David Harten Watson's Blog
September 19, 2021
Review of Cold Storage by David Koepp
Cold Storage by David Koepp waCold StorageCold Storages well-written but poorly researched, containing laughably obvious plot mistakes!
Although otherwise well-written, Cold Storage illustrates the perils of writing about a subject about which the author knows nothing, and not bothering to do any research beyond Wikipedia. It was obvious that the author is a screenwriter and not a novelist, because he made all the same mistakes that Hollywood does. Yet, it was fun to read, despite the mistakes.
In my experience, New York Times bestsellers are usually poorly written, poorly edited, poorly researched, or all of the above, but last month, I decided to take a chance and buy a New York Times bestselling novel anyway, hoping it would be the exception: Cold Storage, by David Koepp. Unfortunately, although it was an exciting read that was hard to put down, it was no exception to the rule that New York Times bestsellers are poorly written, poorly edited, or poorly researched.
This is a long review, but please read to the end to find out how an appalling lack of research combined with poor editing to turn what had begun as a 5-star book into a laughingstock by the end. Its quality steeply declined over the course of the novel from “excellent” to a book that can serve as a warning to writers of the perils of being ignorant of your subject and not bothering to do any research beyond Wikipedia! As a result, it’s hard to assign a star-rating to Cold Storage, because the first two-thirds of the novel were 5-star quality, while the last third of it was three-star at best, full of silly, careless mistakes due to lack of even the most cursory research, mistakes that should have been caught in editing. However, I was an Economics major, so like the Econ major with one foot in boiling water and one foot in ice water who says, “On the average, I feel fine,” I’ll say it averages out to three stars, but the believability of the novel steeply declines the further you read in the book.
Cold Storage is a techno-thriller (a combination of science fiction, action, and horror), very much in the same vein as The Andromeda Strain. In fact, its plot is suspiciously similar to The Andromeda Strain. Both novels begin with a satellite or space station that was contaminated with an alien or mutant microorganism and then fell to earth. In both books, after the satellite falls to earth, Air Force officers were sent to retrieve the downed satellite. In both novels, the Air Force officers sent to retrieve it find everyone in the small town have died suddenly and mysteriously, and in both novels, they seem to have gone crazy before they died. In both books, the alien microorganism, if allowed to spread, could wipe out all human life, an extinction-level event. In The Andromeda Strain, the alien microbe was bacteria, while in Cold Storage, the alien or mutant microbe was a fast-growing fungus.
First, the good points. The novel is fast-paced, full of action, and was so exciting I couldn’t put it down. It also has colorful characters, with at least a half-dozen viewpoint characters (not including the fungus itself, which became a “viewpoint character” at times – more on that absurdity later). The novel even has some romance, an unlikely romance between two extremely different people that somehow – well, I won’t spoil it by revealing how that romance develops or turns out, as I’m trying to keep this review free of any spoilers!
It’s hard to come up with a star-rating for this book, because for the first two-thirds of the book, it was a five-star book, so exciting that I couldn’t put it down! Sure, there was a lot of head-hopping (constantly changing the viewpoint character from paragraph to paragraph), which was sometimes annoying, but it wasn’t confusing, so I could live with that. Sure, even early on, I had some nagging doubts about the believability of the science – the fungus seemed to be highly intelligent, with a will of its own, an extremely rapid ability to adapt, and an uncanny ability to project thoughts into the minds of its human and animal hosts, controlling the minds of people and animals – but I’m not a microbiologist or fungus-ologist (to coin a phrase), so for the first two-thirds of the novel, I just shrugged at the scientific techno-babble and enjoyed the thrilling action.
However, in about the last third of the book, the plot turned more and more implausible, and my suspension of belief became increasingly challenged, until it was impossible to ignore repeated thoughts of “No way; that’s impossible!” It started with the zombie cat and zombie deer that was capable of riding elevators. I am not exaggerating when I call them zombies – that’s what they were. First, there was a cat with a bullet completely through its head, in one side and out the other, blowing its head in half and destroying its brain. After its death, the fungus found it, somehow reanimated it, repaired the damage to its brain, and inserted thoughts into its head, giving it a mission to climb a tree. The cat, I was almost able to shrug off by saying, “Well, after all, cats are supposed to have nine lives, and cats can climb trees, so I can accept that.” But then came the zombie deer….
First, the deer was hit by a car, and three of its legs were broken. Then the man who’d hit it with his car decided to put the deer out of its misery by shooting it six times: once in the stomach by accident, and then five times in the head, five killing shots through the head. Trust me, a deer shot even once in the head is as dead as a doornail, so a deer shot five times in the head is as dead as a coffin nail! Somehow, the fungus found the dead deer and then not only reanimated it, but also repaired the severe damage to its brain from the five bullet tracks through in its head, fixed the three broken legs, put complex thoughts in the deer’s head, told it to enter a specific building, then taught the zombie deer how to ride an elevator up and down. Okay, for a book that had started out as a science-fiction techno-thriller modeled after The Andromeda Strain, this novel had rapidly devolved into an unbelievable novel about zombies. Besides animals, the fungus also infected humans, who were its primary target, but at least the author didn’t have the humans totally die and then come back to life later as zombies – to quote The Princess Bride, the humans inhabited by the fungus were only “mostly dead”, not totally dead.
From this point on, the novel’s believability only got worse. Much worse. The fungus became a character of its own, with sections and chapters devoted to the “point of view” of the fungus. The fungus was given not only goals and aspirations, but also feelings, emotions, memories, desires, and complex thoughts. If the fungus were purely alien, that might be somewhat believable, but unlike The Andromeda Strain, the fungus in Cold Storage wasn’t exactly alien in origin, but merely an earth fungus that had been mutated by the environment of space.
However, the most unbelievable parts of the novel, where the author’s lack of research showed, and the most unforgivable mistakes (because any halfway-competent editor should have caught the mistakes before publication) involved guns. This author, David Koepp, now tops my list of authors making laughably ridiculous mistakes with weapons, surpassing Orson Scott Card (who wrote of the “massive recoil of the M-16”, a gun with virtually zero recoil) and even Veronica Roth (who repeatedly wrote of guns having “handles” and protagonists needing to “click the bullet into the chamber” before every single shot).
The main protagonist of Cold Storage is an Air Force officer in a Special Operations unit who’s supposedly highly familiar with every type of weapon, up to and including “suitcase nukes”. It was bad enough that this protagonist called the gun’s grip a “handle” and called magazines “clips”, mistakes that nobody with even the most basic knowledge of guns would make. I started marking errata (errors) on page 275 (out of 372) of the mass-market paperback version, or 74% of the way to the end.
Page 275 demonstrates a complete disregard for the basic laws of physics. It has a little old lady firing a pistol at a man who is running at the protagonists, “coming at them hard and fast.” David Koepp wrote that the “slugs” [sic] from the handgun “slammed into Mike’s chest with such force that they reversed his course of motion. They lifted him off his feet, blew him back two yards in the air, and dropped him to the cement floor, dead.” You don’t even have to know anything about guns to know how absurd this is – you only have to have taken a high school science class to know Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction” (see https://www.livescience.com/46561-new...). This means any force that could act on a grown man enough to have “reversed his course of motion… lifted him off his feet, blew him back two yards in the air,” would have also lifted the old lady off her feet, blown her back four yards in the air, and dropped her to the cement floor, dead. Also, if you knew anything at all about guns, you’d know that there is no gun that can reverse someone’s course of motion and blow them back two yards in the air. Not only is there no handgun that can do that, but there’s also no rifle and no shotgun that can do that (despite what you see in Hollywood movies). I can only conclude that David Koepp got his knowledge of guns from watching Hollywood movies, but I’ve got news for you: Hollywood gets everything wrong about guns, everything.
But the error that made my jaw drop, made me re-read the page repeatedly because I couldn’t believe what I’d just read, and had me scratching my head trying to figure out how the hell anyone could make such an absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous mistake was on page 313 of the mass-market paperback. For those who don’t know anything about guns, the mistake on page 313 was equivalent to having a Harvard professor protagonist claim that Harvard has no law school, or a Jeep salesman claim that Jeeps don’t have four-wheel-drive, or a Princeton professor claim that Princeton isn’t in the Ivy League, or a protagonist who works at the Vatican say that the Pope is a Southern Baptist, or a protagonist living in Manhattan claiming New York City doesn’t have a subway system! The mistake was that obvious to the 300 million Americans who, unlike David Koepp, have any familiarity with guns (not only the over 100 million Americans who own guns, but also obvious to anyone who has ever shot a gun, handled a gun, considered buying a gun, or even known anyone else who owns a gun).
On page 313 of the paperback, the protagonist who’s an Air Force Spec Ops guy (and supposedly a gun expert) not only makes a ridiculous mistake, but does so in excruciating detail: “Roberto took a Glock 19 from an open case, loaded it, and turned it around, offering it to Naomi handle [sic] first… ‘You’ve got a twelve-shot [sic] magazine, a trigger safety here, and a thumb lock [sic] over there. You need to flip both of them [sic] to pull the trigger. Once you’ve pulled, each shot requires another pull, but the safeties won’t re-engage unless you take your finger off the trigger.’”
Now, forget for a moment the misuse of “handle” to mean grip, forget the fact that the Glock 19 doesn’t have a twelve-round magazine, and ignore the totally unsafe gun handling (loading the gun, flipping it around so the muzzle faces himself, then handing the loaded gun to someone). The gun is a Glock, and the best-selling pistol in America, the Glock 19 (so tens of millions of Americans instantly notice the mistake). I’ve never owned a Glock myself, but everyone knows – everyone except author David Koepp and his editors, apparently – Glocks don’t have any manual safeties! None at all. There are no models of Glocks that have manual safeties. For the USAF Special Ops protagonist to claim that a Glock has not one but two manual safeties, and that “You need to flip both of them to pull the trigger” is the most ridiculous gun mistake I’ve ever seen in a book, and I’ve seen some doozies! Not only do Glocks have no safeties, but there are also no handguns from any manufacturer that have two safeties that you have to “flip” off. Then to further write that the safeties will “re-engage” as soon as “you take your finger off the trigger” is beyond ludicrous, because there is no handgun in which a manual safety will “re-engage” as soon as “you take your finger off the trigger.” It would be total idiocy to design any gun with safeties that would “re-engage” as soon as “you take your finger off the trigger,” and again, Glocks have no manual safeties at all. Everyone knows that. The Glock 19 was the best-selling pistol in America in 2020, and everyone knows Glocks have no manual safeties – everyone except author David Koepp and his incompetent editors! With tens of millions of Americans owning Glocks, you’d think the author could have just talked to one of the tens of millions of Americans who own one, rather than just making up fake, nonexistent safeties.
While I was reading page 313 over and over, trying to figure out how the heck David Koepp could have made such an obvious mistake, and in excruciating detail, especially when his protagonist was supposed to be an Air Force Special Ops guy who’s an expert on weapons. I looked up the Wikipedia entry for Glock. First, the Wikipedia entry pointed out that the Glock 19 was the best-selling pistol on Gunbroker in 2020, so you’d think the author could have seem that and just talked to one of the tens of millions of Americans who own one or the hundreds of millions of Americans who have heard of Glocks, but the author chose not to. It’s obvious the author just looked up the Wikipedia entry instead, but he was so ignorant about guns that he totally misunderstood the Wikipedia entry that he was reading, and also looked at the Wikipedia diagram of a Glock and misunderstood the picture he was seeing. When he saw the Wikipedia diagram of a Glock, he mistakenly thought that the slide-lock (which locks the gun open after the last shot) release lever was a safety lever. It’s not. He missed the clear text saying, “Glock pistols lack a traditional on-off safety lever,” and then he read the section about the Glock’s internal safeties (which are simply to prevent an accidental firing if the gun is dropped) and thought they were talking about external safeties! Wikipedia says, “the three safety mechanisms are automatically disengaged one after the other when the trigger is squeezed, and are automatically reactivated when the trigger is released,” but Wikipedia is talking about internal safeties that prevent a gun from firing if dropped, not external safeties, not manual safeties! Let this be a lesson to writers: you should never use Wikipedia for research if you are totally ignorant about the topic of the Wikipedia article, or you will misunderstand the Wikipedia article, and your ignorance will come through in your writing.
Phew, now that I got David Koepp’s most glaringly obvious gun mistake out of the way (page 313),
Then there was page 325, where the author has the recoil of a Heckler & Koch 9mm machine pistol being so severe that it causes paralyzing back injury to the man firing it! Then there’s page 347, where David Koepp writes about bullets “sparking off” a metal surface, something that only happens in Hollywood movies (unless someone is shooting titanium-tipped bullets, which are extremely rare and only useful for target shooting). Then there are pages 354-355, where the author writes that the protagonist “heard their gun go dry with a series of soft clicks,” something that cannot happen with real guns, only in Hollywood movies. Then there are the multiple places in the book where David Koepp calls a gun’s grip its “handle” and its magazine a “clip” (FYI, guns don’t have clips, unless you’re talking about a WWII era M-1 Garand or a WW-1 era bolt-action).
The moral of this book review is a lesson to writers: when you have a protagonist who is an Air Force Special Ops guy, you must know what you’re writing about, so you have to do just a teensy-weensy amount of research, something beyond reading Wikipedia articles that you don’t understand or watching Hollywood movies that get all the facts wrong. Now I see that David Koepp is a screenwriter, not a novelist, and that explains a lot – it explains why he seems to get his gun "facts" from Hollywood movies.
Although otherwise well-written, Cold Storage illustrates the perils of writing about a subject about which the author knows nothing, and not bothering to do any research beyond Wikipedia. It was obvious that the author is a screenwriter and not a novelist, because he made all the same mistakes that Hollywood does. Yet, it was fun to read, despite the mistakes.
In my experience, New York Times bestsellers are usually poorly written, poorly edited, poorly researched, or all of the above, but last month, I decided to take a chance and buy a New York Times bestselling novel anyway, hoping it would be the exception: Cold Storage, by David Koepp. Unfortunately, although it was an exciting read that was hard to put down, it was no exception to the rule that New York Times bestsellers are poorly written, poorly edited, or poorly researched.
This is a long review, but please read to the end to find out how an appalling lack of research combined with poor editing to turn what had begun as a 5-star book into a laughingstock by the end. Its quality steeply declined over the course of the novel from “excellent” to a book that can serve as a warning to writers of the perils of being ignorant of your subject and not bothering to do any research beyond Wikipedia! As a result, it’s hard to assign a star-rating to Cold Storage, because the first two-thirds of the novel were 5-star quality, while the last third of it was three-star at best, full of silly, careless mistakes due to lack of even the most cursory research, mistakes that should have been caught in editing. However, I was an Economics major, so like the Econ major with one foot in boiling water and one foot in ice water who says, “On the average, I feel fine,” I’ll say it averages out to three stars, but the believability of the novel steeply declines the further you read in the book.
Cold Storage is a techno-thriller (a combination of science fiction, action, and horror), very much in the same vein as The Andromeda Strain. In fact, its plot is suspiciously similar to The Andromeda Strain. Both novels begin with a satellite or space station that was contaminated with an alien or mutant microorganism and then fell to earth. In both books, after the satellite falls to earth, Air Force officers were sent to retrieve the downed satellite. In both novels, the Air Force officers sent to retrieve it find everyone in the small town have died suddenly and mysteriously, and in both novels, they seem to have gone crazy before they died. In both books, the alien microorganism, if allowed to spread, could wipe out all human life, an extinction-level event. In The Andromeda Strain, the alien microbe was bacteria, while in Cold Storage, the alien or mutant microbe was a fast-growing fungus.
First, the good points. The novel is fast-paced, full of action, and was so exciting I couldn’t put it down. It also has colorful characters, with at least a half-dozen viewpoint characters (not including the fungus itself, which became a “viewpoint character” at times – more on that absurdity later). The novel even has some romance, an unlikely romance between two extremely different people that somehow – well, I won’t spoil it by revealing how that romance develops or turns out, as I’m trying to keep this review free of any spoilers!
It’s hard to come up with a star-rating for this book, because for the first two-thirds of the book, it was a five-star book, so exciting that I couldn’t put it down! Sure, there was a lot of head-hopping (constantly changing the viewpoint character from paragraph to paragraph), which was sometimes annoying, but it wasn’t confusing, so I could live with that. Sure, even early on, I had some nagging doubts about the believability of the science – the fungus seemed to be highly intelligent, with a will of its own, an extremely rapid ability to adapt, and an uncanny ability to project thoughts into the minds of its human and animal hosts, controlling the minds of people and animals – but I’m not a microbiologist or fungus-ologist (to coin a phrase), so for the first two-thirds of the novel, I just shrugged at the scientific techno-babble and enjoyed the thrilling action.
However, in about the last third of the book, the plot turned more and more implausible, and my suspension of belief became increasingly challenged, until it was impossible to ignore repeated thoughts of “No way; that’s impossible!” It started with the zombie cat and zombie deer that was capable of riding elevators. I am not exaggerating when I call them zombies – that’s what they were. First, there was a cat with a bullet completely through its head, in one side and out the other, blowing its head in half and destroying its brain. After its death, the fungus found it, somehow reanimated it, repaired the damage to its brain, and inserted thoughts into its head, giving it a mission to climb a tree. The cat, I was almost able to shrug off by saying, “Well, after all, cats are supposed to have nine lives, and cats can climb trees, so I can accept that.” But then came the zombie deer….
First, the deer was hit by a car, and three of its legs were broken. Then the man who’d hit it with his car decided to put the deer out of its misery by shooting it six times: once in the stomach by accident, and then five times in the head, five killing shots through the head. Trust me, a deer shot even once in the head is as dead as a doornail, so a deer shot five times in the head is as dead as a coffin nail! Somehow, the fungus found the dead deer and then not only reanimated it, but also repaired the severe damage to its brain from the five bullet tracks through in its head, fixed the three broken legs, put complex thoughts in the deer’s head, told it to enter a specific building, then taught the zombie deer how to ride an elevator up and down. Okay, for a book that had started out as a science-fiction techno-thriller modeled after The Andromeda Strain, this novel had rapidly devolved into an unbelievable novel about zombies. Besides animals, the fungus also infected humans, who were its primary target, but at least the author didn’t have the humans totally die and then come back to life later as zombies – to quote The Princess Bride, the humans inhabited by the fungus were only “mostly dead”, not totally dead.
From this point on, the novel’s believability only got worse. Much worse. The fungus became a character of its own, with sections and chapters devoted to the “point of view” of the fungus. The fungus was given not only goals and aspirations, but also feelings, emotions, memories, desires, and complex thoughts. If the fungus were purely alien, that might be somewhat believable, but unlike The Andromeda Strain, the fungus in Cold Storage wasn’t exactly alien in origin, but merely an earth fungus that had been mutated by the environment of space.
However, the most unbelievable parts of the novel, where the author’s lack of research showed, and the most unforgivable mistakes (because any halfway-competent editor should have caught the mistakes before publication) involved guns. This author, David Koepp, now tops my list of authors making laughably ridiculous mistakes with weapons, surpassing Orson Scott Card (who wrote of the “massive recoil of the M-16”, a gun with virtually zero recoil) and even Veronica Roth (who repeatedly wrote of guns having “handles” and protagonists needing to “click the bullet into the chamber” before every single shot).
The main protagonist of Cold Storage is an Air Force officer in a Special Operations unit who’s supposedly highly familiar with every type of weapon, up to and including “suitcase nukes”. It was bad enough that this protagonist called the gun’s grip a “handle” and called magazines “clips”, mistakes that nobody with even the most basic knowledge of guns would make. I started marking errata (errors) on page 275 (out of 372) of the mass-market paperback version, or 74% of the way to the end.
Page 275 demonstrates a complete disregard for the basic laws of physics. It has a little old lady firing a pistol at a man who is running at the protagonists, “coming at them hard and fast.” David Koepp wrote that the “slugs” [sic] from the handgun “slammed into Mike’s chest with such force that they reversed his course of motion. They lifted him off his feet, blew him back two yards in the air, and dropped him to the cement floor, dead.” You don’t even have to know anything about guns to know how absurd this is – you only have to have taken a high school science class to know Newton’s Third Law of Motion, “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction” (see https://www.livescience.com/46561-new...). This means any force that could act on a grown man enough to have “reversed his course of motion… lifted him off his feet, blew him back two yards in the air,” would have also lifted the old lady off her feet, blown her back four yards in the air, and dropped her to the cement floor, dead. Also, if you knew anything at all about guns, you’d know that there is no gun that can reverse someone’s course of motion and blow them back two yards in the air. Not only is there no handgun that can do that, but there’s also no rifle and no shotgun that can do that (despite what you see in Hollywood movies). I can only conclude that David Koepp got his knowledge of guns from watching Hollywood movies, but I’ve got news for you: Hollywood gets everything wrong about guns, everything.
But the error that made my jaw drop, made me re-read the page repeatedly because I couldn’t believe what I’d just read, and had me scratching my head trying to figure out how the hell anyone could make such an absurd, ridiculous, ludicrous mistake was on page 313 of the mass-market paperback. For those who don’t know anything about guns, the mistake on page 313 was equivalent to having a Harvard professor protagonist claim that Harvard has no law school, or a Jeep salesman claim that Jeeps don’t have four-wheel-drive, or a Princeton professor claim that Princeton isn’t in the Ivy League, or a protagonist who works at the Vatican say that the Pope is a Southern Baptist, or a protagonist living in Manhattan claiming New York City doesn’t have a subway system! The mistake was that obvious to the 300 million Americans who, unlike David Koepp, have any familiarity with guns (not only the over 100 million Americans who own guns, but also obvious to anyone who has ever shot a gun, handled a gun, considered buying a gun, or even known anyone else who owns a gun).
On page 313 of the paperback, the protagonist who’s an Air Force Spec Ops guy (and supposedly a gun expert) not only makes a ridiculous mistake, but does so in excruciating detail: “Roberto took a Glock 19 from an open case, loaded it, and turned it around, offering it to Naomi handle [sic] first… ‘You’ve got a twelve-shot [sic] magazine, a trigger safety here, and a thumb lock [sic] over there. You need to flip both of them [sic] to pull the trigger. Once you’ve pulled, each shot requires another pull, but the safeties won’t re-engage unless you take your finger off the trigger.’”
Now, forget for a moment the misuse of “handle” to mean grip, forget the fact that the Glock 19 doesn’t have a twelve-round magazine, and ignore the totally unsafe gun handling (loading the gun, flipping it around so the muzzle faces himself, then handing the loaded gun to someone). The gun is a Glock, and the best-selling pistol in America, the Glock 19 (so tens of millions of Americans instantly notice the mistake). I’ve never owned a Glock myself, but everyone knows – everyone except author David Koepp and his editors, apparently – Glocks don’t have any manual safeties! None at all. There are no models of Glocks that have manual safeties. For the USAF Special Ops protagonist to claim that a Glock has not one but two manual safeties, and that “You need to flip both of them to pull the trigger” is the most ridiculous gun mistake I’ve ever seen in a book, and I’ve seen some doozies! Not only do Glocks have no safeties, but there are also no handguns from any manufacturer that have two safeties that you have to “flip” off. Then to further write that the safeties will “re-engage” as soon as “you take your finger off the trigger” is beyond ludicrous, because there is no handgun in which a manual safety will “re-engage” as soon as “you take your finger off the trigger.” It would be total idiocy to design any gun with safeties that would “re-engage” as soon as “you take your finger off the trigger,” and again, Glocks have no manual safeties at all. Everyone knows that. The Glock 19 was the best-selling pistol in America in 2020, and everyone knows Glocks have no manual safeties – everyone except author David Koepp and his incompetent editors! With tens of millions of Americans owning Glocks, you’d think the author could have just talked to one of the tens of millions of Americans who own one, rather than just making up fake, nonexistent safeties.
While I was reading page 313 over and over, trying to figure out how the heck David Koepp could have made such an obvious mistake, and in excruciating detail, especially when his protagonist was supposed to be an Air Force Special Ops guy who’s an expert on weapons. I looked up the Wikipedia entry for Glock. First, the Wikipedia entry pointed out that the Glock 19 was the best-selling pistol on Gunbroker in 2020, so you’d think the author could have seem that and just talked to one of the tens of millions of Americans who own one or the hundreds of millions of Americans who have heard of Glocks, but the author chose not to. It’s obvious the author just looked up the Wikipedia entry instead, but he was so ignorant about guns that he totally misunderstood the Wikipedia entry that he was reading, and also looked at the Wikipedia diagram of a Glock and misunderstood the picture he was seeing. When he saw the Wikipedia diagram of a Glock, he mistakenly thought that the slide-lock (which locks the gun open after the last shot) release lever was a safety lever. It’s not. He missed the clear text saying, “Glock pistols lack a traditional on-off safety lever,” and then he read the section about the Glock’s internal safeties (which are simply to prevent an accidental firing if the gun is dropped) and thought they were talking about external safeties! Wikipedia says, “the three safety mechanisms are automatically disengaged one after the other when the trigger is squeezed, and are automatically reactivated when the trigger is released,” but Wikipedia is talking about internal safeties that prevent a gun from firing if dropped, not external safeties, not manual safeties! Let this be a lesson to writers: you should never use Wikipedia for research if you are totally ignorant about the topic of the Wikipedia article, or you will misunderstand the Wikipedia article, and your ignorance will come through in your writing.
Phew, now that I got David Koepp’s most glaringly obvious gun mistake out of the way (page 313),
Then there was page 325, where the author has the recoil of a Heckler & Koch 9mm machine pistol being so severe that it causes paralyzing back injury to the man firing it! Then there’s page 347, where David Koepp writes about bullets “sparking off” a metal surface, something that only happens in Hollywood movies (unless someone is shooting titanium-tipped bullets, which are extremely rare and only useful for target shooting). Then there are pages 354-355, where the author writes that the protagonist “heard their gun go dry with a series of soft clicks,” something that cannot happen with real guns, only in Hollywood movies. Then there are the multiple places in the book where David Koepp calls a gun’s grip its “handle” and its magazine a “clip” (FYI, guns don’t have clips, unless you’re talking about a WWII era M-1 Garand or a WW-1 era bolt-action).
The moral of this book review is a lesson to writers: when you have a protagonist who is an Air Force Special Ops guy, you must know what you’re writing about, so you have to do just a teensy-weensy amount of research, something beyond reading Wikipedia articles that you don’t understand or watching Hollywood movies that get all the facts wrong. Now I see that David Koepp is a screenwriter, not a novelist, and that explains a lot – it explains why he seems to get his gun "facts" from Hollywood movies.
July 13, 2019
Controversial romance: False, defamatory, and libelous claims about my protagonist, Pran Gilamondson
Below is a statement from the protagonist of Fortress of Gold and Magic Teacher's Son, Pran Gilamondson:
I, Pran Gilamondson, must rebut the false, defamatory, and libelous claim that I (Pran Gilamondson) am a pedophile who engaged in "pedophile type encounters." I am now reviewing my legal options to get these false, defamatory, and libelous statements about me taken down from the website where they were anonymously posted. The anonymous person lied about the age of my two love interests -- they're both over seventeen, not twelve as the reviewer falsely claimed -- and also lied about my age (I'm sixteen, not seventeen as they claimed)! How can I possibly be a "pedophile" when both of my love interests are older than me? That's absurd, false, defamatory, and libelous, so I am reviewing my legal options (any lawyers reading this? If so, please read to the end).
In total, the anonymous Internet troll posted six lies about me (6, count 'em) in just four sentences in their false, defamatory, and libelous online post.
The first two lies were:
(1) My age (I'm 16, not 17)
(2) The age of my love interests, who are both 17 or older, and since I'm 16, I can't possibly be a "pedophile" for falling in love with people older than me, so it is libelous to claim that I am.
(3) The third lie claims that we were sexually "fooling around" when all we ever did was kiss, hold hands, and hug. It does not matter how old you are to kiss, hold hands and hug (rumor has it that some parents have even been known to hug their children, LOL). We never saw each other nude, and we frankly never even commented on the other person's body, because we are attracted to each other for their personality and their face, not their body! It is a tame, chaste romance, a sweet, innocent romance, not sexual, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. Who knows where it will lead in the future, but so far it has always been a sweet innocent, nonsexual love.
(4) The fourth lie, the most defamatory and libelous, calls my holding hands and kissing my love interest "pedophile encounters", when in fact we were both over age 16, the age of consent is 16 in the state where we kissed, so we were both above the age of consent, the other person is older than me (not younger, older!) and again, we never did more than kiss, which is not illegal no matter how old you are!
(Are any lawyers out there reading this so far? Keep reading please, so you can tell me if I have a legal case to have these false, defamatory, and libelous comments removed from the Internet, or if my status makes me unable to do so).
(5) The fifth lie, which is a real whopper, is that in the documentary written about my adventures on Earth (Fortress of Gold, Book 2 of the Magicians Gold series), the romance "was not needed to further the plot or for character development." On the contrary, the romance was ESSENTIAL to the plot and the character development! It's a sweet and innocent first-love and coming-of-age story, as described in the editorial review by Reader's Favorite (a coveted five-star review). Without the romance, Fortress of Gold would just be a simple heist story, plus magic. Without the romance, both of the main characters would be flat characters, without the kind of emotions and feelings you'd expect in a young-adult coming-of-age story, which is also a story of first love, in all its confusing and complicated forms.
6) The sixth lie is that the five false statements above somehow make Fortress of Gold "Inappropriate for young adult readers" (False. It's suitable for ages 13 and up, perhaps younger).
As for the ages of the characters involved in the romance in Fortress of Gold, it's the same age difference as in the Twilight books, which were runaway bestsellers, and the Twilight movies , which were blockbuster Hollywood movies!
Let's compare Twilight to Fortress of Gold, point by point, shall we?
(SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FIND OUT WHO FALLS IN LOVE WITH WHOM IN Fortress of Gold, THEN ONLY READ THE "Twilight" DESCRIPTIONS BELOW, NOT THE "Fortress of Gold" DESCRIPTIONS BELOW)
1) TWILIGHT: A love triangle between a 17-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and an eternally-young vampire who is over a century old.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: A love triangle between a 17-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, and an eternally-young Magician who is over a century old. Sounds similar so far? Exactly!
2) TWILIGHT: The century-old vampire stalks the teenage girl wherever she goes, sneaks into her bedroom while she's sleeping to spy on her while she sleeps, manipulates her, physically abuses her, regularly contemplates killing her, and threatens her that he'll most likely kill her if he stays in the same school as her (that would be a "red-flag alert" in any high school these days). Bella thinks, Oh that's okay, Edward, I will just internalize your abuse as my fault. After all, you're a man so you must be right.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: Each character in the relationship cares about the other's feelings more than their own, and would never do anything to hurt the other emotionally, even if it costs them their own happiness. There is no stalking, no physical abuse, no threats to kill the other person, and no manipulating the other person.
3) TWILIGHT: the century-old vampire has wild, furniture-breaking, bedroom-destroying sex with the seventeen-year-old girl. As soon as Jacob turns sixteen, he runs around half-naked all the time, even in the movies, and yet nobody minded an underage boy running around topless (except my fellow Mormons, but that’s another story. The Twilight author is also Mormon, as am I).
FORTRESS OF GOLD: There is absolutely no sex, only hand-holding, hugging, and kissing. Nobody gets naked, and nobody even wants to see the other naked. Nobody comments on anyone's body. It's a chaste romance, except for the kissing and hugging.
4) TWILIGHT: A sixteen-year-old boy (Jacob Black) falls in love at first sight with a newborn baby girl (Renesmee) and decides he's going to marry her, on the very day she was born! Yes, Jacob saw a newborn baby and immediately decided he was going to marry her. Did any reviewers call that a "pedophile type encounter"? Why not? "Because it's a werewolf thing," Twilight fans will tell you. Okay, that's fair, considering Twilight is fantasy, but Twilight is also billed as young-adult fantasy, and doesn't that sound like too much of a pedophile theme for a young-adult novel, having, a sixteen-year-old propose marriage to a newborn baby girl on the day she was born? Thank God there's nothing like that in Fortress of Gold, or it might be controversial! Oh wait, Fortress of Gold is controversial now, because of an anonymous online troll's lies.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: A sixteen-year-old boy (Pran) finally admits to himself that he and Jelal fell in love almost at first sight way back in the first novel, Magic Teacher's Son. However, both of them are over sixteen, so what's the big deal, their gender? Come on, on Earth it's the year 2019 for Pete's sake, so join the 21st century, don't be a homophobic bigot. Did you know that LGBT teenagers are committing suicide almost every day in America due to such bigotry? It's sad that the Kingdom of Eldor is more tolerant in their early 19th century, agrarian world than America is in its 21st century, cosmopolitan world.
5) TWILIGHT: Purely heterosexual romance, although it's an abusive relationship between a stalker and his victim, whom he is constantly thinking about murdering.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: A mixture of heterosexual romance and gay romance, none of it abusive, as the protagonist (Pran) discovers that he's either bisexual or bi-romantic in this sweet, innocent, coming-of-age, first-love, young-adult fantasy novel. The other teenage characters are mercifully understanding and accepting about Pran having romantic feelings towards both a girl and a boy. One adult character is not quite as quick to catch on to what's happening, but he soon overcomes his shock and comes to accept it as well.
Below are some comments from my author, David Harten Watson, who wrote the two documentary novels about me (Pran Gilamondson). Dave says,
"One lesson teenagers can learn from the novel Fortress of Gold is that being true to yourself and coming out as a teen doesn't have to be a life-shattering, or worse yet, life-ending experience. This lesson be beneficial, even therapeutic to today's LGBT teens, who have a high suicide rate. It's a lesson that is vital for LGBT teens in my own church, the LDS (Mormon) Church, because LGBT Mormon teens are suffering from an epidemic of suicide that was addressed by the HBO documentary by Dan Reynolds (lead singer of Imagine Dragons) titled Believer.
"I should not have to apologize for allowing the characters in Fortress of Gold to make their own decisions and choose to love whomever they choose. I did not plan the gay romance (I planned for Pran, the 16-year-old boy to end up with Vitina, the 17-year-old girl), but once the romance between Pran and Jelal happened, I realized it was true to both boys' nature, that this is what would make them happy. Everyone deserves a chance at happiness, even fictional characters, and the only chance for both Pran and Jelal to be happy was for the two boys to come to accept the love that they so clearly felt for each other ever since the first novel, Magic Teacher's Son. Go back and re-read the first novel, Magic Teacher's Son, and it will become clear that Pran and Jelal always loved each other, but Pran was unwilling to admit it, even to himself, until Jelal gave him the opportunity to express his true feelings. The relationship between Pran and Jelal is true love, there is nothing sexual about it, and I refuse to apologize for it!
"Even though the age difference is the same in the Twilight series as it is in Fortress of Gold, I've never heard anyone call the romance in Twilight "pedophile type encounters" not even when the century-old vampire in the Twilight novels had wild, furniture-breaking, bedroom-wrecking sex with the teenage protagonist, unlike Fortress of Gold, in which they merely kiss! Also, in the Twilight series Edward was a creepy, misogynistic, abusive stalker who not only followed Bella around surreptitiously, but even sneaked into the teenage girl's bedroom to watch her while she slept, and Jacob Black, when he was sixteen years old, ran around half-naked all the time. None of my characters are stalkers like Edward, or exhibitionists like Jacob, or misogynistic abusers like Edward, so a movie version of Fortress of Gold would be rated PG.
"Note: I happened to like the Twilight novels and movies, so I am not saying any of this to denigrate the Twilight series, just to point out that Fortress of Gold is better for younger audiences than the Twilight series is. Fortress of Gold is much more innocent, tamer, less risqué, less violent, less abusive to women, and less misogynistic than the Twilight series, by any measure! The main difference is that Twilight had a heterosexual romance, and Fortress of Gold has both heterosexual and gay romance, and a diverse cast of characters including a gay character, a bisexual character, and heterosexual characters, as well as people of color, disabled American veterans, and people from other cultures, nations, and kingdoms."
BELOW IS PRAN SPEAKING AGAIN:
Now here's a link to the false, defamatory, and libelous online post about me, Pran Gilamondson, that used six lies to falsely claim that my first true love, my love for Jelal, who is actually older than me, somehow makes me a "pedophile." Please go to this web page and counter that anonymous post about me with the truth! Read the book about me, Fortress of Gold, judge for yourself, and counter this libelous troll's lies with the truth! https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
Compare that false, defamatory, lying review to the review by Reader's Favorite, which recognized that the love story in Fortress of Gold is a sweet and innocent romance, so Reader's Favorite said so in their 5-star review, which you can read here: https://readersfavorite.com/book-revi...Fortress of GoldFortress of Gold
I, Pran Gilamondson, must rebut the false, defamatory, and libelous claim that I (Pran Gilamondson) am a pedophile who engaged in "pedophile type encounters." I am now reviewing my legal options to get these false, defamatory, and libelous statements about me taken down from the website where they were anonymously posted. The anonymous person lied about the age of my two love interests -- they're both over seventeen, not twelve as the reviewer falsely claimed -- and also lied about my age (I'm sixteen, not seventeen as they claimed)! How can I possibly be a "pedophile" when both of my love interests are older than me? That's absurd, false, defamatory, and libelous, so I am reviewing my legal options (any lawyers reading this? If so, please read to the end).
In total, the anonymous Internet troll posted six lies about me (6, count 'em) in just four sentences in their false, defamatory, and libelous online post.
The first two lies were:
(1) My age (I'm 16, not 17)
(2) The age of my love interests, who are both 17 or older, and since I'm 16, I can't possibly be a "pedophile" for falling in love with people older than me, so it is libelous to claim that I am.
(3) The third lie claims that we were sexually "fooling around" when all we ever did was kiss, hold hands, and hug. It does not matter how old you are to kiss, hold hands and hug (rumor has it that some parents have even been known to hug their children, LOL). We never saw each other nude, and we frankly never even commented on the other person's body, because we are attracted to each other for their personality and their face, not their body! It is a tame, chaste romance, a sweet, innocent romance, not sexual, and anyone who claims otherwise is lying. Who knows where it will lead in the future, but so far it has always been a sweet innocent, nonsexual love.
(4) The fourth lie, the most defamatory and libelous, calls my holding hands and kissing my love interest "pedophile encounters", when in fact we were both over age 16, the age of consent is 16 in the state where we kissed, so we were both above the age of consent, the other person is older than me (not younger, older!) and again, we never did more than kiss, which is not illegal no matter how old you are!
(Are any lawyers out there reading this so far? Keep reading please, so you can tell me if I have a legal case to have these false, defamatory, and libelous comments removed from the Internet, or if my status makes me unable to do so).
(5) The fifth lie, which is a real whopper, is that in the documentary written about my adventures on Earth (Fortress of Gold, Book 2 of the Magicians Gold series), the romance "was not needed to further the plot or for character development." On the contrary, the romance was ESSENTIAL to the plot and the character development! It's a sweet and innocent first-love and coming-of-age story, as described in the editorial review by Reader's Favorite (a coveted five-star review). Without the romance, Fortress of Gold would just be a simple heist story, plus magic. Without the romance, both of the main characters would be flat characters, without the kind of emotions and feelings you'd expect in a young-adult coming-of-age story, which is also a story of first love, in all its confusing and complicated forms.
6) The sixth lie is that the five false statements above somehow make Fortress of Gold "Inappropriate for young adult readers" (False. It's suitable for ages 13 and up, perhaps younger).
As for the ages of the characters involved in the romance in Fortress of Gold, it's the same age difference as in the Twilight books, which were runaway bestsellers, and the Twilight movies , which were blockbuster Hollywood movies!
Let's compare Twilight to Fortress of Gold, point by point, shall we?
(SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU DON'T WANT TO FIND OUT WHO FALLS IN LOVE WITH WHOM IN Fortress of Gold, THEN ONLY READ THE "Twilight" DESCRIPTIONS BELOW, NOT THE "Fortress of Gold" DESCRIPTIONS BELOW)
1) TWILIGHT: A love triangle between a 17-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and an eternally-young vampire who is over a century old.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: A love triangle between a 17-year-old girl, a 16-year-old boy, and an eternally-young Magician who is over a century old. Sounds similar so far? Exactly!
2) TWILIGHT: The century-old vampire stalks the teenage girl wherever she goes, sneaks into her bedroom while she's sleeping to spy on her while she sleeps, manipulates her, physically abuses her, regularly contemplates killing her, and threatens her that he'll most likely kill her if he stays in the same school as her (that would be a "red-flag alert" in any high school these days). Bella thinks, Oh that's okay, Edward, I will just internalize your abuse as my fault. After all, you're a man so you must be right.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: Each character in the relationship cares about the other's feelings more than their own, and would never do anything to hurt the other emotionally, even if it costs them their own happiness. There is no stalking, no physical abuse, no threats to kill the other person, and no manipulating the other person.
3) TWILIGHT: the century-old vampire has wild, furniture-breaking, bedroom-destroying sex with the seventeen-year-old girl. As soon as Jacob turns sixteen, he runs around half-naked all the time, even in the movies, and yet nobody minded an underage boy running around topless (except my fellow Mormons, but that’s another story. The Twilight author is also Mormon, as am I).
FORTRESS OF GOLD: There is absolutely no sex, only hand-holding, hugging, and kissing. Nobody gets naked, and nobody even wants to see the other naked. Nobody comments on anyone's body. It's a chaste romance, except for the kissing and hugging.
4) TWILIGHT: A sixteen-year-old boy (Jacob Black) falls in love at first sight with a newborn baby girl (Renesmee) and decides he's going to marry her, on the very day she was born! Yes, Jacob saw a newborn baby and immediately decided he was going to marry her. Did any reviewers call that a "pedophile type encounter"? Why not? "Because it's a werewolf thing," Twilight fans will tell you. Okay, that's fair, considering Twilight is fantasy, but Twilight is also billed as young-adult fantasy, and doesn't that sound like too much of a pedophile theme for a young-adult novel, having, a sixteen-year-old propose marriage to a newborn baby girl on the day she was born? Thank God there's nothing like that in Fortress of Gold, or it might be controversial! Oh wait, Fortress of Gold is controversial now, because of an anonymous online troll's lies.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: A sixteen-year-old boy (Pran) finally admits to himself that he and Jelal fell in love almost at first sight way back in the first novel, Magic Teacher's Son. However, both of them are over sixteen, so what's the big deal, their gender? Come on, on Earth it's the year 2019 for Pete's sake, so join the 21st century, don't be a homophobic bigot. Did you know that LGBT teenagers are committing suicide almost every day in America due to such bigotry? It's sad that the Kingdom of Eldor is more tolerant in their early 19th century, agrarian world than America is in its 21st century, cosmopolitan world.
5) TWILIGHT: Purely heterosexual romance, although it's an abusive relationship between a stalker and his victim, whom he is constantly thinking about murdering.
FORTRESS OF GOLD: A mixture of heterosexual romance and gay romance, none of it abusive, as the protagonist (Pran) discovers that he's either bisexual or bi-romantic in this sweet, innocent, coming-of-age, first-love, young-adult fantasy novel. The other teenage characters are mercifully understanding and accepting about Pran having romantic feelings towards both a girl and a boy. One adult character is not quite as quick to catch on to what's happening, but he soon overcomes his shock and comes to accept it as well.
Below are some comments from my author, David Harten Watson, who wrote the two documentary novels about me (Pran Gilamondson). Dave says,
"One lesson teenagers can learn from the novel Fortress of Gold is that being true to yourself and coming out as a teen doesn't have to be a life-shattering, or worse yet, life-ending experience. This lesson be beneficial, even therapeutic to today's LGBT teens, who have a high suicide rate. It's a lesson that is vital for LGBT teens in my own church, the LDS (Mormon) Church, because LGBT Mormon teens are suffering from an epidemic of suicide that was addressed by the HBO documentary by Dan Reynolds (lead singer of Imagine Dragons) titled Believer.
"I should not have to apologize for allowing the characters in Fortress of Gold to make their own decisions and choose to love whomever they choose. I did not plan the gay romance (I planned for Pran, the 16-year-old boy to end up with Vitina, the 17-year-old girl), but once the romance between Pran and Jelal happened, I realized it was true to both boys' nature, that this is what would make them happy. Everyone deserves a chance at happiness, even fictional characters, and the only chance for both Pran and Jelal to be happy was for the two boys to come to accept the love that they so clearly felt for each other ever since the first novel, Magic Teacher's Son. Go back and re-read the first novel, Magic Teacher's Son, and it will become clear that Pran and Jelal always loved each other, but Pran was unwilling to admit it, even to himself, until Jelal gave him the opportunity to express his true feelings. The relationship between Pran and Jelal is true love, there is nothing sexual about it, and I refuse to apologize for it!
"Even though the age difference is the same in the Twilight series as it is in Fortress of Gold, I've never heard anyone call the romance in Twilight "pedophile type encounters" not even when the century-old vampire in the Twilight novels had wild, furniture-breaking, bedroom-wrecking sex with the teenage protagonist, unlike Fortress of Gold, in which they merely kiss! Also, in the Twilight series Edward was a creepy, misogynistic, abusive stalker who not only followed Bella around surreptitiously, but even sneaked into the teenage girl's bedroom to watch her while she slept, and Jacob Black, when he was sixteen years old, ran around half-naked all the time. None of my characters are stalkers like Edward, or exhibitionists like Jacob, or misogynistic abusers like Edward, so a movie version of Fortress of Gold would be rated PG.
"Note: I happened to like the Twilight novels and movies, so I am not saying any of this to denigrate the Twilight series, just to point out that Fortress of Gold is better for younger audiences than the Twilight series is. Fortress of Gold is much more innocent, tamer, less risqué, less violent, less abusive to women, and less misogynistic than the Twilight series, by any measure! The main difference is that Twilight had a heterosexual romance, and Fortress of Gold has both heterosexual and gay romance, and a diverse cast of characters including a gay character, a bisexual character, and heterosexual characters, as well as people of color, disabled American veterans, and people from other cultures, nations, and kingdoms."
BELOW IS PRAN SPEAKING AGAIN:
Now here's a link to the false, defamatory, and libelous online post about me, Pran Gilamondson, that used six lies to falsely claim that my first true love, my love for Jelal, who is actually older than me, somehow makes me a "pedophile." Please go to this web page and counter that anonymous post about me with the truth! Read the book about me, Fortress of Gold, judge for yourself, and counter this libelous troll's lies with the truth! https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-re...
Compare that false, defamatory, lying review to the review by Reader's Favorite, which recognized that the love story in Fortress of Gold is a sweet and innocent romance, so Reader's Favorite said so in their 5-star review, which you can read here: https://readersfavorite.com/book-revi...Fortress of GoldFortress of Gold
December 31, 2018
Woke up to find myself in the year 1950!
Checking my calendar: is today New Year's Eve 2018, or 1950?
Did I somehow wake up in the year 1950 through some bizarre tear in the time-space continuum causing a time-travel event? Do I have to worry about how to get "Back to the Future" like Marty McFly?
Why am I suddenly wondering what year it is? Because today, a homophobic bigot turned out to be the first reviewer of the audiobook version of my new YA fantasy novel Fortress of Gold (Book 2 of the Magicians Gold series, and a sequel to Magic Teacher's Son). The novel Fortress of Gold has no sex, violence, or profanity, so it would be PG-rated except for the fact that it has two boys kissing, which I'm willing to grant you might make the book PG-13. However, just because of two boys kissing, this reviewer told me he considered Fortress of Gold suitable only for adults ages 21+ and explained that as the reason he rated it only 2 stars. Fortress of Gold contains no sex, violence (except accidents), or profanity (except two Biblical swear words), but this reviewer told me in an email explaining why he rated it 2 stars without bothering to explain why in a review,
"Several situations were definitely 'adults only'. Giving it a rating of ages 21+"
Yes, he said it's "adults only... ages 21+" just because it has two boys kissing! He went on to say, "Perhaps in maybe 5-10 years it would garner a larger audience." That's why I had to check my calendar this morning to see if this is New Year's Eve 2018 or 1950!
FYI, I did my research before and during writing Fortress of Gold; I read lots of young-adult romances including YA gay romances, but not a single YA gay romance novel that I've read is tamer than Fortress of Gold (they all contain kissing, and unlike my novel, most YA romances contain lots of actual sexual activity, too, not just kissing).
Now I'm even more worried about what members of my own LDS Church will think, because I'm Mormon, a member of arguably the most anti-gay religion in America! However, the great Mormon SF novelist Orson Scott Card had many LGBTQ characters in his early books, including gay protagonists. Orson Scott Card's gay characters did more than just kiss, and yet he's still considered a devout Mormon (perhaps our Church forgave him for having gay protagonists in his early novels because he came out against gay marriage, or perhaps he had to come out against gay marriage so our Church would forgive him for having gay characters in his novels, as it may be a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?)
What I want to know is, who gave Vice-President Mike Pence a review copy of my audiobook Fortress of Gold (and why is he emailing me under an assumed name)? Fess up, who let Mike Pence listen to my audiobook?
This audiobook listener also thinks it was too soon to mention such a sensitive political subject as the 2000 election in my book -- that was 18 years ago, but it's still too soon?
Please check out my new YA fantasy novel Fortress of Gold, which I still consider suitable for all ages, despite what one homophobic audiobook reviewer said on New Year's Eve 2018, which he seems to think is still 1950! Fortress of Gold is available in print and ebook as well as audiobook, see http://Pen-L.com/FortressOfGold.html
Did I somehow wake up in the year 1950 through some bizarre tear in the time-space continuum causing a time-travel event? Do I have to worry about how to get "Back to the Future" like Marty McFly?
Why am I suddenly wondering what year it is? Because today, a homophobic bigot turned out to be the first reviewer of the audiobook version of my new YA fantasy novel Fortress of Gold (Book 2 of the Magicians Gold series, and a sequel to Magic Teacher's Son). The novel Fortress of Gold has no sex, violence, or profanity, so it would be PG-rated except for the fact that it has two boys kissing, which I'm willing to grant you might make the book PG-13. However, just because of two boys kissing, this reviewer told me he considered Fortress of Gold suitable only for adults ages 21+ and explained that as the reason he rated it only 2 stars. Fortress of Gold contains no sex, violence (except accidents), or profanity (except two Biblical swear words), but this reviewer told me in an email explaining why he rated it 2 stars without bothering to explain why in a review,
"Several situations were definitely 'adults only'. Giving it a rating of ages 21+"
Yes, he said it's "adults only... ages 21+" just because it has two boys kissing! He went on to say, "Perhaps in maybe 5-10 years it would garner a larger audience." That's why I had to check my calendar this morning to see if this is New Year's Eve 2018 or 1950!
FYI, I did my research before and during writing Fortress of Gold; I read lots of young-adult romances including YA gay romances, but not a single YA gay romance novel that I've read is tamer than Fortress of Gold (they all contain kissing, and unlike my novel, most YA romances contain lots of actual sexual activity, too, not just kissing).
Now I'm even more worried about what members of my own LDS Church will think, because I'm Mormon, a member of arguably the most anti-gay religion in America! However, the great Mormon SF novelist Orson Scott Card had many LGBTQ characters in his early books, including gay protagonists. Orson Scott Card's gay characters did more than just kiss, and yet he's still considered a devout Mormon (perhaps our Church forgave him for having gay protagonists in his early novels because he came out against gay marriage, or perhaps he had to come out against gay marriage so our Church would forgive him for having gay characters in his novels, as it may be a question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?)
What I want to know is, who gave Vice-President Mike Pence a review copy of my audiobook Fortress of Gold (and why is he emailing me under an assumed name)? Fess up, who let Mike Pence listen to my audiobook?
This audiobook listener also thinks it was too soon to mention such a sensitive political subject as the 2000 election in my book -- that was 18 years ago, but it's still too soon?
Please check out my new YA fantasy novel Fortress of Gold, which I still consider suitable for all ages, despite what one homophobic audiobook reviewer said on New Year's Eve 2018, which he seems to think is still 1950! Fortress of Gold is available in print and ebook as well as audiobook, see http://Pen-L.com/FortressOfGold.html
