REALLY starting to understand why folks pay other folks to manage their social media. After two Jamesons and a bourbon, this is what y’all get.
April is the Cruelest Month
In The Dermanenlion Saga, the world as we know it comes to a mushroom-cloud-shaped end on April 14th, 2057.
April 14th is also the release date for all three books in the series – 2025, 2026, and 2027. Followed by the release of illustrated hardbacks.
So why did I decide to destroy the world on April 14th?
Well, I didn’t just throw darts at a calendar, if that’s what you’re thinking.
And it’s not actually about that poem, as convenient as it may be.
April is cursed. Why do I think so??
First off, lets give the requisite nod to my education, which is a Masters’ in history. Over the years, this historian has started noticing a lot of significant, and tragic things, tend happen in April. For instance:
April 1st – Battle of Okinawa convinces US to use the nukes on Japan
April 4th– Martin Luther King Jr. assassinated
April 9th – Confederate surrender at Appomattox ends the American Civil War
April 12th– Fort Sumter starts the American Civil War; RMS Titanic launches
April 14th – RMS Titanic sinks; Lincoln assassinated
April 15th – Boston marathon bombing
April 17th – Bay of Pigs invasion
April 18th – Paul Revere’s Ride
April 19th – Waco massacre; Oklahoma City bombing; Lexington and Concord start the American Revolution
April 20th – Columbine High massacre; Hitler’s birthday
April 26th – Chernobyl reactor meltdown
April 30th – Hitler’s suicide
I’m sure there’s more that can be added to this list, and I’m also sure that another historian with an obsession with another month could probably compile a similar list. But this ain’t about them, lol. It’s about me. And Esmund. And Dermanenlion.
Now, onto my own, very personal distrust of April – – – and the reason why I chose April 14th to nuke the world. Dermanenlion Day. My own D-Day.
April 14th 2001, was one of the worst, most traumatic days of my life. I was in a horrible car accident that scarred my friend for life, put my boyfriend in the ICU for two weeks, and left me with nightmares and PTSD for three solid years. I could go into the gory details – the injuries, the fear, the whole nightmarish event – but I won’t. Imagine how horrible it could get when you’re run off the road at 70 mph, and that will do. And the jerks that did it didn’t even stop.
No I don’t have photos. This was 2001. We didn’t have cameras on our phones yet.
The next year, me and that guy were in another car accident, almost exactly a year to the day. It was on April 16th, and his lovely little race car, a 1987 Nissan 300 ZX, was totaled by a woman in a truck who rear ended us on the highway. We had just won a sponsorship and were out celebrating.
And that, as they say, was the end of that.
Following that, every year for the next several years someone I cared about had a car accident – in April.
I started thinking, April is cursed.
Then came the day I broke my personal April curse: I got on a plane on April 14th. I was terrified.
And it didn’t crash.
It DID, however, catch fire.
It was an electrical fire. I smelled it before we had even gained altitude, and, being a mechanic, recognized the odor of burning wire immediately. I went cold. There was no good way my brain could “justify “ok” THAT SMELL on a plane in flight. The flight attendants ran towards the cockpit just as Best Friend “B” raised her head and said, “What’s that smell?” and then a clearly rattled pilot came on and announced we were having to turn back. At this point, Best Friend “R” looked up and asked, in her characteristically calm British fashion, “Oi, wot’s goin’ on?”
Spoiler alert – we made it safely to the ground (obviously).
Later that night, when I was (finally) in New Orleans (via a different plane) and drinking in my favorite bar with my favorite two people in the whole wide world, I declared the fact that the plane had caught fire without killing any of us the clear END to my personal curse. It had been scary, it had been wild, no one had been hurt, and therefore it had been FUN! We slammed drinks with my friend the bartender. We danced to jazz and 80s hits. We ate beignets on the Mississippi and watched the sun come up. It was a new day.
And truly, that was that. No more fuckery for me in April. And that was over ten years ago.
But when it came time to write the apocalypse, there was the issue of figuring out the date. The date was important. It would be written on the walls of Esmund’s traumatized mind in bright flashing neon letters for the next 2000 years – I didn’t want to choose just any old day in the calendar. I wanted it to be a day with real-world WEIGHT and MEANING.
What day should I pick?
September 1st, the day the Nazis invaded Poland?
August 6th, when we dropped the nuke on Hiroshima? A very logical date for my book, and I nearly went with this to please fellow history nerds.
What about June 28th, when Franz Ferdinand’s assassination changed literally the entire course of humanity in a few blood-soaked seconds?
April 14th, when Lincoln’s assassination poisoned the course of Reconstruction and altered the course of US history, racial relations, and regional attitudes towards each other for the next 150 years? (Yes I do maintain there would have been no Ku Klux Klan and perhaps no Jim Crow had Lincoln been alive to “bind up the nation’s wounds” with “charity towards all” and “malice towards none.”
April 14th, when the Titanic, my first historical obsession, sank, taking 1,517 out of her 2,223 passengers to the icy deeps with her.
April 14th, when I nearly died. Twice.
April 14th.
April 14th was the day Fourth World would be consigned to the nuclear bombs. Dermanenlion – a Maya word referring to the apocalypse, the end of the world, literally “life over cliff of death.”
I took the worst day of my life and immortalized it.
And twenty three years later, I decided to launch my book on that date.
Not because of the bad luck in history, in my book, in my personal life, but in SPITE of it. To reclaim April 14th. To take the worst day of my life and change it into the BEST.
April 14th, 2025, my very nearest and dearest came out to my favorite pub and celebrated this triumph – the launch of Severance, the first book in the Dermanenlion saga. My heart, my soul, and twelve years of my life. They bought me out of author’s copies. We drank, laughed, and caught up. And yes, the guy that was so severely injured in the car accident was there – no longer a romantic interest, but instead one of the best friends a girl could hope for. He asked, with gravity in his voice, “Why today?” I know he bears the scars still beneath his clothes.
I said, ‘To take it back. To make it into something good.”
That, my friends, is what true alchemy is. Turning lead into gold is metaphorical – it’s about learning to take the shit life hands you and make it into something great. Lemons into lemonade and all that rot – but with sincerity. With passion. With boldness and daring.
And on that note, let’s have a peek at the apocalypse as seen in Book One.
The world was burning.
Each building and flame and toppled tree seemed to bend in the direction of the sucking wind that swirled around Esmund. It carried embers and soot in shivering waves through the decimated buildings, past the skeletal spiral of what had been the Empire State Building, and towards the nightmare that hovered just past it at the tip of the island: towards the great fiery mushroom-shaped cloud that was now all that remained of one of the greatest cities in the world, and of the millions of souls who had once called it home.
Even though he had been expecting it, the sight was still enough to send Esmund reeling. He tipped, grabbing at the railing for support. He might as well have grabbed an oven coil! He yanked his hand away with a gasp and ended up sucking in a mouthful of soot and embers, causing him to bend double in a fit of agonized coughing. But even through the violent hacking, he found he could not remove his eyes from the terrible cloud that hung over what had once been Times Square. It was at once dreadful and beautiful, roiling, writhing, moving, as though by depriving the residents of New York of their lives it had thus managed to take on a life all its own. It glowed a sinister, ominous red, with blue, purple, and green occasionally lacing through it. Edmund found himself wondering if that was because there was fire in the cloud itself, or if it was simply the glow of the inferno that blazed below. The horizon beneath was engulfed in towering flames, and he understood the cause of the great wind which tugged violently at his Italian suit. The greedy inferno was sucking oxygen into that great chimney of nuclear destruction, growing bigger, hungrier, deadlier. The flames spread, consuming all that was consumable even as Esmund watched. This must be that phenomena which had plagued Dresden and Hiroshima – a firestorm.
April 24th, 2025
I’m really starting to understand why folks pay other folks to manage their social media accounts.
Me n Stephen King
My very first day on Twitter (X) – which has since been deleted following Musk’s announcement that it would used for AI training – I followed all my favorite authors, including Stephen King, and was gobsmacked when he me a message thanking me for being a loyal fan. I was over the moon – Stephen King knew I existed!!
Then I figured out that “he” was just one of many, many, irritating spam pages that impersonate famous people for… for what? Attention? World domination? Heck, I don’t know! These people need better hobbies.
Yeah, yeah.
Anyway. On to events of actual importance.
I’m involved with a little (not so little, actually) magazine called Space Monsters. If you’re into sci-fi, fantasy, and horror then you can and should check out HERE , as well at Kickstarter. Even if it’s not your thing, just go click on it. It’s free, and helps our metrics or algorithms or whatever you tech savvy folks call it.
It was one of those lovely little gifts from the universe I wasn’t expecting – I’ve only met the editor, Jason, a handful of times in person, but he noticed my book promotions on FaceBook and decided to scoop me up. Next thing I know, I was officially the magazine’s resident vampire expert, banging out a column on the new Nosferatu film, combining my education as a historian with my love of all things Dracula.
Jason, being an absolute gem, also give me a little promo spot in the mag, so if you sang one this summer you’ll get a sneak peak at Book Two (coming next April). The excerpt follows Lord Esmund through nuclear winter and features a fully mature Visitant (my vampire breed) go head to head with a fledgling, which, trust me, is not your run-of-the-mill baby vamp.
So with the mag all finalized and going to print, Jason PMs me this:
My brain bluescreened. Full-on ERROR 404. Beause there, right in front of me, was word of Stephen goddamnKing sitting there with my writing in his hands.
STEPHEN KING KNOWS I EXIST.
STEPHEN KING KNOWS I’M A WRITER.
And hopefully he’ll say something about me being a promising premiere author.
Look, I’ve been saying for as long as I’ve been writing this trilog that it was going to make me rich and famous. I’ll be the American J.K. Rowling, minus the controversy – a humble high school history teacher instead of a humble single mom. But although I’ve been planning on getting famous eventually, the fact of it actually drifting into King’s hands is… just mind blowing.
Why This Means More Than Just Fan-Girling
Yes, I love his work. Yes, I have read literally every word he’s written at least once, including his Bachmann books. Yes, I started reading him in sixth grade (which, btw, is WAY too young to read IT. Holy crap. That terror was FORMATIVE. To this day I do not trust storm drains.) But it’s so much more than that.
I started writing Dermanenlion around the same time I picked up The Dark Tower series. I had always known King liked to set his stories in the same imagery towns like Castle Rock and Derry, but I hadn’t realized that all his stories were interconnected, part of a much larger universe. And then, as I got deeper into The Dark Tower, I hit those books.
The ones where King himself shows up.
In Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and finally The Dark Tower, King doesn’t just make a cameo. He makes himself an integral part of the plot, a vital spoke in the wheel of Ka. His characters are pisse at him because he hasn’t finished their story, thus endangering their lives and the existence of their entire universe. Not just their universe – every universe, including our own.
This stuck with me for two big reasons.
- King doesn’t present himself as the creator of these characters, but as a conduit tapping into their universe and fated to tell their story.
That’s what I believe, too.
Every story I’ve written – of which Dermanenlion is merely the most recent and the only one I want to publish -has felt like I was glimpsing another, very real universe, and if I didn’t write quickly enough the window closes and the story is lost. That’s why I was so obsessive for so long over Dermanenlion; I was terrified the window would close before I had finished. That’s also why I got turned on to The Dark Tower – I was discussing this feeling with a friend of mine who exclaimed, “That’s what King thinks, too! He says so in these books!”
2. King stepped away from The Dark Tower for some time because he was intimidated by it.
Y’all. OMG.
I can’t tell you how many times over the seven years I spent writing Dermanenlion that I thought, this is too damn big for meIt had started off as three dreams, as three short story concepts, but it merge and kept growing, expanding, morphing before my eyes into something massive. I’d catch a glimpse of something else and suddenly, the doors and windows to Fifth World would fly open and I’d see, to my terror, another 100+ pages unfold before my mind’s eye.
People say writing a story is like trying to wrestle an octopus into a mayonnaise jar. For me, it was a kraken.
And every time it felt too big, every time I felt like breaking beneath the weight of it, I’d go back to the Tower. And I’d remind myself that if Stephen King, the master of horror himself, could feel intimidated by his own work, than it was ok for little ‘ol me to feel that way too.
King, if you ever find your way to this humble little blog, thank you. Your candor got me through my own project. Hopefully you don’t hate what you’ve read of it.
I went through The Dark Tower series three times while I was working on Dermanenlion and On Writing twice. His influence on me was so strong that I initially included him in the acknowledgements – never dreaming he’d actually read it.
I took it out, though, feeling rather silly.
Guess I should have left it in. Because here we are.
And Stephen King is holding my work in his hands – or, rather, on his computer.
Wow.
April 2nd, 2025
I’ve been working with WordPress for over a decade and it still never fails to frustrate me. My inner Luddite constantly reminds me that I’m closer to Gen X than Millennial.
So Here’s the Story of the Time I Had a Real Literary Agent
Yes, you read that right. For a whole glorious five minutes (really it was probably more like two weeks ) I had a literary agent who was interested in representing me. So what happened? Why did I end up going the self-publishing route?
Spoiler alert: she ghosted.
Rewind to spring 2023. I had been on the “agent hunt” for about two-and-a-half years at the time. Frustrating, demoralizing, depressing. At first it took me months to even get a reply, and I started having a sort of existential crisis. Did I exist? Were my queries even going through? Or were they simply vanishing into some mysterious black hole in cyber space? Was there a secret government conspiracy against me as punishment for all the questionable research I did to write this book, and the CIA was eating my queries? Were they turning up in the same place as the socks and the tupperware lids and my high school class ring?
The very first time I got an actual rejection, I was ecstatic – at least it was an acknowledgment that I existed!
That novelty quickly wore off.
At this point please note I will not be using real names.
It was on May 24th, 2023 that I had a brain wave to start specifically querying local agents, hoping our proximity would get my foot in the door. There was one in particular that stuck out to me because the name reminded me of a favorite song. I found an agent, who I shall refer to simply as Kay, who was interested in the sort of fiction I write and sent her a query. I queried two or three other local agents that afternoon as well, but I had a really good feeling about that first one. When I got into my car later, I put that particular song on repeat and just blasted it all the way home, manifesting myself a literary agent all the way.
And a few weeks later, I got a letter back.
A real, live letter from a REAL, LIVE AGENT. Kay wasn’t rejecting me. She wasn’t telling me we just “weren’t the right fit” or that my story just didn’t “resonate” with her. SHE SAID SHE WAS INTERESTED.
And writing this now, I wish I hadn’t deleted that email in a moment of heartbreak.
I had sent her Dermanenlion as a single, massive tome. Half a million words, six hundred pages Times New Roman 12, single spaced. She advised me to break it into a trilogy and even gave me industry-preferred over/under word counts for the books. She said once I’d made the revisions, to get back to her. She also said if she was slow to respond, I should feel free to “poke” her.
By the Dead Gods, you never SAW a girl revise so quickly! Within two weeks I had the whole thing broken up into logical three parts with good rising/falling action and appropriate climaxes and had written an updated synopsis of the entire trilogy. I fired it back, super excited but not ready to tell anyone yet. Move in silence. I was terrified of jinxing the whole thing if I said a word, and I wanted a definitive YES or a contract or something in my inbox before I told ANYONE.
^^^^^^^ this is how secret I was keeping it ^^^^^^^^
I imagined organizing a happy hour with my friends, who would arrive assuming it was just the usual after-work thing, only to surprise them all by telling them I HAVE AN AGENT and I’M ON THE WAY TO PUBLICATION. I was eyeballing my coveted, carefully bogarted bottle of Blantons, thinking THIS would be an occasion to enjoy a glass.
I must have checked my email 3,000 times a day for the next two weeks. I waited and waited… and after two weeks I sent a gentle nudge, essentially, “Hey, just checking in and wondering what you thought of the revisions and how we move forward,” or something similar.
Nothing.
I let three weeks pass this time, and nudged again. Same words, slightly rearranged, all polite and patient.
Nothing.
Four weeks passed. This felt EXACTLY like getting quiet-dumped by a man. And just like that awful feeling when you know he’s lost interest but doesn’t know how to tell you, I resolved to accept the feared outcome with grace and pride.
At this point we were in August. I remember because I was back at school and wrote my final email during my planning period. It was another polite nudge, but this time I added something to the effect if, “If I don’t hear back from you, then I shall assume you’ve decided to pass and I will move on, no hard feelings, with a thanks to you for your kind feedback.” I was letting her off the hook with grace incase she was avoiding me due to fear of confrontation.
Unfortunately, in my experience the High Road leaves you feeling just as shitty as any other route.
Hitting send on that did worse than leave me feeling deflated. As the following days and weeks passed, I became increasingly depressed as the hope I had been clinging to for the past couple years slowly slipped away. To have come so close, to have tasted triumph only to have been crushed left me feeling like Icarus, broken, burnt, and defeated. My barely repressed abandonment issues woke from their restless sleep, stood up, and roared loudly, growing ten feet taller. I had been discarded. I was trash. My book was trash. Not even worth a reply.
I deleted the email thread in the same manner I deleted ex boyfriends from my phone. It was over, done, and I didn’t want the reminder. Like closing the door behind me when I left. It was closure, designed to protect me from the hurt.
And just like with the ex boyfriends, it didn’t work.
All the fight had gone out of me. My queries, once regular, petered out. A couple times a month I’d kick my own ass into sending out another few, but it was bitter exercise. The rejections kept coming – a whole lot of agents claiming to want “new twists on old tropes” but rejecting me all the same, even with my promise of a “new, original type of vampire” that was “guaranteed to redefine the vampire genre, doing for a new generation of readers what Rice and Stoker did for theirs.” I began to realize that no one wanted anything truly new. New is a gamble. New isn’t guaranteed to sell. Everyone, it seemed, just wanted the same old stories retold.
It was almost exactly a year later I found out what happened. And the discovery not only gave me much needed validation, it set me on the path to self-publishing.
I was half-heartedly mucking around in the forums looking for agents to query when I stumbled across this tiny snippet, and my heart basically froze in my chest:
My agent…. Had been fired? Quit? I looked at the date. It was literally right around the time I sent my revisions! Immediately I plunged into the thread. It was all over the place with side conversations, but I found this piece…
I hopped over to Twitter (X)- I had an author’s page at the time, but took it down when Musk announced all content would be used to train AI – to see if I could learn more. On her page I found the original “no longer with” tweet, and another mentioning her frustration that she had been locked out of her email…. And could no longer reach a bunch of her clients.
There it was. She didn’t ghost on purpose. She didn’t lead me on. She didn’t change her mind. I wasn’t trash. Life had simply gotten in the way.
I didn’t find any more details on what happened. I reached out to one of her authors that had been involved at the time and never learned any details beyond this: Kay felt the agency had done one of her clients wrong, and quit on principle. So perhaps I dodged a bullet.
I searched her up further to find out if she had gone to another agency. I thought I’d just email here and say, “Hey! Here I am! Gurl, lets gooooooo!” She had not. She was – at the time – working as a literary critic, not an agent.
So it was now a dead end.
But still. I felt vindicated. I WAS NOT TRASH.
The next few weeks saw a brief uptick in my agent hunt. The author I had spoken to was good enough to give me the agent that had picked up her up when Kay had vanished, but the agent in question, while sympathetic to my experience, just wasn’t interested in my book. I queried a couple more, but my interest in the entire thing had waned, only this time it was different. Now it wasn’t a result of depression. My witchy-brain had been turning the entire experience over in my head, examining every corner of it, asking “Why? What was the point of letting me get so close only to take my agent away? What is the message I’m meant to get from this?”
The answer was clear. I was just going to have to do it my own damn self.
Like so much else in my life. I am one of those cynics who is convinced – from long experience and much disappointment – that she simply can’t rely on others. They’ll drop the ball. They won’t show up. They’ll do it poorly if at all. It’s how I learned to fix my car. How I learned to fix my house. How I ended up in leadership with a very impressive resume.
I’ll do it my damn self.
And so here we are. My book, ready to go on Amazon, Kindle, and waiting distribution via Ingram Spark. The audiobook is on the way, as soon as I buy a microphone. Instead of making pennies per book I will earn about three bucks a copy. I have freedom and control. And I have to admit – although I wanted the affirmation an agent would have provided me, I got that already, from Kay. And let me tell you – the sheer empowerment and satisfaction I feel from DOING THIS MYSELF is beyond compare. It’s an achievement. It’s an accomplishment. And finally, after ten years – it’s here.
March 25th, 2025
THE TOME
My other website is called “Assorted Musings of an Unknown Historian,” so I thought I’d better be equally whimsical. Don’t get too excited, I’m really only witty after enough bourbon.
April 26th, 2019. The day I completed the saga. 692 pages (word, TNR 12), 423,066 words, three books, and seven years of obsession.
And it all started with two seemingly unrelated dreams.
February 26th, 2025
Fifth World Publications TX 
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