fiction – Gunpowder and Ink!

Leap the Dead – Release day!

Link is below.

Release day’s are so exciting. It’s the culmination of hours and hours of beating my keyboard. And now I get to watch and wait as reviews roll in.

And trust me, reviews are my very favorite thing about being an author.

A lot of authors say don’t read them.

But personally? I love ’em. It’s a direct response from the readers.

Sure, no two readers are the same. Opinions vary and such. And if 99 people out of 100 like something, there’s always one butt hole who will ruin it. So you kinda gotta take them with a grain of salt, but reading good reviews makes me happy inside. It means I did my job well. I entertained.

Actually, come to think of it. The only noticeably bad review I’ve ever received was on Goodreads for West of Prehistoric. Some fellow ‘author’… who writes poorly received lesbian romance…. hammered me for her not being able to finish the book because my main character wasn’t racist enough for the time period….

Sorry lady. I don’t write liberalism.

Anywho. I’m not bitter…

Her books are of wretched filth and have poor reviews. Mine are of toxic masculinity and have awesome reviews.

Suck it, loser.

Enjoy buying half a cup of Starbucks with your meager royalty checks. I’ll be over here ordering another case of military surplus 7.62 bullets.

I digress…

Leap the Dead is out. It’s awesome. It’s fun. Go get it and read it.

And leave a review. 🙂

https://amzn.to/4u1uoMF

Oh, and I forgot to mention.

West of Prehistoric is 99 cents this week. And that’s a steal of 118,000 words of awesomeness for a rock bottom price.

Get you some of that one as well.

Link below!

https://amzn.to/4aTOVtN

December 2025 – Update

The writing continues. I’m over 60% through writing the Leap The Dead. It’s going well, we get to explore Yeuhan Island in depth, and the Japanese Emperor’s sadistic Unit Thirty-Five. I’m having fun with that. And Trample The Weak is still doing REALLY well in sales. So I need to wrap that up…

My next project is up in the air though… I was going to write this series about two competing billionaires using mercenaries to retrieve artifacts of Christ.

But then I saw this $0 deal on Amazon for The Blood King by Matt James who is a fantastic writer and cover artists. (He does my cover art)

And danged if he didn’t write my book.

It’s so good, folks. I’m about 3/4’s of the way through, reading it in bits and pieces on my bathroom breaks at work. (heh) And I’m very, very impressed. I highly recommend it. He gets the ‘nerd lore’ down pat. I won’t say anything more than that, but it’s clever and historical and such.

Go buy it. The sequel, The False Prophet, is already out.

So, since Matt James wrote my series and all… it’s back to the drawing board.

Settling Prehistoric is still waiting. I’d love to go back to the world of Prehistoria and write about my favorite character of all time. But I’m going to have to re-read the books so I don’t goof it up after taking a year and a half off from the series.

And… that’s kinda it. I’ve a few small ideas that I’ve got to do some thinking on and see if I can expand them properly for a nice little series.

But we will see.

Hope you all had a glorious Thanksgiving with much giving of thanks to our Lord and Savior, and enjoyed your bountiful feasts on this conquered land.

Hasta la vista.

An easy request for you…

Trample the Weak is finished.

It goes to some readers for feedback this weekend.

And then….well….

If you haven’t followed the story – the publisher who contracted these WWII/Kaiju/Pacific Island/Marine books went under. Thus I’ve decided to try my hand at self publishing. With Amazon, KDP, Print on Demand, etc… the publishing world has changed greatly to where there is no longer a stigma to self-publishing. Instead it’s turned into a very viable way to get your books to your readers without the middle man (publishing house). This will be an experiment with a learning curve for me. And I’ve been spending a good amount of time reading how to do most of the craziness that is super intimidating to a first timer.

And this is where I need your help. To make this experiment work, I need you to follow me on social media(I’m on FB,Instagram, and now X) and/or ideally – send me your email address for the rare 1-2x a year “Up for Pre-order!” and “It’s Out Ohmygosh Buy it Now!”Email List.

The purpose for this is that a lot of social media has clamped down on free advertising. Even if you are a verified account. Because social media, looking at you Facebook, wants their money for advertising.

But nothing can clamp down on a Email List except for the individual hitting the unsubscribe button at their discretion.

Following this blog works if you want a lot of information. If you want a little, or don’t care about my writing updates or process, please send me your email for the Email List so you can find out about new releases. There’s a Contact option at the top of the blog.

In the near future, I should have a fancy pop-up on this website. But WordPress likes it’s money too and wants me to upgrade to Business to add a simple Email List plugin. -eyeroll- And unfortunately, I’ve a hard time justifying a $250/year expense for a single plug in. (I’ll be looking at other site hosts soon.)

So… a lot of information.

FB = https://www.facebook.com/AuthorErikTesterman/

Instagram = https://www.instagram.com/authoreriktesterman/

X = @ErikTesterman

Thanks friends.

Looking forward to putting this book in your hands!

Erik.

Trample the Weak – Back Book Blurb.

These are always fun to write. I typically do it as I’m rounding the final corner of the manuscript so it’s a cool milestone to hit. I’ve still another 12-15,000 words to write and then polishing, but I’ve been hitting about 1.5k words a day. Which is the best writing I’ve ever done in terms of sheer volume, and from what I’ve been churning out, I don’t think much editing will be needed.

I learned today that there are ‘over writers’ and ‘under writers’. Over Writers tend to be extremely verbose and write too much, while Under Writers will lean towards not being wordy enough in terms of description, dialogue, etc.

I’m definitely an Under Writer. If I had to choose, I’d prefer this anyways as it means when I go back to edit instead of cutting big chunks out, I’m adding to the story.

But anyways, I wrote the Back Book Blurb today.

Here it is. (Subject to change.)

***

Corporal Henry didn’t sign up for adventure.

He signed up to kill the enemy.

And as the Marines of the 2nd Division push back the Empire of Japan from their heavily fortified islands in the Pacific Ocean, he is given the chance when they are tasked with taking Yeuhan Island. A small island with an airfield vital for the coming invasion of mainland Japan.

It is there, underneath the sand and bodies, that a secret of the Imperial Japanese Army will be discovered hidden inside the island.

The Emperor’s Unit Thirty-Five.

A sadistic combination of fanatical scientists and soldiers, who search for the mysterious, the wonderous, and the unknown. Anything that will aid their empire in crushing the Americans.

On Yeuhan Island, they found kaiju.

And it is up to Corporal Henry and his small band of degenerate Marines to kill them all.

Or the tide will turn, and the war will be lost.

***

Coming soon.

Mid April 2025 Update

Trample the Weak – 75% finished.

Writing has been going extremely well the past few weeks. And I’m at the fun part in the book where the main characters are riding around in a Willys Jeep shooting kaiju with the pedestal mounted Browning Machine Gun.

So that’s exciting.

It’s like writing something out of a video game.

The book will probably be wrapped up in the next month or so and then the writing of Leap the Dead will start.

In other news, the publisher who had contracted for these books went out of business it appears. Their website has disappeared and they haven’t posted on FB in about a year and a half. Thus, I’m toying with the idea of self-publishing these two. I have this very rational fear of having all my eggs in one basket. (Or all my books with one publisher.) So I might as well learn a new skill set and make some bigger royalty percentages.

As for the West of Prehistoric series, I’ve got a rough idea for the next book. It’d be titled Settling Prehistoric and be all kinds of fun. I’ve set up some cool things in the previous books that I always wanted to go back and revisit.

In personal news, our Bear has turned ten! For an English Mastiff this is quite the milestone. As the Vet said during his checkup, he’s a ‘Super Senior’.

We had a small party for him and sang Happy Birthday. Then he promptly ate the cupcake WITH a candle in it.

Also, a shout out to Henry Rifles for one of their recent instagram posts. As you all know, Jedidiah Huckleberry Smith and his iconic 1886 rifle in .45-70 are a pivotal pair in my books.

So when this popped up, I was promptly tagged by a buddy.