In the depths of Manhattan’s Lower East Side, four people coexist in a cesspool of lust and betrayal — Wolfe, a broken cop with a history of questionable behavior; Goldi — a young woman trying to survive her dreams and the death of her lover; Gretel — an undercover agent struggling to remain true to her oath; Ivan — a horror of a man who will do anything to get what he wants.

Back to reading regularly and writing reviews, which I love to do.

This month’s checklist is vast, but that’s how I roll.

“The goal, my darling man, is to cum just as you take your last breath, to realize the most amazing orgasm, the most glorious sensation – for that matter – imaginable, just as you die. It is the purest high I have ever felt, and” – she’d searched for words, but she had never finished the sentence. There was no way to describe it; neither she nor the others who had survived the ritual and achieved this dark pleasure were ever able to summon words that did it justice. All they ever shared was a knowing look of some unspeakable glory followed by the recognition that some of their friends had not been able to be revived.

The other day, it hit me that I should do something familiar, something many people have seen online on YouTube — Honest Trailers. (If you haven’t seen an Honest Trailer, you are missing out.) Why not create an Honest Trailer for my own story? And so, with a bit of help from ChatGPT, who took my notes and fashioned the script, and ElevenLabs, a text-to-voice application with tons of really cool voices, I put this thing together and am dropping it here for you today.

What did I do this week in writing, and better yet, what should I be doing? When you have a bunch of WIPs in progress, it’s hard to keep up with everything. I’ve started a calendar on a notepad now just to stay on schedule with what I want to do. That includes when I write this newsletter, what episodes and chapters I’m writing in my various WIPs, and what and when I’ll post during the week on my Substack, The Fictional, as well as on The Fictional: After Dark.

Working on the novel again, among other things…

Welcome to The Fictional: After Dark, my little foray into erotica. There are as many dirty stories to tell as there are fantasy, science fiction, adventure, romance, and noir ones. So, let’s tell them!

1st Newsletter of the Year

The slog is real, and I totally understand when writers struggle, when you see writers talking about struggling to get 300 words on paper, when writers lament about the editing process, the marketing process, the querying process. This is the slog. The pure joy of writing, like any relationship, doesn’t persist 24/7/365. You have to do the work. You have to want it. You have to put in the time. You have to love it, even when you hate it. Like any good relationship, sometimes writing loves you, and sometime it hates you. And it’s okay.

There are lots of other ways back to writing when you’re burned out, and that’s part of what brought me back. I gave my brain a break. I let all the pressure I put on myself, which I blogged about in the stories linked above, and dove into things that I like and that I know will bring me back around. If you’re burned out, figure out your strategies and get yourself back into the game. No rush. No hurry. There are no deadlines. Just tell your stories.

Goldi thinks back on Red and Wolfe…

In 2023, I wrote easily over 100k words. I cranked out tons of other stories and articles, drafting and planning a slew of serialized fiction tales and working on a complete rewrite of the first mystery novel in a series I have planned while also writing the fourth novel in the series. If that wasn’t bad enough, I started rebooting on my website a 150-episode serial I wrote with friends back in 2010–12.

I thought I could do it all, and I won’t say that I still can’t. The ideas are there, and I won’t deny them. All those words, stories, and characters are in my head, waiting for their turn, and I don’t want to deny them. But I did for a minute — well, for the last seven months. I hit a wall, but it wasn’t a wall of energy or a wall of ideas or a wall based on finding a new hobby. This unloved ukulele can attest to that. It was something different.

In the middle of all, I hit the wall of expectations.

The best and worst thing about Alice was that she was a bitch. She was a straight loner most of the time, more often than not the hottest thing I saw in any given day, and generally the most frustrating woman I’d ever met; but that’s what I loved about her, and that’s what made just about everyone else want to punch her in the face.

AI is a tool, like everything else. How you use it is what matters. I’m using it and having a blast! I can do so many things now that I couldn’t before, and it’s so exciting to have this 360-degree approach to my writing, from ideas to polishing the text to audio voiceover and images. It pushes all my creative buttons, and I like when those buttons are pushed a lot.

A tragic tale of lust and betrayal. After ten years, the story started in 2013 is finally done. Read about how four authors put together a dark fairy tale and it finally made its way to completion.

What I’m writing in 2024 is going to be, just like in 2023, a lot!

Dorothy: Locked & Loaded was told by five different authors from 2010 to 2012 delivering 138 episodes over two years!

Anyway, I still have to write the novel. I won’t let ChatGPT do that. But at least if I need an idea generator, then here’s something I can use.

In Crabquake, our heroes Jesse and Haze battle a new kind of insanity — giant crabs morphed by the chromium seeped into Baltimore’s historic Inner Harbor and unleashed by an earthquake on the unsuspecting neighborhood of Fells Point.