Do you have: Honor, Courage, Commitment?
Release Day is here, for a prequel short with Marine-grade clusterf*ckery!
It’s finally here! Available on Amazon and through Kindle Unlimited, with a nice pretty permalink at HonorCourageCommitment.KEBartlet.com.
Because no plan survives first contact with the enemy, a group of Marines has to choose: Vacation or Honor, Courage, Commitment.
Editorial Review!
Also got my first ever editorial review too, about this little prequel short, from the wonderful David Bruns, former U.S. Navy submarine officer and author of the bestselling The WMD Files and Command and Control series! Check it out below ↓.
When the unambiguous, black-and-white values of the Marine Corps run headlong into the moral gray of reality, what emerges is a voice—young, cynical, and looking for answers in a rapidly changing world.
A little treat!
As a thank you for being one of my awesome Substack subscribers, I wanted to share some extra tidbits about this story.
The initial plan for release:
My hope for the release day was initially back in May, either on May 1st for the anniversary of the raid that killed Bin Laden or on May 4th for being able to use the “May the Fourth be with you” phrase as a little marketing thing.
But of course, I couldn’t wrangle the dopamine dragon and this wasn’t done until May 15th. Which is why I picked June 2, the 108th anniversary of the legendary “Retreat, hell! We just got here.” during the Battle of Belleau Wood in World War I, from which the nickname “Teufel Hunden” or “Devil Dog” comes from in U.S. Marine Corps lore.
It was also originally going to be a serial, with each episode / chapter releasing weekly on Substack (and cross posted to platforms like Wattpad, ScribbleHub, Inkitt, Tapas, and more) before later being mostly taken down in order to comply with Kindle Unlimited’s exclusivity clause.
That obviously didn’t happen, but will definitely happen for some future works (so Subscribe so that you can be among the first to read them and for free!)
Where the story idea came from:
The story itself came as an idea while trying to wrangle my ever shifting attention span a little better, using the Pomodoro time management method of focused 25 minute intervals with 5 minute breaks to produce more and rabbit hole less. Did it work? Debatable, but probably not for now?
A first time for me:
It’s also my first time writing using the In Medias Res storytelling device, where the story starts of smack in the middle of things, before going back to the beginning.
Most importantly: Why did I prioritize this over the many other backburnered projects I had that only exist as scratch pads or drafts?
Because I learned, well after I should, that cold discovery of my The fall of the CRINK Alliance series didn’t convert as well as it could, because the first book didn’t code as well to the genre.
Sure, it had a cool (at least in my opinion) 3D-esque graphic of the Korean peninsula with the flags overlaid, but:
≠
the cool Tom Clancy vibes of
Clear and Present Danger or Command and Control
And so, Honor, Courage, Commitment was born!
From the Kindle Description:
No plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Between five U.S. Marines, a former U.S. Navy Corpsman turned student doctor, and a NSA engineer, they should have known better.
A group vacation to St. Thomas — sun, Caribbean barbecue, and a hotel rate that existed solely because one of them was an airline pilot in civilian life. For one week, real life and adult responsibilities were supposed to be on hold as they enjoyed warm weather and water so beautiful that it should have earned the U.S. Virgin Islands full statehood on its own.
Then a teenage girl grabs Eliza Rogers by the arm and even the group's desk jockey could figure out that something was most definitely not okay. Especially when you factored in the ratio of teenage girls to old guys in the group.
There was a major problem though: The Posse Comitatus Act, a whole bunch of [Number] U.S.C. [Some Other Number] that none of them could identify as non-lawyers, and decades of DoD Instructions and Marine Administrative Messages (MARADMINs) said that they should stay out. Legally speaking, that members of the U.S. Armed Forces had no business interfering in civilian matters without a presidentially declared state of emergency.
But in the absence of justice, in the absence of law enforcement protecting people instead of protecting the status quo, what's left if not for people whose core values are Honor, Courage, Commitment.
Honor, Courage, Commitment is a military thriller about what happens when the people trained to defend the republic and the people for whom it is supposed to stand decide that waiting for the system to work is not an option — and what it costs them when they're right. Because when one is not a member of the Epstein class, consequences are in fact real.
A prequel to the Fall of the CRINK Alliance series.
About the Author
K.E. Bartlet (KEBartlet.com)
is an author, professional hacker turned cyber warrior turned everyday whackadoo, former Silicon Valley engineer, university professor, and survivor of Uncle Sam’s Big Green … Weenie. She loves to hack life through its cheat codes, dumplings, and disappearing into a good book even while traveling around the world.
For anyone who’s read this far, she uses a pen name since she only slept through part of her OPSEC training after running out of snacks.
Other Works Available Now:
My Dumpling Your Dumpling — Political Techno Thriller à la Tom Clancy.
Operation Danger Close — Political Techno Thriller, more à la Tom Clancy.
Different Worlds — Romance meets Thriller meets Rainbows.
In Crayons We Trust: A Satirical Tale of Divine Clusterf*ckery — Religious Satire.
Congrats on your new book. My debut novel, Electromagnetic Assault was reviewed by David Bruns as well. He has a high bar for writing reviews so kudos to you.
Congratulations on the new release 👏