Introducing ... Me ... (Part 1 of 3)

I am an engineer, a father, a husband, a poker player, a fantasy footballer, a former comic book collector, a movie buff.

So how the hell did I end up involved in ANY publishing company’s best seller list?  Especially with a paranormal romance short story set in the 18^th century Caribbean?

These are not easy questions to answer, but when the Bloggin Mamma originally asked Patricia Laffoon and I to do a guest blog on her site, what I really wanted to do was tell that story.  I’ve decided to make that story my first series of blog posts on this, my own blog.

I hadn’t really done any creative writing at all since high school, and without explicitly giving away my age, that had been about twenty years.  I’ve always been told I was a good writer, but that was pretty much limited to letters and technical documents where I work.  I’d never even considered the possibility of writing for an audience (although that’s certainly easier than getting up and talking for an audience, but I digress).

So around April 2010, I notice my wife staying online late … a lot.  Turns out she had met and become friends with someone who was involved in a role playing group.  Role playing?  Seriously?  I never thought she would get into what I thought of as role playing, which is sitting around a table with a Dungeon Master’s book, reams of paper, and various dice doing battle with orcs and dragons and the like.  And this was a role play group centered around a series of romance novels?  (It is a Sherrilyn Kenyon Dark Hunters RP.)  Wow ... I just thought wow.  It made me chuckle.

So then, she asked me to read some of what she had written and give my opinion.  I was floored.  The way she wrote with her writing partner was just intense … full of emotion and depth and angst and action and … well everything.  (Side note: We are hoping she will get published soon too, yay!)  It was obvious that there was a lot more to this than I thought there was.

I found myself really rooting for the characters and keeping up with them.  Turns out my wife and her partner write absolutely incredible emotional argument and subsequent makeup scenes.  So you are always wondering “holy crap, is this going to be it?”  I started to get why people wrote and why other people (fans) followed it.

One day they asked me to help them with a little experiment, since they knew I played poker avidly, and help them see if they could RP a poker game, so I took over an abandoned profile just for that purpose and helped them try it out.  Even though the experiment was a failure (I think we ended up playing a total of two hands in about ninety minutes), it gave me a little taste of what writing and interacting at that level was like, because I had to describe the action that was going on in enough detail so people could follow and visualize it.

Ok, so I was hooked.  Although I hadn’t read book one of SK’s series, I blitzed through the Dark Hunter Companion cover-to-cover so I wouldn’t be completely lost, and picked the name of an incredibly minor character that worked at the Sanctuary bar, figuring that was a good way to get involved.

What happened next came out of absolutely nowhere, as an entire backstory including a family tree with some of the other characters formed in my head in about a week.  I couldn’t wait to get it down on paper.  It was almost a short story in itself.  And the key to it was that, the character didn’t know the backstory, so I was able to write it and let the other players and fans discover the backstory at the same time as my character did.

That was the first incarnation of Rudy.

Ok, this is me, on vacation in San Diego, and this is probably the only pic you'll ever see of me LOL