This is number 137 in the blog series, “My Writing Life.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
EACH YEAR, I feel compelled to publish a disclaimer that covers me for everything I might fail at for the coming twelve months. No, it’s not a resolution, nor is it a list of goals or excuses. In its original form, it is simple.
There is nothing about my religion or my politics that requires me to convince you that I am right and you are wrong. Nor is there anything about my religion or politics that requires me to listen to you trying to convince me you are right and I am wrong.
Pretty simple, really. I think, however, people take that to mean I have no opinions about what is right and what is wrong. I do! I have very strong opinions about what is happening in the US, immigration, war, women’s rights, LGBTQIA+ rights, the economy, and even opinions about what is happening in other places around the world, like Ukraine, Venezuela, and Palestine. Not expressing them in my life and in my writing is the same as not having them at all. So, they come out in the standards of my heroes, the philosophy in my writing, the opinions expressed by my characters, and their actions. As a result, I have found it necessary to add this disclaimer before every new story I write.
This is a work of adult fiction. The story and characters are fiction. Any incidental mention of places, historic personages, products, or organizations are the property of the respective owners. This book contains content of an adult nature. This may include explicit sexual content and characters whose beliefs may be contrary to your religious, political, social, or world view. The content is inappropriate, and in some cases illegal, for readers under the age of 18, or anyone who cannot tolerate content that does not agree with them.
When I’m talking to most people, I find it is silly to need this kind of disclaimer, either for my writing or my life. Most of the people I interact with are adults. But some people who comment on my stories or send me email plainly are not adults in my definition and shouldn’t be reading adult fiction. Many cannot even discern the difference between fiction and reality. But I’m not going to quit writing.
I am happy to say, in fact, that I have two books that I am working on at this time.
The first should come as no surprise. I wrote the first draft of The Inheritance Paradox in November 2025. I have decided this will be a Devon Layne (aroslav) book, even though it is decidedly lacking in explicit sex. I am deep in the rewrite and am pleased (as are most of my alpha readers) with the progress, though it went a little slowly over the holidays as I traveled and celebrated. I expect the writing will pick up a bit now that I’m getting re-focused on it.
The story is predicated on the idea that a man in 1979 is recruited as a genetic courier to travel into the past and spread a particular gene through the population. How? The usual way. To impregnate women in several different centuries who will pass his genetic material on to future generations.
One of my alpha readers said she loved the concept of the genetic courier, but there had to be some way for him to pass the genes on besides getting a lot of women pregnant. Well, that was the deciding factor for me to choose to make it a Devon Layne book and not a Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) book. If the mere requirement of the MC to have sex is too much to handle, some readers need to be protected from it. That doesn’t mean the sex will be explicit in the book, but it will definitely be a major theme.
When I was in the Pacific Northwest for the holidays, I had the opportunity for a delightful luncheon with my alpha reader and good friend, Les. I told him that I had decided to make the sequel to Nathan Everett's (Wayzgoose on SOL) A Place at the Table my next priority project. His immediate question was whether I had started making notes for it yet. Um…
In November of 2023, I wrote a complete first draft of A Place Among Peers. It was a little over 88,000 words and 21 chapters. I didn’t hate it, but it left me flat. I chose not to release it until I could figure out what was wrong with it and rewrite it. I opened the version I ‘annotated’ in October of 2024 when I’d ‘figured it out.’ But I had other things to be concerned with at the time.
It turns out that I hadn’t figured it all out after all. As I read through the annotated draft, which merely pointed out things that needed to be changed in order to set the story ten years later, I realized it would be more appropriate to mark the thirty percent or so that didn’t need to be changed. So, I’ve been making notes and expect I will start posting the rewrite for Sausage Grinder Patrons sometime in late January or early February. I don’t want to become too distracted from The Inheritance Paradox.
I want to mention that this is a case in which I felt I’d hit the sex and the political parallel with our universe too hard and that I needed to clean it up in order to make it an acceptable Nathan Everett offering.
I will say that while I was ‘on vacation’ I read the entire released version of A Place at the Table, a story available on ZBookStore or on the Wayzgoose page at SOL. I was pleased with how that story developed and am happy to consider it for one of my Signature Edition releases in 2026.
And thus, we begin the new year. I still plan to deal with AI and writing sometime soon. Not sure if it will be next week.