Thomas J. Black

A bit late, due to KDP's apparently new policy on checking for AI generated content, but better late than never.

The latest Nathen Katz Mystery is now available for your reading pleasure! Ebook and paperback versions can be found via the link below:

Father Valentine: A Nathen Katz Mystery (The Nathen Katz Mysteries Book 2) The Nathen Katz Private Investigations firm is hired by the Tannehill family to locate and retrieve their missing daughter, Tiffany. All that is known is that before her disappearance, she got involved with an extremist cult known simply as The Valentine Catholics, led by the enigmatic Father Luc...

It's amazing how often I forget I still have this profile. I really need to update this more often.

4/18/2024

I now have a new thing to add to my bucket list: see Angus McSix live in concert.

ANGUS McSIX - Laser-Shooting Dinosaur - Live at Wacken Openair 2023 Debut Album, ANGUS McSIX and the Sword of Power, out Now!Order here: https://lnk.to/AngusMcSix-ATSOPANGUS McSIX on “Laser-Shooting Dinosaur”: “Angus has ridd...

Sometimes I forget I still have this page.

Here's a new blog post I wrote regarding the music currently playing through my earbuds.

GloryHammer Vs Angus McSix: a Battle of Absurd Power Metal Adventures I don’t remember how I discovered them exactly anymore, but some time around 2013, I discovered the majesty of Gloryhammer. “Tales From the Kingdom of Fife” was an album that saw …

https://tjbauthor.wordpress.com/2024/03/09/gloryhammer-vs-angus-mcsix-a-battle-of-absurd-power-metal-adventures/

GloryHammer Vs Angus McSix: a Battle of Absurd Power Metal Adventures I don’t remember how I discovered them exactly anymore, but some time around 2013, I discovered the majesty of Gloryhammer. “Tales From the Kingdom of Fife” was an album that saw …

Something that's been weighing on my mind lately.

I’m Done Being a Fan At this point in life, I think I’m done with being a fan. It’s no fun anymore, and the more I hear about the fandom at large, I just can’t stand to associate myself with this crow…

It's that time of the year again. Have fun reading about the mixed bag that was my 2023.

2023 in Review 2023 was… A roller coaster. That’s really the best way I can describe things around here. 2022 may have been a trainwreck, but 2023 had enough positives to outweigh the negatives. At le…

You haven't heard much from me lately because of my brand new project:

http://www.howaboutthatthing.com

It's a new website that I write for. Here, I write about whatever thing happens to have my fascination that week, and hopefully, it's as entertaining as I think it is.

So far, the audience is small, but the feedback has been unanimously positive.

New articles every Friday. Who knows what this week's thing will end up being? Regardless, I hope to see y'all there.

Site TitleHow About That Thing?

NaNoWriMo DAY 7: No progress. Largely because I was busy returning phone calls and changing passwords to portals I don't use often enough to warrant remembering the originals in the morning, and watching MST3K with Paul the puggle on my lap in the afternoon.

NaNoWriMo DAY 6

pages: 18
chapters: 5

words: 7,070

You didn't miss anything regarding days 3, 4, and 5, other than horrendous writer's block.

Ladies and gentlemen, the rough draft of Father Valentine: the latest Nathen Katz Mystery, is complete!

Currently, it sits at 76 pages, which is well below the pagecount I usually use to justify print copies. However, a big part of the 2nd draft process is usually adding things to the preexisting text, including whole new chapters that weren't originally there. So there's a good chance it'll reach the 100-page milestone.

Otherwise, for a physical copy, I've given thought to possibly bundling two stories into one book. Hell, Garth Marenghi did it with THREE books, and it worked out for that guy. I guess. I still need to read book 3.

More news as events transpire.

In other news...

St. Louis Gave Me COVID A week ago, my wife, my brother-in-law, and I went to St. Louis for the weekend. We went to see the arch again (largely to give my brother-in-law the chance to see it), we saw a pretty awesome exh…

So yeah, after all the bitching I did through the last month or so, I reactivated my Twitter. Less with the intent to use it, and more because I had useful contacts there, and said contacts have apparently made it clear they have no interest in joining Threads. So, yeah. I might not post there nearly as much as I used to, but I may have been a bit hasty in deleting it. Luckily, I beat the 30-day window for reactivation, and it kept all my stuff. For all the good that did me.

For whatever reason, I found myself feeling a bit nostalgic about an attempt at a movie script I wrote in 2011. Read aall about it here:

https://tjbauthor.wordpress.com/2023/06/04/i-hate-all-of-you-the-movie/

I Hate All of You: The Movie The year was 2011. I was in the trenches of getting “traditionally published”, and seeing nothing but failure. Of course, back then, I was also a bit on the pretentious side, I must c…

HUGE NEWS!!!

Technically, my wife and I have been sitting on this one for a couple weeks, but we wanted to wait for the sonogram before we started announcing things. Now that everything has been made official, I can let the world know that I'm going to be a dad!

The Sentient Derp: the latest voyage of The Starship Spacy McSpaceface is now available for your reading pleasure! Get your copy today via the link below.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BZX157ZK/ref=sr_1_2?keywords=The+Spacy+McSpaceface&s=books&sr=1-2

The Sentient Derp: A Voyage of The Starship Spacy McSpaceface A new planet has been discovered by The Galactic Commonwealth, and the crew of The Starship Spacy McSpaceface are sent to investigate it. It's up to Captain Doug Douglas to explore the new finding, make contact with its native lifeforms, and make sure Executive Officer/Co-Captain LaRita Nolland d...

Coming 3/30/23 to a Kindle near you!

The spellcheckening of The Sentient Derp is done! I'm just waiting on the coverart, which should be here within the week. If all goes as scheduled, expect a release in early April.

The 3rd draft of The Sentient Derp is done! next up, the spellcheckening. Then, one final readthrough. Finally, after a year of on-again off-again progress, it'll be available for your reading pleasure.

Also, somewhere in the middle, I need to get cover art.

Basically what I've currently been working on summarized in one quick blogpost.

https://tjbauthor.wordpress.com/2023/02/13/this-occasion-in-writing-updates-2/

This occasion in Writing Updates Well, I’m officially done with nathen Katz. For now. Not going to lie, I haven’t ruled out the possibility of sequels. In fact, The Jack of Spades wasn’t the villain I had origina…

STATE OF THE PROJECTS:

1. Currently re-rereading The Sentient Derp. Usually, the 3rd draft is basically spellchecking, but since so much of the manuscript changed or got rearranged during the second draft that it's practically not even the same book from the first draft. So I'm giving it another readthrough to see if I like the current version.

2. The Dealmaker: book 4 of The Highway Men is in the works once again. No telling when that'll be finished, but once it's done, I'm thinking of giving The Highway Men series a bit of a break.

3. I'm deeply considering the possibility of shelving The Tragedy of Wormhole Joel. For starters, I have had the worst writer's block on that project. Second... Honestly, I'm just not in the kind of headspace where I can confidently write misery p**n like that anymore.

4. I've given thought to a book 3 in The Helen Tamzarian Papers. I haven't really thought through the more intricate details, but I do have a core concept I've thought about working with.

5. I'm still kicking around some ideas for future Nathen Katz Mysteries. I just haven't decided on a specific one just yet.

6. I had an idea for another new project. I don't have much in the way of plot, but the current working title is My Dad Destroys Planets. More on that if anything comes of it.

The Jack of Spades: A Nathen Katz Mystery: is now available for purchase! You can get it in both ebook and paperback formats via the link below:

https://www.amazon.com/Thomas-J-Black-ebook/dp/B0BSVMHG27/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=LR0WSUE1XDKE&keywords=the+jack+of+spades+the+jack+of+spades+nathan+katz&qid=1674583715&sprefix=the+jack+of+spades+the+jack+of+spades+nathen+katz%2Caps%2C123&sr=8-1

The Jack of Spades: A Nathen Katz Mystery Nathen Katz is many things: a former hacktivist, an energy drink addict, a neurotic mess... But most importantly, he's in charge of The Nathen Katz Private Investigations Firm. He and his partner, Raymond, receive their latest case from the FBI of all places, and it's now up to them to track down...

Coming 1/24/23 to a Kindle near you.

The Jack of Spades is as good as done. I'm just waiting for the cover artist to finish with the cover, and then I can get around to setting up a release date.

In 2021, I took part in NaNoWriMo: the event that challenges an author to complete the rough draft of a 50,000+ manuscript in 30 days. It was not only the first time I actually met the deadline, but it was the first time I managed to finish a NaNoWriMo project with about 8 days to spare.

In 2022, after several proofreading sessions, I titled this work The Jack of Spades: A Nathen Katz Mystery, and attempted to get it published. Not self-published, like all of my other works, but "traditionally published". For-real published, in other words.

This quest lasted 8 months, and I was handed a ridiculous amount of rejection letters by every single agent I contacted. I probably would've maintained this quest up until today, but my father-in-law passed away in late August, and between arranging a funeral, and figuring out the wonder and majesty of probate court, I was in no mood.

My plan overall was to self-publish if I couldn't get this for-real published. This would've been the case around October or so... But then, I had an idea. And in order to make this idea work, I would need to revise a generous portion of the current version of The Jack of Spades.

If this lead on a cover artist works out, I'll probably be picking a release date for The Jack of Spades either before The Sentient Derp, or not too shortly after. I'm still working out the details, but you are probably going to be seeing a lot of ya boy TJB in Q1 of 2023 if all goes according to plan.

Currently investigating some leads into possible affordable cover artists. I'm not sure how this will pan out, but the way things have been presented to me, I may have to rearrange my priorities, and release one of my OTHER projects before The Sentient Derp.

Hope everyone is having a merry christmas.

A lot of people on Twitter were talking about migrating over to something called Hive. I looked at it on Google Play, and wow. 1.6-5? Damn.

I've honestly given thought to closing down this page, and making all my author promotions and publicity exclusive to Twitter. And spare me any rants about how Twitter is censoring your freedoms because my buddies and I attempted to overthrow the government over Dear Leader continuously insisting Joe Biden is a big stupid meany face for refusing to just let me win. My reasoning has nothing to do with that debate one way or the other. I might actually save my thoughts overall for the blog, but know that I've been thinking about this for a while, and I might actually go through with it this time instead of being all passive agressive and butthurt because my last novel or novella didn't sell so well or whatever.

Whatever I decide, I'll be sure to update you all on where you can find me and what you can do to stay up to date.