally, I also ask “what can I do to help?”
I have this idea for something I can do to help.
From now through mid-April, each week I am going to make a different book free. I’ve never done something like this before. I usually make a book available for download over a weekend or on a particular day, like my mother’s birthday. But these are interesting times we live in, and interesting times require some interesting books! So I hope over the next couple of weeks you download the MOBI from Amazon, kick back, and enjoy something that isn’t about plagues and toilet paper-hoarding.
I’m jump-starting this “March Madness” with Terrible Lizard (the humorous story of a police officer who lives in a world where dinosaurs exist, so instead of working with a K9, he works alongside his Velociraptor). Terrible Lizard will be free this week (Monday to Friday only because of Amazon rules). Then each week after, I will follow with the first three books in the Zombie Dog series.
Book/Schedule for Free Release:
Terrible Lizard, March 16 to 20
Cadaver Dog (Zombie Dog Series, Book 1), March 23 to 27
Dead Dog (Zombie Dog Series, Book 2), March 30 to April 3
Zombie Dog (Zombie Dog Series, Book 3), April 6 to April 10
As always, 20% of my proceeds go back to charities (because even with free book giveaways, there is some profit), so if you are inclined to purchase one of the books, please do. Usually I send my donations to Dinosaur Ridge in Colorado, Bay Area Pet Adoptions here in Houston, or the Native American Heritage Association, but in the spirit of the moment, I might send the donation to the Houston Food Bank or to something like Doctors Without Borders. I haven’t thought a lot about which one because this is all happening so quickly, but I will put a note out in the future once I’ve made that decision.
March 8, 2020
Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs Released
So, I got the good news that Severed Press has released Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs. It is available on Amazon as a Kindle. The paperback usually follows in a week or two.
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Mountain Climbing was a story I envisioned almost a year ago. Like most everybody else, I’ve been intrigued with people who have the ability to climb massive mountain peaks around the world. It seems daunting to me, so the idea of climbing thousands of feet with only modest equipment and your skills to keep you up really inspired me. I wanted to jump into writing it immediately, but I was plowing through Ghost Dog at the time. Ghost Dog took most of 2019 to write (and it’s still not out yet), so I had to push off Mountain Climbing. I think that was a good thing.
First, it was good because I discovered Free Solo and The Dawn Wall on streaming. I’m sure you’ve watched these documentaries about Alex Honnold, Tommy Caldwell, and Kevin Jorgeson. I was intrigued with the “characters” (not to dehumanize them) in these documentaries, and I like a good character. I think there’s a little of them in the people ascending my mountain.
At the same time, I wanted to bite down on a topic. One of the things that really spoke to me about Backpacking With Dinosaurs was that it dealt with racism while also being a horror story about people being chased by dinosaurs. I wanted to write a similar story with real-world gravitas. In my part of Texas, the Santa Fe shooting happened only a couple years ago. So I decided to write about two mountain climbers who were memorializing their fallen friends and students who were involved in a mass shooting. My goal was to focus on the survivors and their struggles after the shooting. I did not want to glamorize the shooting. I don’t think you could. Shootings are tragic; the nadir of our society.
But for me, the story still had to be about the climb. It had to be about these twins, Travis and Brady, and everything they were going through. All the thoughts they had while climbing New Profanity Peak, but also all the obstacles they faced. Readers of Backpacking (which, by the way, you don’t have to read – these are standalone books about different sets of people and their encounters in Dinosaur Falls) will recognize some of the names of different landmarks, like New Profanity and the Seven Graves River. I wanted to concentrate on the wall, though. How do you climb a mountain that is off-limits to climbers, so there’s no data about it? What do you do when, inevitably, some of your research ends up wrong? (There’s only so much preparation you can do.) And of course, what kinds of dinosaurs live in the mountains?
That last question is especially tricky because fossils aren’t found in areas where mountains existed in the time that we associate with dinosaurs. Fossils are unearthed in sedimentary rock, not igneous rock. Imagine a dinosaur dying on a mountain. That mountain shifts and breaks and ruptures, as mountains do in geologic timescales. The bones are fractured and torn apart. Sometimes they are smashed together. So there is little evidence of what dinosaurs would actually live up in the mountains. This is where I had to take some creative control and work with the dinosaurs I had and figure out which ones are more suitable for mountain life. For that reason, I think this is the most colorful species pallet I will write for the “With Dinosaurs” books.
There really aren’t much of T. Rexes or Velociraptors, though there are some. But there is the Majungasaurus, a creature that looked like a smaller version of a T. Rex, but with a very different kind of bite. And there are lots of flying dinosaurs, like the Dimorphodons (aka, the “Wolves of the Sky.”). And I thought this adventure would be a perfect one to include the Brachiosaurus and its gargantuan heights. How did it interact with mountains, and how would it react to the mountain climbers?
I think Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs is a special book. It builds on concepts built in Backpacking, and like that book, it looks at humanity’s dark depths through the lens of creatures that haven’t existed for millennia. And yet, dinosaurs may have returned to our planet, but there have always been worse creatures.
Enjoy!
Mountain Climbing With Dinosaurs is out on Amazon.
