Jack of Harts

Back in the 1980s, when I was a teenager and just starting to see a world outside my home and school, a rich New York Democrat said that foreign trade was out of hand. Unfair. That other nations were stacking the deck to hurt us. That it had to be stopped. That we had to do something about it. I’ve lived my entire adult life watching what some have called the sucking sound of wealth being vacuumed out of our country and sent throughout the world. Others have been more targeted and said it was being sucked out of the American middle class.

I’m fifty now, and I’ve watched the factories and mines and refineries and power plants that fueled our economy closed, only to be reopened in other countries and the American workers now out of a job told to learn to code. I actually did learn to code, and though I don’t work in that industry, I did build a good job for myself. But I’ve watched President after President just not tackle that giant vacuum of wealth. But now, for the third election in a row, the American people have gone out to vote for the man who has talked about it all my adult life. Voted to tell him to do something about it.

I don’t know if it will work. But if we continue on the course we are on now, America will crumble and die. I’ve watched the looting in my lifetime and I want the next generations to have a chance at something better than what the looters left behind. I don’t know if we can, but we have to try. And if we’re the only country in the world not using tariffs to protect our homegrown industries, then we will always lose to those who use tariffs to protect their own.

The two-volume Wyrd Warfare set of anthologies from Raconteur Press are for sale and ready for you to read. They feature the imaginations of some twenty different authors, asking what if magic was real and nations fought wars with it? In the pages of these volumes you will see the most humble of farm-raised men, otherworldly creatures, terrifying dragons, and even gods all marching to war. What weapons would they wield? What tactics would they use? How would magic change war as we know it? How would war stay the same? Wyrd Warfare is an imaginative look at what war could be like if magic were real. Thank God we all know it is not. Right?

Raconteur Press is publishing a new Wyrd Warfare anthology this week, and it will be including one of my stories. Captain William Carter, hunter of otherworldly creatures and threats to mankind, returns for the first time. Not all short stories in chronological order after all. If you want to brush up on Captain William Carter before seeing how he fights in war, check out how he fights when he’s had a drink of something Faery in From the Brim to the Dregs. What would you do if you can see the future? Would you claim it or let it slip through your fingers?