Hello, friends!

Here’s a story from when my youngest brother was really little. My mother walked into the living room and found him in the process of making the place look like a tornado passed through. She put her hands on her hips and said, “E, who made this mess?”

Not one to fess up to his crimes, even in hopeless circumstances, E said, “Boo did it!”

“Nice try, E,” my mother responded. “Boo is at school. E, who made this mess?”

“T. T did it, for sure,” E said.

“Wrong again. Also at school. Who made this mess?”

“… Z did it!”

“0 for 3 kid. All at school, and you’re out of brothers. Now…” Mom folded her arms. “Who made this mess?”

Starting to feel some panic, E looked around for just a moment. Then, he narrowed his eyes and looked around suspiciously before grumbling, “Monsters…”

And thus the story became legend in my family for years and years.

Anyway, happy Dia de las Madres! (Read that in a growly voice, it gets funnier, I swear.) Well, a late Mother’s Day. If you’re a mom, you’re awesome. If you’re not a mom… well, I’m sure you’re probably still groovy at least.

Bloggyness Review: Monster Hunter International

About time I reviewed a book again.

Monster Hunter International was written by Larry Correia and published by Baen in 2009. It’s set in an alternate-dimension Earth where monsters are real—werewolves, vampires, creatures unique to this book’s universe, and more. Also, elves are backwoods hicks with mullets. It’s great. Professional monster hunters (of the government and private variety) gear up with heavy weaponry to kill the nastiest of these creatures and keep humanity safe from harm (and from generally even being aware that these things exist), while maintaining some sort of peace with the ones that make livable neighbors..

The book starts with the main character, Owen, nearly getting eaten by a werewolf, after which he’s formally invited to join Monster Hunter International (or MHI), a private monster hunting organization. Owen then starts getting visions from a ghost that appears to live in his head, which warns him about a doomsday timer that’s ticking down. Crap starts hitting the fan in a pretty steady stream at that point.

This book was a breath of fresh air. After a string of books that I found disappointing for one reason for another, or that (despite finding extremely well done) I had to walk away from for content reasons, it was amazing to find myself reading under the covers late into the night, trying not to wake my wife and knowing I would regret the lack of sleep when I went to work the next day, but I just had to know how Owen was going to get himself out of the next mess he found himself in. The book was well-paced, and I found myself tearing through chapter after chapter. I fully plan on reading the rest of this series, and checking out everything else Larry Correia has written—once I finish my current backlog.

Now, Monster Hunter International isn’t perfect. I found the romance between the male and female leads a little convenient at points—and, honestly, how easily she was swayed over to him makes her commitment questionable—and the extreme danger that the main characters regularly find themselves in occasionally made me wonder how any character made it out of many situations alive, but those were extremely forgettable issues when faced with my overall enjoyment.

And here’s the best part: Monster Hunter International is 100% free. That’s right. In ebook form, anyway. Baen has a pretty good library of 100% free ebooks that you can download without having to give them any information at all. Just grab it and run, and side-load it to your e-reader at some point. Even if you don’t end up liking all the books you grab, including Monster Hunter International… They’re free! And if you do like it, there’s six or seven more books in the main series, not counting a ton of short stories for additional flavor, and Correia’s other book series. Those you have to pay for, though.

I’m not getting paid for this message. This review isn’t an advertisement. I really enjoyed this book, so I recommend reading it—and it’s free. Telling you to go read a book that costs money (or wait time at the library) is one thing, but a book you can download and keep forever? That low effort and investment? Just do it. I downloaded 10 or 20 books from the Baen free library, and that’s what I’ll be digging through for the next while, and then I’ll dive deeply into the content of the authors whose free books really grabbed me. (The caveat being I need to finish House of Leaves before I can start on my free list.)

(Also, despite Baen referring to these books as “library” books, they aren’t connected to a library in any way. You don’t have to make an account anywhere. You keep ’em forever once downloaded.)

I’ve known about the Baen free books for quite some time but, to be honest, I assumed that free meant low quality. One book doesn’t make a pattern, but Monster Hunter International gives me every reason to believe I’ll enjoy most of the rest of the books I’ve downloaded, so now I’m kicking myself for not making the jump earlier. And if it is true that these free books are on the lower end of what Baen publishes, well, that bodes extremely well for my future happiness when I start buying books.

Writing Updates

Hazel Halfwhisker is at about 94,000 words. And that number won’t go up for some time.

I’m still going to be writing and striving to push this story forward in the coming days, but I think I’ve misunderstood my pattern for writing draft one of this story, which I now know to be thus: write an act (more or less) and have no idea what I’m doing in the short term (despite my medium- and long-term goals, which are well-defined); take a lot of notes as I do so; revise that act while taking advantage of experience and hindsight (or rewrite the act, in the case of the last 20,000 or so words I wrote…); then rinse and repeat with the next act until draft one is finished. Then look at the notes I haven’t acted on yet and do further revisions/rewriting. Polish, polish… Perfection! Publish.

‘Tis the fate of the plotting-discovery writer. I at least know what I’m writing toward and have an idea of the things I want to hit along the way, but I’m still stumbling blindly forward on a moment-to-moment basis.

It’s going to be worth it, though. I think this story will really knock people’s socks off.

Send-Off

HAPPY (late) DIA DE LAS MADRES! Go give your mom a hug, if you can, and tell her she’s amazing. And feel free to let me know if you know anything about Monster Hunter International, and if so what your thoughts were. Have a great week!