Jax Book Nook

  • Happy Pandemonium Day!

    I hope all the readers of this blog had a Happy Thanksgiving, consuming obscene amounts of turkey while watching grown men play a child’s game. I had a decent Thanksgiving, not enough to gain weight, but I’m on a diet. That and my in-laws generally don’t cook well enough to tempt me off of it. They’re from Ohio. Oh well, enough talk about how mid-westerners have no sense of taste. Let’s talk about starting a new holiday.

    As you all know, I’ve long bemoaned our culture’s tendency to turn holidays into months long events that occupy way too much of the calendar just to sell a few more sparkles and do-dads and improve the bottom line. We need more holidays, not longer holidays. That’s why I am introducing Pandemonium Day, a new holiday I have started with no financial incentive whatsoever.

    As you know, I am disparately attempting to hock my new novel, Christmas in Pandemonium. I’ll leave a link below, but it’s a story about a town founded by Satanists 400 years ago and what happens when a crooked televangelist comes to town to drum up fame and fortune. The story begins on…wait for it…the First Sunday of Advent! Yes, the book uses the liturgical calendar, partly because the headmaster of my Catholic high school once suggested we make First Sunday of Advent resolutions rather than New Years Eve resolutions. I’m sure he thought that idea would rock like Led Zeppelin, but it went over more like an actual lead zeppelin.

    Anyway, the book starts with the First Sunday of Advent, when Fr. Gabe Strobel is assigned to the Catholic Church in Pandemonium, which has no parishioners because Pandemonium has no Catholics. The parish exists to make it look like the Diocese of Charleston is doing something about the whole worshiping Satan thing. The crooked televangelist comes to town this day as well. It’s the first full day in the Pandemonium Timeline. So, in honor of my book, and my old headmaster, I declare today Pandemonium Day! You can celebrate by buying my book!

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  • Happy Thanksgiving! I am not from Russia!

    My thanks to everyone who downloaded Beer Run for free over the past four days. I’ve moved on to promoting Christmas in Pandemonium for the most part, but any way I can get people more interested in my writing, the better. Now that we are approaching the Holiday season, when we really need to start hocking this “Christmas Story” for real, I have an announcement to make: I am not from Russia.

    You see, our Dear Leader on Twitter recently made a change to his platform to reveal where the poster is actually located. This revealed something quite shocking: a lot of “America First” accounts are actually located abroad in places like Nigeria, or well, Pakistan. Now, I must admit, I don’t know how to check my own profile for location, but I promise you, I’m not from Nigeria, or Pakistan, or India, and I’m definitely not from Russia scout’s honor. My name really is Jack Willems, and I live in West Virginia. You don’t need to worry about my Twitter account or any of my other material being a psyop, you stupid American imperialist pigs.

    Whoops, did I say that last part? I mean, beloved readers. Continue consuming my propaganda, I mean, content. Buy Christmas in Pandemonium. It certainly isn’t meant to undermine your dying Empire. Now if you excuse me, Natasha and I need to prepare a bomb for moose and squirrel.

  • Free Beer (Run)!

    For the next five days, November 20-24, Beer Run, my first novella, is available for free! Beer Run is a book about Bill Stiltson, a man living on the moon in the 2538 in a Star Trek world with its own union of planets and Intergalactic Navy. Bill isn’t interested in any of that stuff though. He just wants to run his microbrewery. One day, however, he buys an illegal android from a bankruptcy trustee to help his bar but finds himself caught up in a Luddite conspiracy.

    Here’s the link:

  • Now Querying Live in the Dream!

    I’m taking a break from promoting Christmas in Pandemonium and whining about stupid stuff to announce that I am now querying literary agents for Live in the Dream: my adult science fiction novel of approximately 79,000 words. I started yesterday and have sent out 20 queries so far. If that seems excessive, just google it and you’ll see its relatively normal.

    Live in the Dream takes place in the year 2192 where Lucas Shaffer, an artificial human grown in a jar, works as a wage slave to maintain an economy on autopilot. Half the time, however, he lives in the Dream 97 program along with his virtual family, just like the other artificial workers of the world. On the eve of his retirement, Lucas logs in to find his virtual family has disappeared. Now, he has to travel across the country and the globe to retrieve each of them, one by one, uncovering a conspiracy to destroy the Dream in the process.

    I hope to get a literary agent at a major New York or London firm to take me on and get my foot in the door at one of the Big 5 publishers. Hope springs eternal. I’m also getting beta readers for my other two projects: a sequel to Pandemonium and a young adult science fiction project.

    Finally, I’ve heard there are scammers on social media pretending to be literary agents. I will tell anyone going this route to be very careful. It’s unlikely someone in the high society of these New York or London literary agencies would DM you out of the blue. I’ve run into it a few times already. If you plan to go the literary agent route, then you should know that literary agents generally want you to apply through an online form or through email, both of which can be found on the agency’s website. There are just too many scammers out there.

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  • Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein: Not a Disappointment

    An amazing thing happened after I complained that Halloween was disappointing: someone released a quality horror movie. A week late. What the Hell?

    I suppose it’s an affirmation of my prior assertion that Halloween movies are just scary movies that don’t have to be watched on Halloween. I just wonder why Netflix decided to release this movie on Nov. 7. Yes, it had a limited theatrical run on Oct. 17, emphasis on the word limited. I don’t wonder at all why it was released on Netflix. Who even goes to movie theaters anymore? I take the kids whenever they are showing Toy Story or something like that, but other than that, I’m good.

    Guillermo del Toro’s take on Frankenstein is amazing. It doesn’t follow the book exactly, but it actually improves on it in my view, by doubling down on the themes in the book. It’s not a story about why man shouldn’t play God. It’s a story about how God should not play God. The monster looks amazing, which is what you would expect from someone who made the Shape of Water and Pan’s Labyrinth. Victor is a self-absorbed jerk, something the female lead makes clear. The ending breaks your heart.

    Why they released it just to miss the Halloween movie season? I don’t know. The one thing holidays are supposed to still be about is marketing. Maybe they decided to just show contempt for the whole exercise. Anyhow, please buy Pandemonium! It would make the perfect Christmas gift…in November!

  • Halloween 2025: A Disappointment

    Hello everyone! Thank you once again for making the West Virginia Book Festival a success for me! I really appreciate everyone buying Christmas in Pandemonium, regardless of when, how, or why!

    You know what I did not appreciate: Halloween this year, which was like a horror movie with three hours of buildup only to end with the villain being some kind of cosmic spider that can only be defeated through magic rocks. Thank you, Stephen King.

    As you all remember, (yes, there are enough of you to use “all” rather than “both,” at least now) I have a thing against celebrating holidays two months early. It’s semi-coercive, obviously commercialized, and crowding out the other holidays. Well, people started celebrating Halloween in early September this year, something I have complained about, and the results were predictable: Halloween petered out before the actual date.

    When I was picking my kid up from Daycare, I could see the Halloween inflatables they had starting to deflate a full week before October 31. We were taking down Halloween decorations before Halloween. Then, there were various Trunk or Treat activities for two weeks before All Hallows’ Eve. Lots of fun for kids, but what it leads to is this idea that Trick or Treat doesn’t have to happen on Halloween night. Charleston, WV, where I live, even “moved” Trick or Treat to October 30, before moving it back to the real Halloween due to weather. Everyone’s first complaint was “That’s a Friday! What about High School Football?!” Needless to say, when actual Halloween came around, the level of festivities was greatly reduced from last year, probably due to our culture having demoted the actual day in importance to such a degree that most couldn’t be bothered to come out.

    May I do a side note here: where does the Charleston city council get off telling people when to Trick or Treat? Trick or Treating is a Halloween ritual, and Halloween is on October 31 because All Saints’ Day is November 1. It’s essentially a religious holiday, though we don’t think of it that way. If anyone could change when Halloween is, it would be the Pope, and I’m not sure even he could do it. If he did, I think a lot of Chicago school kids would give him strange looks the next time he went to a White Sox game.

    Finally, Hollywood has fallen for this as well. The Conjuring 4, supposed blockbuster for this Halloween season, came out on September 5. By the time Halloween rolled around, you could get it on streaming. There’s no reason to go to the theater anymore. Last night, I put the kids to bed and put on the Black Cat, an old Universal film from 1934. It’s an underappreciated classic, but I fell asleep halfway through. That’s this Halloween in a nutshell.

    We don’t need longer holidays. We need more holidays celebrated better. Let’s make Oktoberfest a thing. Give everyone Valentine’s Day and St. Patrick’s off. By the way, if we’re open to adopting Saints days and other holy days, bring back Michaelmas! If it was good enough to make it into Shakespeare, it ought to be good enough for a bank holiday.

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  • Thanks for Coming to the Book Festival!

    I’d like to extend my thanks to everyone who attended the West Virginia Book Festival yesterday. I met a lot of new readers and sold a lot of books. Hopefully there are some new readers to this blog by virtue of all those bookmarks with my URL typed on them. It was great getting to sell my book in public.

    I’ve got a few things coming up in the next couple of weeks. I’m going to submit one manuscript for beta reading. It’s a young adult science fiction novel about a girl who runs away from home by hitching a ride with an alien. I’m also going to put the final touches on “Live in the Dream,” my more serious science fiction novel before querying it.

  • Reminder: West Virginia Book Festival, October 25th!

    Here is a reminder that I will be at the West Virginia Book Festival with signed copies of Christmas in Pandemonium on October 25th! The West Virginia Book Festival is at Charleston Coliseum and Event Center in Charleston, West Virginia, in the event that any of you are in the area. I’ll draw you a map if you want. Be there! Buy a copy of Christmas in Pandemonium! Come to think of it, buy one now!

  • Meet Me at the West Virginia Book Festival!

    Hello everyone! Another great week of book promotion! We are approaching the West Virginia Book Festival, October 25, 2025, in Charleston, West Virginia, at Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center, where I will be present and available to sell copies of Christmas in Pandemonium, my new novel. Here’s the link once again.

    I’ll also have copies of Beer Run and Beer Run 2 if anyone is interested in that. I’d love to talk everyone’s ear off. I hope you caught my interview with my publicist, Joe Mycut, last week, and if now, here’s the link for that.

    Links, links, links. So, in summary, buy Christmas in Pandemonium. Buy Beer Run. Go to the Book Festival and buy me and actual beer. Afterwards that is. They don’t sell beer at the book festival. They do sell pepperoni rolls, so get me one of those. Meet me at the Book Festival at Charleston Coliseum and Convention Center, Saturday after next, in Charleston, West Virginia.

  • Catch My Interview on YouTube!

    Hello everyone again! I swore I’d never do two blog posts this quickly in succession, but here we are! My interview with Joe Mycut, my publicist, is out on YouTube! Be sure to watch and to subscribe to the channel.