Time Burrito

Orcs in Portland Coming to Audible!

I’m excited to announce that Orcs in Portland and Other Social Justice Issues is coming to audiobook narrated by the talented Rebecca Woods. If you haven’t had the chance to listen to this series on audiobook, I highly recommend it. Not only had she elevated it to a whole new level, but comedy is also best experienced with a friend.

Next time you’re driving with your pals or want to share some entertainment, pull up your favorite chapter and get others to listen. Trust me, comedy is infectious. Having done a fair number of live sketch comedy shows, I can guarantee you that the hilarity of the show was directly related to the size of the audience. A show with a packed crowd would have them laughing and the same show with a sparse amount of people would tank.

There is a reason why Saturday Night Live and just about every show does it in front of a live audience. With the group of people laughing, it’s easier a home for the audience to laugh. It’s a social phenomenon. As a writer and performer of comedy, I could always tell if an audience enjoyed what I did. Unlike a drama, where a blank stare could mean anything, comedy is easy to judge with laughter.

So set your calendars for March 19^th because that’s when Orcs in Portland will be out on audio. Hopefully, your St. Patty’s day hangovers will all be cured then.

Orcs invading Portland, a warg in the janitor’s closet, black ooze dissolving the gym teacher: a typical day for the students of Beaverton High and their fearless teaching assistant.

Petra thought working for her old high school was the worst thing that could happen to her—until a magical disease infected her son.

Meanwhile, the Barbarians Breakfast Club faces creatures invading their high school and murdering their classmates and principal. Okay, so maybe the latter isn’t that bad.

The phenomena intensify, and soon, it is not just the high school that’s infested with murderous creatures. So, our hapless heroes must seek aid from old allies and enemies.

Find out if Portland can survive in the second Misfits of Carnt novel.

Necromantic rituals, murderous ogres, battle-scarred rangers: not a typical Saturday detention for unsuspecting teaching assistant Petra and her delinquent teen charges.

The Beaverton High School Breakfast Club show up for what they thought would be cleaning the locker room with a toothbrush when the morning goes horribly wrong, and they fall victim to a deadly, dark spell.

Some jerkwad moon mage shoves the consciousness of Petra’s three-year-old into the body of a musclebound barbarian, and she is transformed into a halfling.

The kids get stuck as a cleric, fire mage, and other stalwarts of your typical fantasy gaming party.

Now they must quest through a land of pissed-off warriors, angry giants, a pompous vampire, and a necromancer out to kill Petra and her child.

Despite being in a world where everything threatens to shuffle off her mortal coil, the hardest part is convincing a hulked-out man that the battle axe is not a toy, the undead are not cuddly, and he should use the potty.

Ways to Spice Up the Workday Using Fantasy Tropes

Boring day at the office? Try any of these fun ways to keep it exciting. Except not really because some will get you executed for war crimes!

1. War drums – Why enter tax season with an army of accountants packed into cubicles with only the clatter of keyboards when you could have a man in a loin cloth and Viking helmet beat those drums? Hire another fur clad warrior to whip those pencil pushers when they aren’t doing taxes fast enough. Who says you can’t make money and have fun doing it?

2. The Printer of Never Jamming – What’s better than a mythical magic item like a printer that never jams? A quest to seek out such a glorious artifact! You can have IT create a dungeon of unspeakable technological horrors that one has to beat to find the printer, spoken in prophecy, to never jam. It’s even better if the object has a name and a backstory, “Printladriandor was created by Xeroxian Elf Master Smiths in the Golden Age of Printing, but war broke out between the Materialists and the Digitalists. A curse was cast on all the printers to forever jam except Printladriandor, but it was lost…”

3. Rousing Speeches – Why just use mundane language around the office like, “I’m going to the bank,” or “does anyone want Jimmy John’s for lunch?” Rousing speeches can be used to spice up any old boring workday, and they’re even better if you yell all the lines. “Employees of Alfred Alfred and Alfred Tax Firm here me out. I’m about to embark on a perilous journey from which I may never return. But rest assured that I will deposit our accounts receivables, and there will be payroll this Friday! We may be battered and broken from this tax season. Our fingers may be bleeding and Tony on the war drums got COVID, but they can never kill our spirit! Never take our minds! Never crush our hearts. HIZZZZZAAAAAA! Also, who wants Jimmy John’s for lunch? I was gonna stop there after the bank.”

4. Ritual Magic – Nothing makes team building like robes, occult symbols, and demonic dead languages. Summoning an ancient power to smite your enemies at H&R Block can really liven up those doldrums at work. It can even turn into an experience that will bond people for life when Carol from HR gets possessed by the ancient evil and starts killing everyone. The survivors will never forget that day when they meddled in powers they couldn’t possibly comprehend.

5. Bring an Orc to Work Day – Think of all the fun the office will have when battle lines are drawn between the bloodthirsty Tolkien orcs versus the more humanized and could even be Lawful Good Paladin orcs of DnD. You could have your own siege of Helm’s Deep at the office but with orcs on both sides of the battle line!

6. Epic Coming of Age Quest for the Intern – If you ever find yourself impaled by a trident or skewered by an arrow, use your dying breaths to charge the intern with a quest that will surely end up deciding the fate of the entire world. Bonus if you can start with something innocuous that eventually leads to the fate of the entire world hanging in the balance like, “Find tax code 403b…” Even better if tax code 403b is in the dusty vault of the intern’s father who died long ago in mysterious circumstances.

7. A Hero Forged in Tragedy – Why send strongly worded letters to villages who aren’t paying their taxes when you can burn the entire village and slay everyone in it? Don’t forget to leave one child alive who will grow up to be the greatest tax lawyer the world has ever known.

10 Ways to Alter Time Without Killing Hitler

We all know that killing Hitler creates a worse alternate reality like an even more horrific outcome of World War II or an infinite number of Full House spinoffs that eventually destroy space time. Yet, we all can agree that Hitler was a bad guy, and most people would probably sign up for a madcap sci fi adventure to kill the dude if it was spearheaded by Bratt Pitt and George Clooney (Ocean’s Infinity).

But why risk destroying space time with the Jackalope TV series, or Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen joins the Dino, Ninja, Infinity, Samurai, Jedi, Commando, Power Rangers (I’m currently under the impression that we are living in a Power Ranger spin off destruction of space time apocalypse).

Buy Hitler’s art. We all know he was an art school dropout. What if one person believed in him as an artist? Like Michelle Pfiefer in that movie with the Coolio song. “You asked me once how I was gonna save your life. This is it. This moment. Now let’s put on that art show.”
Take all the German troop transports and replace them with clown cars. People wouldn’t be able to take them very seriously when nazis start spilling out of clown cars.
Give Indiana Jones the hot tip that Hitler’s mustache is an ancient artifact from biblical times (this may require photoshopping Hitler mustaches on paintings like the Last Supper). It will totally be worth it when Indiana tears the mustache off as he yells, “It belongs in a museum!” (This particular time travel theory is predicated on the mustache being the source of the dictator’s power).
Take those targets painted on all the British planes and swap them with the German ones. Whose bright idea was it to paint a target on a plane anyway?
Give Hitler a subscription to the History Channel. After he learns of all the terrible things he did in WWII and going down in history as the most over used time travel plot, maybe instead of invading Poland, he’ll use all of Germany’s resources to find “them ancient aliens.”
Involve Hitler in a wacky romantic Hallmark adventure where he learns the true meaning of Christmas and the value of living in a small town leaving that big city workaholic life behind.
Create reality TV decades earlier, set him up as a judge on American idol, so he can use all his sadistic urges to crush people’s dreams.
Send him on a rocket ship to the moon. Wait… I think that was the plot of a movie…
Provide the German people with sober and stable economic policies that will improve the conditions of everyone and prevent the rise of fascist populists who destroy democracy and resort to autocratic law… wait, sorry that was about America.
Pugs balancing on beach balls in a tutu. Trust me, dictators find this hilarious, and it will distract him while you swap all his speeches with ones written by Greta Thunberg. No one can quite galvanize the people like Greta Thunberg.

The Misfits of Carnt Are Coming to Audio

I’m here to announce that the Misfits of Carnt series got purchased by an audiobook publisher called Podium Audio. That’s big news for me because I’ve never sold the rights to anything before. It’s also big news for you because you’ll get to experience one of my book series in the way it’s meant to be experienced, through audiobook. Not only will it be professionally produced, but the narrator, Rebecca Woods they secured for the book is talented. Not only is she good with accents, but she had fantastic comic timing.

And in case you’re wondering (being that the magic of Carnt is cast with singing), are you going to hear a cover song of Adele when Jack raises the dead? Sadly, no. Even using the lyrics is copyright infringement to the music industry. That’s why all my musical references are all song title and artist only. Anything else walks a line that I cannot cross.

Maybe one day, if the story was ever popular enough, I can go back and afford the licensing agreements to use actual songs in the book. But this is my first audiobook deal, and the first time any sort of publishing company is taking a risk on me, I need to prove to them that I’m worth the investment.

And I think the Misfits of Carnt will be worth their investment because I believe this series (and my work more generally) was meant for audiobook. When I write, I listen to everything before I publish. My final edit, the one that tells me this story is ready for the world, is done through text-to-speech. When I write, I hear the voices of the characters in my head. For me writing is more of an auditory experience.

Rebecca nailed those voices, as if she was listening to my thoughts as I wrote it. I’ve been writing the third book these past few months and am in the editing phase. I find myself going back and hearing her voice in my head. The same thing happened to me with the Wheel of Time audiobooks, I cannot read those books without hearing the narrators in my head. Suffice it to say that her performance is fantastic.

Not only that but comedy is best experienced with a group of friends. I’m serious about this, back in college, I was part of a sketch comedy group, and one of the shows had six people in the audience on opening night. We got a chuckle or two, but it tanked. We all felt bad, like it was the worst production we ever wrote, and a dumpster fire of a play. The next night, it was packed, people were laughing, it was one of our best shows we ever did.

With the Misfits of Carnt being on audio, that means people can get together and listen to the book with their friends. When it comes out on audio, I implore you, get together and do a Misfits of Carnt night. If the thought of meeting for many nights to listen to the whole thing doesn’t sound feasible, take your favorite chapter, gather your friends, and listen.

Laughter is infectious and is best experienced in a group. What may generate a smile while reading can be gut bustingly funny with friends. If you want an experience with your friends, then listen to the book with them. There’s a reason why Monty Python films were wildly successful in the United States when they were first released, the films were a limited release and packed a comedy hungry audience into a theater, and after they all laughed together, they went home and quoted to each other for years to come.

The Misfits of Carnt was written for that communal experience that one could quote later to make each other laugh. Now, it will be available in a form where one can experience that together. There really isn’t any other type of audiobook meant for listening parties. Imagine getting all your friends together for a titillating romance or depressing triple axe murder book. I’m not saying those aren’t fun to put on your queue, I’m just saying that those are books that people read and get together later to talk about.

The Misfits of Carnt are books that you can experience together. Comedy is better together, and at the very least it will be a unique party idea.

You can get the audiobook here.

THE COSMIC COMEDY COLLECTION

Featuring five brand new Sci-Fi Comedy stories from five brilliant authors, The Cosmic Comedy Collection is a book that will have you laughing at everything from shapeshifting aliens, superintelligent AI, to flying cats. It’s weird, it’s wacky, and every single story in the book can’t be found anywhere else.

This book contains talented, hilarious writing from:

A.J. Pagan

Aaron Frale

John Coon

Phillip Carter

Robin Drown

Arranged by Author-Comedian hybrid and bigfoot lookalike Phillip Carter, this book is a wild adventure into comedy that proves that Science Fiction can be a lot more than sulky protagonists and miserable weather. It can be silly, twisted, and downright ridiculous too. And at the same time, it can still be pretty clever.

If you like your Sci-Fi with a comedic edge, you’re in the right place.