Ho ho… oh hell!Is that sleigh bells ringing in your ears or a few rounds from an M60?
You wanted the jolly fat man to bring Yuletide joy, but the season has gifted you with a heart breaker and a life taker — Badass Santa.
Grab your eggnog and camouflage candy canes, strap on your bulletproof holiday stockings, and prepare for thrills and kills.
From blood-stained rebellion at the north pole to a black ops raid on a distant planet, these eighteen action-packed tales will show you Saint Nick as you’ve never seen him before.
This anthology includes my Phoebe the Tank story “Operation Sleigh Ride” where Pheobe, Santa Claus and a hacker take on human traffickers during a Christmas Eve truce.
So, I’ve been working to get my books into indie book stores around Iowa. If you want to pick up signed copies of my books, they’re available at these great places!
I lived in Burlington, Iowa as a kid, so I’m very pleased that the Burlington By The Book was willing to host my books. It’s definitely cool to have my books available in a place I lived, and where I first saw Star Wars (I watched A New Hope at the drive thru theater).
This was my first stop on my birthday book store run back in October. The folks at 2 Sisters are amazing, and were happy to work with an indie author. They also work with other local authors and have a whole store beyond just books. If you’re looking for a great book and other gifts, they’ve got what you’re looking for!
Beaverdale Books is a great book shop in the Beaverdale area of Des Moines. Along with a wide variety of books in every category, they support a lot of indie authors. So if you’re in the Des Moines area, swing through and check them out!
I stopped in here on my daughter’s recommendation and it was worth the time. The Captain is a great guy and full of both fun stories and knowledge. With a collection of indie authors and collectable books, you’ll find something at Captain’s, whether it’s the book you’ve long sought or a fun story!
If you can get to Indianola, please take a bit of time. It’s a neat town near Des Moines. Pageturner is a great book store. They have a wide variety of books in both fiction and non-fiction, with a healthy science fiction section and they support a lot of us in the indie author community. So, if you get a chance, check them out!
Pella Books is a great place I found shortly after we moved to Pella. They’re a used book store, and they’ve been very supportive of indie authors! Since they’re an indie book store, it’s been a great relationship! Check it out, and wander about a little, since the building was originally a church and has a historic marker. After you buy some books, wander over to a local bakery and get some Dutch Letters or other baked goods, and maybe stop for a meal at one of the down town restaurants!
If you can’t make it to these fine establishments and are still looking for my books, slip over to my bookshelf page where you can link to the stories directly, or email me at Keith@keithhedger.com if you want a signed copy directly from me!
Like many writers, I get asked how I keep coming up with ideas. The truth is that I have a lot of ideas. I don’t have enough time to write all the stories those ideas are connected with, but I do have a lot of ideas for stories. And sometimes, some event or comment or action I see gives me an idea for a story.
What I do with this ideas is make a note of them. So, it gets jotted down in a notebook, or texted to myself, or added to a page in my Notion pages. In some way, shape or manner, I document that idea.
If the idea is good, it will be there when I have time to develop it. If it’s great, I build a lot more base for it, so I can act on it when there’s time and not a dozen other deadlines and projects going. Some, sadly, go to the great note page in the sky.
One other interesting idea happens with a few of those idea, though. A rare few show up when I’m working on a story, and they fit. Not usually in the scene I’m writing, but somewhere in the story. So, I work it in.
That’s where Pheobe the Tank came from. Someone else had made a comment about sentient tank stories and I was working on Sandblaster at the time. Since there were already tanks in the story, it was fun to go back through and add a sentient tank to this cyberpunk mercenary story.
From there, I was invited to submit to the Worldbreaker anthology. Which lead to Amarillo by Fire Fight, where Phoebe the Tank catfishing an infantry soldier while in a rolling tank fight.
So, there you have it. Most of the writers I know don’t have a lack of ideas. We really don’t. We have capacity to work on one or two stories at a time, and not nearly enough hours in a day to write everything we want to, but we generally don’t seem to lack ideas.
Thanks for reading through this. I hope you enjoyed a glimpse into my process!
Keith Hedger's Home for Fiction 