What I Write and Some Side Notes

Just me yammerin' a bit

So yes, a bit of writing post. When I grew up most authors did NOT write the in the exact same genre every book. Few, if any, wrote series. Every work was unique though you got the (rare) trilogy now and then. Nine Princes in Amber only exists as a series because somebody had kids in college.

Now I don’t mind writing series, as long as they have an end (POI is an exception to that - it will have an end, probably after I die. I do need to write that one of these days - for when that comes to pass). I hate series that don’t finish. That I wrote book 3 of Days of Future Past is proof of that. Unfortunately, well I’ve learned better after I did that and all the people who promised to read the trilogy once it was done never fucking did.

Side note: People who say they won’t read a trilogy until it’s done are (mostly) liars. They never come back when it is done, if the writer is masochistic enough to finish it.

The thing is, I don’t like writing the same story over and over and over and over and over again. I know authors who do this. Every book is pretty much the same plot with just some things changed. THAT’S FINE!!! And I am 100 percent AOK with that. So are a lot of readers out there as some of those folks are making serious bank. It’s just not something I can do.

When I finished Valens Legacy, I was done. I wrote Dan’s Inferno for obvious reasons. There’s even a joke in there about hating Reno. The only reason I wrote Valens Heritage was because a lot of people wouldn’t stop bugging me about it. Also, y’all will notice I did something quite different. Originally I had three separate story lines with three different heroes. Yeah, I cut it back down to two pretty quickly. I also broke a few of my own rules with Mihalis, because I really just wanted to have fun.

(Oh, is Valens Heritage Post-Harem now? Valens Legacy is now Pre-Harem (Or so I’ve been told) and as Mihalis breaks ALL of the ‘Harem’ rules (but one) there’s no way that can be Harem now! Mind you, I didn’t create those rules, a bunch of ‘recent’ fans of the genre have created them and boy do they get LOUD if you break em! :-D )

But I digress...

Ghost Warrior was an attempt to do something new, something that is very much Post-Harem. It didn’t go over well, sadly (and not for the reasons I expected, either!). Book 3 of that is pretty much done. I could wrap it up in a week. But I don’t know if I will. I doubt I’ll ever publish it. The people who wanted to see it read it on my subscriber pages, and there honestly weren’t all that many.

How to Be a you-know-what had some different style elements in it. Some of those were set ups for the longer story, but too many people got too upset up front that the hero was having affairs with a couple of married women (he’s 18 for cryin-out-loud, and he just found out he’s a monster! Give him a little slack!). Just FYI, the setups were 1) so he’d end up stealing his enemy’s wife and 2) realizing that he needed to be ‘true’ to his women and end those affairs. But apparently that was a bit too much? Oh well. I like to do character arcs and I like to have people learn and grow.

But getting back to the initial thought, I like to write different stories and I like to jump around a bit. That’s how you got Wolfhounds, a series I’d wanted to write almost a decade ago. When I started writing ‘Men’s Fiction’ I did it because no one else was. No one. Not a soul. It was out of vogue and you couldn’t get it published. So I wrote it and well, I couldn’t get it published, so I sat on it. Until self-publishing came along and I put it all out and it sold, and people liked it.

Hammer Commission, the first book, was plotted out in the year 2000. Thirteen years before I published it. Oh, for those keeping score, it was the first book out there with an active ‘Harem’ in it, in men’s fiction (best I can tell, and it was a best seller) and definitely the first one with ‘Monster Girls’. I followed that up with Portals to Infinity, which had been written in 2003 / 2004 put wasn’t published until 2013, because I honestly thought no one would buy it. I was shocked when several years later I see all of these new ‘Harem’ fan sites (for Japanese ‘harem’ anime) are telling everyone about it and pushing it (and pirating it sadly).

For some reason, no one every pinged on the ‘harem’ aspects of Hammer Commission and the following books. But everyone pinged on them in Portals of Infinity. Go check out the 1 and 2 star reviews, which I’m sure are still there. I got a lot of hate on that! Wow! But I wrote that stuff because it was fun and I was writing for ME and ME alone at that point. When I put them out and they sold? Wow. When I found out that people were very into the idea of a hero with more than one girl friend? That was when the second guy who was supposed to be in Days of Future Past died before he was even created (Poor guy!)

So after Days of Future Past died, I took Shadow, created a pen name (Jan Stryvant) and published it. Shadow was also a book that had been written a few years earlier - mainly as an exercise. It did so well that I sat down and wrote Valens Legacy, and well the rest is history (series sold over a million books, btw).

After that lawsuit, wherein I spent a lot of money and had a lot of agita for the year plus that it ran (and again, thanks to the folks who contributed - you were gold!) I got an offer from Toni at Baen to write HARD-SciFi again (my first love *sniff*) and of course I jumped at it (and need to get BACK to it) and in that process Wolfhounds was also (finally) born.

I have plans for two more books in the Seasons of Change (Summer’s End series name) I also have plans for some more books in that world. I do hope to start on all of that in a few weeks. I also have plans for another Wolfhounds series and a follow on book to Valley of Fire - that will be sort of a stand alone.

There will be no more Jan Stryvant books. Apparently what I write there is no longer interesting and also I’m just out of touch on what a good ‘harem’ series is. (If Valens Legacy is ‘pre’ and Valens Heritage is ‘post’, where does that leave poor Dan’s Inferno?)

I mean, I’ll probably write one or two at some point over the coming years, I just won’t publish them. Hell, I’ve got one novel where the hero is pretty much flying around in space with a traveling bordello! But when I showed it to a friend he told me that I’d by crucified by a lot of the ‘harem’ fans because he’s ‘letting other men sleep with his women!’ - well duh, traveling bordello! :-D

Hell I got a YA book that’s like 30K words finished that I decided not to put out. Maybe one day I’ll finish it and publish?

The thing is, I can’t write ‘formula’ very well. Yes some of you may have noticed that there is a certain theme that I like to go with, I’ve done it several times and it was because I’m good at it and I do enjoy the ‘heroes journey’. I also remember all the shit that I went though when I went off on my own as a young man. Though I can’t understand the people who are always upset that rather than running off and seeking immediate revenge when something bad happens to the hero, my heroes tend to bide their time.

These folks either have poor impulse control, or have just never been in a situation where doing that will at best, put you in jail, at worse, put you in the ground. Guy I went to high school with is still doing life in prison (convicted at age 19) for doing just that. I’ve had some very nasty things happen to me in my life, and if I’d gone out and just ‘gotten my revenge’ at that moment, I too would still be in prison.

So yes, I like to push boundaries and explore new ideas, I like characters who tend to think first and don’t throw tantrums, and I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again. I want to explore new ideas and new stories. Like the authors I once adored (and still do in many cases) I don’t want to write just ONE thing. I want to write ALL the things. I know there are people out there who don’t like that, and that’s fine. You do you, you read what you enjoy. But if you come along and start telling me I have to follow ‘rules’, well... that ain’t gonna happen. Especially when said rule teller starts off with ‘I’ve never read anything you’ve written’.

:-D

Who knows, maybe I’ll publish the flying bordello story one of these days anyways. I’ll just put a huge ‘Not Harem’ label on it.

For now? I’m going back to scifi once I get POI12 finished (yeah, I’ve been gone from that too long, so it’s been a bit rough). Just understand that I’ve always written, and I’ll always be writing. Because I do it for ME. Whether or not I’m publishing it? Some of it’s pretty edgy. Some things are probably considered ‘porn’ nowadays (when did we get so touchy about sex again?) though they really aren’t. And some of it is definitely guilty of skewering sacred cows.

But if I can make you smile, possibly even giggle or laugh, then it’s all worth it in the end.