So Now I’ve Got a Publication Date

Update:

The Book Detail Page went live on Amazon:

Amazon book page

Wohoo!

I started loading the files for the e-book and paperback on Amazon.  The release date will be 21JAN2026.  I’m doing a last review of the text to find typos and “literary infelicities” before I hit the button and make the pre-release page live.

I’m setting up a page on the site (link directly below) for the marketer to direct traffic here.

Coming 21JAN2026 – The Sniper by Jake Barter

I have to admit I’m more excited about this than I thought I would be.  I’m especially looking forward to getting the paperback proof copy.  I’ll put it on the shelf of my bookcase in the living room between my copies of The Iliad and The Odyssey.  After all Homer has only produced two books in the last three thousand years and I wrote one in less than a decade!

I think today is the first time i started thinking about the next book in the series.  Bogey’s had his work.  I’ll let him off the hook and let Connors recruit some new folks to wrestle with the political chaos that has enveloped America after the events in “The Sniper.”  For this one i’ll have to map out a series of events.  I can’t just wing it.  Maybe I’ll do a “future history” timeline like Heinlein did for his alternate history stories.

I think in these later stories I might like to have a moon base.  It’s definitely not an unbelievable technological stretch and it would give the stories a less claustrophobic feel.  Mars just seems too difficult and with a fractured America I doubt the resources could be imagined available for something as challenging.

But that’s just a spit-balling thought.  I’m going to have to do some serious thinking before I just jump into it.  It’ll have to feel right.  And then I’ll have to come up some new characters.  I think I want some technical types in this story.  And I’ll have to think of what is going to happen to poor President George Chastain.  I’ll left him holding the bag with a bunch of states in basically open revolt.  He inherited this mess and he has my sympathy but I’m afraid it’s not going to get easier in the next book.

And in the next book I might try my hand at my first love story.  I’ve left Paul Connors and Grace Boghadair sort of up in the air.  With bogey out of the limelight maybe it’s time to see whether those two have a future.  Well, I’m no romance novelist but maybe I can come up with a believable plot to get those two together.  After all she is a widow looking for a husband and you can’t find a more eligible bachelor than the richest man in the world.

Well, I’ll attach the links to the Amazon pages for the books and the author (Jake Barter!) as soon as they’re live.  Meantime here are my cover shots.

The Land of Opportunity

It appears that the globalist establishment in the West (Europe and the Anglosphere) are attempting to simultaneously merge with the Third World and disappear.  By disappear I mean erase their ethnicity, history and culture and become a melting pot something along the lines of Brazil.

And despite the best efforts of people like Donald Trump they seem to be succeeding.  The chaos that emerges from unlimited third world migration is a pretty frightening spectacle.  The recent series of brutal attacks, rapes and murders by migrants against law-abiding Americans and the unconcerned reaction of city and state officials to this onslaught is instructive.  The lesson to take away is clear.  There is no one out there to protect you from these invaders.

Your only course of action is to minimize your exposure to migrants.  First and foremost is to live in countries, states and cities that actively search out migrants and arrest them.  Currently the United States under Donald Trump is such a country.  But within the United States, the blue states and even the blue cities within some red states maintain pro-migrant policies that allow them to live here without fear of arrest or deportation.  So, the first order of business is leaving these “sanctuary” jurisdictions.  And that should be a major improvement in your ability to avoid being harmed by migrants.  And in general, staying out of large cities anywhere will be a good policy.  Large cities attract migrants because of the many opportunities to find employment and blend in.

Now as we’ve seen, the Democrats, when they come into power will suspend all activities by ICE and the border guards and just allow millions of illegals to steam in.  So, if we have a Democrat in the White House after Trump we may be in a situation where migrants are present throughout the country in large numbers.  At that point, the only way to decrease your odds of being harmed by migrants would be to live in a red state that allows you to take active steps to protect yourself.  You’ll need to live in a community that supports a robust police force that actively pursues criminals and prosecutes them to the fullest extent of the law.  Ideally a liberal use of the death penalty would be the optimal strategy.  Other things you can do include living in a gated community with private policing.  But this is very expensive and only practical for the very wealthy.  Alternatively, citizen patrol programs can have a beneficial effect.

As a last resort, you can look into other countries where law and order are a priority.  Recently even a place like El Salvador has had enough of crime and cracked down on their gang members in a remarkably effective way.  Now El Salvador is not a place you’d want to live in.  But I think if the United States continues to vacillate back and forth on important priorities like immigration there will be more Americans leaving for safer places.  Places that come to mind are in Eastern Europe (Hungary, Czechia, Poland) and South America (Chile, Argentina).  But who knows, maybe there are several other countries that are fed up with crime and dysfunction.  Someday soon someplace beside the United States may be considered the land of opportunity.

It Doesn’t Compute

Most of life is about paying the bills.  We work most of our days to pay for food, shelter and raising children.  And for the most part we don’t think too much about all this.  After all what we do is the human analog of what very living creature on Earth has to do to keep its species alive into the future.  And none of them question why exactly all this goes on.

But when you get to a certain point and the end of the race is in sight and maybe you have a little more time on your hands than you used to, you might start asking some questions about what all of this is.  This is called philosophy or religion or maybe just plain curiosity.  One day you look around and think, “How the hell did this whole thing get started and where the hell is it going to end up?”

And it’s a good question.  The pessimist’s answer is the whole thing is just a complete accident.  Life itself is just a random occurrence that probably will just peter out and end when the sun dies in several billion years or maybe even sooner than that if some things go sideways for us here.  Who knows?  Maybe we ourselves will be responsible for the end of life.  Some madman may decide it would be fun to figure out a way to kill off every last bacterium and virus and make it so that none could ever reappear on Earth again.  It seems like a stupid idea but there are lots of crazy people and who’s to say that a really smart crazy man might not take it into his head to do something like that.

But there is definitely a sizable chunk of humanity that believe that we are here for a reason.  They believe in some kind of God.  Not necessarily the personal God of the Bible.  Some think there is some sort of universal spirit that is associated with all life or maybe just human life.  And it’s safe to say they have no way of ever proving what they believe in is real.  I’ve heard lots of people trying to prove God’s existence.  And I don’t think anyone has ever come up with anything that would convince an atheist that he is wrong.

No, the belief is not based on proof.  But at the same time, I don’t think for the most part it’s wish fulfillment.  I think it’s a form of intuition.  Some people look around and say I just don’t believe that all of this is the result of random chance working out over the course of several billion years.  It’s like that old idea that if a billion monkeys typed on a billion typewriters (word processors) for a billion years that they would come up with the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.  I think it’s a case of not letting large numbers intimidate you.  I can understand that over the course of geologic time mountains can turn into valleys and stars can explode.  But how does that create Mozart or Shakespeare or even you?  It doesn’t compute.