Theodore D. C. Cox 📚 Legends & Demons

Arnold Schwarzenegger reveals he demanded a helicopter-mounted machine gun for Predator specifically to out-do Stallone's Rambo weapon Arnold: “We ended up kind of like, 'You killed 28 people in the movie. I killed 32.' I got to top that.” Arnold: “It was not the body count, and then it was kind of like, 'Well, what was your body fat?' You know, I was down to 7%. So I said, 'I was down to 10%.' So it became a competition with the body.” Arnold: “'Well Arnold, you can never hold that.' I said, 'We'll figure out a way. Don't worry about it. I got to have a bigger gun, a bigger machine gun than Sly used in Rambo.'” Arnold: “So then he killed, you know, 80 people, and I had to kill 87 people. And you got sucked into it too, because the difference between Rambo 1 and 2 and 3 and 4, you got bigger guns, bigger body count, the whole thing.”

🚨 Dua Lipa opens banned book library after global right-wing book censorship.

Imagine sitting in a theater in 1999 and witnessing this for the very first time.

Harry Potter will unfortunately always be nostalgia bait for some but for real guys the world building is objectively shit

I know we're reaming Nolan for The Odyssey rn but we never should have let this shit slide

The more you know.

Bloodlust (Spellswords Book 3) is coming out in just a couple of weeks, but I'm trying to keep readers abridged of new projects, so after some hard work and ~10k words written in the space of a week, it feels safe to share what I think is coming down the pike next. Set on a vast continent resembling the American Great Plains, The Forged Princess begins in the city of Edessa, built a century ago by a people exiled from their homeland across the sea. They encounter a fallen, broken civilization called the People who now exist as fractured tribes that hunt across the continent and commit constant warfare on one another. The People unite to drive the Edessans out, but after decades of bloodshed, an uneasy peace has lasted for almost twenty years. Now, an Edessan princess reaches her seventeenth birthday and will be caught up in a blood feud that began before she was born. Princess is another one of the books I wrote in my pre-Twitter days when Deathbringer and The Way of Mortals were first drafted (10+ years ago). It's inspired by European and American history and fantasy—and Star Wars, sort of. It's a story about identity and lost love, along with an attempt at a twist on found family and revenge tropes (that last one's becoming a theme for me, I'll admit). The book that's developing now is very similar to the one I wrote a decade ago, but part of it is proving to be very different. It's also a standalone novel, but if readers really want a sequel or other stories in the setting, I'd be open to that. I'm always a little nervous to prematurely announce future projects, but with a fully finished novel to update, I hope this story will go the distance. I'll have more to share as the writing continues, so look out for that in the days to come. (Banner image was made by AI, because people are people and everything about AI is stupid and hyperpolarized now. It's only for illustrative purpose and doesn't represent a final cover.)