I blame my kids: Travis Hiltz on Dino Force

Travis Hiltz takes over the page today to talk a little about his contribution to Dino Force, now funding on Kickstarter.

I blame my kids. This story is their fault.

Both of them were huge Power Ranger fans and as any good parent would, I ended up watching a lot of episodes with them.

Yes, it’s goofy, the acting is uneven and trying to make sense of the continuity will make your brain melt. At the same time, it’s got a fun silver age comic book vibe, most of the characters are likable is constantly throwing out ideas that made the writer part of my brain go ‘what’s up with that…? Why aren’t they doing more with that?”

This led to us having all kinds of ‘what if…?” chats, and using their action figures to create our own episodes.

It was fun and as close as I was ever going to get to write Power Rangers.

Then Nick came along and suddenly, all those ideas we’d come up with while playing had a place to go.

Mixed in with that sense of excitement, I was given Africa as my country to protect. The added challenge of being a middle-aged white guy writing about Africa really got my brain firing.

Then I decided I wasn’t juggling enough ideas/challenges and decided to make my hero a teenage girl.

It was a fun, stress inducing experience helping to create this little world and because of the subject matter I might actually get my kids to read one of my stories.

Or receive that most hoped for by every parent bit of praise: “Yeah, it was okay.”

Dino Force is now funding on Kickstarter.

Travis Hiltz has been making up stories for as long as he can remember. In high school he started writing them down. By college he had collected several rejection notices and had a one act play produced. After several years of writing fan fiction, he decided to restart his efforts to get published, and much to his surprise, this time it worked. He has since become a regular contributor to Blackcoat Press and Metahuman Press. He lives in New Hampshire with his very tolerant wife, a slightly less tolerant teenager, two cats and a staggering amount of comic books.

Jim Beard introduces the world to Saucy Robot Stories!

Almost any genre was possible in the classic pulps, and just about everyone of them had a "spicy" version. The spicy pulps were the back counter magazines of their day, although by today's standards they were far more tame than your average PG-13 film.

But that grand tradition of the pulps never quite combined with the emerging tales of mechanical men also prevalent in the 30s and beyond. Until now.

Series creator Jim Beard teams with co-editor Nicholas Ahlhelm to bring the adventures of Sam, the world's first fully automated man. (And we do mean fully automated.)  Saucy Robot Stories introduces him and his friends Augie and Doona as they have weird adventures across New York and beyond.

In six new stories by Sam Gafford, M.H. Norris, Travis Hiltz, Justin Bell, Aaron Smith and Chuck Miller, the pulp genre is stretched with new and unique ways our heroes face down new threats and new weirdness. All with just a bit of sauciness to go along with it!

Saucy Robot Stories will be available in April from Metahuman Press.

The Horror Heroes are back!

It has been three years since the first edition of Horror Heroes launched with stories of Dracula, the Mummy, Frankenstein and the Invisible Wolfman. Since that time, fans have asked when another edition of monsters turned heroes would make it on to shelves. That time is now, as Horror Heroes 2 has arrived in print and digital.

The new anthology features two short stories and a novella by three writers all returning from the previous volume.

Travis Hiltz kicks the anthology off with his own take on Frankenstein’s Monster as he turns the creature into a modern adventurer with his own team of off-the-wall allies in “Frankenstein & The Rejects”.

Editor Nicholas Ahlhelm adds a little romance to the scares as he takes readers to “The Beach House”, the location Lynda travels to in order to finally spread her wings after years of being the good girl. There she meets a strange young man, one that might actually be a legendary sea monster!

Darrin Albert closes things out with “Steamed!”, a new novella featuring his bigfoot hero Littlefoot. Darrin designs an entire world between human and sasquatch, one which Littlefoot must bridge in order to find her future and possibly save all of human and sasquatch-kind!

These three big stories are now available in print and Kindle editions. Metahuman Press continues its devotion to low prices with $12.00 print volumes and $3.99 digital editions. Readers can take their pick, or get the digital edition free as part of Kindle Unlimited or with Kindle Matchbook (and the purchase of the print volume.)

Horror Heroes 2 makes the monsters the heroes just in time for some amazing Halloween hijinks. Pick it up today!