“What a long strange trip it’s been . . .” (Truckin’ by the Grateful Dead).
We’re now almost a month into 2021 and it truly has been a long strange trip. We certainly aren’t seeing the bright optimistic future I was promised when I was a kid. Still, I have to hope that we’ll bottom out at some point soon and start climbing again.
The Mountain Men series reaches its end with Reunited With The Mountain Men (Mountain Men 10). Writing the series has definitely been a long strange trip. Like first-time-gay stud Tom Prescott, the tale has taken “Every wrong direction in its lonely way back home” (The Pilgrim, Chapter 33 by Kris Kristofferson).
If I was doing it again, I wouldn’t write the “Queer Klansmen” books. It seemed like a good idea at the time and I’ve written some earlier blog posts about it, but they were too topical and their subject matter was too serious for the kind of light-hearted stories I like to write. Still, if I hadn’t written those books, I probably wouldn’t have created Washington, Tiny, and Alpha, who are some of my favorite characters. So it goes.
All in all, though, I’m very pleased with the Mountain Men. I’ve had a lot of fun with them and I’m glad to be leaving them with a “happy ever after” ending.
One of the strange turns on my personal trip is book covers. I’ve been fortunate to work with four talented artists. One dropped out for health reasons. Two more artists stopped doing covers because people close to them died and they didn’t feel like continuing. The final one just didn’t want to do any more covers for erotic books.
It’s hard to find cover artists to do erotic books, so I’ve started doing my own. I’ve always chosen the images, so that stayed the same. But, I’ve had to find suitable software and learn how to use it. That’s taken two weeks that I would have rather spent on writing. Fortunately, I have worked with graphics software before, but that was long ago and far away.
My first cover is for my upcoming book, Hotwife And Husband. I’ll be writing more about that in a future blog entry. I’ve got more books in the pipeline, too.
Keep hanging on . . .