Blame the World Outside the Door-A Follow-up

This is just a short follow-up to say the Big Birthday Bash books on Kindle did a gangbuster business. Tens of thousands of readers downloaded copies, especially of UNIDENTIFIED, WIREMAN, and BAD TRIP SOUTH, three of my suspense novels. The short story that did the best was DARK REALITY, and it is one of my favorite stories that I've written lately. The success of the books is due to all you readers and to my colleagues who Tweeted and posted notices and set up interviews with me. I thank you all so much. It made my birthday exciting and rewarding.

I hope the readers who got copies will read them eventually and leave short reviews. Sometimes readers grab books that aren't usually what they read and then are surprised to open and begin reading such dark, terrorizing stories. If you got my books thinking they were going to be light reading, I'm sorry to report they will not. All my work is dark, graphic, realistic, and the subject matter concerns crime, criminals, and the crazy world we live in. I have spent years researching and studying the criminal mind. I've even talked to a few criminals, those incarcerated and those who should be. They fascinate me because I could never commit those crimes against my fellowman and I wonder what they are thinking when they do. So, no, the books aren't light, they aren't uplifting except in the sense justice is served, and they aren't comedic. If you like dark fiction, however, you came to the right place and the right writer.

Few women are writing fiction this dark and realistic, and few women ever did over the years I was writing novels. I don't know if that makes me strange (probably), but it has been the area that interested me most and that has rewarded me with an audience. Readers don't expect women writers to write with such...all out gusto, shall we say. They don't expect us to delve so deeply into the psychotic mind or to define the areas of darkness that lurks in the human soul. Yet, it was always where I wanted to go and explore--the caves, the crevices, the hidden doors in the minds of the people who were broken and either in pain or oblivious to how their misdeeds affected the world. There is never an end to it. Every day a new psychotic personality blooms and becomes deadly. Every day someone chews off the face of a stranger or kills his wife and his kids. Those minds aren't closed to writers. When we look into them long enough, the abyss waits, but some of us teeter there on the edge just long enough to come back and write about mad men and mad women. That is what I do. It is what I have always done. You know what's coming. It is probably what I will always do.

So if you got a few of my books and you're ready for the strange and the dark, step inside, close the door, lock it, and read a book or two. Just don't blame me for the nightmares. Blame the world out there, the one I looked at closely and wrote down in stories. I merely reflect part of the evil that men do. The real monsters out there are a hundred percent worse than I will ever be able to portray them. They just are.

Thanks again! I had a happy little birthday and you got some scary little books!