Turning someone you don’t know into a vampire probably violates the Hippocratic oath. But Alex wasn’t really thinking about that when he found a girl bleeding out in his shower.

Being turned into a vampire isn’t as cool as it sounds. Especially when all Hannah wanted to be was dead. She thought she had finally escaped her brother. Until she woke up. Alive? Undead? Whatever. And now Hannah is stuck with the uncoolest vampire in existence. 

As Alex and Hannah feel each other out — breaking some bones along the way — Alex’s oldest friend comes looking for help, and Hannah’s brother comes looking for her. What none of them see are the forces pushing them all on a collision course.

Failure Is Always An Option

I spent over seven years working on an epic fantasy series only to realize in a moment of clarity I wasn’t a good enough writer to write it yet. Moments of personal clarity suck. It’s pretty rare to have one that makes you realize that you’re doing everything right. No, you have moments of clarity when you’re able to give yourself enough distance from the bricks you’re bloodying your knuckles on to realize it’s part of a wall with a gate in it — a gate that isn’t even locked. I could see where I was, and I could see that if I kept writing I would steadily get to the place where I needed to be in about five years. What made the most sense was to set aside seven years of work and work on projects I knew I could finish as the writer I already was.

Love What You Do

At the same time I was deciding to set aside what I’d been working on, a writer friend of mine started working on a really funny Urban Fantasy story and I found myself extremely envious of their getting to work on humor. Envy is a tool. Envy tells you what you really want, not what you think you want. When I found myself envious of my friend’s story, it had less to do with them and everything to do with what I needed to be doing to love my own writing. For whatever reason I immediately thought of vampire characters I’d created back in the ’90s and wrote a fluff piece with them conversing them in present day, referencing the events of 1986 when they’d originally met. Alex is going on about how he still didn’t remember how Hannah ended up bleeding to death in his shower when she admits he doesn’t remember because she drugged him… and suddenly I wanted to know a whole lot more. I had these great characters with all of these tantalizing clues about the people they used to be, and instinctively knew all the things that had to change to get them to the present. Intrigued, I basically wrote one of the last scenes in what became the third book of The Shattered Ones. I knew the end. I knew how the characters changed. I knew where the events started. So, I just… started writing. Pretty soon I had a story I figured I could never do anything with, but I loved writing again

Finish What You Start

I got serious about writing. I canceled my World of Warcraft account (between all of my characters I was putting in full-time-job hours on the game), and dedicated that time toward writing. I started submitting stories. I published a few short stories and a couple of novellas. I stopped taking myself so goddamn seriously and just focused on finishing things. I found the best way for me to finish things was to have a deadline. (Seriously? Who would have thought? Oh… everyone who actually gets paid, that’s who. If I had a time machine I would totally squander it going back in time to shake my past self. Also, getting extra sleep. I would totally use it to get extra sleep. Why doesn’t anyone ever do that?)

Make Your Own Luck

It bothered me that I had this not-quite finished vampire story I couldn’t do anything with. What I needed was a deadline and editorial assistance in getting it finished. I decided I would pay to get it professionally edited and self-publish it as three serialized short novels. Splitting the story into three shorter bits makes a lot of sense for my particular writing style. Also, I’m not a well-known author. Pretty much… no one has ever heard of me. It’s in my best interest to lower the time and money commitment someone has to put out to discover me and then to keep feeding new installments at a rapid rate to keep their interest as well as increase my discoverability.

I contacted Brian White, who is the publisher of Fireside Magazine, to see if it was the kind of thing he’d be interested in doing as a freelance editing project. Tragically comedic vampires aren’t everyone’s cup of tea and I wasn’t really interested in working with someone who hated my writing. (There aren’t a lot of writing rules I think work universally, but I’d wager “Don’t partner with someone who hates your work” holds true for most people.)

Duck and Roll

Not only did he agree to look at it, but he asked for the option to choose to offer on it for Fireside after reading it. This was a huge shock because I had no idea that Fireside was even thinking about publishing books, much less already had one in the pipeline. Wait… I accidentally sold a vampire series? That isn’t a very helpful story for anyone hoping to use my experiences as a guide for their own publishing journey. On the other hand, every single publishing story I ever heard wasn’t helpful to me either other than to illustrate that isn’t the part of the business you can control. I made the decision to set aside my project. I got serious about writing. I wrote the series. I submitted stories. I decided I needed an editor. Publishing is freaking WEIRD at every level and it is impossible to plan for. So, don’t plan for it. Write what you want to write that makes you happy. If you keep learning and watching you will know where a story belongs when that opportunity comes along.

* * *

Minerva Zimmerman is a statistically chaotic neutral writer of tragically funny fiction. She lives in rural Oregon and works as a museum professional. She occasionally blogs at minervazimmerman.com and spends too much time on Twitter.

Minerva Zimmerman: Twitter

Take On Me: Amazon | Kobo | iTunes | Nook

When you write a book, you will receive criticism and edits and then you will have to perform surgery upon it, and sometimes this surgery is light — like, a stitch here, a biopsy there — and sometimes it’s the kind of surgery chirurgeons did during the Civil War where they’re just like FUCK IT, CLEM, YOUR WHOLE HEAD HAS TO COME OFF, HAND ME THE BONE SAW. In rare cases the surgery is murdersurgery where you just start indiscriminately killing darlings left and right with an ice pick and leave a gore-slick tile floor in your wake.

But it’s a thing you do because you have to do it. Real writers edit. Real writers rewrite. And it gets easy once you commit — you move piece here, you nudge a piece there, and then it feels more comfortable. But until that point arrives, until you are actually willing to move through the edits, I find that I go through five stages.

And so, I give you, the Kubler-Ross Model of Grief Associated With Editing And Rewriting.

Denial

Edits? What edits?

*ignores email*

*pushes any and all print-outs under the refrigerator*

The book is fine. It’s fine. I never got edits. It’s perfect. Bulletproof even.

*hums a tune loudly, too loudly*

*stares*

*twitches*

Anger

THESE EDITS ARE BULLSHIT.

I CALL SHENANIGANS. THEY’RE JUST WRONG IS WHAT THEY ARE. YOU CAN’T JUST… YOU CAN’T JUST CHANGE STUFF. THESE ARE MY CHOICES. THESE ARE MY CONTROLS! Y-YOU DON’T KNOW. YOU’RE DUMB, EDITOR PERSON. SUPER-DUPER-DUMB. LIKE A… A ‘HOOFED ANIMAL KICKED YOU IN THE HEAD’ DUMB. YOU CAN’T JUST EDIT ME. I’LL EDIT YOUR FACE. I’LL CRITIQUE YOUR DUMB DUMB FACE WITH YOUR BUTTHOLE EYES AND YOUR NASTY DOODOO MOUTH. I LOVE THESE CHARACTERS. I LOVE MY WORDS. EVERYTHING IS FINE. YOU’RE NOT FINE. THIS BOOK IS AMAZING. THE REASON I’M THE AUTHOR AND YOU’RE THE EDITOR IS BECAUSE YOU’RE WEAK. THOSE WHO CAN’T WRITE, EDIT, AM I RIGHT? YOU’RE PROBABLY A MONSTER. A HUMAN MONSTER WHO LIKES TO PULL THE WINGS OFF PIGEONS WITH PLIERS AND OHHHH SURE I’M JUST YOUR LATEST PIGEON. I HATE YOU SO BAD. ALSO YOUR SHOES ARE TOTES UGLY.

FUCK IT, FUCK THIS SHIT, FUCK ALL OF EVERYTHING FOREVER.

YOU’RE NOT MY DAD.

*kicks over lamp*

*hugs manuscript tight, lip quivering*

Bargaining

Okay, ha ha ha, sorry about that thing about calling you a monster. I am. That was uncalled for. It was uncouth. I get that now. And the lamp, too. That was a nice lamp. And your shoes are lovely!

So — *clears throat* — let’s talk about these edits. Like, did you really mean them all? Sure, sure, no, no, I know you did, or you think you did. But let’s drill down. Nitty-gritty time. Get our hands dirty. I’m willing to concede, ha ha ha, that the book isn’t perfect. I know that. Of course it’s not! But maaaaaybe it’s not all that bad, right? Like, okay, perhaps we don’t need to get rid of that character entirely. Oh, sure, sure, he can get pulled from chapter three and still remain in the rest of the book, right? And maybe some of these metaphors are a bit loosey-goosey but I think with minimal tweaking — what’s that? No, yeah, sure, I know the ending doesn’t work, but what you’re suggesting is a bit drastic. I don’t want to rewrite the whole ending. Maybe fixing one paragraph will do it. Just one little paragraph. You know how it’s like, “Oh, that shirt doesn’t look good on you,” but then all you have to do is unbutton the top button or like, pop the collar and it’s like, bam. New shirt. New look. Hot look. You go from looking dumpy and sad to just… just snazzy with one little change.

I think we can do that here. Yeah, no, I’ll do your edits, totally. Totally. Just to a lesser degree than you expected. I mean, they say “kill your darlings,” but that sounds so dramatic. Nobody wants to kill anything. We don’t want to murder parts of the book. The book is precious. It’s nice. It didn’t hurt anyone. Let’s not kill our darlings so much as massage them gently into shape.

That’ll fix it. That’ll fix everything.

Probably.

Right?

*chin up*

*blink blink*

Right?!

Depression

everything is a lightless black void

i am terrible at this

all the edits are true

the edits were probably being nice and you were just pulling your punches and the book is terrible and i am terrible and all hope is a screaming dolphin caught in a tuna net

i am a sham. i am an imposter. i am a dung beetle juggling a shit ball uphill.

jesus god what am i doing with my life

i think maybe i’m just going to leave these edits here for a while and i’m gonna walk away from this heinous bus crash of a book i wrote but first i’m gonna quietly place it in this lead-lined trunk and then bury the trunk in the backyard and then build a prison for wayward youths on top of it

i am gonna go now and be a janitor or an accountant or at the very least i am going to sit on the toilet and contemplate my choices all of which have clearly been very poor okay thank you bye

*eats a cookie*

*fails to chew, crumbs tumble from lips onto shirt*

Acceptance

*wakes up after three-day slumber*

*blankets in a tangle, sun through the curtains*

I can do this.

So now I’m going to go do it.

*does it*

yay

I got an email.

The email contained the following paragraph:

My Dilemma, Dr. Wendig, is that I have a book I want to write, something that is kind of… ‘out there’ and totally different to anything else I’ve written or published so far… and the fact of the matter is that I’m SCARED (ugh) to write the damn thing. To really go for it. I mean, we’re talking about just being willing to let it all hang out and write something off the wall and ‘dark’ and ‘edgy’ and all that good stuff. It’s just downright… weird. And I don’t usually write stuff that’s all that weird, but this story is DEFINITELY fucked up. You know? And you’re a writer who… if I had to find something that unites all your work so far, it’s just… FEARLESS. You’re never afraid to go there. Wherever ‘there’ happens to be. I mean, I’m sure you have moments of pant-soiling terror while actually doing the writing – but you still do it. You still write whatever particular twisted weirdness you happen to be vomiting onto the page at the time. 🙂

It’s a great question.

I have thoughts about this.

I have strong thoughts about this.

As I have noted before, I wrote several books before I actually wrote the one that would become my debut novel (Blackbirds), and those several books were a mixture of hot barf, garbage noodles, and books that were sorta-maybe-not-terrible but that weren’t really me. They were all books where I was trying to figure out just who I was as a writer — I was chasing the market, I was chasing the success of other authors, I was chasing my own bewildered ass. I knew I very badly wanted to succeed, and in trying to succeed I forgot why I wanted to write books in the first place, which is because books are awesome. Books changed me. The characters and metaphors and ideas in those books grafted themselves into my DNA. Their effect on me was irrelevant to their success in the marketplace. The effect that mattered was that the books that I read throughout my life and that I connected with were a success to me.

When it came time to write Blackbirds, I was besieged by a case of the FUCKITS. There existed a part of me that felt like it was possible this would be the last book I’d ever write. Because, yeah: fuck it. I didn’t know if I would have the courage to try and write another suck-fest literary tire fire, so I figured if this could be my last, I would go out with a bang. I was just like fuck success, fuck selling this book, fuck being someone else, fuck writing rules, fuck it, fuck it all. I was dealing with some heavy (but standard) shit in my life — the recognition of the mortality of those around me and by proxy the recognition of my own mortality — and as a result, I had this book inside me. It was a cantankerous, mean little fucker. It was a bitter, acerbic, snarky book. It brooked no shit. It gave no shit. The protagonist, Miriam Black, was haunted by death. She knew how other people were going to die and felt powerless to stop it. And that created in her this special kind of venom, this peculiar kind of wayward rage that I found somehow necessary. And so I wrote the book. It took me years to figure out how to even write this book, but I did it, and in writing it I didn’t care about how everyone else thought books were supposed to be written — I only cared about how I wanted to write this book. I clumsily, defiantly broke rules. I inelegantly put to paper this human tornado protagonist who whirled about the narrative, messing up everybody’s plots. She didn’t care about you. I didn’t care about you. I cared only about the book.

The book landed. Got sold. Got pubbed.

Like, the book I wrote is damn near the book that is (once again!) on shelves.

And that book has sold somewhere north of 50,000 copies by this point. Which, by the way, and I say this with no small pride, is pretty great. A book that sells that many copies is not necessarily common — especially a book that I considered marginal, edgy, a bit gonzo, a bit black-hearted. (Though the blackness of her broken heart is contrasted with the few veins of gold that keep that particular organ together in a kind of magical kintsukuroi.) It’s a book with two sequels and three more coming.

I learned a vital lesson in that, which is to always write the book I want to write.

Because fuck you, that’s why. (Er, not you personally. I like you! I mean the general you. The you that tells me I shouldn’t do that.) I write my first drafts with me in mind. I write the first draft like nobody is watching. Though of course I edit the second draft like everybody is watching. First draft is for me. Second draft is for you.

I have no fear when I write.

Because I’m looking to please me, first and foremost.

That sounds callous. It seems selfish. But it’s really the only way to write that book. You can’t write to please everyone else — in part because EVERYONE ELSE comprises this monster blob of competing desires, and also in part because what EVERYONE ELSE wants is unknowable and unpredictable. But what I want? I know what I want. And what I want is to write the book that lives inside my arteries and capillaries, the book that flows through me sure as blood. All I gotta do is chew open my fingertips and type the tale onto the page and it’s mine. I own it. That red is my red, those streaks are my streaks. All the fingerprints belong to me.

All your fingerprints belong to you, too.

You know the book you want to write, even if you don’t think you do. Shut all the worries and anxieties and uncertainties out of your mind and really, you know. You know the book that sings to you when you’re not expecting it. You know the idea that haunts you, that scratches at your brain-stem like a cat dragging its claws across its scratching post. You know what book you’d write if you were the last poor fucker in a world where everyone else was dead.

You know what your own fingerprints look like.

But too often we worry about what everyone else’s look like.

We think we’d rather that our work look like their work. It’s easier that way. Almost like we don’t have to own it, as if we can absolve ourselves of responsibility that way. Like we can just be them instead of being us. Like we can write their books instead of our own.

Nope. Sorry.

Too many books appear and those books chase trends that already exist. They try to be something else — stepping carefully in the footprints of what came before so as not to do differently and mess up the sand. They consume the successful stories and then process them bodily and excrete them back onto the page in some gross literary replication of The Human Centipede. But the books we remember aren’t the ones that carefully tried not to leave footprints, but rather, the books that ran batshit and screaming through the sand and the surf. We remember the books that left their own ragged, looping trails, that cut through the underbrush, that kicked over rocks, that changed the landscape rather than fearing to disturb it.

Trends are bullshit. The books that set the trends are the ones we care about — not the books that carefully hurry after, trying to draft off its speed, trying to cloak itself in the scent of the former as sure as a dog rolling in squirrel diarrhea.

Look at it this way.

Assume you get one shot at writing this book.

That’s probably not true, but hey, it might be. You might write one book and then get hit by a bus. You might get gored by a bull or sucked into a jet engine. We’re all gonna die. It’s just a matter of when the carousel stops turning for us. So, again, assume that it is at least possible the book you write now may be your last.

Make it a good one.

Make it yours.

Don’t be afraid to write the book you really want to write. Fear is what stops great stories from being told. Fear is complicated by the industry — but you can’t worry too much about the industry. Fearing the industry (which by the way is an unknowable Byzantine puzzle box anyway where nobody really knows what works and what doesn’t) is a good way to halt your breath and stay your fingers and stop the story from ever happening. Concentrate on the thing you can do, which is write the best book you can, and a book that you draw from your heart and your genital configuration as much as from your mind. Everyone wants you to stay inside this neat little fence. But you know who stays inside fences? WAKE UP, SHEEPLE. You know who jumps fences? AWESOME MOTHERFUCKERS WHO GO HAVE CUCKOOBANANA ADVENTURES. I mean, stories are rarely about people who play it safe. And so why should authors be encouraged to run counter to what makes our characters so interesting?

Leap the fence. Seize that chaos. Whet your own edge. Go weird. Go buckwild.

You do you.

I want to read the book you want to write.

I don’t want to read the book somebody else wants you to write.

I mean, what kind of advice would that be? Play it safe. Be a little boring. Write somebody else’s book instead of your own. Quiet your voice and diminish what makes your story special. The one thing — the one thing! — you get to bring to the story that nobody else has is you. So, shunt fear and embrace the terror and goddamn just go with it, you know?

And now, if you will, a revised version of the Rifleman’s Creed, for us writer-types —

The Penmonkey’s Creed

This is my book. There are none like it, because this one is mine.

My book is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.

My book, without me, is useless. Without my book, I am useless. I must write my tale true. I must shoot straighter than my fear who is trying to kill me. I must kill my fear before my fear kills my story.

My book and I know that what counts is not what others have done, what sales we make, what tweets I have twotted. We know that it is my heart that counts. 

My book is a living document, because it is my life. I will learn it as it is my kin. I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its characters and plots and themes. I will put my heartsblood into the book and it will put its heartsblood into me as we become part of each other.

Before the Muse that I have shackled to the radiator in my office, I swear this creed. My book and I are the representatives of who I am. We are the masters of our fear. We are the ink-stained fools who press our fingerprints into the page for all to see. We are story and story-teller, one and the same. We are the gods of this place.

So be it, until victory is mine and I have finished my shit — fuck yeah and amen.

* * *

Miriam Black Is Back (In Print)

Miriam Black knows how you’re going to die. This makes her daily life a living hell, especially when you can’t do anything about it, or stop trying to. She’s foreseen hundreds of car crashes, heart attacks, strokes, and suicides. She merely needs to touch you—skin to skin contact—and she knows how and when your final moments will occur. Miriam has given up trying to save people; that only makes their deaths happen. But then she hitches a ride with Louis Darling and shakes his hand, and she sees in thirty days that Louis will be murdered while he calls her name. Louis will die because he met her, and Miriam will be the next victim. No matter what she does she can’t save Louis. But if she wants to stay alive, she’ll have to try.

“Fast, ferocious, sharp as a switchblade and fucking fantastic.” — Lauren Beukes

Indiebound | Amazon | B&N

Well, hello there.

You will note that Star Wars: Aftermath is now a proper trilogy.

You will also note that these books have names, and when things have names, THEY ARE REAL.

*vibrates*

Both books continue the adventures of the characters from Aftermath — Norra Wexley and her son Temmin, his maniac B1 battle droid Mister Bones, ex-Imperial loyalty officer Sinjir Rath Velus, bounty hunter Jas Emari, and all-around bad-ass SpecForce dude Jom Barell. (Oh, and we shouldn’t fail to mention Admiral Sloane and her mysterious boss.)

Book Two is called Life Debt, which means that finally we will explore the life debt that bonds two of the galaxy’s most iconic characters — classic hero and sidekick, Qui-Gon Jinn and Jar-Jar Binks.

Wait, no.

Sorry, let’s try that again.

Book Two is called Life Debt, and those who read Aftermath will recognize that a certain interlude in that book starring Han and Chewie may have some resonance here…

Book Three is Empire’s End, and if I said any more about that, I would have to lop off your arms with a lightsaber and replace them with bitey ferrets. Sorry, “space-ferrets.”

I don’t know dates, but I expect these will land in 2016 and 2017 respectively. (Actually, looking at the links above, Amazon has the second book listed for May, 2016. Not sure how accurate.)

Congrats too to talented super-pal Delilah S. Dawson, who gets to write one of the cool new novellas based on some of the aliens inside The Force Awakens — in particular, she’s writing “The Perfect Weapon,” a tale of Bazine.

Thanks to all the folks who have dug the books and checked them out. Met tons of fans of the books this weekend at NYCC, which was rad as hell. (Also, for those asking where I got my I Survived The Battle Of Jakku shirt, well, just click this link.)

So, last week I did this BIG DAMN POST about blah blah blah NaNoWriMo is coming up so this is NaPloYoNoMo (National Plot Your Novel Month), which means you should at least try some kind of outline. And in this post I detailed for you a wide variety of outlines that go well-beyond the school-era Roman numeral parade.

I also warned you I was going to ask to see your work.

Well, here I am.

Asking to see your work.

*shocks you with a shock-prod*

BZZT.

By asking, I mean, demanding.

BZZT.

So, if you please? Show us your work.

BZZT.

If you tried your hand at an outline, any outline, any kind of plotting at all, it’d be very snazzy and nifty and spiffy (aka snifftzy) if you showed us how it was going.

If you care to share, of course.

And you do care to share.

Because I have a shock-prod.

BZZT.

BZZT.

BZZT.

(Easiest way to share your work is to drop it in a post of your own, and then give us a link here in the comments so we can all visit and ooh and ahh and offer comments.)

With great power comes great dysfunction.

Lupo Danish is the most feared man in organized crime. Tales of his exploits are told in hushed whispers around mobbed-up campfires. But when terror strikes gangland, there is only one man capable of battling with monsters, for he has already become one himself. A furious blend of Beowulf and Amazing Fantasy #15, Lupo Danish Never Has Nightmares is a tale of guilt, retribution, and punching. Lots and lots of punching.

Lupo Danish never botches a job. Lupo Danish never misses his mark. And Lupo Danish never has nightmares.

I’M GLAD I WAITED ON THIS

The going wisdom is that at the end of your life, you don’t regret the things you did, but the things you didn’t do. But in this case, the going wisdom can get gone. I came up with the idea for Lupo Danish Never Has Nightmares, a crime version of Beowulf, in 2003. I got about 100 pages written that summer and realized that the idea was good, very good. It was in fact such a good idea that there was no way a perpetually drunk 26-year-old college student living in a garage was going to be able to execute it in a way he wouldn’t later regret. This is counter-intuitive to any writer worth his or her salt, because once you put something down, you rarely pick it back up. But I mentally carved out an area in my brain to think constantly about Lupo, and I was sure I’d get back to it, if for no other reason than I was unlikely to come up with a better idea. Would it have been even better if I had waited longer? If I’d waited until I was dead to write this, would it have been the greatest novel of all time and space? I dunno, maybe. But I’m still grateful I didn’t let that one asshole back 12 years ago fuck this all up for me.

WRITE WHAT YOU WANT

Having said all that, I very much enjoyed getting to work on this book. Like many slack-asses, I would often put off the work of writing to do more fun things like amateur dentistry and compulsive gambling. But Lupo was easier in this regard because a) of all the projects I’ve taken on, this one spoke to me enough to really want to see it through and b) I could justify reading stacks upon stacks of superhero comics as research. So write the stuff that speaks to you most and you’ll never work a day in your life. Again, you’d think I’d have learned this by now, but turns out I’m a big dimbulb most of the time.

INVEST YOURSELF IN YOUR CREATIVITY

For a novel that is largely concerned with punching, this book has a lot of me invested in it personally. That doesn’t exactly put it in an exclusive club: Artists have been exorcising their demons with their work for years, at least since Smokey Robinson recorded “Tears of a Clown.” But there are things about me in this novel that I didn’t even catch until the second or third pass over the final version, and when I did catch them, I had to sit down for a minute. This certainly seems like a lesson I should have learned by now, but if I’m going to insist on playing the wasp-ish role of stiff upper lip in my day-to-day to the severe detriment of my emotional well-being, I sure as fuck better find a way to get that out in my writing.

THE DROWNING CHAIN IS A THING

I’ve always loved the Coen brothers’ films, and one of the many reasons is they are very entertaining at just a surface level, but then they’re also rife with delicious symbolism and imagery. In no way should this be taken to mean that my book is on par with a Coen brothers’ film; however, as far as high water marks to which to strive, I think I could do worse. In the course of trying to invest Lupo and the other major characters with as much subtext as I could, I learned a lot about, among other things, water safety. This will make it much harder for me to ever drown myself when depressed, which I’m sure is a relief to my mom. Plus, “drowning chain” as a phrase sounds really cool.

MY FRIENDS ARE VERY MUCH GOOD

Again, this is not so much a lesson learned, as a fact reinforced, which I might argue is more vital than learning new things at times. From beginning to end of this book, I have had a large and more importantly loving support system of friends and well-wishers to help not only keep my spirits up, but also write this thing and make it as good as I possibly could. I’m not going to risk insulting anyone by listing anyone here, but you sexies know who you are anyways.

* * *

Jimmy Callaway is a writer and stand-up comedian in San Diego, CA.

Jimmy Callaway: Twitter

Lupo Danish Never Has Nightmares: Amazon