“Thomas Pluck!”

When I mention the name Thomas Pluck out loud, my two-year-old daughter recites it in a cute high-pitch voice. His name must have some sorta boom-chicka-boom rhythm the way she spins around on her toes as she sings out, “Thomas Pluck!”

Today, I was sent quite a present from “Thomas Pluck!” The gift was his final edit of Blade of Dishonor that we’ve been working on together—or rather he’s been working on based on an idea I hatched about a character named Reeves. My proposal was cliché and to “Thomas Pluck!”’s credit, he let me know it was cliché. But he liked the germ of the idea and ran with it. It’s too early to get into specifics as this nearly 50k word novel needs to be edited by yours truly and we have to work on the cover art, though I think “Thomas Pluck!” has that, um, covered.

Wait a sec, I just remembered he had talked about Blade once before and said this about it:

David Cranmer asked if I’d be interested in writing about an MMA fighter tussling with ninjas over a stolen sword. How could I say no to that? David published my mixed martial arts fighter tale “A Glutton for Punishment,” and I grew up on ’80s ninja movies and the Shogun Assassin “baby cart” samurai films. It is set in the present day, but the action begins in World War 2. I enjoy writing this so much that there may be a prequel written in the era of feudal Japan.

Well, he exceeded far beyond what I imagined. Today, at the soul-sucking day job, I read as much as I could at lunch and then said out loud, “Thomas Pluck!” My co-worker asked, “What’s a Thomas Pluck?”, and I replied, “You will know soon enough.”