I write my stories to relieve the population pressure. Too many people banging around in there and the only way to get them out is to write them out. There's a bitter ex-Navy Master Chief living next to a quietly desperate tarnished Russian angel, who is trying to keep her soul intact. A clever Hareem girl trying to bargain her way out of a city that's being sacked and burned. A maimed soldier seeking solace in the Ozarks; she finds the girl of her dreams but ends up pulled into the web of a serial killer. A couple of 1920s library aids in a Boston marriage who find themselves kidnapped, but it's actually much worse than the imagine.
I write in a Noir style - too many 4 page pulp stories and hardboiled detective novels when I was young and impressionable. I started seriously trying to write in June of 2016, so expect some rookie mistakes. If you don't like the style, there are a lot of much better writers on Lit, and I hope one of them suits you.
That said, the encouragement and support from the readers has been remarkable, and I appreciate it. This has become more and more a joint effort between me and The Missus, I may do the writing, but she come up with plots and characters. We will stay up late into the night drinking wine (and sometimes a little whiskey) bouncing ideas back and forth and telling each other crazy stories.
My most read series is "Tales from the Shack", but honestly, we never intended to write a series, it sort of just happened. I posted one story, then got a lot of feedback asking for more, so we wrote another, then another and so on. The whole thing happened because of reader encouragement and it wasn't really planned in any way. If I'd figured out what was happening in time, I'd have numbered them sensibly.
Weirdly, the best order to read them in is not the order we wrote them in. I've listed the best order The Missus and I have come up with below.
1. Learning the Smugglers Blues
2. Gun Gun Teddy Bear
3. Shameless
4. Monster
5. Pogo and Spooky
6. Tales from the Shack: Nobody
7. The Shack: Necessary Evil
8.The Shack: Guardians (You can read "The Marker" here too - it isn't, properly speaking, a Tale from the Shack, but it does give the background of
one of the minor characters)
9. Pogo's Very Long Day
10. Blue Topaz Eyes
11. Blue Topaz Eyes II (Emma's Tale)
12. Behind Blue Eyes
13. The Shack: A Parable of Wolves
14.The Shack: Ladykiller
15. The Shack: An Angry Man
16. The Shack: .An Unreasonable Man
17. The Shack: An Implacable Man
18. The Shack: And Unstoppable Man
19. The Shack: The Milk Run
We have novelized the first three Needles and Delaney stories into an ebook on Amazon, titled, originally enough as "Needles and Delaney." We did that partly because so many have asked us to, partly because it was just something new to do, and partly as to protect the work - there are people who skim sites for stories then publish them as ebooks under false names. Some of the real heavy hitters here have had that happen to them.
Gender
Male