Authors Jacob & H.P. Holo
Hey, Holo fans! 😀 The Blasters and Blades Podcast invited me on to chat Monster Punk Horizon, and it was one of the most fun interviews I’ve ever done.
If you’d like a deeper look into the Monster Punk Horizon universe, or just a general good time, give it a listen! 😄
Also, if you enjoyed what you heard, make sure to follow them on Anchor.fm, Facebook, and Twitter, and if you really enjoyed what you heard, you can support the show here! 😄
Join H.P. on the Blasters and Blades Podcast as she chats her first new series in years, GameLit Fantasy Adventure Monster Punk Horizon!
It’s almost time for Monster Punk Horizon to be unleashed upon the world, and H.P. has lots of fun stuff planned this week to lead up to and beyond the release day (Thursday, October 14th, BTW)! 😀
Be sure to follow us on Facebook, YouTube, and Twitch to keep up with all she has planned! Each weeknight for the next two weeks, she’ll host an online video chat exploring a different corner of the Monster Punk Horizon world, taking reader questions – and sometimes giving out signed prizes! 😮 Check out the schedule below to see what’s in store. (Links below go to YouTube and will be updated as available.)
And of course, don’t forget that you can preorder Monster Punk Horizon now on Amazon – or read it starting Thursday on Kindle Unlimited!
Hey, Holo fans! Things are looking a little different over here – in a good way!
After 7 years publishing (Has it really been that long? 😲) we decided our website was in need of an upgrade, and now, thanks to ModFarm Design, we’d like to welcome you to this glorious, shiny, new hub for all things Holo Writing.
Here you’ll find complete details on all our books and series – from summaries to audio samples to review snippets – as well as our blog, newsletter signup, swag shop, and an easy-to-use contact page if you just want to say hi. 😊
Also, author pals: If you’re in the market for a website or website glow-up, Rob at ModFarm is amazing. He’s attentive to what authors want from their sites and determined to make it happen, customer service is near-instant, and site-building in general was pretty quick. The whole design experience gets a big thumbs-up from us! 👍
All that said, welcome to the new website! 😄 Drop in and explore a while!
If you’ve been following us these past two weeks, you’ve seen the first two books in my new series, Monster Punk Horizon, and now Jacob and I are delighted to bring you the cover reveal for Book 3! 😀
Audio Release Date TBD
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Losing a trusty weapon is like losing a close friend, and Pix’s beloved capacitor blade is on its last legs.
Fortunately, she has a plan to craft a new, even better weapon. Unfortunately, her plan involves hunting down a vicious migrating monster that has more teeth than some hunters have brain cells. Even worse, this new creature has riled up the apex monster of Skull Harbor, and both of them are spoiling for a fight.
But Pix has one thing they don’t: a party foolhardy enough to take them both on.
She’ll need all the help she can get, because it’ll take all their combined luck, skill, and oversized weapons to put down these two monsters. But her friends have her back. After all, there’s awesome loot to be had!
If they manage to survive…
Excess is unique from the previous two Monster Punk Horizon books in that it’s a collaboration between me and Jacob!
While I was writing Book 1, Jacob became so fascinated with the world he watched me create that he wanted to write a story in it – and since he was between books in the Gordian Division series at the time, he took the lore I’d already established in Book 1, created a new monster, and churned out the rough draft of Book 3 before I’d even started Book 2! 😄 I then went over it after I’d finished Book 2 and H.P.-ified the parts Jacob had marked “write whatever here.”
Excess is slightly different in style, too, in that it follows Pix more than Jaz – which is to say, it follows Jacob’s Monster Hunter character instead of my Monster Hunter character. 😉
As you may have guessed from the vibe of the covers, one of Monster Punk Horizon‘s original inspirations came from our nights playing Monster Hunter World together. It’s not quite fanfiction; in fact, my first step when designing the series was to create a world whose basic mechanics and essential history were independent of the various fictions that inspired it, but that still allowed me to pay homage to those fictions and to insert Easter Eggs for fans.
Even so, our gameplay experience in Monster Hunter World is very much in the DNA of the Monster Punk Horizon series, and particularly in how Pix and Jaz came to be in the first place. Jacob and I have wildly different play styles, his very strategic and mine very … not. 😆 Plus, when I play video games, I have a tendency to invent headcanons totally separate from the lore of whatever game I’m playing – especially in games with stories as simple as Monster Hunter World‘s.
Because of that, Pix and Jaz had personalities and backstories before I even knew I was going to write Monster Punk Horizon, solely because I needed a way to entertain myself during loading screens, and making up stuff about our player characters was a fun way to do it. It’s no coincidence, then, that Jaz is the Leeroy Jenkins of the pair (me), while Pix is the methodical gamer who likes to go in with a plan (Jacob). Stories told from Jaz‘s perspective – that is, Books 1 and 2 – are thus rather more chaotic than stories told from Pix‘s perspective, which I think brings a nice balance to the series as a whole. After all, even worlds as crazy as this one need a break from the craziness every now and then. 😊
Excess (Monster Punk Horizon #3) is set to release on Kindle Unlimited this December, and is already available for preorder.
And again, if you’d like to be one of the lucky people to read it early, be sure to join the Pug Scouts – our VIP Street Team! 😀 I’ll be sending out eARCs soon, and all you have to do in exchange for your free book is post a review once the book is live!
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
Last week, you saw a peek at Book 1 in my new GameLit adventure comedy series, Monster Punk Horizon. 😀
Now, since the second is going to crash-land soon after its release – a month, to be exact – here’s the cover reveal for Book 2! 😮
Audio Release Date TBA
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An epic convention. An epic cosplay. An epic engagement. It was the best night of Kaito’s life—until the ground opened up beneath him.
Well, technically, a portal did. Either way, it sucked.
Now, trapped in another world with rampaging monsters, he’ll have to learn to survive. Fortunately, this world is conveniently similar to his favorite video game. And he’s got monster hunting experts (?) Pix and Jaz to show him the ropes.
With their help, he might last long enough to find a way home.
But if not, at least he’ll have fun hunting monsters before he dies!
Last week, you met my series protagonists Pix and Jaz, two girls who just want to hunt monsters and pay off their college loans. They were born and raised in the monster-dominated world under the Dazzling Skies, so named because its sky is taken up by thousands of glittering portals to other worlds, which constantly dump interesting loot and monsters for them to hunt –
And sometimes people for them to save.
Which makes the Dazzling Skies a perfect setting for an isekai story.
If you’re unfamiliar with the word – “isekai” is a Japanese term meaning “different world” and refers specifically to light novels and anime in which a character is transported from their familiar world into a fantasy world, often with distinct video game trappings.
I was indifferent to the isekai genre when I first encountered it several years ago, but as the genre developed and began to play with and parody its own tropes, I grew to love it – especially Overlord, The Rising of the Shield Hero and – I kid you not – Reborn as a Vending Machine, Now I Wander the Dungeon (Review here, btw! 😀).
And, while I hadn’t set out to write isekai stories at the inception of this series, I quickly realized that the basic structure of the world I’d set up lent itself well to such stories. This structure, in turn, would allow me to show the bizarre world of the Dazzling Skies from an outsider’s perspective.
Book 2‘s protagonist, Kaito, is from a strange world himself – a far-future version of our world where everyone has hyper-advanced biotech altering their perception of reality, and where a particularly angry breed of cow changed the course of history – but the world under the Dazzling Skies is far stranger than anything he’s ever encountered. Though, fortunately for him, it does share some similarities with his favorite Immersive Video Game series … 😉
Isekai Skies (Monster Punk Horizon #2) is set to release on Kindle Unlimited this November, and is already available for preorder.
And again, if you’d like to be one of the lucky people to read it early, be sure to join the Pug Scouts – our VIP Street Team! 😀 I’ll be sending out eARCs soon, and all you have to do in exchange for your free book is post a review once the book is live!
In the meantime, keep your eyes on the blog next week for the cover reveal of Monster Punk Horizon #3! 😀
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
Yesterday’s blog post told you there’d be interesting book-and-monster-related news, and here it is!
It’s been a looooong time coming, but I’m excited to announce that I finally have a new series coming out! 😀
What new series is this, you ask? 😮 Well, read on!
Where my last book The Wizard’s Way was a love letter to all things steampunk, this series is a love letter to all things monster – hunting, collecting, researching … and sometimes, befriending and bribing into badass kaiju battles. 😄
See, while I was in the process of writing The (still-in-progress) Wizard’s Circus, I flipped through some of my early writing notebooks from middle school and junior high. Around that time, I was obsessed with Pokémon, Digimon, Monster Rancher, and virtually every other monster franchise that was coming over from Japan at that time – and it showed in my writing. There were monsters and monster trainers/tamers/friends everywhere, and as I continued to flip through these notebooks, I realized that decades later, I’m still into these kinds of franchises.
After all, as of recently, Jacob and I have been spending our weekends competing in Digimon Card Game tournaments, and even before that we spent most evenings playing Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise together!
It was then that an idea hit me, and would not let go until I’d brought it to realization – a series that pays loving homage to all those monster franchises in much the same way The Wizard’s Way did to steampunk fantasy.
And so, without further ado, I present to you Monster Punk Horizon, a GameLit fantasy adventure comedy coming soon to Kindle Unlimited!
Audio Release Date TBA
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Pix and Jaz are two girls who just want to hunt monsters, craft armor, and pay off their college loans—but when a colossal new monster falls through the portals in the Dazzling Skies, it’ll take all their skills to survive it.
Their skill levels? Slightly above noob.
Fortunately, they have their oversized swords, a lot of sass … and one giant monster friend who might help them out.
For a price…
The eBook is already up for preorder on Amazon (and paperback and audio are coming), but if you’d like to be one of the lucky people to read it early, be sure to join the Pug Scouts – our VIP Street Team! 😀
I’ll be sending review copies out to Street Team members soon, and all you have to do in return for your free copy is post a review online once the book releases! 😀
In the meantime, keep an eye on the blog for next week’s cover reveal for Monster Punk Horizon #2! 😄
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
In the course of rediscovering Pokémon cards last month, I made one other fascinating discovery:
There’s a new Digimon card game, which came stateside as recently as this January. 😮
Y’ALL.
Preteen me might have liked Pokémon, but when it came to Digimon, she was a straight-up obsessed nerd (like, even more so than usual). Pokémon was a fun show to watch, but Digimon had a darkness and complexity to it that Pokémon didn’t (at least, for the age group it was aiming to entertain), and there was a certain weird edginess to the monster designs that made it capture my imagination in ways Pokémon didn’t.
A lot of my writing from that period was obviously Digimon-inspired, as were the monsters I created for my own unique monster series, and Digimon stayed with me far longer than Pokémon did.
There was also a Digimon card game in those days – Digimon Digi-Battle – but it never took off like the Pokémon card game, and didn’t last very long. I’ve always lamented that Digimon itself never reached the level of success Pokémon did – it’s always been present, but never as popular – and thus I found the new card game a welcome and pleasant surprise.
So I resolved to collect it, too. Because 1) IT’S DIGIMON, and 2) the art on the cards is BADASS. While Pokémon continues to be made for kids, the art on the Digimon cards is clearly aimed at adults who loved the series as kids, with a respect for the target audience to match. I mean, look at the difference in the two generations of cards:
I didn’t expect to actually play the game, just because my main gaming buddy is Jacob, and he’d been indifferent to the Digimon show when I tried to introduce him to it several years ago. (Admittedly, Digimon Adventure – the Americanized version, at least – does not watch well if you have no nostalgic attachment to it and are first experiencing it at 40. 🤣)
However, when I went to one of my local card shops to pick up some packs, the employees were chatting about how well-designed a game it was. Knowing that Jacob enjoys analyzing rule sets, I casually mentioned this to him and asked if he’d like to play.
My goal was really just to use gameplay and deckbuilding as justification to buy more booster packs for my collection. 😁
But then Jacob started looking at the rules and deck options. 😮 And talking about how each theme color plays differently. 😮😮 And asking about the lore of specific Digimon. 😮😮😮
And suddenly we own all the trial decks and Jacob’s telling me to watch the mail for Digimon booster boxes.
I was already a card-collecting monster, but it looks like I inadvertently created a new one. 😆
The awesome thing about the whole discovery, though, is that the new Digimon Card Game really is a spectacularly-designed game.
Its basic rules make it easy to pick up and play; each color-grouping of cards lends itself to an interesting variety of play styles; and most of the individual cards are designed with such an interesting variety of functions that, easy as it is to pick up, it has the potential for a wide range of complexity.
That’s also one of the things that makes opening booster packs so exciting; while I’ve of course pulled cards that don’t mesh with my play style, it’s rare that I find a card to which I’m indifferent, either because of what it can do inside the game or because of its art.
To some degree, I’ve liked literally every card that I’ve pulled.
There are more than a few cards where I’ve gone “Oh, I’m going to hate facing this card in the game … but that is also a really cool gameplay mechanic. 😀” And often a single intriguing card or combination of cards will lead me to building a whole deck inspired by them. 😮
It’s been enormous fun to rediscover and re-engage with this part of my childhood in a way childhood me never did. Back then, I only collected cards and kept them in binders to admire; I never played with them, and actually getting into the gameplay side of things gives me a whole new appreciation for the hobby as a whole.
It also comes in an extraordinarily well-timed moment – when I’m about to release a brand new series that pays homage to Digimon, Pokémon, and all the other monster franchises I’ve loved since childhood.
But more on that in my next post. 😉
Several weeks ago, Jacob made the fateful choice to show me a random article about the insane state of today’s Pokemon card scene.
Little did he know what monsters he was about to awaken. 😁 (Yes, plural.)
I’ve been a Pokémon fan since age 12, when the series and associated games first started coming to the US. I saved up my hard-earned preteen allowance to buy a Game Boy Color solely to play the Pokémon video games and then spent everything that was left on Pokémon cards. My enthusiasm waned when I hit high school and decided I was grown up enough to put away childish things (😐), but once I stopped feeling so full of myself in adulthood, my love for the series returned.
To this day, I still play Pokémon Go like it’s that one week in July 2016 when the game first came out and there was such a sense of joyous community that we all thought Niantic had singlehandedly achieved world peace through Pokémon. (Ha.) There are Pikachus hidden all over my house. The Detective Pikachu movie was a high point of my adult life.
I hadn’t touched my cards in 20 years, though, and figured that, if I was to offload them, now was the time to do it.
For the uninitiated: Pokémon card collecting right now is bonkers, y’all. A combination of pandemic-inspired collecting (a hobby easy to do from home … especially with stimulus checks), scalpers rushing stores to buy up stock for sale at inflated prices, and all things Logan Paul have united to send prices for the cards skyrocketing. (For perspective, one of my comic shop pals decided to bite the bullet and finish his Pokémon collection last Feburary. At that time, it cost him $400 to do so. The same cards today, post-pandemic, would have cost him several thousand. 😳)
My collection was modest, but given that I did all my collecting during Pokémon’s earliest days, I knew I had at least a few cards that would sell well, so I started researching to figure out how best to price them for auction.
And Y’ALL.
Turns out there’s a whole card collecting culture that I was wholly unaware of.
Pokémon Investing, for example, is A Thing, and involves strategizing which sets, packs, etc. to buy and keep in anticipation of their value rising. (Which it absolutely does with Pokémon cards. Unopened Base Set packs – single packs, from the first release – can go for $200-$400, and even semi-recent booster packs sell for at least 3x their original market price. 😳) There are controversies over the ethics of pack-weighing before selling (because heavier sealed packs are more likely to contain holofoil cards). There are even card types from the generation I collected that I’d never even heard about – namely the shadowless Base Set cards, which are an early printing that lacks a shadow behind the focal picture on each card. (The shadows were added in subsequent printings to enhance the look of the card.)
All this to say, the more I learned about the modern collecting culture, the more it fascinated me, and the more I wanted to get back into it.
I started that week wanting to sell all my cards and ended the week ordering bulk lots off eBay and Facebook Marketplace to jump start my collection. 🤣
I don’t plan on being a hardcore collector. I’m in it mostly for the fun and sense of childish, nostalgic glee the series instills in me, so my collection’s basically going to be Pikachus, cards with art I like, and Pokémon with ridiculous, silly designs and punny names. (In accordance with this, my first goal is to build up my Perrserker horde.) Plus, frankly the idea of having expensive cards in my house stresses me out, especially given the frequency with which Nova likes to put her butt on whatever I’m paying attention to at any given time. 😬
Still, it’s been enormous fun to return so hard to a hobby I hadn’t thought about in decades, and to find such a fascinating new branch of it.
But it didn’t end there.
This is where the plural “monsters” comes in.
Part 2 to come! 😁
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.
It’s turning out to be a good summer for audiobooks – especially for our Gordian Division fans. 😀
This one came as a surprise to even us! 😮 But after a long wait, the audiobook version of The Valkyrie Protocol (Gordian Division #2) (once again published by Baen Books and narrated by the excellent Gabriel Vaughan) is finally out and ready to entertain your eager ears. 😄
We’re excited to finally tell you about it, and hope you find it worth the wait! 😊
You can currently find it on:
Also, if you haven’t yet started your adventures through time and alternate history, The Gordian Protocol (Gordian Division #1) is out and ready for the listening on:
Enjoy! 😄
Hey, readers! If you’re a fan of things and like to wield your fan power in fun ways, then let me introduce you to The Dragon Awards.
Hosted by Dragon Con, The Dragon Awards are annual awards given to the year’s best in science fiction and fantasy entertainment – that’s books, movies, television, comics, the whole shebang.
What makes them stand out from other awards of their ilk? They’re entirely decided by you, the fans. 😀 You don’t even have to have a Dragon Con membership to vote!
That said, The Dragon Awards nomination period is open now and will run through July 19th, 2021, but the earlier you get your nominations in, the better.
And we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention that Jacob and David’s The Valkyrie Protocol is eligible this year for Best Alternate History Novel. 😉 *wink wink*
To submit your choices, visit this page on the Dragon Con website before July 19th.
Remember, nominations need to have been released between July 1st, 2020 and June 30th, 2021, and you can only nominate a title in one category. (If you nominate it in multiple categories, then all are rejected. 😧)
The Valkyrie Protocol aside 😉, what are you voting for this year?
We’ve established before that I’ll pick up books for the sheer WTFery of their titles alone.
That said, there was no way I was going to skip Hirukawa’s Reborn as a Vending Machine, Now I Wander the Dungeon, Volume 1 (illustrated by Ituwa Kato). 😄
In Reborn as a Vending Machine, our nameless protagonist is a vending machine enthusiast (yes), who’s crushed to death when he tries to catch a falling vending machine (yes), and wakes up in a fantasy world with the brand new body of … a vending machine (but you guessed that already).
He can’t move on his own. He can only talk in canned vending machine phrases like “Insert coins” or “Get one free with a winner.” And though he can convert money into magical points to fuel himself, he’s in the middle of a forest and running out of power. Fortunately, along comes the adventurer Lammis. She’s a cute, sweet girl, and despite her size, her Blessing of Might allows her to pick him up like it’s nothing and take him to her home settlement – where she and her fellow villagers are fascinated by this new magical item. 😯
And, well, being a vending machine enthusiast in a vending machine’s body, he decides to do the natural thing – and become the best darn vending machine he can possibly be. 😊
I’ve had such hit and miss experiences with light novels that my only real hope for this book was “Please be readable, 😬” so it was a delight to discover that the novel was not only readable, but unexpectedly charming (and followed by Volumes 2 and 3). 😀
I mean, you have to admit there’s something endearing and admirable about a character who wakes up as an inanimate object and goes “Welp, this is my life now. Might as well be good at it.” And as absurd as the setup is, in the context of its own world, it actually works quite well.
Like most isekai (“another world”) stories, this one features a character stat and magic system where characters can take special abilities (here called Blessings) and amass points to level up. This is how Boxxo, as he’s christened by Lammis and the others, gains his Force Field (ever useful when thieves and monsters try to break into him). He also uses his converted points not only to power himself, but to upgrade his vending machine body to become more durable, and to add new items for villagers to buy from him. He has access to any item he bought from a vending machine before he died, and they’re all novelties to the characters in this fantasy setting – not to mention useful. Soon he finds himself being taken on campaigns to feed adventuring parties in the field, being asked to provide unique items to help out in the settlement, and so on.
The story is a simple, almost slice-of-life one (the major problem at the climax is that Boxxo gets stolen and…well, he can’t move on his own) but Boxxo himself carries it with his upbeat characterization and resourcefulness. It’s fun to see how he solves problems by choosing what to offer his customers, and his past life as a vending machine enthusiast is evident in how he chooses the products. (Several sections go into minor detail about the manufacturers of certain products and why said products were designed the way they were.) The direr situations in which he finds himself also require him to think quickly, to determine how to best spend his limited magic points for defensive upgrades, often mid-danger.
The other characters are fun, too, but frankly they’re just anime archetypes, and in fact a lot of the episodic situations of the story follow similar familiar tropes. (There’s a bathhouse scene, naturally. And speaking of such content, some of the illustrations are pretty obviously aimed at readers who like boobs, but the novel itself never gets more scandalous than Boxxo being embarrassed about being in the presence of said boobs.)
All in all, for an isekai fan who’s looking for something light, fun, and just a little different, Reborn as a Vending Machine, Now I Wander the Dungeon, Volume 1 is worth a read. To my own surprise, I’ll be buying the next two volumes, because familiar as it may be, there’s something just that delightful about the story of little vending machine that could. 😊
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Note: Holo Writing is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program and, as such, may earn a small commission from any product purchased through an affiliate link on this blog.