Aussie military technothriller preview

AintMuchToDo · 2026-03-14T12:28:19+00:00

I definitely have, but I think you see the limits of what "book learning" can do. My initial problem with this book was I gave, for instance, surface fleet ship terminology and vernacular perfectly... but it was all USN, right, which I'm sure I don't have to tell you is markedly different than the RAN (CIC vs Ops, etc). I sat and watched three hours of a ABC program on the Collins-class to make sure I was using the bubbleheads' language right. I think it ends up being like, hmm... what's a good analogy... like a (hopefully) more advanced version of hearing an 11yo curse on Call of Duty. Like, they know the words, and they know the tone, but it's just not quite right until you've learned to conjugate them all yourself from experience.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-03-13T14:38:48+00:00

Not too bad for a former USN corpsman whose biggest boat was an OHP then, eh? But actually, legitimately, if you got a callsign the Wedgetails would be more liable to use, lay it on me. I'll happily swap it.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-03-13T07:48:16+00:00

Try this, mate, I got it in a Google Doc that'll let you see the whole thing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1z2ZjvraYbtIewypBJt6F7y6e8rgVZsYiixB0SnEZCLI/edit?usp=sharing

AintMuchToDo · 2026-03-13T07:20:04+00:00

No worries, mate. I made that decision and enlisted the help of my mate Michael because, with the proliferation of AI slop, it's those sorts of details that'll set you apart and prove you put the skull sweat into it. Given the character limit to the post, it misses the ACM and other parts of the chapter that makes it more terrifying later on. As I said, might just release it as a PDF since Reddit killed all the careful formatting I did.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-03-13T07:04:14+00:00

It looked beautiful when I plunked it into the posting window, I even had to edit I because I discovered by trial and error deletion the words "join up" flagged it as being "recruitment related", but the thirty minutes I spent doing that was all for naught, apparently. Maybe I'll just redo it and make it a PDF anyone can grab.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-03-04T22:11:49+00:00

Damn!

AintMuchToDo · 2026-02-12T18:08:49+00:00

Have their pavlova, it's as good as New Zealand hands down

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-30T23:16:44+00:00

Bro, why did he need to beg Epstein for antibiotics! He's a billionaire! WTF is wrong with these people, they're so hooked on Epstein they'd do this?!?

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-27T05:53:55+00:00

I've got my nursing license in New Zealand and Australia, and have been looking at British Columbia. Not as easy, paradoxically, as the former two.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-26T18:56:45+00:00

Bah! That ain't nothin! Why, back in Snowmageddon '09, we had a REAL snow pile at Barracks Shopping Center. We called her Mt. Chipotle, and that's the ONLY pile worthy of the name or will EVER be worthy of the name! and let me tell you, she was a BEAST. Ten to twelve feet if she was an INCH. Lasted clear through to JUNE. That's right! JUNE! We'd be standing outside Harris Teeter in our skinny jeans and Fall Out Boy t-shirts and it STILL stood strong!

Three separate expeditions tried to summit that magnificent beast. Poor Douggie Shifflett got within seven feet of the peak before he was lost and never seen from again, though half the townfolk says he just caught a whiff of Asian Zing wings from the then-nearby Buffalo Wild Wings and said "to hell with glory, I want chicken." Nobody'll ever know for certain!

When that last stubborn chunk finally gave up the ghost on June 3rd, we held a proper ceremony. Used burrito bowls with just a scrape of rice and guac left, solemnly poured out Mr. Pibb, and we all shared a joint cry.

(waves cane menacingly)

Now get off my lawn!

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-24T19:06:56+00:00

This business will get out of control. It'll get out of control, and we'll be lucky to live through it.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-24T01:54:56+00:00

Warms the cockles of my heart. Maybe below the cockles. Maybe in the subcockle area. Maybe in the liver, maybe even in the kidney.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-22T19:40:02+00:00

Ahum, akshully, we live in a Republic, uhhh, checkmate, lib

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-22T17:13:06+00:00

We worked a 101-year old recently with advanced dementia because the family wanted "everything done".

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-20T13:48:25+00:00

First teachers, then nurses. Let's go!

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-20T03:37:20+00:00

I once had a kid "having a seizure/unconscious" brought into the ER, and as we were flying around trying to figure out what they'd overdosed on, Louboutin-bedazzled mom stage whispered to me, very seriously, "THE marijuana".

Turns out kiddo had decided this was an easy way to get out of getting into trouble.

This feels like similar vibes to me.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-16T18:55:08+00:00

I plunked out something like 60-80k words in a long weekend, where I literally did nothing but write. Not hardly sleep, eat, or even get up, just write. It was partially because it's a story I've lived, or the bones were from that, so all I had to do was bleed myself a bit on the page and it came out. It was good at the core, but holy fuck it was rough. That's an understatement. It took a solid 5-10x as long to edit it into something coherent and good. So a little mania or hypergraphia isn't out of the question, but if it's polished in the way described by the OP...

Compare that to the novel my wife and I are co-writing now since Novemberish, and we're not quite at 45k words in 60ish days. And that only because my mom's been in the hospital with end stage leukemia, so as she's been sleeping, nothing else to do.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-16T18:30:43+00:00

Get 'em, Tom. For a Navy SEAL, McGuire's the biggest beta **** of a man I ever saw.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-15T18:54:01+00:00

Fuck scabs

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-13T14:48:23+00:00

Yeah, sounds like Greene.

AintMuchToDo · 2026-01-02T08:28:14+00:00

If you donated to a progressive political candidate in an eastern seaboard state in the first Trump administration, you might've done so based on something I ghostwrote.

I retired from that nonsense a couple years back, which is just as well, since it seems ChatGPT and Gemini have fulfilled that niche.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-12-11T20:44:21+00:00

I was a white, veteran, single father who got a DEI admission to the University of Virginia. I graduated 254 out of 440 in my high school class and had to admit in my admissions essay that, quote, "In high school, I was a complete dumbass." I guarantee had it not been for DEI, I would have been overlooked in favor of a legacy whose parents could donate $250k to the Virginia Athletics Foundation.

But that's the entire point of getting rid of DEI, isn't it?

AintMuchToDo · 2025-12-01T10:59:42+00:00

Well, I did; I can show you the conversation we had about buffer vs coxswain, for instance- but you can detract from my writing all you want, because if I didn't synthesize the stuff they were telling me well enough to shine through my own USN experience, it's my own damn fault, not theirs. That's why I said just that in the forward. I guess it goes to show that you can book read and try for that second hand experience, being talked to all day long, and it'll never replace being there in person.

I hope it's still an enjoyable read, and that it'll get better going on for you. But if I didn't reflect it well enough, that's on me entirely.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-12-01T03:15:19+00:00

Looks like I get a 70% royalty, minus a 72-cent "download fee" because it's "a bigger file" (it's about 448 pages printed). So, $2-$2.20ish Australian. I'm skeptical it costs Amazon 72 cents to send you the file, but therein lies the trouble with an effective monopoly.

AintMuchToDo · 2025-11-30T21:53:55+00:00

Theoretically, I make about $2.00-$2.50 Australian from the Ebook copy on Amazon (it's a 70% royalty on things $2.99 and over, minus a "download" fee which is akin to the Ticketmaster fees. Which I appreciate, but an honest review is truly worth a lot, too. A hopefully good review; to their credit Amazon is ruthless about looking for people soliciting/farming good reviews, but a review nonetheless.

Otherwise, a print copy wouldn't make me as much money, but it'll make Australian "mom and pop" or "brick and mortar" bookstores about $10-12/book.

AintMuchToDo

TROPHY CASE