Iron Head & Other Stories

The Fight Card team flexes its muscles for a good cause. Iron Head and Other Stories is the first of several charity anthologies being released by the Fight Card team over the next few months, and it includes my vintage fight fiction short, Bushwhacked – written under the pen name James Hopwood.

All monies made from this project go to revered Western (and other genres) writer, Jory Sherman who has racked up a stack of medical bills. Over the years, Jory has not only been a prolific writer, he has been a mentor to many other up and coming writers.

Here’s the blurb from Bushwhacked.

Trooper Gladstone Farrell of Victorian Colonial Police Force was corrupt as they came.

Farrell had a fearsome reputation throughout the Central Victorian Goldfields. He was not in the least concerned at keeping the peace. As far as he was concerned, ‘Gold Fever’ was about money, and he did everything possible to get his share. However, this did not include hard labor, such as digging or panning for gold. His methods were much simpler. He would allow others to do the hard graft, and when they had found a few ounces he would swoop – always in the capacity of a custodian of the law. Most of the miners in the area didn’t have licenses, so when Farrell came calling, they either had to pay a portion of their diggings or face a hefty fine. Either way, Farrell got their gold or their money.

When Farrell swooped on the Clancy brothers for mining without a license, they made an unusual proposition to keep from going to jail. Danny Clancy was a bare-knuckles fighter; but not an honest one. His next fight was fixed, and his opponent was set to fall in the sixth round. Farrell muscled in on the deal, intending to collect two ways – first taking his cut from the Clancy brothers, and secondly, cleaning up with his own side bet.

James Hopwood (pen name of David James Foster), author of King of the Outback, a hard punching story in the Fight Card series is back with another knuckle bruising tale. A tale in which nothing is as it seems, and in which someone will be Bushwhacked!

Even if you’ve already grabbed a copy and read Bushwhacked, there are nine other great stories in this collection and at only US$1.99 – less than a glass or beer or cup of coffee – there’s plenty of fine entertainment to be found in these pages, and you’ll be helping a good cause.

You can find Iron Head and Other Stories at Amazon.

Fight Card Presents: Iron Head & Other Stories is the first in a series of charity anthologies from the Fight Card authors cooperative – a writers community featuring many of today’s finest fictioneers, including Jory Sherman, Ryan McFadden, Mark Finn, Troy D. Smith, Ed Greenwood, Jack Badelaire, James Scott Bell, James Hopwood, Bowie V. Ibarra, and Matthew Pizzolato.

Compiled by Paul Bishop and Jeremy L. C. Jones, 100% of the proceeds from these anthologies will go directly to an author-in-need (in this case, revered western writer Jory Sherman) or a literacy charity. Words on paper are the life blood of a writer. The writers in this volume were willing to bleed in order to give a transfusion to one of their own – and then continue to bleed to give a transfusion to literacy charities in support of that most precious of commodities … readers. They are true fighters, every one …