Six weeks!
That’s it. Six weeks from today Bear Brawl is officially out in the world.
Which means advance copies have been sent and something awesome is happening:
People are reading the book and loving it.
Some of the early reviews are stellar and creative and clever.
This one from Sam Hunter’s Campus Files blog made my weekend. First, the headline:
“Bear Brawl Review: Skip Therapy, Fight an Apex Predator.”
Haha. I love that. I'm IN.
Then I kept reading. He says:
“The premise is so wild it genuinely hooked its claws into me. It kept me up late into the night, flatly refusing to let me hibernate.”
That's pretty much exactly what I was hoping for when I wrote this thing.
But then he got into the actual book and what I was trying to do with it, which is gratifying beyond words.
He called Bear Brawl “wildly entertaining and surprisingly resonant,” said “the pacing is downright relentless,” and described the whole thing as a “lean, mean, honey-coated adrenaline rush.”
I mean, come on. That last line belongs on an action movie poster!
My favorite thing about the review is that he got it.
Yes, this is a book about a former UFC fighter who spends a year training to fight a 450-pound black bear with his bare hands. It's supposed to be nuts. It's supposed to be fun. It's supposed to move fast.
But I also wanted you to care a great deal about our hero, Brick Bridger, and his family and his motivation and why he’s really trying to do this completely insane thing.
I wanted to write the kind of story I love. Jaws. First Blood. Rocky. Big characters. Big stakes. Lots of action. A story that moves and doesn't let you put it down.
Now other people are finally reading it.
And they get it.
That feels phenomenal.
Six weeks.
If you've been following the progress of Bear Brawl in this newsletter and have been meaning to preorder it, now is the perfect time. Let’s rise up as the best crew of Sophisticated Meatheads this world has ever seen and make Brawl a bestseller together.
You’ll have the book in your hands before you know it:
November 10.
Man vs. bear.
Let's go.
Jon