THE RED BEAD — So what the hell is this? Well, I watched “The Black Donnellys,” “Hatfields & McCoys” and “The Sopranos” and my little brain started percolating. Then I read the bios of a couple of guys named John Brisker and Jack Johnson, and of course I’m completely in love with “Daron’s Guitar Chronicles.”
All that being said, I was struck by a deluge of awesome and the character of Anselm “Devil Anse” Lotham came into being along with the rest of his crazy ass family.
The free webserial follows the life of Anse, either through his own short introspection pieces, or through his top enforcer Lee Shuman. Starts at the very beginning when they’re not famous, and follows through to all the stuff with Interpol and the bodies chopped up in the bay.
I started a page just for The Red Bead, and it’s here at http://altredes.wordpress.com so you can just follow the story with none of the other shenanigans that go on here 🙂
UPCOMING REVISIONS — Because sometimes they need to happen.
So I love to read and there have been some stories that have completely irked my every sensibility. Which means that I understand that sometimes you read a story and it just doesn’t work for you or basically anyone else… and if the majority of people say a story doesn’t work, well, then a story doesn’t work.
Because of things I’ve inferred from reviews and ratings and from my own feelings upon rereading certain of my stories, I’ve made the decision to make some revamps. Because that’s the best part of epublishing — I can make the changes that need to be made and it doesn’t cost me a million dollars to do it.
SHAME — This story has always been fairly uncomfortable to me. It basically just presses every single one of my creep buttons at one time. I wrote it in a minimalist style that gave everything a kind of cold feel. And I’m not going to change that.
The story of “Shame” is a very unpleasant one and there’s no way I would ever try to sugar coat the events. I also would never want to romanticize what happened and the story was meant to feel kind of grimy, without going too far into perversion.
That being said, I’m at work on “Fierce” and “Conflagration,” two sister stories that I’ll be adding to “Shame.” They’ll just be addons to the ebook and they take everything into a new direction. So the same ebook on Amazon and Smashwords will have a new revision and hopefully I’ll be happier with the way the story went without having to do the horrible turn I was going to give “From Diamond to Coal” where alterna-Simon meets canon Simon and it’s a complete and utter headsuck. I decided to go in a whole other direction with the Simon Peter’s AU story and I’ve been writing and revising on it.
“Fierce” is Simon getting past what happened and we actually get to climb inside his head and feel the things he feels and the colors are bright as he loudly proclaims: “I am not a victim. I was victimized, but I am not a victim.”
“Conflagration” is Simon moving on with his life. And he maybe possibly finds love with an incredibly hot and wonderful man that’s totally not Alan Trent, but a new character.
ERSATZ — Okay, so this one was prompted by the picture I found of just a guy’s torso with a pillow on his lap. I stuck him on a bed and that gave me the ending. Then I had to figure out how he got there and whose room and bed he was defacing with his naked butt cheeks.
I was attempting to write a funny story, but it kind of morphed on me into a bunch of melodramatic fluff. Best friends that don’t know they love each other, but why can’t they just be together with no problem? Well, one dude has a dark past from a sucky childhood and the other has undiagnosed bipolar disorder. What, you didn’t get that from the story? Yeah, neither did anyone else.
And that’s totally my fault. I either stretched a very short story too long, or I took a longer story and crushed all the juice out of it, leaving only the pulp behind with none of the heart.
So I’ll leave the original version in the ebook, but I’ll be adding the revised edition as well.
Now that I’m done dissecting my work, what was the purpose? Well, I just wanted everyone to know that I do listen to the opinions of the people nice enough to read my work.
Also, link porn:
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