Ralph L. Angelo Jr.'s Blog, page 4

Hey great news! 'Stranger Things' The absolute best...

Hey great news! 'Stranger Things'  The absolute best TV series to appear on Netflix, or probably anywhere, has finally been renewed for season two! It was a no brainer and I think they were just making us all nervous on purpose by not greenlighting season two the day after season one hit, but hey they finally did and I for one can't wait. More awesomeness-They gave us all the titles of every episode in advance. How cool is that?

Here's the link to all the info about the new season-Things are getting Strange again~!

PS- The second Hyperforce book has JUST been released and is available at http://tinyurl.com/hyperforce2

Hyperforce II-Of Madmen and Megalomaniacs is available now!

My new release-Hyperforce II-Of Madmen and Megalomaniacs' is now available !



What is Hyperforce II about you might ask? It's about the superteam Hyperforce's continuing adventures as they seek to discover the whereabouts of one of their first enemies, 'Mindmaster' who has been purposely dogging the team for months. he's been causing havoc for an unknown purpose. But that purpose now becomes clear.

This is not the only threat facing them though, as a subsea adventure looms when a brand new subsea powerhouse appears and draws them into an adventure beneath the waves. It's an adventure that will have far reaching ramifications for Hyperforce.

After this, the team will meet their deadliest and most terrible foe to date. One who will issue a bloodcurdling battle cry of 'Kneel and know Dyspair!' before raining awful destruction upon them all! Will Hyperforce be able to survive the horrible attacks of this new world conqueror?

Also, who is this mysterious newcomer who hides in the shadows, watching, waiting and assessing the team? Is he friend or foe? Is he an ally looking to aid them in their struggles? Or some new Knightmare seeking to give them yet another hurdle to overcome?

And finally, is their a traitor amongst them,? A serpent in their midst? Has one of their number really been sent to spy upon them and destroy them from within?

Drama, Danger, Action, Adventure and lots more await within the pages of Hyperforce II!

Join Captain Power, Solaron, Dragonfly, Silver Shadow, Creature, and Stryker as they strive against all odds to win the day.

Featuring a  stunning new cover by the inimitable Gustav Barta.



Find out the answers to all of these questions and more within the pages of the new novel  'Hyperforce II-Of Madmen and Megalomaniacs'  available at http://tinyurl.com/hyperforce2

Nuff Said...

Soon...

Gustav Barta

This is the FB page of my cover artist, Gustav Barta. I think he's fantastic!  Check out his page and also his website!

https://www.facebook.com/GustavBarta/

Website : http://gustavbarta.weebly.com/ 

To see what he's done for me, go to my website and check out any of my covers on my novels that are published through Cosmic Comet Publishing. 


As always all of my own books are available at http://RLAngeloJr.com or http://tinyurl.com/ralphsamazon2




Subscribe to my blog! Click on the link at the top of the right hand column to get my daily rants delivered to your inbox.

The Earth Station DCU Episode 2 - DC TV Shows

The Earth Station DCU Episode 2 - DC TV Shows   A podcast I was involved in discussing the DCU TV shows, check it out! It's great fun!

Did I mention...

That both 'Redemption of the Sorcerer' and 'The Cagliostro Chronicles' are on sale for only 0.99 cents in kindle format?

Get your copy of 'Redemption' here by clicking on the image below

    Get your copy of  'The Cagliostro Chronicles' by clicking below   

Ralph's Rants-Bits and Pieces...

So a quick note today. Just wanted you to all know that I have completed my next novel-the writing stage of it, anyway. Now it's got to go off to editing. The cover is done as well and the outstanding Gustav Barta has That should see publication within the next month or so.

Also another book I had a hand in, 'Sinbad the New Voyages-Volume IV' has made its way to becoming an Audiobook on Audible. It's always a great feeling to hear my words spoken by a terrific voice actor, and Ron and Rob over at Airship 27 productions have hit another homerun out of the park. Jeff Fournier did a fantastic job on the voice characterizations.

And lastly, my website is now all new and improved.   Check it out at http://RLAngeloJr.com

Have a great day everyone, and I'll talk to you soon!

Roger and out
-Ralph

What's uppppp???

Hey friends, Roman's etc. How y'all doin'? This is Ralph checking in. Yes, I know it's been a while but I just wanted to stop by and say  Heee-llll-ooo!!!

Okay now that I've got that out of the way, I'm still working on the way behind Hyperforce sequel, but I am making headway. I talked to my cover artist yesterday and he's starting work on a new cover. Now I just have to finish the last chapter and get the book out to an editor. One thing I can guarantee you is that it will have been worth the wait!

Once this is finished I'll be jumping right into the next Cagliostro Chronicle.

So good things are on the horizon from me!

In the meantime you can catch up on the first Hyperforce novel here at http://tinyurl.com/hyperforce where its available in  kindle, paperback and audio versions! All cool stuff.

Also if you need to catch up on the first three Cagliostro Chronicles you can right here at http://tinyurl.com/cagchron

Okay cool! Thanks for the interest in my page and for following me as well as for reading my books. If you have any comments or questions feel free  to leave them in the comments box at the bottom, rock on True Believers!

Marilyn Weimer Interview on Ralph's Rants

Marilyn Weimer Interview


Hello and welcome to Ralph’s Rants. Today I’ll be interviewing author Marilyn Weimer. Hello Marilyn, how are you today?
Ralph, thank you for inviting me for this wonderful opportunity.


Marilyn, what can you tell us about yourself?
I began writing when I went back to college in Southern Calif. And found in Creative writing that I could write and enjoyed writing.


What genre do your books fall into?
Contemporary fiction (tinted with a little fantasy).


Do you have a writing schedule or plan? Do you write the same time every day? Or just when the urge hits you?
I am a morning person and more creative then, but usually I edit in the afternoon. Since I’m an artist I balance between the two. I teach watercolor classes and I set writing aside to prepare for the class.


What era do your stories take place in?
Present. The theme of MariKay’s Rainbow is the protagonist wants to build a WWII memorial museum in memory of his grandfather.


How many books do you have out there?
Two and one in editing process. I have worked on the third for over twenty years.


What is the next release from you about?
The novel takes place in Perris, CA. Two 15thcentury Spanish brothers searching for gold are led by a Meha maiden to a California gold mine. Present day young woman, an amateur archeologists, discovers human bones and a gold medallion on her family homestead. She intends to use her discovery and stop her father from constructing on her grandfather’s land.

When will we see it out there?
This fall or spring 2017.


What other books or stories do you have planned for release this year?
None this year. I have worked on an outline for a possible sequel to the first two stories because I’ve been asked by more than one person.


Who are your inspirations as a writer?
Sonja Massy “Far and Away” and Dorothea Frank Benton “Lowcountry Summer”


What author or novel made you decide to become a writer yourself?
Ms. Massy. I met her and enjoyed her book and movie and discovered how personable she is and was inspired by her.


Marilyn, feel free to leave links to your web page or your blog or direct links to your books or whatever you would like here.
Amazon.com MariKay’s Rainbow and Rawnie’s Mirage   http://marilynweimer.weebly.com


Once gain I thank you for joining us here on Ralph’s Rants; it’s been a pleasure chatting with you. Good luck with all of your books and writing endeavors. Have a great day!


As always all of my own books are available at http://RLAngeloJr.com or http://tinyurl.com/ralphsamazon




Subscribe to my blog! Click on the link at the top of the right hand column to get my daily rants delivered to your inbox.

C.E Martin Interview

Hello everyone and welcome to another edition of ‘Ralph’s Rants does interviews’Today our guest is author C.E. Martin. Hello C.E. and welcome to Ralph’s Rants, how are you doing today?
All in all, pretty good. My only real complaint is that I'm not a full-time author--that would be pretty awesome. C.E., why don’t you tell us a little about yourself?
I'm a USAF veteran, having served from 1990-1994 as a law enforcement specialist. After the service, I returned home and eventually worked as a criminal investigator for the local prosecutor. I stuck with that for a little over seventeen years, before stress took its toll and the writing bug had thoroughly chomped on me. I retired to pursue writing, but wasn't able to get the numbers I needed to stay even semi-retired, so I took a job working at my best friend's business. It's a nice, stress free environment with a small team, but I wish on a daily basis I could return to writing full-time from home.Aside from all that career stuff, I'm married, with two daughters (16 and 10), and spend what little free time I have X-boxing or watching cheesy B Movies.Are you considered an adventure fiction or new pulp author?
That's an interesting question, and varies from person to person, I'd guess. It seems to me most of the New Pulpers think Pulp equals a setting in the 1930s and lots of Fedoras. I'm not seeing much in the way of Conan, Tarzan or John Carter-type stories in New Pulp. To me, (New) Pulp is a style, not a setting. It's the predecessor of the modern Thriller, with page-turning, over-the-top action. Which is exactly what I write--with emphasis on over-the-top. So, I'd say I'm definitely more New Pulp than Adventure, but readers may have their opinion. What have you written in the past?
So far, in my four years of self-publishing, I've written 11 novels and 12 short stories all set in the same supersoldiers vs the supernatural universe. I also wrote a Middle-grade Kid Pulp story, so my youngest could read something I wrote--it's kind of a mashup of "Toy Story" and "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", with an ex-Action Figure-turned-detective solving the murder of a famous fashion doll. Before self-publishing I had written a few novels and several short stories, most of which are in a box or filing cabinet somewhere in my basement. I also tried my hand at screenplays in 2011--I am a huge movie fan. One was a B Movie-esque story of a mailman who discovers he's descended from a skinwalker and a bezerker when zombies invade his neighborhood—a werewolf vs undead story prime for Syfy's saturday nights. One of these days, I'll convert it to novella format and self-publish it. My second screenplay attempt, Mythical, was a carefully engineered Young Adult story of two teens stumbling into the middle of a secret war between humanity and the forces of darkness. I enjoyed it so much, I novelized it and self-pubbed it on Kindle, beginning my current Stone Soldiers supernatural military thriller series. I have to say that screenplays are so much more satisfying to write, because not having to do the narrative lets you churn them out superfast. I wish I could do more, but I have to devote what little writing time I have toward projects I can actually sell as ebooks. What do you consider your greatest piece, (story, book, novel, etc.) out of anything you have written up until now?
Tough call, but I'll go with one of my short stories from last year, Infernal Machine. It's from my Shadow Detachment series of shorts that are prequels to my main novel series, Stone Soldiers. Basically, it's the story of a supernatural computer, built by demonic beings, that turns against its masters to help humanity. I had wanted to do an A.I. character in my main series for some time, but didn't want to go with the cliche'd super computer built by some secret government lab. As such, it really limited how the A.I. appeared in the series. Finally, I was able to come up with a unique spin on its origins. Plus, I really liked doing the reverse of the standard A.I. tropes: Max, the name the A.I. gives itself, chooses to serve humanity and has a definite Christian philosphy--made easy by the fact that it was built by demons, so it knows Heaven and Hell are real. I like how this turns so many previous A.I. stories on their head--the intelligent computer is good rather than evil... HAL 9000, Skynet, Colossus, Tron, Matrix, WOPR, etc. etc. I was also delighted to have worked faith (the machine's) into an A.I. story--a recurring theme in my series--without being preachy.
Http://amzn.com/B018PK0PISWho has served as an inspiration to you as a writer?
Well, that's a list really. Will Murray was my initial inspiration to write, way back in the 1980s when he was ghosting for Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir on The Destroyer  series. Murphy, Sapir and Lester Dent further inspired me, once I realized the sheer amount of writing they had done on their series. Alas, the slush piles swallowed most of my submissions to publishers back then, and I only sporadically wrote. When I discovered Kindle Direct Publishing in 2012, the urge to write flared up again and I began writing right around the Dinosaurs of traditional publishing and put my work out for whomever was interested.The late Warren Murphy was an excellent role models for authors to not only keep plugging away, but in appreciating your customers--the readers. I was fortunate enough to meet Mr. Murphy before he passed away last year, and his dedication to writing--right up to the very end--is further inspiration to never quit and keep doing what you love. Even if it is just on the weekends.C.E., what do you seek to imbue a story with when writing it? Is there anything in particular you strive to ad to a story to make it a signature C.E. Martin tale?
Action. I hate dialogue, but grudgingly admit it is needed to move a story along. Unlike TV, where talking is literally cheap, I don't fill scenes with people standing around in Picardian fashion, talking about what they are going to do. I have action, action, action, with characters talking during the thick of it, or as foreshadowing just before a mission. I also want my action to be over the top. My evil villains are really, really evil--there's no doubt about they're evil. Conversely, the heroes are super heroic and super human. I know the trend these days is to have ordinary people fend off the bad guy, but I like a clash of titans. Must be all the comic books I read and all the Godzilla movies I watched as a kid. I also portray the military positively. There's nowhere near enough of that in fiction anymore. I get tired of the military portrayed as heavies, or bumbling idiots in so many films. Being the military doesn't make my characters heroes, it's because they are heroes they're in the military to begin with. When I started in 2012, there weren't very many other military supernatural works out there. Now there are quite a few. I could be envious, but I'm glad my fellow veteran/authors are getting the message out there.What is your upcoming release schedule looking like? What is the next story from you we can look forward to?
I'm sure it will once again turn out to be more grandiose than what I'll actually have the time to do... Just like every year...I'm finishing up the last short story in the Shadow Detachment prequel series for a while. The series served a twofold purpose for me: it gave me new content to release every month, and it gave me a bunch of short fiction to convert to audio for this summer. I've already begun recording myself reading the stories, and will probably start releasing them in April or May. Before then, I've got a new series I want to release, Shadow Raiders, again in the same universe, where the supersoldiers travel to alternate planes of reality to take the fight right to evil's doorstep, so to speak. Unlike Shadow Detachment, this series, unless it becomes wildly successful at the get go, will only have one or two releases a year. I've also got to wrap up the twelve-book arc of Stone Soldiers that I started in 2012. One book to go, then I'll probably scale back to novellas if I continue that series. Again, it's based on numbers, with readers determining if it continues. If it doesn't, I have plenty of other stuff I'd love to write, ranging from more "real-world" stories all the way to a Christian Post-Apocalyptic Space Opera I've wanted to do for about ten years now. But to answer the original question, my current work-in-progress is a Cold War supernatural adventure entitled "Red Magik"...What is it about?
Red Magik is set in 1981, at the height of the Cold War. The U.S. has just learned that the Soviets have Medusa's head and are working on unlocking the secret to her ability to turn people to stone. Anyone having read my Stone Soldiers series knows that Medusa's head is part of the process of making living stone soldiers, so this is where I finally show how the head was obtained. It's a tale of infiltration and theft--a paranormal heist behind the iron Curtain, that takes the lead character from Stone Soldiers out of his comfort zone as a commando and forces him to work alongside a psychic spy. There's a surprise villain thrown in for the climax, and the whole thing is my homage to Cold War action movies such as Clint Eastwood's Firefox movie. Hopefully this will be done and out before the end of march 2016. Who are the protagonist(s)?
Colonel Mark Kenslir, the Spellbreaker, as readers of the Shadow Detachment series have come to know him, is the lead character. A man carrying three curses that grant him immortality, super human strength and the ability to come back from the dead--all while dampening his natural ability to negate magical energies. This time around, Kenslir must team up with a female telepath who's quietly been reading minds in Moscow, gathering intelligence without her targets even knowing it. Unlike Kenslir, this telepath has been shielded from the full scope of the war against the forces of darkness and magic in the world, so she's in for an awakening of sorts when the duo raid a distant Siberian prison camp to steal Medusa's head. What makes them extraordinary?
Well... Kenslir is superhumanly strong, resists most injury and is unaffected by magical or psychic abilities. He's resisted the effects of a werewolf bite, a basilisk's glare and the curse of the Fountain of Youth, thanks to his own inherent abilities as a seventh son of a seventh son. Remember--I like over-the-top, and this character is part parody of the convoluted origins of 1970s comic book characters. Immortal, with decades of combat experience under his belt, he's the old-school Pulp-type character--like Doc Savage with a machinegun and supernatural powers. Leia Flannigan is a Boston native working under deep cover in Moscow. And she's a telepath, able to read minds while appearing innocuous and ordinary. When she learns about Medusa's head, her confidence is shaken and she's plunged into a mystical adventure she never would have guessed was possible. Psychic spy meets supernatural soldier, as mind-reader and immortal must work together to keep the Cold War at a stalemate and deprive the Soviets of a mythical weapon of immense power. Or at least that's the plan... it's still a work in progress. While I do outline, things often come up as I write that greatly change my plans... Feel free to leave us all links to your books or website or blog etc. whatever you wish.People can learn more about the Stone Soldiers and Shadow Detachment at www.ShadowDetachment.com.  If anyone is interested in the latest news for either series, or the upcoming spinoff series Shadow Raiders, check out the blog at StoneSoldiersbooks.blogspot.comIf anyone would like to skip all that and just check out the books themselves, visit my Amazon Author page at: http://amzn.com/B0089W99VCI rarely post at Twitter, @Troglodad. I also lurk on Facebook, facebook.com/CEMartin.Author and when the urge hits me, I ramble or rant about all sorts of stuff on my Author blog, www.Troglodad.info




As always all of my own books are available at http://RLAngeloJr.com or http://tinyurl.com/ralphsamazon2




Subscribe to my blog! Click on the link at the top of the right hand column to get my daily rants delivered to your inbox.