3 Takes

Ark Press Authors

Jun 04, 2026

1. Autodidacts Anonymous

2. Girlfriends

3. Differential Predation

1. Larry Correia

Autodidacts Anonymous

Then there was shooting, and I wasn’t just fucking around busting caps at trash in the desert either. My dad had taught me to shoot, but that wasn’t good enough. I needed to be better. I needed to be smarter. I needed to know tactics. I looked up what was considered the best and asked, what does it take to get to that? Then that’s what I would push for.

The Spears ranch money paid for a lot of instruction. Most guys that age get fake IDs so they can buy beer. I got my first fake ID to get into a precision rifle class that was limited to twenty-one and older.

You’d be surprised what kind of good quality education is available for anyone who wants to put in the time and money. I had both, as well as a fanatical fixation on getting better, and a motivational anger that burned like the sun.

Excerpt: American Paladin. Get American Paladin by Larry Correia.

2. Andrew M. Dare

Girlfriends

Piper Hayes. Ben’s girlfriend is Piper Hayes, the prettiest girl at Ridgeport High School. (Ben is aware of what goes on in Ridgeport High because he cares about Piper and his friends who go there. Even though he doesn’t attend there, he’s generally known at the town high school.) Piper is plucky. She is effortlessly popular at school. Many wonder what Piper is doing with such an oddball as Ben Prescott. Ben, who is seemingly indifferent to her looks, finds her soulful and particularly likes her quick wit and aplomb in difficult situations. She gets his offbeat sense of humor. Piper is, in general, the leader of the girls who hang with the hunters. She is a total theater girl in the old-school sense (i.e., a lover of stage and show, not a goth nightmare), starring in all the senior plays this year, and is a regular player at the Ridgeport Community Theatre. She can be called upon when acting skills or theater craft are useful. Ben and Piper attend football games together where they watch Porter Rockwell QB the Ridgeport Raiders.

Maren Davis. Porter’s girlfriend is a fellow LDS girl, Maren Davis. Maren is good friends with Piper Hayes. She is considered the friendliest girl in school by most. She is soulful and a big reader of all manner of fiction. She is a romantic at heart. She is the tallest of the girls and is the most athletic. Porter and Maren attend early morning seminary classes at the LDS chapel, and Maren is the incoming seminary president.

Sloane Rensselaer. Sloane, the richest girl in town, has a big crush on Latch, who she views as a romantic outsider, a James Dean figure. Sloane’s parents are not super happy about this, however. Latch is slightly befuddled by the whole thing, but he thinks Sloane is cool, and he greatly admires her car, which is a vintage Shelby GT500. (A $200,000 car.) He basically consented to be her boyfriend so they can ride around in it, but he’s come to really adore Sloane in his own way. Latch maintains Rensselaer’s fleet of personal vehicles, and he and Sloane met when he had to rescue her when she got stranded driving on sand on the beach. Sloane is Ben Prescott’s first cousin.

Source. Get American Treasure Hunters: The Hunt for Confederate Gold by Andrew M. Dare. Pre-order all the ATH books here.

3. Travis J. I. Corcoran

Differential Predation

Living on a farm, my thinking turns to biology and ecosystems – which is really just another way of saying economics. Earth’s ecosystem is driven by sunlight – 1,367 watts per square meter. Everything that is alive – and everything that has ever been alive – lives off of the differential between that insolation and the dark of space.

An organism can capture the sunlight directly (like clover does), or it can eat something that captures the sunlight (like sheep do), or it can eat something that eats something that captures the sunlight (like humans, wolves, and parasites like liver fluke do).

It’s currently believed that predation evolved not long after unicellular life did.