rlfj: Blog

Welcome back to the adventures of Carl Buckman! Good news for all you fans - Book Three is almost as long as the rest of the story so far.

As always, let me know when you find any errors or anachronisms. I’m not as smart as Carl, so these things can slip through. Thanks.

One comment that was made was: ‘Thank heavens you don’t have Carl going the Delta House route!’ Oh, if you only knew the truth! Delta House was mild compared to what I saw when I was in a frat! No crap, but I saw about 90% of the antics in that story.

And so our journey together ends. This story has been just as enjoyable to write as AFS was, and without the heavy political tones that some readers objected to. Like AFS, it ended up going places I never quite expected, but I think it concludes satisfactorily. If there was one overall theme to what people wanted to read, it was Grim vs. Candy Pants at the end; that was always my intention, and I think I did it properly.

Many readers wanted Grim to keep going from 2010, but I always wanted to end in a current time frame, taking down the villain. I had a wide range of suggestions of what Grim could do in the future – many chapters on Reaper babies, including lots of girls, and catching grief from the men in the family, with Grim delivering babies during a hurricane/snowstorm/shootout; Al Qaeda/ISIS/Mexican drug lords coming after Grim and/or his family; Grim as a guest lecturer/instructor at the Georgia Police Academy and/or the FBI Academy in Quantico; Grim and Kelly meeting/hosting/rescuing Tolley Hunter during a visit to Georgia; Grim’s life being made into a book and/or movie, like Audie Murphy’s; Grim and Candy Pants in a gigantic showdown. Those were just some of the suggestions. Many of these ideas had merit, but at some point a character becomes a caricature and, ultimately, a cartoon.

Still, Grim has been one of my most popular characters. He’ll be back for a couple of sequels. Just be patient. I’m returning to AFS for a bit.

A couple of readers pointed out that Atheringdon would almost certainly have been through Fort Benning at some point in the past. The point was that as an officer his experience would have been significantly different than from the enlisted trainees.

A few readers pointed out that Armor is actually at Fort Knox. Sorry folks, but Armor was at Fort Knox. In 2010, as part of the BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) program, The Armor School was moved to Benning.

Not a whole lot to blog about this time. Grim is winding up his publicity tour and getting back to his normal life, though normal for Grim is extraordinary for most of us.

The ‘wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs’ line did not originate in the film American Sniper, but showed up earlier, in a book by Lt. Col. David Grossman, On Combat; it was suggested by one of my military editors, jjmcdonald7911. Another similar quote is that ‘people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf’, generally attributed to George Orwell, though his comments were a restatement of something said earlier by Rudyard Kipling, and only put in the final form years after Orwell’s death, by Richard Grenier. That quote I used in AFS, so I didn’t want to trot it out here.