Curmudgeon's Lair

I'm still feeling grouchy. Sometimes it's just because I'm tired or stressed. Right now, Mr. Porky is back to leaving me death threats and threats to steal my books to punish me for imagined slights.

I have resisted writing another rebuttal because I get tired of it. He knows better than to try coming to Massachusetts to get me (he's in Illinois) because I practice cast iron fry pan diplomacy as in WHOMP!

Sales of the new book are doing well. I really have no right to complain. But I'm still feeling grouchy. I assume that what I need is more access to my English boytoy.

I got into a quarrel. Details are not important. I am, after all a curmudgeon, and quarrels are what curmudgeons do best. Jean had been after me to write some bondage novels for a long time because there is so much of it in my fantasy. So last night I got into a quarrel in email with the self-styled King of Bondage, a male dom who writes beat the woman and make her love it books. So, getting into my usual huff, I told him that i could write a bondage book that would outsell his.

I have no idea how much of my regular readership will carry over into it. Be that as it may, I am writing a bondage novella, Jean says that it only has to be 30K words long. Piece of cake compared to what I normally write.

The marketplace is unpredictable, but I issued the challenge and we'll see if my talents at fantasy bondage carry over into regular "Beat me, Kiss me" books.

I'm a ghetto author. No ifs, ands, or buts about it. I had a lot of good luck and fine opportunities over the years and I made mistakes and messed it all up. So view this as the story of my mistakes that I'm going to tell over the next few posts.


I finished the fifth book in the Lycan Blood series and have started the final draft on another book called Damnation's Children which is the beginning of yet another series. I'm also working on Blood Hope.

The series and books are all intertwined.

However, getting to meat of this post is that I've been going through a period of reflection regarding all the years i have written professionally and how I got to this godforsaken place called ebooks.

I made many mistakes along the way. To err is human.

i started out in fiction. I started writing seriously in high school. So many of us do. But at 18 I created my own fantasy world and wrote a novel set there. I sold my first short story when I was 23. The one I sold first actually came out second, but that's another story.

I was attending a junior college close to home. My folks had decided to return to Texas when I was 17, and so I moved from the laid back liberal environment of Los Angeles to the more uptight world of a Fort Worth, Texas high school in an area my parents were from. When I graduated, I attended Tarrant County Junior College, northeast campus. I didn't go straight through, took classes part time while living at home and working.

At the ripe old age of 21, I came across a flyer for a women's college in NY. I had kept my writing a secret. I sent the novel out with my application and got a phone call from the Dean of Admissions begging me to come. So i did. I had two classes with the poet in residence, Paul kane, (he went on to win a guggenheim) . One class was poetry. It was not your usual poetry class where everyone writes free verse. We had to learn to write in all the traditional forms before he would allow us to write free verse. It was an education in form and when and how to break the rules.

the other class was a one on one in which I worked on polishing up and finishing the novel I learned a lot from him. The only experience out there today that can get close to that is Seton Hill

People are wondering why the next Dark Brothers book has been delayed and other books have come out ahead of it. There are many reasons, but the largest is that I had to rethink it.

As the character of Stygean Loosestrife became more and more important to the plotline, he began to gradually take over the focus of the books. Then there were also the out of control side plots that I broke out into their own series.

When I pulled it all together in late spring, the first thing that I did was to rip out the side plots.

That allowed me to see just how much about Isranon there was compared to how much there was about Stygean.

Stygean had overwhelmed the story line. This happens sometimes and causes a protagonist to become a false protagonist. However, I did not want that fate to happen to Isranon. So I have had to gradually rethink the book and look for ways to alter the content and allow Isranon to keep his role as the primary protagonist. I also saw that many supporting characters had become lost in my obsession with Stygean. They need to be worked back into the main story line.

Blood Hope will contain one of the main turning points in the series and I find myself having to give it much more thought to get it right than any previous book in the series.

The fate of Stygean contributes heavily to the conclusion of the series and I must work this right for it to make sense and logic.

Hopefully everyone will bear with me while I try to get it right.