Duleigh: Blog

I've been writing for over 40 years. My first years were spent writing technical documents concerning the B-52 weapons system. Later I wrote documents on troubleshooting home PCs. And what did I do for relaxation? Fire up my home PC and write anything that wasn't a technical document! Sci-Fi, Adventure, Erotica, they were all fair game for me. I even loved writing term papers in college when I finally got around to going. After all, I enlisted for the GI Bill. Might as well cash in on it, right?

These days I spend a lot of time helping young independent writers with the craft. Every now and then a young author will come to me and say, "I just finished this short story and I love it so much that I can't put it down!" and I tell them, "Don't put it down. Go with that feeling and see where it will lead you."

That's the thing about story writing. Quite often, a writer will start with an idea and not know where it will go to. Other times a writer will have a conclusion he wants to reach but no idea how he's going to get there. Like the reader, us writers are along for the ride, not knowing quite where this journey will take us and delight in the joy we find along the way. My book, Love's Last Kiss, is an example of this.

Love's Last Kiss started as a writer's challenge. The challenge was to write a story using exactly 750 words. The story started out as a forbidden May/December romance. Forbidden because the young man was the sweet, older MS sufferer's physical therapist. I loved it so much I just had to expand it out to a 40,000 word novella. But that wasn't enough, so I continued to write the story, filling in details and adding greater dimension to the characters, exploring their past. Now at full novel length, I named it Love's Last Kiss and I'm finally happy with the story.

Steve Anderson was a "Yooper" who is someone from the upper peninsula of Michigan. He's a combat veteran with a dark past and is a damn good physical therapist. Maria D'Amato is a widow from New York City. She's beautiful, sexy, and she was severely injured in the accident that killed her husband a decade before. On top of that, she was twice Steve's age, had a daughter his age, and worse - she was his patient.

Steve had built quite a reputation as a physical therapist, but Maria had MS and Steve wouldn't see her. She needed a specialty therapist. Maria worked hard to bring herself up to a physical condition where Steve would see her as a patient. Maria's goal was to dance at her granddaughter's wedding, and Steve accepted her challenge. Their friendship blossomed and extended past the therapy table. She cooked true Italian meals for him and he became her pool boy.

Soon, love bloomed, and they realized they couldn't live without each other. They chose to spend the remaining time they had as husband and wife, and had a quiet ceremony at Maria's house. That's when everything fell apart, casting Steve back into a world he turned his back on years ago. In Afghanistan, he survived battles between different tribes through being the best shot in the unit. Now here in Vero Beach, Florida, his sins are racing to catch up to him. Only one person, Maria's sister Fabbi, can resolve the dark secrets of Maria's past before Steve and Maria's daughter Natalia start a war than can only be extinguished with blood.

You can find Love's Last Kiss here with all of Duleigh's eBooks

One of my first literary loves was classic science fiction. I ate it up every chance I could get. I loved science-based science fiction more than any other genre. Anything that came out of the Golden Age of Science Fiction could be found in my room. Yes, I read fantasy like the Dragon Riders of Pern and Star Trek, but the work of the grand masters is what stirred my well-read heart. I loved the classic writers, Asimov, Heinlein, Clark, Bradbury. My bookshelves were filled with their work.

I've heard that Golden Age SF was too simplistic, but what's wrong with linear narratives, heroes solving problems and saving the world in a space-opera style? I love writing in that style, and I try to emulate the style of the grand masters. I try to emulate their language. There are no astronauts in my books because that word wasn't invented until after the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The guys in the rockets are "spacemen." There are no computers, PCs, or laptops because they didn't exist when the Grand Masters were at their height. My high-tech equipment is called terminals connected to a room size computational device, and they have access to a two-way wrist radio because Chester Gould gave one to Dick Tracy in 1931.

I wrote my Scarlett Saga Star-Wars style. The Star Wars saga started with Episode 4, A New Hope, then came back around to episode 1 and that's what I did with Alan Scarlett. Episode 1 is titled Alan Scarlett and the Scarlett Virus, a novel length origin story of my space hero Alan Scarlett.

Imagine yourself born and raised in a colony on Mars. Bradbury Canal is a research colony and isn't designed for kids, but there you are, ten years old, and your parents get killed under very mysterious conditions. That's the situation that Alan Scarlett finds himself in when he and his sister Christa get taken in by their mysterious Uncle Ray. The three of them have one desire: find the man or men who killed their parents and bring them to justice, but what were Alan and Christa's parents doing?

Why would somebody want to kill a pair of xenobiologists? Harrison and Laurel Scarlett were simply studying ancient Martian virus and bacteria fossils. Then the mysteries began to pile up. The heavy lift freighter NSS Lake Baikal disappeared, leaving no trace of its crew, cargo, or passengers, including Uncle Ray's wife and stepdaughter. Not long later, the Eastern Bloc's Martian colony of Kōngchéng, with hundreds of people living there, went silent.

The surviving Scarlett children grew up with one thing in mind, find the man that killed their parents and 100 other Martians with them. Both got their doctorates at a young age, Alan got his in Astrophysics and enrolled in the Naval Academy. Christa got a degree in "Art History" and found work at a "Museum" in Moosejaw, Saskatchewan, and as far as anyone is concerned, that's the truth.

As for Alan, he went straight from flight school to space school to advanced command school and was given a squadron of highly talented spacemen. Their mission: Rebuild the Western Alliance Navy (the west's fighting force in space) but also: wipe out something that's called The Scarlett Virus.

A rollicking romp through space as Alan Scarlett, outnumbered and out gunned, leads his men and women into combat. This full-length novel is Book #1 of the series and Book #2 is on its way! It can be found here at Bookapy!

Back in 2021, I had a great idea for an erotic horror story for a contest. It is what I believe is the first original take on A Christmas Karole in a very long time. The story needed Karole's neighbors to be well known to the reader, so the lives of her neighbors were explored to set up the Big Finish. Unfortunately, I missed the contest deadline, so I shelved the story for a year. But I fell in love with my characters. I wasn't ready to set them aside. I wanted to explore their past. What drives them? How did they get where they were when the horror story began? Since I outlined their lives in a "Ghost of Christmas Past" kind of way, I sat down and started writing to fill out their story even more, and the more I wrote, the more I fell in love with Don and Lanh.

Don Campbell (Donovon, not Donald!) is the only son of a widowed farmer, Ralph Campbell. His mom died when he was eight and for the next eight years he's lost in a cloud of sorrow and loneliness. Being poor, he's picked on in school constantly. His only passion in school is swimming, but he's kept from trying out for the team by upperclassmen. He has an option to join the team. Little did he know it was all another prank.

Lanh Nguyen was a tiny Vietnamese-American girl, the youngest of six, three brothers and two sisters. Because the family business and her older siblings were such a burden on her mother, Lanh was raised by her oldest sister, Tam. Lanh is a hard working genius with an accent because she learned to speak Vietnamese first and all of her older aunts and uncles spoke it exclusively, so for years English was a second language to her. She, like Don, was a target of taunting and pranks, but as captain of the debate team, she was merciless.

At the Christmas Dance, Don was told he would have a spot on the swim team if he got a girl on the dance floor to embarrass herself. Lanh was told a very nice boy wanted to teach her to dance. When they were pushed together on the dance floor, the DJ played an extremely romantic song and they were caught in the spotlight, but the prank backfired when Don and Lanh's eyes meet and they fell for each other. From that moment on, they were no longer lonely.

They were two social outcasts headed for a sad, untimely end, but they found a kindred spirit in each other that crossed the racial divide and they leaned on each other for support. Lanh was made the woman of the Campbell household and practically adopted by Don's dad, Ralph. She soon found a love for life on the farm and became a great help with the dairy herd. Don took the teasing and kidding from Lanh's older siblings and became a tremendous help at the family restaurant.

As they drew closer to each other, they learn to depend on each other in school. Lanh takes it upon herself to help Don get his grades up because, after his mom died, he just didn't care. Don stood up to the racial assaults on Lanh and protected her from attacks of other kinds. First Love follows Don and Lanh's journey from high school losers to gold medal champions, published authors, and eventually their path takes them to the altar.

First Love is a sweet introduction to Don and Lanh. Their teen woes taught them to lean on each other, to trust each other, because, as we all know, our teenage dreams have a way of falling apart.

Here's where you can find the complete book

I'm sure you've seen those great strike films from Operation Desert Storm, Operation Just Cause, Operation Deliberate Force, Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and many others. I'm sure you didn't think of how those bombs got to the release point, just that they were safely tucked away in a bomb bay or hanging happily from a bomb rack until the gun camera could record their final seconds of life, the last thousand feet they plunged, and the remains of the target they obliterated.

Good, because I enjoyed working in anonymity. For 20 years of my life, if you give me an airplane and a trailer load of bombs, me and a few other guys would find something to do with them. It amused us, in a safe, secure, and mostly sane manner to do something nobody else on earth would enjoy doing. Putting bombs on airplanes. I worked mostly B-52s where loading four planes in one day was an impossible task. Three was a good number to reach.

Then I got assigned to Kunsan Air Base, South Korea. Torn from the secure home that the Strategic Air Command had become, I was a bomber kind of guy in a crazy fighter world. And I was not prepared for that kind of crazy. The silliest funniest things that ever happened in my life happened at Kunsan and I loved every minute of it - the airman that was terrified of frogs, the pilot who was sure he nuked Korea, the joy of watching an NFL game on TV without the headache of over-paid announcers (It's really a zen moment!) I knew I had to put these events down on paper or I'd forget them.

Introducing Technical Sergeant Michael "Wedge" Donovan who is sometimes called "Guns" Donovan depending on which John Wayne movie you like. (No, other than rank we're nothing alike) He was recently assigned to Kunsan Air Base and suddenly the adventure of his solitary life began. His flight to the Land of the Morning Calm was delayed due to electrical problems and suddenly Wedge was stuck trying to find his way to a base he's never been to in a land where he's functionally mute and illiterate due to the language barrier.

He somehow arrives to his base which is in the middle of an exercise and he quickly realized they play for real. On Kunsan explosions and gun fire are as real as it can possibly get and for someone whose idea of a military exercise was 12 hour shifts and cold chow hall food, this became a real eye opening for Wedge. On his first encounter with the men and women of Kunsan Air Base, he discovered they were all "Dumb Dead."

Enter Technical Sergeant Roxanne Dawson, a beautiful black girl and self-professed lesbian. She shares a bathroom with Wedge and he commits the unforgivable sin his first day there by using her shampoo. It couldn't be that egregious of a sin, he did con her into going to dinner. Friendship bloomed but soon the big Irish loner found himself locked into the Friend Zone by the cute black lesbian. Should he find peace in this relationship? Should he break it off and make a move on the cute Korean waitress at the NCO club? Or can he melt her heart with his Irish charm?

There's a lot of silly things going on around Wedge and Roxie, and a lot of it actually happened to me. If you meet some familiar faces, that's completely intentional. Kunsan is the crossroads of the Air Force and eventually most people pass through there. In my tour I met several guys I hadn't seen since basic training so I tried to instill that feeling in this story. Hopefully Wedge and Roxie can make it through their tour without becoming dumb dead.

Friend Zoned - A Juvat Romance can be found at Bookapy.com for under $3.00.

Several years ago, my wife and her mother were watching a series of Christmas movies on TV that I really hated. I would love to decorate my house like they decorate houses in those movies. But the plots and the dialogue were just awful. So predictable. Yuck. I would tease them for watching those movies because it was the same thing over and over: a young woman moves from the city to the country where she finds peace in her grandfather's Christmas tree farm. Her boss, who loves her, follows her to the country to talk her back to the city. He alienates everyone in town, an old boyfriend takes interest in her, the kids sing at the pageant, and suddenly the boss realizes the "true meaning of Christmas" (actually he couldn't be further off) and he and the girl find love on Grandpa's Christmas Tree Farm.

Fresh off my GI Bill English Lit degree, I bragged I could write a better Christmas Story than that with one eye tied behind my back. My wife simply said, "Put up or shut up." So I did.

Rule #1 of being a writer is to Write What You Know. After that, the rest of the rules are silly and generally meaningless, but I remember Rule #1 and I began to write a Christmas story in my favorite place on earth, Southern Erie County, New York. Hills, trees, farms, and life-threatening lake effect blizzards by the dozen. Perfect for a Christmas romance/sex romp. And I finished it and put it aside while I worked on other projects.

Four years later, I dug out what was lamely titled "Our Year" and wondered if I should do anything with it. I cut a chunk out of it and released it in a holiday contest and it took second place! I was shocked. I almost threw that story away! The reaction from my beta readers was that they loved the characters and wanted so much more. Andi, our heroine, is a smart, beautiful, sexy young doctor whose ex-husband did her wrong, very wrong. She meets Paul, a quiet, sullen doctor that she met briefly five years previously. They are brought together in a life-threatening blizzard. Both have serious trust issues that they earned in previous battles of the heart and they come to realize that they will not survive this blizzard if they don't come together. Will they open up to each other? Will Andi's twin 5-year-old daughters find the true meaning of "missile toast?"

I try to make my characters real, individual, and likeable. If there's a character that you don't like in my stories, rest assured, you just identified The Bad Guy. A friend suggested I publish my stories, and I've been writing without direction for a couple of years so I took Our Year and polished it, made the blizzard more life threatening, made the characters kind and warm, and I gave my friend the reborn Andi's Dream - A Blizzard in Buffalo

I truly enjoyed writing that book. It's a fun romp through the 'south towns' of Western New York, the land where I grew up. It's a real insight into what it's like to be trapped in a blizzard in Buffalo, and what we do to survive the blast of snow. That and an insight into what it's like to finally find love and security after a pain filled life.

Agent's Note: You can find Andi's Dream - A Blizzard in Buffalo in its inexpensive entirety, at Bookapy. Here's a link to Duleigh's Page where you can find the above, and all of his work to date. Thank you for your consideration, and have a safe and Happy New Year's celebration!