ALL ABOUT DEBBIE #3

1. Who are you?

I am Debra Bascomb/formerly Maitland. I am the administrator of the Public Defenders Office in Jacksonville, Florida, covering the three county circuit of Duval, Clay and Nassau Counties. I was formerly Associate Professor of Business at the University of North Florida until my asshole ex-husband destroyed my career.

1. Are you the hero of your own story?

From where I’m standing, yes. The author gives that position to my ex, Bill Maitland, because he’s got the sexy job of prosecutor with the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville. But his story is my story, and if there was any justice, it would be my story because I’m the best thing that ever happened to Bill. And he’s the one that destroyed our marriage and blighted my life, no matter how sorry for himself he’s feeling.

1. What is your problem in the story?

I fell in love with a short, insecure guy who has never trusted me, not really, in 20 years. He may say he has, but deep down I know he’s just been waiting for me to go to another guy to walk out on me. And when he did walk out on me, and destroyed my career at the same time, I gave him what he’d been wanting. I found a young stud and I didn’t regret one minute of it. So I divorced him and what did the sorry bastard do but slim down and get hot and start having women all over the courthouse and hook up with this gorgeous French bitch who drives me crazy. It is not fair. He’s moving on, and I thought I was too, but he’s still messed up my head so bad I’m seeing a psychiatrist to find out why I want to kill him. That’s my problem. I want to move on and make a life without him, and it’s so much harder than I thought it would be.

1. How do you see yourself?

I’m a good person. I was a good daughter, even if I was screwed up royally as a teen. But getting 38 d breasts when your friends are in training bras has a habit of doing that to you. (They grew to 38dd). I am a good mother. I was mother and father to our two children for most of their lives. St. Bill was nowhere to be found. I met an awkward, nerdy guy in college and chose him over guys that were better in bed and better looking and better life choices because I fell in love with him. I saved his ass from being kicked out of school because he’d lost weeks from injuries he suffered coming to my rescue. I gave up my dreams and worked to put him through law school because he came from genteel poverty and he never had to worry about money when I was working for the Hunt Bank. I saved his college career, I gave him his legal career and along the way I gave him the best sex he’ll ever have in his life, even with that bitch Aline des-Jardins. I was a faithful wife way beyond what anyone who knew what our bedroom was like would ever expect. And when I finally reached out to find some happiness for myself with a gorgeous young Assistant Professor Doug Baker, Bill destroyed my career and Doug’s in one night. Without even trying hard. And the asshole had the nerve to feel like he was the one that got screwed over.

1. How do your friends see you?

I don’t have many friends. Men can’t take their eyes off my boobs and can’t stop trying to grab a feel. Old guys. Young guys. Friends of my son and daughter. If they have a penis, they’re making moves on me. The best male friend I ever had wanted me and had me, but he saw me as a person instead of a pair of big tits. He saw me as a professional who had made a career for myself and had the right to break away from a marriage that was killing me. He just thought I had made mistakes in the way I went about it. He’s gone now and I miss him more than anyone I never loved. Maybe I did, a little.

I don’t have many female friends. None of them trust me with their husbands or boyfriends. As if that’s my fault. If they can’t keep their men happy, that’s on me? The entire time I was with Bill I never cheated on him. Well, that’s not EXACTLY true. But the two times I touched another man I never….did anything girls don’t do in junior high. And the one man that I almost made a mistake with that I would have regretted, I was able to stop and walk away from. And trust me, there are not many women in Jacksonville that could say that. But, I do have one good female friend. Evelyn Criser is almost as hot as I am, so she’s not jealous and she understands what we go through with men from 7 to 70.

Flat chested ugly bitches see me as the evil seductress that lies awake plotting how to steal their old, bald, fat lovers. As if. Men I wouldn’t have looked at twice get their feelings hurt if I don’t drop and beg them to let me given them a blow job. As if I owe them sex just because they want it. Take it from me, being beautiful and hot is something I’d never give up, but it can be a royal pain in the ass.

1. What are your achievements?

I am an Associate Professor of Business at a major state university. Starting later than anybody I work with, I still made it up the ladder, played the political game, wrote the papers, did the research on corporate organization and almost made to full professor status before Bill blew me out the water. I was a good teacher, better than most around me because I knew what life in the real business world is really like and I did my best to prepare students for what they’d face when they walked into working offices.

I helped my ‘friend’ Bill get his undergraduate degree, worked my ass off to pay for his law school education, married him, gave him two children, went to their activities and cheered for them and played mother and father when they really needed two parents. And I tried, I really tried, to talk to him after our split, to ease the pain that he had to feel because he still loved me. But he wouldn’t talk to me, and he wouldn’t listen. But I reached out to him.

9. Who is your true love?

There’s only been one – Bill Maitland. And there probably won’t ever be another one like him. Maybe that’s a good thing. Because I think sometimes he almost killed me, even though I dumped him. Maybe we ought to settle for comfortable friendship and convenient lust, because love hurts entirely too much

10. If you were stranded on a desert island, who would you rather be stranded with, a man or a woman?

If it was going to be for a month or less, a woman. It would be relaxing not to have to go through the whole man/woman thing for a while. More than a month, a man. Hot hopefully. I’ve gone too long without sex and I don’t want to make a habit of it

11. How do you envision your future?

Hopefully I’ll find another man to love and share my life with. Hopefully I’ll finally be able to shake off the anger and rage and emotions that Bill still rouses in me and realize he’s not the most important part of my life anymore. He’ll always be important, because of our children. And because he is a good man and truly one of a kind. But I don’t want him to be my heart. I want to be happy without him. And I want to raise our son and daughter to make good marriages and make Bill and I proud grandparents. And most of all, I never want them to read the emails between Doug and I before my marriage to Bill crashed and burned.

ALL ABOUT DEBBIE - PART 2

The First Part of Debbie

Debbie Bascomb

 I have always liked and wanted big breasted women in my personal and fictional life. No apologies. There’s a reason  why tall, dark and handsome – not to mention well hung – shows up over and over in fiction and real life as the iconic male sex symbol.

Probably the most ubiquitous of the bombshells in my writing has been Debbie Bascomb. She is one of the most important figures in the ongoing “When We Were Married” series but she has and will pop up  in other books as well.

She is, of course the ex-wife and love of Prosecutor Bill Maitland’s life. Following a painful divorce after 20 years of marriage, both she and Bill are trying to figure out what a life will be like without the other.

Thanks to the efforts of some friends, Debbie has been given a visual identiy. I had  a nebulous vision but when fans showed me what I’d written, I realized what I’d created. She appears to be a pornographic male fantasy. But I have met Debbie, and not on the silver screen or porno films either, but in the  office of a Florida high school. Not exactly as I’d written her, but possessing the same sexual charisma and the ability to enchant men without trying. And I’m sure there are more Debbies.

(Sidenote) When I met her husband, or boyfriend, because he had come in to discuss his son’s progress, I told myself that it would be interesting to see if she came in with him the following year. He was a young, good looking guy. But even though this was real life, not the pages of fiction, I wondered if a normal guy could hold a Debbie. AS it happened, I met with him the following year and she was not there. And he made it clear to me she wouldn’t be coming again.

When I first started writing WWWM, I wrote it from Maitland’s perspective and didn’t get into any third person perspective from Debbie’s viewpoint until a few chapters in. Which meant that from Maitland’s perspective  she was a cold-hearted cheating bitch and most readers adopted that view of her. It isn’t until later in the first book that it’s possible to see there are TWO truths about what is happening – and why.

Maitland is THE central character and the entire series revolves around him. Which makes it possible to underestimate who and what Debbie is. She liked a lot of sex with a lot of different men, but she was the smartest woman – the smartest person – Maitland had ever met. And after  he saved her at the Frat House party, she stayed with him – on and off – for two years when almost any of the men lusting after her could have given her a life Maitland could only imagine.

Debbie went to work at the Hunt Bank in Jacksonville and kept up her studies while supporting Bill financially getting through Law School. When he graduated and went into private practice, she resumed her academic career and eventually became an Associate Professor of Business at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville.  Along the way, she made time to give Maitland three children, two of whom lived,  and she raised them.

It wouldn’t be fair to say that she raised them alone, but especially after Bill went into the State Attorney’s Office in Jacksonville in Florida’s 3^rd Judicial Circuit, his work took up more and more of his time – and his life. That is one of the Big Hurts that destroyed their marriage, which she refers to over and over in WWWM. He spent one of their anniversaries in Paris – without Debbie -working a case of human trafficking of Muslim girls from Paris to Florida for prostitution. You can look at that as either a very good thing, or a very bad thing.

Of course, their marriage eventually  goes down in flames. Bill is free to sample the delights of the women he’d stayed scrupulously away from for 20 years. Debbie begins a torrid affair with a younger, very hot professor she has been mentoring. When that affair burns out and he moves on, she is more selective about the men she takes into her bed.

After Bill crashes a gala at the University and gets both Debbie and her lover  fired, she moves on to the Jacksonville Public Defender’s Office, headed by a friend of both her and Maitland, the blind Attorney Johnny August. She talks herself into a number two position under August as Director with the job of managing a corps of young, ambitious attorneys, which August refers to as “herding cats.”

In the end, while Debbie possesses a lot of positive qualities, none of these really detract from her overwhelming sexual magnetism.  While Bill describe her  in many places as being almost inhumanly beautiful, that assessment has to make allowances for the fact that he is in love with her and probably will be until the day he dies.

So to really get an idea of her appearance and how it affects men, you have to look at other places.

Look At “The Currency of Time” in  1999.

Oil man Michael McCarthy has attended a Christmas Gala at the old Jacksonville Train Station with Deirdre Lancaster, heir  to the $150 million OIL Inc. fortune, the woman he’s fighting against falling for because he already knows she’s in love with a Mafia thug. As he turns his gaze from the flame-haired Deirdre:

“Could you grab a champagne for me?”

I turned and momentarily lost the power to speak.

She was tall, as tall or taller than Deirdre. Blonde as sunlight, a face that could have come from a frieze of an ancient goddess, full red lips, eyes that could pin a man like a butterfly pinned to a page. My eyes dropped and her body was better than her face. Big breasts, a woman’s full hips. She wore a low cut dress that drew the eyes of the half dozen men who swarmed around her.

“I’ll walk with you if you need someone to keep you company,” she said, smiling at her posse to take the sting out. To make it more obvious that she was going to be with me, she slipped her arm inside mine and tugged at me to move me forward.

I let her walk me away from her admirers.

“What just happened,” I asked when I regained the power of speech. “I know I’m catnip to women, but I usually have to work it a little bit.”

She grinned.

“You are an attractive man, but I was honestly using you. You may not have noticed, but men tend to be attracted to me. Normally it’s fun, but once in  a while a woman wants to be able to walk around without a pack of horny men sniffing her.”

“Glad to be of service.”

“You  came in with Orion Lancaster and the tall redhead. Are you with them?”

“I work for him, for both of them, actually.”

“You’ll pardon me, but you don’t look to me to be a paper pusher, an executive type.”

“What do I look like?”

She looked me up and down and the thing that really puzzled me was that my dick didn’t immediately spring to attention.

“A roughneck oil rigger, one of those men who work in the muck and oil, guys that actually work with their muscles.”

“You have a good eye, as well as good everything else. I do physical labor, but I also push some paper once in a while.”

I found an elf and grabbed two champagne flutes. As we both drank we made our way through the crowd moving toward the entrances at the rear of the ball room. When we got close enough to the rear entrance that  we could feel the cold breezes from the outside I watched the goosebumps rise on the gilded flesh of her upper breasts.

She noticed where my gaze went and smiled.

“Why are you in here alone?” I asked. “I noticed your wedding ring. I can’t imagine a husband letting a woman who looks like you wander around unattended.”

“He’s here. I just lost him but we’ll hook up in a little while.”

“That’s dangerous. I honestly don’t know why I haven’t put the moves on you. You’re exactly the kind of woman I’ve always gone after.”

“I’m married?”

“That’s never stopped me before, to tell you the truth.”

I could tell she wasn’t shocked.

“You think there might be a reason why you’re not trying anything with me?”

I shook my head.

“I saw you when you came in with the redhead. You never took her eyes off her when she went off to dance.

“You’re wrong. It’s not like that.”

“She’s a beautiful woman. And there was something in your expression when you watched her walking away.”

“We’re not like that. I’m not like that. She’s the daughter of my employer. I like my job.”

She shrugged.

“It’s  never going to happen,” I said, dismissing the fantasy.

She searched the crowd.

“You never can tell. Fifteen years ago I could never have imagined being married to my husband. Nobody else could have either.”

She saw someone across the room and stepped away from me.

“Thank you for the company. That tall, white haired man over there is State Attorney Austin Edwards, my husband’s boss. He invited us both to this party to celebrate Bill’s being promoted to the number two prosecutor in his office. Bill will be somewhere around him.”

As she swiveled away from me I thought that Bill -whatever his name was- had to be one of the luckiest assholes on earth. And I wondered again why in the hell I hadn’t tried for her. And I told myself there was no way in hell I could possibly be thinking of anything serious with Deirdre Lancaster.

AND LASTLY:

I had another snippet about Debbie that I was going to put in here BUT…

SIDENOTE: Burt Reynolds was at one time probably the country’s biggest male sex symbol. And a major movie star (Financially but not critically. Check out “Smokey And The Bandit” and “Deliverance.”)

In 1974 he made a movie called “The Longest Yard” featuring a football game between prison cons and prison guards inside the prison. Reynolds was a football./NFLsuperstar sent to prison for some bad life decisions.

One of the other cons is trying to cheer him up by telling him all he has to do is “get his shit together.” And at that point Reynolds utters the quote that is my favorite quote EVER.

“I’ve got my shit together,” Reynolds says. “I just can’t lift it.”

Which has been my problem for many years. A friend of mine tells me I’m the most disorganized person he’s ever known. And he’s right. I’ve  been writing for many years. And I can’t tell you exactly how much I’ve written. I know there are stories I loved that I can’t find any more and I doubt I’ll live long enough to find them.

Now that I’m working electronically, it’s even worse. It’s hard to realize this, but I’ve been writing as DQS for almost a decade. You write a lot of stories and novels and partial novels in 10 years.

 I’ve got hundreds of copies of the same story, that I’ve made changes to. Where it gets bad is finding ONE copy in the forest of similarly tagged files. I’m stuck right now on my “BETA MALEs” two-part novel because I wrote an important section I can’t find..

 ENOUGH RAMBLING

The reason for this sidebar is that I;m going to turn to the great resource of all disorganized authors – my wonderful readers 😉

There is a short section in one of the WWWM books – I think it’s #3 – when a man is trying to console Debbie. I think is the Public Defender Patrick Leary.

And he tells her “You’re a beautiful woman. Even men who are too old and fat to believe they can ever have you, want you to smile upon them!”

That’s it. Roughly. I think that one quote explains everything you need to know about Debbie and the effect she has on men. 

NOW, what I’d like is for my intrepid readers to FIND THAT QUOTE and let me know where it is, page number and volume.

My mail list is not set up yet so I’ll be relying on Facebook members and Twitter-ites to do the heavy lifting. UNLESS I HAVE A HUNDRED READERS MEET THE CHALLENGE you can have your choice of both volumes of the BETA MALE/SHARK duology or the upcoming “Stay She Said” volume 5 of WWWM – FREE!

AS always, I’d prefer you to email me at danielqsteele1@aol.com. Although I don’t mind info in facebook or Twitter comments, I’m more like to  see it in the emails.

Disorganized, you know. But I always read my emails.

THE MAGICAL VEIL

I  TELL MADE UP STORIES FOR FUN AND PROFIT. YET ALL OF THEM. NO MATTER HOW OUTLANDISH, CONTAIN A NUGGET OF TRUTH. SOMETIMES I DON'T REALIZE IT WHEN I'M WRITING. BUT THEY DO.

LET ME TELL YOU A STORY ABOUT  BOY NAMED BILL AND A GIRL NAMED DEBBIE.:

     The summer went by and we went out for pizza, went to a couple of campus plays, took in some movies on campus and off. Mostly we just hung out at my place, helping each other with our classes because we were both going full time all year, watching TV, talking about girls and guys and sex and life and what we wanted to do with our lives.

     The summer went by even though I wanted it to stop, to stay. I loved every minute I spent with her and she seemed to enjoy my company. I knew this was going to end sooner or later. She could have been going out with a different guy every night, being wined and dined and having serious money spent on her.
      it was Friday, July 19. As usual, we didn’t make any plans. She popped in on me whenever the spirit moved her. This time, I decided, I was going to be the one popping in. Let me take her out for once. Even if it wasn’t a real date, it would feel more like one.
     I had a 1969 Volkswagen Bug that my mom had bought in ‘80 and I had kept running. I thought it would probably be the only time Debbie had ever had the experience of squeezing into a Bug.
     I was walking toward her sorority wearing my best jeans and a short sleeved shirt and clean tennis shoes, thinking what it would like to walk up like a real date when I saw her walking out of the front door. She wasn’t alone.
     A tall black guy had his arm around her waist and as I watched, he leaned down because he must have been 6-6 or 6-8. She leaned into him and kissed him      
     I stood there in the rapidly dying sunlight, blinking like a deer caught in the headlights of an oncoming 18-wheeler.
     I couldn’t think for a minute. Why was I so surprised? Not surprised, stunned. Why shouldn’t she be going out on a date on a Friday night? I hadn’t called her, hadn’t asked her if she was free. I’d just assumed that she was waiting by her phone for the pleasure of my company.
     I didn’t even realize what I was doing until I found myself walking back to my Bug, starting it and heading after them. It was stupid. She was out on a date. What the hell was I doing? But I followed their tail lights as they drove away from Sorority Row toward the city’s Restaurant and Nightclub Row.
     I drove back to my apartment. It was 3:30 in the morning. I’d stopped along the way and bought a bottle of Scotch. I sat in the dark, filled a shot glass and started sipping.
     Why the hell had she come to see me? Why the hell had she played at being a friend, joking about blow jobs and masturbation and keeping me constantly revved up, knowing she’d never touch me the way she’d touched that black bastard.
     Half the bottle of Scotch had vanished and Mark and one of my other roommates, Dave, were holding me down while two girls shouted in the background. My right hand hurt like hell and my head was hurting from all the yelling. I didn’t know what the hell was going on.
      “Mark...what....let me up....let me up...”
     “I will, Bill, as soon as you relax. Stop fighting us. Can you relax?”
    I lay back and realized I was on my bed. After a moment, Mark and then Dave eased up and somebody turned on the overhead light and I looked around numbly.

     It looked like a tornado had swept through the room. The chairs were snapped and lay in pieces, the dresser had been overturned and the contents strewn around the room and there was a big, big damn hole in the wall next to the bed.

     I realized my hand hurt so bad I wanted to scream. I looked down at it and it looked like I was wearing a red catcher’s mitt.
      “What-“
     Memory flooded back into me
     “Get me to the emergency room, Mark. I’ll pay for all the repairs. I’m sorry.”
     “What happened, Bill?What in the world happened?”
     “Growing pains, Mark. I just grew up tonight. I’ll explain it to you someday.”

     Despite all the booze I’d had during the night, I was feeling stone cold sober, mostly cold. I wanted to shiver, despite it being in the 70s. After a few tense minutes, Mark and Dave helped me up and I  insisted on driving Mark back to our apartment. It was 9 a.m., the sun was shining and Gainesville was green and beautiful.
     He got out and was getting ready to come around to my side when I said, “I’m not coming in, Mark. I’ll be back in a few days, but I think I’m going to go home.”
     It felt good to be alone and on the road from Gainesville back to Jacksonville, driving through the small towns and rural countryside of Alachua County. Then I was back on Jacksonville’s west side and pulling into the driveway of the small, two bedroom house that had been my home for more than a decade.
     I was turning the key in the front door when it opened and my mother took one look at me and gasped, then wrapped her arms around me. She was a small woman, but she seemed to envelop me.
     “Oh, Bill....”
     “It’s OK, Mom. I just want to sleep.”

From "When We Were Married #1 -The Long Fall

    

     NOW, this is a  fictional story. None of it is true. Not the people. Not the events. Not the time. Not even the place where all this went down. And yet, it is a true story. It is more true than any of hundreds of newspaper stories and magazine articles I've written over the years. 

     It  is a story about that moment when you leave childhood behind, foolish dreams and the belief that if you do all the right things, life will treat you kindly. It is the moment when you realize that loving someone - despite all the romance novels - doesn't mean they have to love you back, the moment when you realize that The Happy Ending is a literary construct..

     Because it is a true story, it has weight and consequence. It left scars and has affected the way I look at life, the way I've lived my life. There's a reason I think the painting that will define my life will be two people trying to crawl their way to each other through barbed wire.

     Since blogs are supposed are supposed to teach: here is ,my nugget of wisdom. You don't need any other resource than the one that stares back at you from a mirror. Whether young or old, black or white, able bodied or confined to a  chair or  bed, your truth is in you. Whether your story takes place in outer space or ancient Greece, you use your imagination to get there, but when you get there use what you  know to make the story resonate with readers.

     OR, face unpleasant or terrible truths you can never discuss or deal with. Don't worry. Just lie about it, use the magical veil of fiction to transform it. And people may even pay you!

#

   

  

      

WHEN YOU COMPLETLY SCREW THINGS UP

     The above title as usual may confuse readers and I confess I could have stated it  lot more elegantly and writerly. I have read columns and blogs on how to drill down and find the central core or theme  of your work/your  book. In other words, WHAT ARE YOU REALLY WRITING ABOUT? WHY ARE YOU WRITING YOUR BOOK?
     I will confess that I've always enjoyed reading about writing, the tricks of the trade, so to speak. And I have learned things in the books and magazines and e-posts. Not much that I've actually used, but that's my fault.. I am hard headed and conceited. I like to visualize myself as a Grandma Moses or Primitive Naturalist of literature.
     Part of it is that writing has always come easily to me. And when you've done it as long as I have, not sold but written, writing is no big deal. "WWWM" has attracted readers and I hope will attract readers after i'm gone, but it follows virtually NO laws of commercial or literary fiction. I like to think of it as a literary Bumblebee. It should not work, not be able to fly, but for some readers it does.
     I have no idea why it works, or what it's about except the great adage: NEVER MARRY A PRETTY WOMAN.
     HOWEVER...once in a very rare while  I completely misunderstand why I am writing a book, the point or moral of it. And it matters.
     Consider "Tis A Far, Far Better thing" with the cover of a guy on the gallows. It didn't sell much, aroused some interest but not much. I know there are valid reasons for that. It had an unusual hero/protagonist: an emotionally stunted guy who has never been able to love or trust any woman since the deaths of his family at an early age.
     Killing any chance of a millennial readership- he makes his living firing people and destroying dying companies. He is a Capitalist in capital letters and believes he's the Good Guy in the story.
And he's hooked up with an attractive artist and New Age Obama follower who has used sex to claw her way out of poverty and is still having sex with other guys. She's a lot more liberated than even your usual Chick-Lit heroine who lives free and wild until she meets The One.
     I've always loved Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" and since this story is about a man who's never experienced love finding it for the first time and learning he can't have it, it was a logical step to have him make the ultimate sacrifice and give up the woman he loves so she can have the man she loves.
     Therefore: the title and the cover.
     Unfortunately, the "tale of two cities" motif only occupies the last 10 percent or less of the book. If I hadn't fallen in love with the image of the guy on the scaffold I would have realized it sooner.
     Self sacrifice for love is NOT what the book is about. I think if you read the book and don't look at the  last tenth,  it's easy to see what it's really about. You have a good looking, sexually active guy who falls into what he assume is lust. It's the only thing he's ever known. He pursues the girl to get her into bed, does get her into bed, and she meets his friends and they have a fairly enchanted sexual holiday until they both have to go to work in different states and different time zones.
     But they keep coming back together. For weekends or vacations or one night stands - in Ponte Vedra or Miami or Paris. And their time together gets longer.  Until it's three years later, They see other people but like two magnets they keep being  drawn together. It frightens his friends who see what's happening and know that he has never been crushed by a love gone bad.
     Eventually for purely practical reasons he asks her to move in with him. AND IT HITS THE FAN. She vanishes for awhile and when she returns he has to face the fact for the first time  when she's not with him, she's having sex with other men. He's always known it. just like he can have sex with other women, but he's never had to face the truth. And he finds out he doesn't like it - AT ALL!
     The story keeps going with some ups and downs and twists and turns. But it's not about
  sacrifice. It's about HOW MEN FALL IN LOVE.
     There's an old saying that women trade  sex for love, and men trade love for sex.Which fits in with my beliefs. There are billions of men and women on the planet so if you want to argue that men can fall into love with the exchange of glances across a crowded room, I wouldn't argue. But most men, I think, fall  in lust first and if they can indulge in a sexual relationship, love usually sneaks up on them.
     So... the title is misleading,the cover is misleading, and the sales copy is misleading.
     Which is why I'm bringing it out with a new cover, a new title and new sales copy. But, as far as I can tell, I'm not changing a word in the book itself. I never spell out the core of the novel, the theme or moral, but I hope most readers will pick up on this if they're not distracted by that damned hangman cover.
     All of which is to say unless you're a completist collector of my work - Pray God there is at least one such creature in the universe -and you've already read the book, don't bother to buy the new version.
     Below is the new title and cover, I'm putting it out on Amazon this to see if I get a different sales reaction this time.

THE BiG REVEAL

    

    I thought about titling this Blog entry "out of the closet" but because the gay connotations it might confuse things, I decided to go with the  'The Big Reveal' instead. This is my second blog entry and while I promised one every week or so, it's more like a month. Still I'll try to be more regular from here on out.

     The subject of this blog will be big news to me, not necessarily that big to others. but it will answer some questions for the future.

     I've been writing for a long time. In fiction I've written science fiction, fantasy, horror, epic sword and sorcery, crime and mysteries.- nearly 200 short stories, novellas and short novels.

      I'd never read much in the field of romance or general mainstream fiction. In  about 2010 I discovered a web site titled Literotica and discovered stories about sex and relationships.
It's a porno site but it also contained a number of actual STORIES about women and men tearing each other up.

     I was drawn to this and starting writing a few of my own. I started writing a long story about an epic divorce and the impact it had on the two people involved, their family and the people around them - When We Were Married. 

     At about the same time I discovered the existence of e-novels,  and outfits like Amazon, Smashwords and Barnes and Noble  and started thinking about publishing on these venues. After I started, I ran into a problem and it kept getting in my way.

     When I wrote  science fiction, or fantasies or mysteries, I knew what I was writing. When I started writing as DQS I had to try to explain to readers what I was doing. My stories had elements of romance, but they weren't romance. They had sex but they weren't porn. I finally had to describe them generically as 'love stories' which is a crappy description.'

     THE BIG REVEAL: What I write are STORIES OF THE WORLD, SEX, LOVE AND RELATIONSHIPS FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF MEN. Most everything I've written as DQS follows this framework.  I like to think I've written some strong female characters, but they aren't the main focus of the books and stories: with a few exceptions

     If you look below the two blog entries you'll see a list of my novels which will give you an idea of what I do.

     Whew! I feel better getting that off my chest!

     Since this  is the first blog of a new year, this is a good time to bring you up to date on current and future plans.

    '˜The 'Currency of Time' which has already been published in a limited form is finished and has an ending. It just needs a 'little' proofing before being published.  (little = a week or so) Unless I throw in a short story or two which will take a little longer.'

   
 There are two novel/anthologies coming next:

          'A Good Day' a comic book super hero/sf with a few super hero stories thrown in

AND

          'The Winter Road' a fantasy novella with a few fantasy stories thrown in.


      About 95 percent of everything in these is already written, which is why I'm going to try to move these out next;

      I'm finishing two related novels, 'There Are No Beta Males, Only Losers' and 'Lady Or The Shark'  I love these because they have SHARKS: a first for me. I also like Lady Or The Shark' (LOS) because it takes a bite out of the Me2 movement. These have different plots and themes but they're closely related.  I'm guessing End of February: maybe.

     The next novels I'll publish 'because they're already written and have been scanned in pieces will be 'Hunter's Prey' and 'The Best Dead Detective Around' 

Detective was my homage to the great Mickey Spillane and 'Hunter' at 210,000 words was the longest thing I'd ever written until WWWM, it took me the longest to finish (18 years), and it is the favorite of all my books of any genre.

     Along the same lines, I'm republishing and re-packaging a previously released novel. 'Tis A Far, Far Better Thing' with  a new title, 'NoTime For Love', a new cover and a new description. 

I'm doing this because the title and cover were wrong for this book. Only the last 10 or 15,000 words related to sacrifice for love. The bulk of the book is about HOW men fall in love. Again, this will be very easy to turn around and re-release.

       The book I'll probably spend the most time on this year will be WWWM5, 'Stay, She Said.' This deals with a major change in William Maitlandâ's life and the re-introduction of one of the most important characters in the series.

     So, there's lot of stuff coming, but very little writing to do.

     On a few other matters: if anyone feels like logging onto my facebook DQS page and leaving 'likes',  that would be appreciated.  https://www.facebook.com/danielquentin.steele  I've never much cared about Facebook at all, but people do keep track of your image on Facebook.

      I recently received an e-mail from a reader who noted with amazement 'you;re not even on Wikipedia!!'

     I don't know that it's possible to be MORE INVISIBLE! than that
.

     So if anyone wants to let people know I exist by leaving a 'like', I'd appreciate it.

     And if anyone would like to leave an entry on yours truly on Wikipedia 'making me a real person' I would not mind  making you a real person (sort of) by introducing you as a character in a future book or story. I've done it before and it worked out well.

     Last but not least. I've appreciated all the reviews I've gotten for my books. I'd like more. short or long, concise or a treatise, whether or not you like my work, please leave reviews.

     PLEASE!