RED LIGHT BYTES: The No. 11 Special
What to Expect in the Electrifying Conclusion of the 2024 Season of 365 INFANTRY! Stories, Radio, Reflection & MORE!
OVERVIEW!
Welcome to the latest of our riveting issues from 365 INFANTRY. Our Winter 2024 promises some of our biggest thrills and boldest adventures yet! In this article, we’ll be giving you the gist of the Force’s latest adventures, and those of their many friends, as well as all the exciting bonuses arrayed around them. We’ll also be giving a sort of “state of the union” address later on, reflecting on the past year and looking to the one anew!
Due to a few hiccups late in production, we will be shifting everything back a day. Stories will drop starting Tuesday, December 17th, and will end Saturday, December 21st. We always want to deliver the best possible product we can, even at our size and budget, and this one extra day of I-dotting and T-crossing will hopefully ensure that status.
With new subscribers joining us almost everyday it seems, it’s always good to refresh our memory of the series basics. If you want a birds-eye view of the stories we tell and the way we tell them, head over to The Whole Story to learn about the world, magazine structure and more. For those curious about the kind of heroes we court, check out Meet The Main Five get the lowdown on our biker friend Gibson, the Force’s leader General Knox, the toughened vagabond Valentina, the wild-eyed vigilante Lita, and our lynchpin lawman Nic Ridgefield!
365 INFANTRY #11: What to Expect
NEW NOVELETTE! THE WAR: Madhound Theory — At long last, Captain “Grim” Herrera and adventurer Jack T. Wellman discover the Black Country Base! Now within the complex itself, it will take all their cunning and skill to escape with its incredible secrets! Back on the home-front, with desert morale at all-time lows, General Adam Knox calls together a convention of all community leaders, and works to understanding the source, and working to repair it as best he can. However, dangerous forces conspire against the convention, and it’s up to Lt. Gibson Blanc and the rest of the pack to upend their miserable plot!
THE HUNT: Anima De Profundi — Valentina and her pack finally discover the first of their many long-lost brethren. Their first Überwolf is all they had assumed; a violent, incredibly powerful, cybernetically augmented machine-hound. It is only after finally subduing the great gray gladiator that they discover he is of more than one persona, who throws their entire understanding of these beasts out the window, leaving Valentina with a terrible choice to make…
THE URBAN AVENGER: The Good German — The Avenger’s Creed is now in business! When Lita’s new organization meets for the first time, among the well-to-do crimefighters like Professor Smith and the roughneck bikers like Mack Malten, is a slick gray sent from the Force themselves as an official liaison. The hound’s name: Roger Steele. And with him comes the Creed’s first task: a spot of industrial espionage! And like Lita’s other adventures, nothing is as it seems!
THE SPEEDFREAK FILES: Primeval Minds — Nic, Harry, and Rory find themselves stuck with one of Hell Patrol’s toughest assignments: genuine investigation. The crime: a series of ritualistic murders. The perpetrator: unknown. And the key to it all, of all hounds, is their very own second guitarist Brett, whose knowledge of native myth puts him right in the killer’s crosshairs!
THE DAY KNOX DIED: Part 3 — By the grace of God, the young gray police officer Adam Knox is alive. He is no longer fully wolven, however, having finally received his first aug in the field: an incredible metal arm. This marvel of A.C.E.S. and her innovations has little time to register when a chance meeting with a major Haven politician may very well aid the troubled soul in finding justice for his fallen brother-in-arms…
FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS ONLY!
ALAN FIREDALE: The Gangland Ghost — When mysterious hit-and-runs start troubling the town of Sophiaville, it’s all hands on deck when the Sherriff ropes in not only Alan and Goldie, but two reformed leaders of formerly warring gangs. Its with their help that Alan discovers the gruesome gangland secret haunting the land, and what it’ll take to bring these ghastly attacks to an end!
FROM THE MAGAZINE
As always, the digest edition of our latest batch features all five thrilling adventures and their stunning artwork, and a specially written introduction. Our bonus article this time is a reprint, but not without any extra work put in. For this issue of the Quarterly, we’re running an expanded and revised edition of our article The Rules of Cool! A 365 Style Guide. Not only will it feature the original overviews of the rides, guns, and garb featured in the series, but special style profiles on characters, laying out all the devils in the detail that make our hounds some of the coolest in contemporary fiction!
EDIT (12/23): I have since scrapped the character wardrobe profile segments in the bonus article. Not just for time’s sake, but because I want to save the character profile format for next year’s run of Quarterlies as a regular staple of the magazine. Stay tuned for more!
We aim to have the Quarterly available on December 17th, but will keep readers apprised if Amazon throws us for a loop. They have a nasty habit of that…
STATE OF THE BASE: 2024
First off, let’s address the short-term, end-of-year concerns. The absence of what would have been this week’s final RLB story and the Emergency Ration from late November is twofold: one, is that I have been writing and rewriting like a madman thanks to the excellent feedback of my test drivers for this issue. 9500 words in a day, levels of madman. I simply didn’t have the time to pen some clearheaded (or outright delirious) flash stories this week. The second is because I want to try something I haven’t yet with this series: a flash anthology, released on Christmas Eve.
Two of the tales will be paywalled to make up for this offseason fumble, but one will remain free-for-all at the top of the collection, in the spirit of the season. I figured since I managed to hit Halloween and Thanksgiving, going for the Charlie Brown Triple Crown of holiday specials would be worth a shot. After all, what does Christmas in the wolven 25th century look like?
More broadly, this year has been equal parts rewarding and punishing. Rewarding in the fruit born from this project and my work on many others, and punishing in the process of getting those works over the finish line. I often struggled with keeping deadlines, staying on top of proofreading, and getting the stories the way I wanted them. It often got to the point where delays could purely come from the dread of having to hit the proverbial typewriter and make something, anything, happen at all.
I don’t pen any of this for pity’s sake, however. The truth is that this very struggle is where you learn the most. How to push yourself, how to pull back, how to rekindle inspiration, and how to keep your head above water in an increasingly volatile media landscape. It’s not best practice to say this (but I’m 23, so fuck it), but I’m almost glad we didn’t fund the Kickstarter this year. I think the pressure to deliver would have been a great boost, but I also don’t think I was nearly disciplined enough to sustain such a campaign. I don’t know if I’m quite there yet, but I do know one thing: this year has disciplined me more than perhaps any other year thus far. This project has disciplined me more than any other project I’ve embarked on.
To deliver in that consistent pulp mold, even as a quarterly, to deliver a half-hour of audio entertainment to paying customers is a genuine blessing any craftsman worth their salt should try and afford themselves. I’m grateful to have created such a vibrant, exciting, playful, and absurd world to play in, for it makes the tough tasks that come with producing great entertainment worthwhile.
I don’t know if there’s anyone else out there that treats their franchise the way I treat 365 INFANTRY. I have a grand vision for it. I know when these stories end, I know how they end, and I know what comes both before and after. However, the fun is in the moments in-between. The fun is in throwing traditional worldbuilding and planning to the wind, and learning by writing. To explore the world as you discover it. I know the back catalogue we’ve grown is an immense one. We’ve written our 100th story this year, and we’re probably well on our way to Story 150. And while I get that makes the series a bit daunting at first, I ain’t stopping for shit on that front.
When you love a world as I do Haven and the Wastelands, your characters as I do with this incredible pack, and a project like this where you can quite literally do anything you damn well please, short of a real shark-jump, you want to kick back with a beer, and spend as much time with it as you can. And my honest hope for 2025 is that I can still indulge this affection while creating fresh and original fiction, music, and movies elsewhere. But I wouldn’t be able to do a goddamn thing if I hadn’t spearheaded this series some three years ago, in the absolute depths of creative unfulfillment.
So what’s ahead for 365 INFANTRY?
Firstly, The Ride for 2025 WILL RETURN. Mainly because I need the money to keep this series afloat, but also because I really want to take it to the next level. Stay tuned for more on that.
Secondly, our 2024 Annual Collection will be debuting late in January next year with a very special novelette concerning two of my favorite new side characters, the Amazonian road warrior Camionera and her charming little pup Corre. You needn’t know all about this personal saga, one that began earlier this year with paid-sub story A Small Salvation, but this new story stands tall and proud as it continues their trek across the Wastes in search for a permanent home.
Lastly, all the little other items of interest mentioned during the crowdfunder will still be worked on:
A NEW Roger Steele story for the 2022 Annual Collection to take the place of “Lions Among The Lambs,” now that it’s a part of the larger novella The Short-Circuit Revolution.
FINAL EDITS of all available titles. This will include unifying the typography of our Quarterlies, another round of proofreads to our Annual Collections and other works, as well as a final redesign for all the Annual Collection covers. After these passes, I’m done touching up the early work. It’ll have to stand on its own merits from here on out.
AUDIOBOOKS of all collected editions and The Short-Circuit Revolution. I’m omitting audiobooks of the Quarterlies purely because the turnaround necessary would be too much, especially with Alan Firedale already on the docket. These will only be recorded after final edits of all collections are locked in, so I can’t guarantee exact release dates at the moment.
Those are the for-sures in the works, but I do want to make mention of some pipe-dream projects that are very likely to happen soon.
The Alan Firedale Adventures — This series is too good to keep paywalled forever. I’ve been longing for a way to bring the series into the public eye without sacrificing its status as our flagship offering to paid members, and I think I’ve found a method. I’m going to start work on bonus adventures. They will be released like standard episodes on Substack to paid members first, and then serialized on major podcast platforms over the course of a week. This mini-serial format was championed by radio programs like Jack Armstrong, The All-American Boy (one of the inspirations behind Jonny Quest) and later TV shows like Clutch Cargo and Space Angel. I want this done right, not by the seat of my pants, so a lot of pre-production planning will be necessary to make the series come alive this way.
A BRAND-NEW Steeled Spies Serial — I have been stewing on the next Agent Steele novella for the better part of this year. I envision it as the second part of a duology concerning his deepest dive into A.C.E.S. and her machinations yet. Like with the Firedale expansion, however, this will demand way more planning than I gave the original serial. Also, in the spirit of our Malmsteen “more-is-more” philosophy, this won’t be doubled-up as next year’s Tales from the Front Line serial. Should all go to plan, it will be serialized for paid members only, then collected for paperback publication.
A Second 365 INFANTRY Short Film — Teased on the page of our test animation from May, While Haven Sleeps, was a still from a potential second short film. I am officially announcing that said short film is in pre-production, and with any luck, will go into full production next year. It is a very special piece concerning one of our central characters as he undergoes a special survey to ensure he’s fit for service on the Force. A mixed-media effort blending 2D animation with surreal miniature effects. Coming soon.
And those are just the ones I’m comfortable talking about. I have so many plans for this series, it is unreal. And I am blessed to have so many incredible people at my back to make these dreams a reality.
May God Bless You & This Force. It All Starts Next Week!
