In Darkness

Dark Icon does not play well with others.

That’s the dirty little secret of my early days writing for the Dragon’s Inn newsgroup. The whole idea was that it was a shared world for collaborative fantasy writing efforts… but my sharing and collaborating efforts were limited to minimal guest appearances of other people’s characters in stories that were essentially MINE.

Ladies Night is a rare exception.

My co-author was Louisa J. King, a UK author that I lost touch with over the years. She was (and hopefully still is) one HELL of a writer. I don’t know who came up with the idea of putting our two main characters… Zade and Val’Keth… together in one story, but the result was what I can definitely call home run. When we started writing, everything just clicked and the words flowed like water.

The story takes place in the aftermath of Streets of Ice, when Zade was still unaware of her lycanthropy… a “curse” which undoubtedly saved her life numerous times. Val-Keth the dark elf was my favorite of all Louisa’s characters, and I was happy to have her along for the ride All the major antagonists and secondary characters were mine, with the exception of the demoness written by Greg Dewey in a cameo appearance. Lovvorn, Eric Hood, December, and Theesa all make cameos as well, with Lovvorn actually sticking around to do some of the heavy lifting in one fight scene.

I don’t know where the idea of the shit monster came from, but it HAD to have been a nightmare.

Yes, that’s right.

I said “shit monster“.

Anybody got $30,000 they can give me? I won’t pay it back, but I promise I’ll write a lot of stories. Good ones, too.
How about $15,000? I’ll only write half as many stories, but that’s still a lot.

Anybody?

….hello?

This fellow here has an interesting website. It’s not genre, but its relevant to my situation so I check him out every once in a while. I haven’t bought his ebook since I can pretty much guess at what’s in it based on the other content on his blog, but who knows… I might give him twenty bucks and take a look for myself one day. The reason I mention him is because of one of his recent posts where he claims to be on path to making four figures monthly with a single ebook.

Heh… that’d be nice, wouldn’t it?

Could I do that? I’ve considered it, but making an ebook and hawking it on this site is not on my short-list of ideas to try first. It’s on my try-eventually list, but maybe I should move it up. Or not.

Could it be done? Well… the one big MAJOR difference between me and guys like this is that their products are targeted toward people who are wanting to make money. Making money online is such a common pipe-dream of so many people that even with cheapskates and skeptics like me around, there are still LOADS of suckers people who are willing to pay money to find out how to do it. All you have to do is advertise it enough… cast your net far enough… and you’ll rake in a reasonably large haul.

Fiction, on the other hand, is different.
(more…)

I’ve just finished adding all of the Dragon’s Inn short stories to the Library. The only things left are a handful of longer novella-length stories that I’ll add to the novels section, hopefully this weekend.

I’ll say right now that the order in which the stories appear on the page is NOT the order in which they were written, nor is it the order in which they should be read. I tried to group related stories together because that just makes sense for a “Library”… but doing so completely scrambles the timeline. And for some of these stories, the timeline is important. The December novels (at the top of the page) are in the correct order, so if you are a new reader you should occupy yourself with them until I can get a proper Reading List put together.

If you’ve already read those, then you can have fun with the Kultra stories, since they are largely unrelated to the December series.

“I can’t deal with the real world any more. It’s broken and I can’t fix it. So I’ll just create another one.”

-Dark Icon