For those of you who have purchased a print copy of PDF of Faction, thanks I really appreciate it... I've found myself the last few days just shaking my head at the positive response to Faction. I mean, did I want Faction to be a success? Of course! Did I want to sell copies? Um... yeah! I've been afraid, however, of what people reviewing the book would have to say about it. Four reviews have been posted so far and a fifth I know is on the way (probably a sixth, too). All of the reviewers have loved the concept and can't wait for the first issue to come out! (note to self, need to send final draft of issue 1 script to Arnie and Mike).
REVIEWS SO FAR:
http://forums.projectfanboy.com/showthread.php?t=3945
http://herospy.com/2009/faction-0-review/
http://makeitsomarketing.tripod.com/popularcultureblog/index.blog?from=20090805
http://interestingfodder.typepad.com/interesting_fodder/2009/08/faction-issue-0-promises-more-awesomeness-to-come.html
Get a copy:
Order direct - http://www.dimestoredistro.com/. Look up Faction, or item DSP-I09-F0. You can download for $2.00 or purchase the printed version for $3.50 plus postage BEFORE AUGUST 31st!
a. PRINT COPY - http://www.dimestoredistro.com/faction-0-2274.html
b. PDF DOWNLOAD - http://www.dimestoredistro.com/faction-0-dl-2275.html
OR go to your local comic book store and give them the below retailer information, explaining that you want them to carry the book and, well, hopefully they will! Make sure they place their orders ON OR BEFORE AUGUST 31st!
RETAILERS - There are two ways to get copies to your store.
1. Order from Haven directly by going to http://www.havendistro.com/, sign up, send a mail to Haven requesting to be set up as a retailer account, gather pre-orders from your store and then search for Faction to order. All orders must be turned in for Faction on or before AUGUST 31st! Issues will deliver in September.
2. Order from DimeStore directly by going to http://www.dimestoredistro.com/, sign up, send an email to DimeStore requesting to be set up as a retailer account, gather pre-orders from your store and then search for Faction DSP-I09-F0. Issues will deliver in September. a. PRINT COPY - http://www.dimestoredistro.com/faction-0-2274.html
Anyway, point is I'm just shocked when I shouldn't be. I've been confident in my writing for a while, but having people recognize it is a blessing... Well, not so much a blessing as a "phew thank GOD" moment. I would have been very bummed if they read the book and reviewed that it was garbage, you know? I didn't think it would hit that extreme, but not everyone can like everything, right? I can think of at least one person who doesn't like Faction... No names, but you know who you are! :P
OK, so I'm sharing some more on Acker today... I split this up over a few days last round to get people a little more info where Acker came from and such. Just to clear up a common question/comment from people who know something about the Marine Corps, there ARE medics in the Marine Special Forces. It's part of a 22 week training program in Ft. Bragg. There aren't many of them, but they're out there! It's 25 years in the future, so things are a little different with how the military operates, but I wouldn't change something as fundamental as the fact that in the field, Naval Corpsmen are the medics, not Marines. In Acker's case, Special Ops Medic is ok... Now that we have THAT out of the way!
My intent with the below is at some point to convert this into a full script for a one shot origin issue for Acker. I've been thinking a lot recently about how I'd like to play out the book and my feeling is that Faction should be generally linear, following Acker's path as much as possible. I may divert from time to time to give people a grander scale view of what's happening in the world, but it's Acker's story, not any other character's. The Knights are key players as are others (won't name names quite yet, but if you've seen some of the bios, you know), so we'll learn about them through exposure. I'd like to take things like Acker's origin, plances where people split paths for whatever reason, other little snippets of the Faction story which warrant it, etc, and actually put them in their own books. Honestly, I have another whole set of characters who may get their own book at some point, but one step at a time, right?!?!
One last thing before I put Acker's history on here... You've seen me post a TON of info on other projects... they have not gone away. Some of them are in the submission phase, waiting for word from publishers or just about ready to send to them. Books such as Unfiltered will be coming out pretty soon, other things are now printed or will be soon, and a lot of other ideas are boiling over. Since Faction is on sale now, though, hey, can you blame me for asking people to buy it?
Acker Kinney – I once thought that life was so complex; the things I did in life were never easy. I enlisted in the Marines the day of my 18th birthday… It was a present from me to me. I could have gone onto college and tried to become an officer, but with what was going on in the Middle East, I just couldn’t wait to go and do something with myself. The recruiter promised me I could be whatever I wanted to be in the Marines, so I said I wanted to be infantry. Boot camp wasn’t a breeze, but I did better in there than a lot of the grunts to my left and right.
Shortly after boot camp, we trained in the “deserts” of Camp Pendleton. We had classes on tactics, hand-to-hand combat, rifles, pistols, and pretty much anything we could get our hands on. We learned to identify ballistics by the sounds they made from over the hill or miles away. I’m betting I lost some of my hearing during that time, but of course it could have been when the boys and I headed out all over Southern California when we were given our limited time off. Some of the guys partied hard, tattooed anything not visible outside of their greens, and damn the torpedoes. People like me? Well, I won’t say I didn’t party, but it wasn’t quite as hard. I didn’t drink much, though I can remember, er partially remember a few crazy nights. I don’t smoke, and God help anyone who tried to do anything else if they got caught.
In those days, we all knew that we could end up shipped to a small base in Kansas or in the middle of the action in Iraq, Afghanistan, or someplace we haven’t even heard of to defend out freedom. In all of our training, some of the officers noticed I excelled in first aid. Suddenly I found that fewer and fewer of my classes were with the guys I had spent the past weeks and months training with. Triage and advanced first aid. While my friends were crawling through trenches and shooting tracer bullets into the night, I was practicing field dressing, crawling through smoke filled sand-traps to find an “injured” soldier. They had me diving into pools to “rescue” drowning soldiers in full gear, running miles carrying the normal field gear plus basic medical equipment, and praying every day that things would get easier.
After a couple of years and ranks later, I found myself in Ft. Bragg. In a 22 week program, the Marine Corps taught me to be a Special Operations Medic. I didn’t realize while I was there but later learned that I was, at 21, the youngest person to ever get through the training. You don’t get in the media for breaking Special Ops records in the military, but the service was proud, so I was proud.
The following years brought one constant – conflict. The war in the Middle East extended over various countries the longer the conflict went on. Eventually, the “official” conflict ended, but we were still out there fighting the good fight. After Bin Laden was killed, Aamir Al-Munajj took his place and named the entire world as devils and vowed to destroy us all. Then it got quiet… We looked throughout the middle east for Al-Munajj’s location. He goaded us with videos proclaiming the end was near for their enemies, but nothing came.
On Sept 11, 2021, twenty years after the devastating attacks on the Twin Towers, the Pentagon, Al-Munajj’s new al-Qaeda struck again, the largest coordinated attack in history. Bombs went off worldwide, planes collided with buildings, trains crashed, busses flipped, key politicians were assassinated, and chaos ensued on 12:01 am GMT Sept 11, 2021. For every attempt that was thwarted, ten were successful. There was not the manpower or intelligence available to prevent everything that happened. When the attacks struck, I was a “young” master sergeant training the next generation of Special Forces medics in Kansas. I didn’t find out until that night that my parents died when a bus exploded in London where they were on vacation. I wasn’t married, I didn’t have kids, I didn’t even have a serious relationship besides friends in the service. Suddenly the military was the only family I had left.
At 37, I told my CO I wanted to be back out in the field. They PT’d me, gave me a clean bill of health, and within a week I was on a plane bound for Tel Aviv. The faces around me on the plane were a mixture of fresh faces and tired devil dogs like me, angry and wanting to hit something. For four years, we fought bands of terrorists, the children of those killed back when we first captured Saddam Hussein and went after Bin Laden and those new to the cause, emboldened by Al-Munajj’s major offensive, humbling the planet. These terrorists were worse than the generation before. Someone was funding them, giving them weapons, armor, and vehicles they had no right to have in their possession in the middle of the desert. Our tech was better, but they knew the terrain. We couldn’t say our training was better because they had years to prepare. It was a slaughter on both sides. Thousands died on both sides, allies from all parts of the globe died together, their blood spilling into the dry sand. On Friday June 13, 2025, everything changed…
TO BE CONTINUED IN FACTION 0...
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