On the off chance there were rumors... Yes, I'm still here. Yes, there is more to the story, but getting there is a long story in itself. As everyone knows, life happens and it happened to me... nothing too tragic, suffice to say that one of the more tragic results is that I lost my muse and just had no desire to write for a very long time.
Sleepwalker itself came about in an odd way, born mainly out of frustration. I love a good story, and while I don't mind sex - mild, hard, blatant, innocent, raw... many formats - in a story, I reached a point long ago where I insisted that there actually BE a story and not just some random events wrapped around a serious of improbable orgasmic situations. Sleepwalker was the result of my hitting a stretch where everything I found (randomly cruising around) just plain sucked (to me, I'm sure it appealed to others) and this voice in my head screamed, "I COULD DO BETTER THAN THIS!!" As the echo bouncing between my ears faded, another - much softer - voice whispered, "then why don't you?"
I started in early January and wrote almost non-stop for two months. If I wasn't at work or attending to mandatory domestic issues (my kids were in HS at the time) I was at my computer. The whole thing was a total 'seat of the pants' project. The closest thing I had to an outline or table of contents was a something I started putting together so that I could keep track of events and refer back to them. I took March off and then dove back in. The original draft of Sleepwalker took almost an entire year. I actually started posting the early chapters before it was completed over at Gina Marie Wiley's site "Beyond the Far Horizon" If you really want to thank someone for my work, that her. I had run across a couple of her works at different sites and searching for more eventually led me to BtFH. She was the first to see any of my work, and encouraged me to do two things: Continue... and find an editor! As anyone who has written will attest, you simply cannot proof your own work. Not unless it is OLD work; something you haven't even looked at in a LONG time. Do yourself a favor and don't try, your brain will see what you 'wrote' not what your fingers actually typed, and unless they are blatant and glaring, you will skip right past all of your mistakes.
I was gone for so long that I actually could not remember how to navigate the site, and could only manage to read and answer emails. Eventually (many months ago) I reached out to our gracious host for help. As I'm sure you are aware, HE is a busy guy. Several months later he sent a reply which I finally got around to reading this morning. And now here we are. This particular entry is just to let everyone know I'm still here. I have to go get ready for work but Saturdays tend to be slow at the office so I am hoping to post again later today. Whether I get to it or not, I WILL be posting a followup with more detailed information on what has been going on with the story. I thank ALL of you for your interest, inquiries, etc over the intervening years. If nothing else the fact that people are still interested is gratifying and encourages me to continue. Between all of you and my daughter, the ONLY family member who has seen any of my work, and has been HOUNDING me to publish ever since - to the point that she actually had her tattoo artist sketch a cover for the first book - I actually got serious again a while back and, well... here I am. Talk to you all again soon.
Shadow
Hi everyone, first let me say I am REALLY sorry for not getting to anyone's emails. I've been accessing almost exclusively through my ipad lately and for some reason it won't connect to my email. I thought maybe I had messed up the password but when I finally tried it at home it worked... maybe something between google mail and the safari browser, but in either case, that is really a poor excuse. The good news is that I have actually been writing again (new stuff, not just the re-writes I was working on) and hope to start posting again soon. Gotta run, but I'll try to get to the emails later today.