Wednesday, October 30, 2013

AVAILABLE NOW ~ FIGHT CARD: SWAMP WALLOPER!

AVAILABLE NOW ~ FIGHT CARD: SWAMP WALLOPER!

PAUL BISHOP (WRITING AS JACK TUNNEY)

THE LONG ANTICIPATED SEQUEL TO THE ORIGINAL FIGHT CARD NOVEL – FIGHT CARD: FELONY FISTS ...

PATRICK FELONY FLYNN IS BACK ... AND THIS TIME HE’S IN WAY OVER HIS HEAD ... 

New Orleans, 1956 ... When the battered body of boxer Marcus de Trod turns up on the edge of the Bayou Sauvage outside New Orleans with the words ‘Get Felony Flynn LAPD’ tattooed in his armpits, Hat Squad detective, Patrick Felony Flynn, knows he is in for the fight of his life.

Far from the hardboiled streets of Los Angeles, Flynn and his partner, Tombstone Jones, are on a two-fisted rampage to find a killer.  But hiding in the swamp, deep inside the walls of the Bayou Sauvage Federal Penitentiary, the killer patiently waits to crush his prey with razor sharp teeth and deadly jaws.

After taking down gangster Mickey Cohen’s championship prospect Solomon Kane in Felony Fists, Patrick Flynn triumphantly returns in Swamp Walloper, facing an even more dangerous foe – a killer fueled by voodoo and revenge ...

 
SWAMP BANNER 2

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

MEET FRONT PAGE PALOOKA'S NICK MORETTI!

FPP
MEET FRONT PAGE PALOOKA’S NICK MORETTI!

The latest review for Fight Card: Front Page Palooka ... "A solid tale of corruption in the prize-fighting game, brought to life with period details, one-liners and slang, boxing lore, historical cameos. Anthony Venutolo gives it to us through the eyes of a whiskey-soaked newspaper man chasing a dream of his own and does so admirably. Here's hoping he returns for an encore ..."

FRONT PAGE PALOOKA

Newark, New Jersey, 1954 

Years of fight halls and newsrooms have east coast sportswriter, Nick Moretti, looking for a change. When a sloppy hustle goes bad, and Nick takes a bullet in the shoulder, it’s time to go west.  Hired by Pinnacle Pictures to write a boxing movie about troubled heavyweight champ Jericho ‘Rattlesnake’ McNeal, Nick joins forces with sexy public relations gal, Dillian Dawson, for a cross-country tour to give an everyman boxer an unlikely shot at the world title – what could go wrong?

From the crackling neon of Hollywood and Sin City, through the steamy Delta, and on to Chi-Town, the glitzy dream becomes a noir nightmare, and newshound Nick Moretti is about to commit a reporter’s greatest sin – becoming a Front Page Palooka ...  Another great two-fisted Fight Card tale!


COMING SOON ~ FIGHT CARD: SHERLOCK HOLMES!

Z SHERLOCK FINAL 1
COMING SOON ~ FIGHT CARD: SHERLOCK HOLMES!

THIS DECEMBER,THE WORLD'S MOST FAMOUS CONSULTING DETECTIVE GETS READY TO RUMBLE ... ANDREW SALMON WRITING AS JACK TUNNEY ... PAINTED COVER BY CARL YONDER... LETTERING BY DAVID FOSTER ... DON'T MISS THIS ONE ...

Friday, October 18, 2013

PUTTING WRITING FALSEHOODS AGAINST THE ROPES

PUTTING WRITING FALSEHOODS AGAINST THE ROPES

FIGHT CARD ROMANCE: LADIES NIGHT AUTHOR CAROL MALONE (WRITING AS JILL TUNNEY) BLOGS OVER AT THE WRIOTER’S FUN ZONE ABOUT WRITING FALSEHOODS ...

Today Writer’s Fun Zone welcomes author Carol Malone (Fight Card Romance: Ladies Night) as she shares with us her writing tips discovered during her writing journey to publishing her first e-book.

Don’t start your writing career believing falsehoods: learn the art of writing. 

I’ve been on a serious writing journey for awhile and just published my first eBook. While walking that path, I’ve discovered a lot of things about myself and the writing process. Even as an amateur, I’d love to share what I’ve learned in the hopes it will keep someone else’s feet on the trail toward their dreams of successful publishing. I held certain beliefs regarding writing that have proven to be false. Here are my top five ...

FOR THE FULL ARTICLE CLICK HERE


Wednesday, October 16, 2013

FRONT PAGE PALOOKA'S SPOTIFY SOUNDTRACK

FRONT PAGE S
FRONT PAGE PALOOKA'S SPOTIFY SOUNDTRACK

Fight Card author Anthony Venutolo created the following Spotify soundtrack, which he listen to repeatedly while writing Front Page Palooka ...


Wednesday, October 9, 2013

PULP NOW: PUNCHING UP YOUR PROSE

PULP NOW: PUNCHING UP YOUR PROSE

AUTHOR, STUNT MAN, AND ALL-ROUND ADVENTURER, TEEL JAMES GLENN BREAKS DOWN THE WRITING OF GREAT FIGHT SCENES ...

I have spent the better part of the last 37 years being beaten, stabbed, set on fire and hit by cars – for money.

That’s right, I’ve been a stunt monkey since I got out of art school and ran into a guy at a party who was looking for someone to storyboard a film. The film had a fight scene, I designed it, got cast in the film, did the fight and never looked back. 

I studied martial arts, boxing, gymnastics and then the more exotic skills like car hits, stair falls, fire burns and most enjoyably, sword fighting (I got to do that with Errol Flynn’s last stunt double).

But time marches on and, as they say, there are old stunt men and bold stuntmen but no old, bold stuntmen. I eventually returned to my first love, writing, and launched on a career of pulp adventure tales. It seemed only natural that my stories reflected my background and had a lot of action (my literary idols were Burroughs, Howard and Hammett). Soon I got a reputation for my actions scenes.

I applied the same principles to the action in my stories as I had to all the fights I choreographed over the years but I now also, as the writer, was responsible for determining when and where action scenes showed up in the story and this fact made me do some serious examination of how and why I wrote them.

Here are a few thoughts that might help my fellow writers...

Since the first storyteller sat around a campfire spinning tales of gods and heroes it has been a given that a little action makes a mildly interesting story into a real grabber. Put your hero or heroine in physical jeopardy and you can have a winner.  Conflict is the key and physical conflict, i.e., a fight, is often the answer.

It is not the only answer, to be sure, and emotional conflict is the essence of real drama, but the line where drama ends and adventure or melodrama begins is an iffy one. If the level of your drama is high, if the characters are convincing and we as a reader care about what happens to them then you can get a frenzy of worry out of us by having a villain try to club our hero. Or shoot him or…you get the idea.

A writer has to be careful that the action is not hastily added in or used as a patch between talking head scenes. This cheats the reader and the writer of great opportunity to explore how the characters react in stressful situations and the chance to inform the readers of some facts about the characters. Where did the character learn to do a certain move, or what about the fighting style of the bad guy triggers a memory from our heroine’s past?

Since the fight has to serve the purpose of the story you have to use the same criteria as any journalistic or dramatic story. Ask yourself, ‘is this fight necessary?’ If it is then you can use the old six questions: Why, Who, How, Where, What and When?

WHY 

Why is this fight the solution to this moment of the story, instead of a dialogue scene?  After all, Shakespeare put the fight at the end of Hamlet for two very strong reasons. It was the dramatic climax that brought together several plot threads, and it was used as a device to reveal the true personalities of the major participants:  Laertes regrets using the poison, Hamlet is proud of his swordsmanship, Claudius reveals his cowardice etc.

There are four chief reasons to have a fight in a story, though often a fight (or action scene) can and should serve more than one of these reasons.

To amaze or confuse a character.

To scare a character.

To conceal/reveal some plot point within the smoke and mirrors of an action scene.

To reveal or accentuate a character trait.

WHO

Who is involved in the action; the principal? A secondary character?  If so, what is their stake in the confrontation (their personal why)?

HOW

How did the fight come about? How does it end? And in what state are the participants when it is all over? Will there be lingering effects? And will the effects be physical or mental or both? There is also the mechanical how of a fight; that is, how to plan it out. You can’t build a house without a plan and just as you would plan out a book or story by making an outline you must do the same thing with the ‘story’ of a fight.

WHERE

Where does the action take place? Is it an interesting enough place, i.e. a kitchen, a garage, a spaceship port? What makes that place of particular interest? Does it add color to the story, or is it just a drab background, a diorama in front of which the action takes place?

WHAT

What is involved, physically in the fight? A sword fight; if so, what style? Or styles. Do they use the objects at hand or did they bring the ‘death dealers’ with them. (Jackie Chan movies are especially good at finding clever things to do with found objects in action scenes—you don’t have to be ‘clever’ funny but you should clever smart). 

WHEN

When is it appropriate to have a fight instead of a non-physical solution? I know I keep stressing this, but that cuts to the heart of the situation of many literature snobs who will not deal with any ‘action’ because they feel it cheapens the purpose of a story.

FLAVORS OF VIOLENCE AND THE ‘OUCH’ FACTOR

A grim, down and dirty knife fight might be fine for a thriller, but wrong for a romantic comedy. Once you understand that it hurts you can think about the ouch factor, that is, how much damage and how much recovery time.

This is where the flavors come in – how you balance these elements: how real, how much pain, and to what end the action in the scene in the story determine if the fight is farce or frightening.

So how does it break down – what makes a fight funny or scary or realistic? 

EXERCISES TO LIVEN YOUR FIGHT SCENES

Not everyone is a fight choreographer, but every one can choreograph a fight. Really. The first thing you do is to decide the type of fight. For argument’s sake we will assume you want to design a sword fight with short swords.

Now, I know you probably don’t have any short swords sitting around the house. No problem. Get some rolled up newspaper and a congenial friend/mate/sibling. Now, slowly, as in really slow like an old Six Million Dollar Man episode, walk through five or six moves. 

Just like a slow motion dance. Then write it down; but in the writing, the newspapers become real swords and you are moving at breathtaking speed.

Now this may not be possible.  You might not be able to physically execute the moves, or have a long suffering conspirator to collaborate with.No problem. Just let the inner child out and get a couple of movable action figures. Even the art store pose-able figures with no features. Tape some short swords made out of pop sticks into their hands and let them do your fighting for you. 

Then write it all down.

When painting students are learning their art they are instructed to copy the paintings of great master, stroke for stroke and it is considered perfectly okay. No legal hassles at all. Okay, now that you’ve read the stories, or story, you have a big task ahead: rewrite it. That’s right, take Conan or Tarzan or whomever and the general situation of the scene and –without peeking – write your version of it. May be your only chance to write your hero without a copyright lawyer running after you. It’s best to do it for a scene you read ‘last book’, or earlier in the book, and once you decide on the scene don’t go back and peek. Cheaters never prosper!

Then put it aside for a day or so before going back to compare them. It doesn’t matter if you unconsciously copied some phrases or exact actions, it is bound to happen, it is the idea that you can achieve some of the energy or flow of the story – and who knows, you might improve on it. Could happen! 

What is the appropriate level of you character’s  skill?

The choices extend beyond purpose and tone for a fight, it must also be appropriate to the time, place and character.

I mean, really, Babe Ruth should not be swinging an aluminum baseball bat unless it’s a time travel story and if your 1860s cowboy hero starts throwing jumping martial kicks he better be named James West!

A certain amount of credibility with your reader is purchased from their imaginations with the preconceptions of what they expect verses what is credible or possible.

Martial arts have points of origin: you can’t have a Bowie knife fight before 1827 because the indomitable Jim Bowie hadn’t invented it (or perfected his brother’s invention – whichever version you believe). And fighting with a Bowie is significantly different than than fighting with other knives, or swords, because while it shares characteristics of both it is its own beast

Thus you see how very important to the believability of the story it is to get the How or with what you characters fight with. Those factors  and their attitude to the action are all great means to understand who they are and how they fit into the mosaic of the story’s world.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Teel James Glenn has written on theater, stunts and swashbuckling related subject matter for national magazines like: Aces, Black Belt, Echoes, and Fantastic Worlds of E.R.B. and fiction for MAD, Weird Tales,  Peculiar Stories, Pro Se Presents, Fantasy Tales, Afterburns, Another Realm,  Blazing Adventures!, Tales of Old and other magazines. He has 30 books in print including  his newest The First Synn: The Bloodstone Confidential from Pro Se. He received the Pulp Ark Award for best author in 2012.

He has taught staged/stunt combat at colleges and choreographed fake violence for over 300 plays and 55 Renaissance Festivals. He has been a martial artist most of  his life and stunt coordinator for 70 films He has appeared as an actor and stunt performer in over three dozen more as well as all the New York soap operas. He has also conducted seminars for theatrical groups from Florida to Canada in staged combat and taught self defense and anti-rape classes nationwide. You can keep up on his adventures at www.theurbanswashbuckler.com

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

HOW A VINTANGE FIGHT CARD NOVELLA WAS BORN IN THE CLOUD

HOW A VINTANGE FIGHT CARD NOVELLA WAS BORN IN THE CLOUD

ANTHONY VENUTOLO TELLS US ABOUT THE SURPRISING WRITING TECHNIQUES HE USED WHEN PUNCHING OUT FIGHT CARD: FRONT PAGE PALOOKA ...
When Paul Bishop approached me at what now seems like an eternity ago to write a Fight Card entry, I was instantly on board. Fight Card was everything I loved – vintage pulp tales of tough guys and their femme fatales that were hard-boiled and whiskey-soaked. Sign me up.
But then came the panic.
Panic why? Unlike my fellow Fight Card scribes, I wasn't a novelist. Those said, I was a lifelong journalist and editor by trade and have even dabbled in many other forms of creative writing on the side. Through the years, I've written a slew of spec scripts for movies and comic books, a proposal and bible for an animated TV show (which was pitched around) and more magazine and newspaper pieces than I care to remember.
But never a novel ...
Sure, I dabbled in short stories, gritty poetry and flash fiction on my blog Bukowski's Basement, which I know Paul had read. To me, writing the weekly flash fiction noir was easy. Doing that for 30,000 plus words seemed daunting.
What was even more petrifying was the prolific pace that other writers seemed to work. Guys like Bishop, Mel Odem, Eric Beetner, Terrence McCauley and Kevin Michaels all make it look so damned easy.
I needed my wheels to spin like a '49 Merc.
As far as my Fight Card entry as concerned, I knew one thing, for sure ... I didn't want my hero to be a boxer for the simple reason that the above men wrote their tales so very well. I knew I probably couldn't top them or tell a story that seemed fresh.  As a result, I turned to what I knew – newspapers. For the greater part of a quarter of a century I've been working in a newsroom so there was oodles of material I could call upon. Newsrooms seemed like a natural setting for the 1954 time setting of Front Page Palooka. I wanted to draw upon that vibe for my novella. Back when I was hired (as a young cub in the '80s) men still smoked at their desks and, if they were lucky, had some Sneaky Pete when the sun went down.
I wanted to channel that nostalgia, so I decided to make my hero, Nick Moretti, a grizzled newspaperman. To me, Nick is the conglomeration of several pop culture characters. You might find some Marlowe, some Sonny Crockett, a pinch of Chilli Palmer, a dab of Hank Moody (kudos if you know who he is) and pretty much any Bogie character from 1949-56. That was Nick. He's sarcastic, has a quick wit, can hold his bourbon and get the girl. Oh, yeah, he can also knuckle up if he needed to.
I had my character. But I still needed a story. I took a breath and before I dove into the writing of Front Page Palooka, turned to the cloud to foster some creativity.
I created a Pinterest board to help me bask in the glory of Nick Moretti's world, circa 1954. Pinterest can be of tremendous use for a writer. If you can get beyond the endless photos of cupcakes and kittens, the photo-driven social network is chock full of images you can group onto specific pinboards, all tied to a theme. Talk about inspiration... Who needs index cards, when I could just call up my Meet Nick Moretti pinboard and get an instantaneous handle on the man? I pinned all sorts of photos – stuff Nick would wear, booze he would drink, bars he would frequent, actors who could play him and – most fun – and the endless chippees he'd date. It all started to come together.
To take it one step further, I also turned to Spotify and created a soundtrack of sorts for Front Page Palooka. What exactly is Spotify? It's a digital streaming service giving users access to millions of songs. It's free. It's legal. And it's allowed me to get that blasted iTunes out of my life. That said, music plays a big part in Palooka, so I wanted the playlist to feel as if a reader were listening to a juke at some dive bar in Nick's story.
The result?  A tremendous and embeddable list of songs that could transport the listener into a bygone era – dance halls in Atlantic City, lavish Hollywood backlots, swanky Vegas casinos, scorched Mississippi plantations, and bourgeois New Orleans saloons. Again, a great way to foster inspiration.
I also wanted to soak up what came before in the hard-boiled and noir arena. I was pleasantly shocked to see a plethora of full-length films available on YouTube and Netflix.
Just a quick sampling of the flicks I was able to stream: Pickup on South Street, Call Northside 777, Sweet Smell of Success, Night and the City, Scandal Sheet, Sunset Blvd., The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Black Dahlia, Hollywoodland, Gilda, Tokyo Joe, Deadline USA, Panic in the Streets, House by the River, Woman in the Window, The Stranger, Witness to Murder, Hideout, The Naked City, Union Station, The Man Who Wasn't There, The Long Goodbye, My Gun is Quick, Kiss Me Deadly, Blonde Ice, While the City Sleeps, Borderline, Kiss of Death, The Prowler, The Night Editor, The Harder They Fall, The Big Caper, The Killing, The Asphalt Jungle, Double Indemnity, Kansas City Confidential, Where the Sidewalk Ends and Detour.
It was time to start writing.
Front Page Palooka (originally titled Union Of The Snakes) was written entirely in the cloud. Sure, a local copy was saved on my main laptop, but whenever I switched computers, it was waiting for me, no matter where I was. My primary service was Skydrive, with a backup on Google Drive and Dropbox. On days when I didn't feel like lugging out the laptop, the writing was done using the same services on my iPad and a great app called IA Writer.
So, there … That’s how a vintage novella set in 1954 was born and bred using cloud services circa 2013. There are so many tools available for writers today to gain inspiration while putting the words down one after another ...

Monday, October 7, 2013

FIGHT CARD ON DAVE WHITE PRESENTS!

FIGHT CARD ON DAVE WHITE PRESENTS!

Tomorrow night, Tuesday Oct. 8th, Fight Card creator Paul Bishop returns to Dave White Presents to discuss the series along with Carol Malone, author of the recently released Fight Card Romance: Ladies Night.

They'll discuss the content and flavor of the books along with how they're marketing the books differently on Amazon and then as snazzy paperbacks. You too can join the Fight Card universe, and we'll tell you how to jump in on a very rock 'em, sock 'em Dave White Presents! 

Put on your boxing gloves and join Paul and Carol on the next DAVE WHITE PRESENTS, Tuesday, Oct. 8 at 7:30 p.m. Eastern, then 7:30 Pacific over www.KSAV.org ...

Saturday, October 5, 2013

GRUDGE MATCH – ROCKY VS. RAGING BULL!

GRUDGE MATCH – ROCKY VS. RAGING BULL!
 
 
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FIGHT CARD: FRONT PAGE PALOOKA BOOK TRAILER


ROBERT E. HOWARD’S CORNER MEN

ROBERT E. HOWARD’S CORNER MEN

MARK FINN

The minute I stepped ashore from the Sea Girl, merchantman, I had a hunch that there would be trouble. This hunch was caused by seeing some of the crew of the Dauntless. The men on the Dauntless have disliked the Sea Girl’s crew ever since our skipper took their captain to a cleaning on the wharfs of Zanzibar – them being narrow-minded that way. They claimed that the old man had a knuckle-duster on his right, which is ridiculous and a dirty lie. He had it on his left. ~ Robert E. Howard, The Pit of the Serpent

Robert E. Howard is best-known for (some would say “forever saddled with”) the creation of Conan the Cimmerian, the invention of sword and sorcery, and also the weird western. These are laudable and important things, to be sure, but what very few people know is that Howard made a good living writing and selling boxing stories in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Primarily humorous in nature, Howard’s boxing stories featuring Sailor Steve Costigan were popular and in-demand by the publishers of Fight Stories, Action Stories, Sport Story, Jack Dempsey’s Fight Magazine, and others.  They were critical to Howard’s development as a writer, both creatively and financially. And now, at long last, all of Howard’s boxing fiction is being collected into a massive, four-volume set of books published by the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press.

Iron Fists: The Collected Boxing Stories of Robert E. Howard, has been a labor of love for myself and fellow editors Chris Gruber and Patrice Louinet. We have been long time champions and defenders of these stories, for a number of reasons. First and foremost, they are about boxing – and I mean, deeply mired in the language and lore of the squared circle. Howard was an amateur boxer and an enthusiastic fan of the sport, and you can tell from the second you read one of his riveting prize-fight scenes. He really knew his stuff. 

Second, these stories are funny. And I don’t mean a little bit, either. I have described Sailor Steve Costigan, the champion of the merchant marine Sea Girl, as having a heart of gold, fists of steel, and a head full of rocks. Costigan is a classic unreliable narrator, and these stories are all written in first person unreliable. The malapropisms and near-swear invective, not to mention that Costigan is just not smart enough to do anything other than punch his way clear of trouble, makes these stories a joy to read. 

Not all of the boxing stories are funny, though. Howard did write a number of more serious pieces exploring various aspects of what he considered made for a great boxer. One story, Iron Man, is a veritable saga that has only recently been restored to its original intended length. 

So, if these stories are so great, how come you’re just hearing about them now? Great question. All I can tell you is, blame Conan. Most people are unaware of Howard’s massive output of humorous writing – over a hundred stories, including the funny boxing and his later funny western stories. Mostly because prior editors and stewards of Howard’s legacy felt it would be better to focus on Conan and the brooding young man who wrote those tales. Reading Howard’s humorous fiction casts a different light on the brooding loner who wrote of imaginary lands and strange monsters. 

Over the past ten years, we’ve done what we could. I produced a series of old time radio plays featuring Sailor Steve Costigan. I wrote the introduction to Waterfront Fists, from Wildside Press. Chris Gruber edited and introduced Boxing Stories from the University of Nebraska Press. We pressured our friend Rusty Burke until he felt obliged (he insists it was convinced) to include boxing stories in the two volume Best of Robert E. Howard books from Del Rey. 

All of those results brought more folks around to the boxing stories. We had new fans left and right. Sailor Steve Costigan began appearing in everyone’s list of Howard’s heroes when they were name checked. These were nice efforts, but it wasn’t enough, because there was so much boxing material that no one had ever seen, and it was languishing. Until now.

The project took a year to do, and it’s the first publication to make full use of the Glenn Lord archive. Multiple drafts were consulted, and extra pieces and parts were discovered. Now Iron Fists will contain literally every scrap of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry that Howard wrote about boxing in his lifetime. Patrice Louinet has painstakingly consulted every page of text to determine the order in which these stories were all written. His findings are published in a four part afterword. Gruber and I traded off on the introductions to the books. He got volumes 1 and 3. I got volumes 2 and 4. That way, we each get to talk about Steve Costigan, our favorite Howard hero. A few of the stories are now more complete, thanks to Patrice’s text corrections with the drafts that were discovered in the Glenn Lord archive. For completists, it’s your dream come true. 

We couldn’t be more excited or proud.  But Gruber and I aren’t stopping there. We have another project, related to the boxing stories, that I can’t tell you about right now. But suffice to say, it’ll be a unique and very relevant item that die-hard boxing fans won’t want to miss out on. 

The foundation is currently offering the books as limited edition hardcovers. Depending on how fast they sell out, we may see trade paperbacks after that. For more information about the books, as well as a table of contents, you can visit the Foundation’s website here: http://www.rehfoundation.org/

Friday, October 4, 2013

AVAILABLE NOW ~ FIGHT CARD: FRONT PAGE PALOOKA

FRONT PAGE S

AVAILABLE NOW ~ FIGHT CARD: FRONT PAGE PALOOKA

Newark, New Jersey, 1954

Years of fight halls and newsrooms have east coast sportswriter, Nick Moretti, looking for a change. When a sloppy hustle goes bad, and Nick takes a bullet in the shoulder, it’s time to go west. Hired by Pinnacle Pictures to write a boxing movie about troubled heavyweight champ Jericho ‘Rattlesnake’ McNeal, Nick joins forces with sexy public relations gal, Dillian Dawson, for a cross-country tour to give an everyman boxer an unlikely shot at the world title – what could go wrong?

From the crackling neon of Hollywood and Sin City, through the steamy Delta, and on to Chi-Town, the glitzy dream becomes a noir nightmare, and newshound Nick Moretti is about to commit a reporter’s greatest sin – becoming a Front Page Palooka ... Another great two-fisted Fight
Card tale!



FIGHT CARD UPDATE

FIGHT CARD UPDATE

After the highly successful launch of last month’s Fight Card Romance: Ladies Night, we have a wonderful follow-up this month with the debut of Fight Card: Front Page Palooka from the dynamic Anthony Venutolo.

When he’s not hanging with his family, or chronicling the antics of Boardwalk Empire for the Star Ledger, the New Jersey based Ant-man inhabits Bukowski's Basement (http://tinyurl.com/q294tyh), a blog dedicated to the Skid Row poet and all things flash fiction. 

In Front Page Palooka, Ant gives us the Bogey inspired newshound, Nick Moretti – charming, yet cynical, burned-out, whiskey-sodden, and not above making sure the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.  Front Page Palooka has it all ... dames, dives, and hard-punching attitude.

FRONT PAGE PALOOKA

Newark, New Jersey, 1954

Years of fight halls and newsrooms have east coast sportswriter, Nick Moretti, looking for a change. When a sloppy hustle goes bad, and Nick takes a bullet in the shoulder, it’s time to go west.  Hired by Pinnacle Pictures to write a boxing movie about troubled heavyweight champ Jericho ‘Rattlesnake’ McNeal, Nick joins forces with sexy public relations gal, Dillian Dawson, for a cross-country tour to give an everyman boxer an unlikely shot at the world title – what could go wrong?

From the crackling neon of Hollywood and Sin City, through the steamy Delta, and on to Chi-Town, the glitzy dream becomes a noir nightmare, and newshound Nick Moretti is about to commit a reporter’s greatest sin – becoming a Front Page Palooka ...  Another great two-fisted Fight Card tale!



As usual, we appreciate any and all blog shout-outs, mentions on social networking sites, and Amazon reviews.

Next in the ring, we have Fight Card: Swamp Walloper – featuring the return of Patrick Felony Flynn in the long awaited (at least by me) sequel to Felony Fists – along with Punching Paradise from Nik Korpon, and Fight River from Tommy Hancock.

Andrew Salmon has been time travelling back to Victorian, England, as he’s been completing our highly anticipated December offering for the holidays, Fight Card: Sherlock Holmes – featuring a stunning painted cover from artist (and new Fight Card team member) Carl Yonder (illustrator of the hardboiled skull and crossbones comic, Pirate Eye (tinyurl.com/nncquoe).

A big thanks this month to Fight Card Team member Jeremy L.C. Jones for his efforts on getting many of our publicity posts out into the wider blogoverse via Book Life Now (tinyurl.com/qax5vlr) with upcoming coverage via Venture Galleries.  Jeremy is also the power behind lining up the numerous fantastic authors contributing stories to three upcoming Fight Card short story anthologies – the proceeds from which will go to authors in need and other literary charities.

Despite his own busy work schedule, David Foster has continued to produce Fight Card covers not only for our e-book releases, but also for the paperback versions (along with beautifully tweaking my efforts at .pdf interior files).  Thx, buddy, we couldn’t do this without you.

I’d also like to welcome writer Kathleen Rice Adams into the Fight Card fold (www.kathleenriceadams.com). Kathleen is an accomplished writer who will be handling the next book in our hybrid Fight Card Romance spin-off, and we’re very much looking forward to her take on Love On The Ropes ...

More next month on our upcoming Fight Card audio versions from Dynamic Ram ...

Till then, keep punching ...