Clerical Error: out now

Clerical Error is out.

This one is going to be interesting.

There are no fights.

There are no explosions.

There are no ... okay, there's one murder.

Maybe one or two people are just a wee bit injured.

But no one is shot. Or stabbed. Or poisoned. 

A lot of this book falls under your traditional cozy. There's a lot of talking and maneuvering. There's a lot of local politicking and environment...

It helps that this is a historical novel dealing with local issues and murder in 1976.

James is a college philosophy professor with too much time on his hands. When an old classmate asks for a favor, he drops in with little notion of what’s ready for him.

The year is 1976, during the dark times – for both the Catholic Church and New York City.

James’ college classmate is Father Gus Sadowski, the pastor of Saints Gabriel, Columcille, and Rocco church in the middle of Bed-Sty, where there drive by criminals are on one side of the parish, and the mob is one the other. Father Gus is all alone to run the parish, and needs some help – because the live-in priest in the attic, Father Timothy A. Lessner, is worse than useless.

When Lessner takes a tumble down the stairs in the middle of the night, the casual favor has turned into a nightmare.

Can James solve the mystery of who killed Lessner before he finds himself the main suspect?

So, obviously, this is different for me.

The joke I've been using has been "If things go wrong, I'll just blame the co-author."

Since the co-author is my father, that's part of the joke.

Anyway, it's out. I think you can even return e-books if you don't like them. So give it a shot.

Be well all.

Pre-Order, NEW RELEASE: Clerical Error

So it's time to talk about a new release.

No, not something from Silver Empire -- much to my publisher's relief. 

This is something from the distant past, brought to you by someone who was there.

Obviously, any similarities between real persons or events is completely coincidental. Wink. Wink.

Enter: Clerical Error.

And, I have a new co-author.

Dr. John Konecsni is a veteran of academia for decades. Primarily teaching philosophy or shuffling papers in a college office.

Who is this man and why is he important?

First of all, he's my father.

... What? You thought I magically managed to have been born with as cool an author name as Declan Finn?

Second of all, he is my co-author on Clerical Error.

Clerical Error is what you might call a "cozy." It's a nice, laid-back murder mystery, without a lot of running around and shooting. In fact, more of the book is almost a comedic historical set piece, back in the sands of time that were the 1970s.

Let's just say that Dr. Konecsni spent a lot of time in Bedford-Stuyvesant, aka, Bed-Sty, hanging out with a college classmate of his.

The classmate happened to be the pastor of a church.

And the "hanging out" meant becoming an assistant pastor for the entire parish.

Take all that together, add a dead body, and you have the plot of Clerical Error.

James is a college philosophy professor with too much time on his hands. When an old classmate asks for a favor, he drops in with little notion of what’s ready for him.

The year is 1976, during the dark times – for both the Catholic Church and New York City.

James’ college classmate is Father Gus Sadowski, the pastor of Saints Gabriel, Columcille, and Rocco church in the middle of Bed-Sty, where there drive by criminals are on one side of the parish, and the mob is one the other. Father Gus is all alone to run the parish, and needs some help – because the live-in priest in the attic, Father Timothy A. Lessner, is worse than useless.

When Lessner takes a tumble down the stairs in the middle of the night, the casual favor has turned into a nightmare.

Can James solve the mystery of who killed Lessner before he finds himself the main suspect?

I came along, edited the book, added a few touches, and thought it was more than good enough to publish.

Clerical Error is up for pre-order.

And anything else I've got up for sale can be found here.

Follow That Clue! The Making of a Great Mystery, RavenCon, 2017, 4-29

As promised, I have video from my time at RavenCon.

The description of this panel is

Part of the fun of reading mystery novels is to discover the clues and figure out the resolution before the detective reveals what happened. As an author, how does one make sure the clues are planted properly without falling into the Holmesian trap of keeping the main clue hidden from the reader.

With
Jeanne Adams (Moderator)
Declan Finn (Yellow Jacket)
Jack McDevitt (on the far end)
Darin Kennedy (in the middle)

Enjoy.

For those people who like a good mystery, here are two I suggest.

The Dragon Awards are open and ready for nominations, and I have a list of suggestions you might want to take a look at. If you already  have a good idea of what you want, just click here to go and vote for them immediately. The instructions are right there.

Or: sign up for my mailing list in order to get free stuff.

The Love at First Bite series. 

    

Rumors Bargains and Lies

Yes, I stole the title from Babylon 5. I'm due.

I'm going to start by thanking File 770 yesterday. Or at least one of its readers, who goes by the name Migly. When I put in the disclaimer yesterday, I mentioned File 770 commenters who harassed me in my email. Which happened. Migly found that strange and pointed out that no one on the File 770 website mentioned me until Mad Genius Club mentioned me first.

Which was nice. No one had told me I had appeared at MGC.  Sadly, I still don't have the time to read it. So, no, I won't be addressing it, since I want to keep this one short.

It has been interesting, though, that I've had an entire alternate biography show up in the past 12 hours that I never knew I had.

Apparently, I'm a sexual deviant who will sleep with anything....

Because, you know, looking like this means I get all the chicks.

.... All of the color blind chicks....

No, let's just stick with all of the literally blind chicks.

This was the one where I laughed my ass off for ten minutes. Really, ten minutes. It was wonderful. It was joyous. It was insane.

I've had lots of rumors on me over the years. Some of them, at least, are based on reality. Am I nuts? There's an argument that can be made for that. Am I violent? Only in my rhetoric. Or if I need to defend myself.

But this? This is such total, complete, and utter BS I can't really even begin to describe it.

And that's when I laughed off all the rest as well. Because they were just as deranged to anyone who talks to me for five minutes. This one? this was the rumor that saved me an awful lot of time. I spent most of Tuesday stressing out over what "people will think."

You know how stressed I was yesterday? I didn't even know how stressed I was until I saw this

"Reality Couldn't Have Done This to Him" ~ A review of Declan Finn's "Set To Kill"

Yup. You read that right. JD Cowan is back, and he's got another review of another one of my novels. And I'm really kinda blown away by how much better this book sounds than when I wrote it. He actually makes me think I could win an award ... any award, really.

I will only excerpt some parts. I really want you to read this one. And if I highlight every part I liked, I'd just copy and past the whole thing.

What you're in for is a story filled with action, mystery, and more than a bit of comedy....

If there is one thing Mr. Finn excels at (there are a few) then it would have to be the action scenes. I'm hard-pressed to think of an author with so many details in their action scenes. Everything flows, the events are described clearly and fit together, and they are usually quite surprising. And funny....

This is a hard book to really nail down. Would it be correct to call it something like if Dashiell Hammett wrote an episode of Murder, She Wrote thinking it was a sequel to Commando? I'm just not sure. If you enjoyed the previous book in this series, It Was Only On Stun!, then you should enjoy this one more. Whatever it is, Set To Kill accomplishes exactly what it sets out to do.

Should you read this book? Only if you like wanton destruction and humor popping up in strange places. And, really, why wouldn't you like those things?

I can't wait to read the sequel. Surely by then Sean Ryan will have enough of a handle on the con experience to run his own. I could just imagine.

You can read the rest here.

Yeah, this is a really good day.

Anyway, if you liked what you read and want to click on the book, here you go, it's below

And if you've read these, a review would be nice. Thanks.

 

Year in review, 2016

I cannot even begin to cover all of the strangeness that happened out in the world in 2016.

After all, think for a moment ...

Trump won.

The Cubs won.

Army won.

Brian Niemeier won.

I got nominated for a Dragon Award.

I hung out with Jagi and John C. Wright.

Who could have guessed that any of the above would have happened?

Okay, Brian Niemeier was apparently a forgone conclusion, but other than that ...

Okay, I guessed that Hillary would lose, not that Trump would win, but that's nitpicking.

And the body count this year ... yikes. Wikipedia has it here. It looks like a massacre.

And yes, I've been busy as heck.

I've actually come out with six books last year.

Yes, six.

Count with me.

Pius History .... which has now been unpublished, and we'll get there.

For All Their Wars Are Merry -- In August

Sad Puppies Bite Back  -- In September

And the following were all in November.

Codename: UnSub

Set to Kill

Murphy's Law of Vampires

And that's not even counting my rerelease of Honor at Stake last June, remember that?

So, yeah, I've been sort of busy.

Oh, and while I think about it, that's not even all of it. because there's still Silver Empire to deal with.

Don't tell me you've forgotten that one, do you? The deal with Silver Empire is to take everything Pius -- the history volume, the short story collection, the novels -- and rerelease it with ambitious ideas for expansion -- expanding the brand, and for expanding the reach of the books in and of themselves.


Ugh ... so ... yeah ... I've been busy.

By the way, this isn't even counting several other projects I've been working on that I haven't told anyone about. Why haven't I told anyone about them? Well, these are books I'm submitting to a publisher, and the backstory behind the submission I'm not even sure I should be discussing it in public, because it was a private conversation. So, that's about 200,000 words I've been fighting with over the past four months, in an effort to get things in shape for any possible situations that might come up.

What the bleep am I talking about? You'll have to wait a bit to find out.

And, again, as I said -- THIS IS JUST 2016.

Just wait until I discuss what I'm doing tomorrow in the rest of 2017.

Movie Night: A Murder Of Quality

You might recognize some of the men and women in this performance.

This is based off of John Le Carre's novel of the same name, this takes George Smiley, who is "a civil servant" (ie: spy) who is looking into the murder in a small town of the local ... gossip, for lack of a better term. Instead of Alec Guiness -- who played Smiley in the two miniseries from the Carla cycle (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, and Smiley's people) -- we get Denholm Elliot, known best as Marcus Brody from two Indiana Jones films.

This stars Joss Acklund as a professor, a very young Christian Bale as a student at a local school, and

Also, if you haven't already, check out some of the books below.

 

Movie Night: Murder by Natural Causes

This is another Levinson and Link ... mystery, for lack of a better term. It's a murder from the murderer's point of view. And it shouldn't be a shock -- after all, they did it dozens of times with every episode of Columbo.

This is, in essence, a 5-man play. Hal Holbrook stars as a mentalist with a bad heart. His younger wife has taken on a younger lover, played by Barry Bostwick.  And they have a cunning plan to make certain that she doesn't need a divorce: a murder with no fingerprints.

But anyone who has ever seen The Mentalist tv show knows that playing games with a mentalist is never as simple and as straightforward as anyone thinks it is.

Also, if you haven't already, check out some of the books below.

Movie Night: Rehearsal for Murder

This was a made for TV movie from the 80s that was a star-studded mystery, from the actors to the writers.

The writers are Levinson and Link, the men who created Columbo and Jessica Fletcher,

The lead actor is Robert Preston (The Music Man), starring as a writer who suspects that his wife's suicide was really murder. A year after her death, he has assembled the men and women of his wife's final performance in order to not only prove she was murdered, but also prove who did it.

This stars Lynn Redgrave (yes, one of those Redgraves), William Daniels (1776, Night Rider) as the producer, Patrick Macnee (Steed of The Avengers) as the last leading man she worked with, as well as a very, uh, uh, very, uh, young uhhhhhh, Jeff Goldblum.

This is one of the most brilliant pieces of writing you will ever see. And I know it's not Christmas-themed, but I'm not able to post Die Hard on the blog.

Also, if you haven't already, check out some of the books below. You might see some similarities in the writing. Heh heh heh.

Movie Night: Death of a Doxy

Another Nero Wolfe novel adapted for A&E many moons ago, Death of a Doxy went a little dark. But then, Nero Wolfe started dark, just look at Fer de Lance.

It also ties in, after a fashion, to A Family Affair, the very last Nero Wolfe novel.

How? Well, read both of them, and find out.






Also, if you haven't already, check out some of the books below.

REVIEWS ARE IN

So, yeah, new reviews, for a little bit of everything.

And they are incredible.

Item the first, Daniel Humphreys really liked Honor at Stake. How can I tell?

"....with Declan Finn’s “Honor at Stake” we have a vampire book that not only hearkens back to the old school, it adds some interesting new twists on the science and mythology of the vampire plague while still remaining firmly focused on the cast of characters who inhabit Mr. Finn’s world.

....Marco has a bit of Mary Sue syndrome to him at first, though Finn does an excellent job of slowly drawing out deeper aspects of his personality, and leaves us with an interesting cliffhanger at the end that will leave you wondering what lies beneath in terms of the character.

....If you’re looking for a great entry point in a new series, ‘Honor at Stake’ is highly recommended. Five stars."

So ... yeah, I think he liked it You can buy the book here.

And then there's Lori Bird. You might remember that Lori originally reviewed Honor at Stake for The Catholic Geeks last year.

This year, it got more interesting. This one goes on for a bit, but here's the most interesting part of the review on Murphy's Law of Vampires, for me.

"Actually, I decided about halfway through that if Larry Correia had been smart, he wouldn’t have asked John Ringo to write Monster Hunter: Grunge.  He’d have gotten Declan to do it, because when it comes to writing about badass, almost-bad-guy good guys with exceptional loads of snark, Declan Finn completely outran John Ringo.  No joke.

He was running so fast, it was like John Ringo was encased in cement and being dragged in the other direction by a freight train.

I would pay a small fortune to have read the Declan Finn version of Monster Hunter: Grunge.  Sorry, Ringo."

Wow. She even went out of her way to compare me to Ringo, and deemed me better.... huh.

So, yes, she liked it.

And then, there are these two reviews on Set to Kill, one by Dragon Award Nominee Marina Fontaine, and the other by the Injustice Gamer.

Marina's thoughts...

Take an Agatha Christie murder mystery. Make it THREE murder mysteries. 

Replace the middle-aged Inspector with a security expert who happens to be a martial arts guru/all-around killing machine ....

Stick it into the naturally insane environment that is the world's largest Sci-Fi/Fantasy con (fictionally renamed WyvernCon).

....Oh and also make it funny enough to qualify as satire.

OK, so maybe it's nothing like an Agatha Christie mystery after all. But it is a darn good read. The reason I was thinking of Christie is because, underneath all the fun and goofiness and inside-baseball sci-fi literary community references, there is a solid plot worthy of an old-fashioned detective novel.....

The pacing is good....The violence is not as plentiful as Declan Finn's fans might expect, but there's still sufficient to keep the adrenaline flowing. The fully fictional characters are well enough developed that you can go into the story cold and still care about what happens to them; and those inspired by real life are easily recognizable while changed up just enough to still fit into a satirical fiction environment.

And all that for only four stars. Heh.

Alfred Genesson, The Injustice Gamer, even broke character for this review.

Ah, I'll drop the facade a little. This book hooked me harder than anything he's written yet, and I really like his previous stuff. The pacing was amazing, all the slow parts had purpose, and the action didn't let up until bodies fell. I didn't feel like there wasn't a wasted word in this book .... I went and read very late when I finished, and I have to get up EARLY for work.  .... I was amazed at what Declan spun out of the cloth of Sad Puppies bite back and Sean Ryan.

So .... wow. Yeah.

These are some amazing reviews. I'm kinda surprised. As usual.

Anyway, you can buy any or all of these here

Honor at Stake
Murphy's Law of Vampires
Set to Kill

And enjoy.

Serial killers and Codename: Unsub

I've always been a fan of serial killers.

Okay, mostly, I've been fascinated about them from an early age because they are at both complex and shallow at the same time. They can be a source of infinite evil, especially the ones who grew up in perfectly normal households, and then became Jeffrey Dahmer, or Ted Bundy-ish. A lot of them are broken, but a large block of them are just evil sons of bitches who need to be put down like the rabid dogs they are.

Because no, to understand all is not necessarily to forgive all. Sometimes it just makes it easier to find and kill the little bastards.

Nowadays, the only way to catch a serial killer is to get lucky. Any similarities between real serial killers and Criminal Minds is ... usually in the footnotes of the early episodes, where they told you what serial killer they were stealing from that week.

There's a lot of police work, there's a lot of forensics, and you have to have teams of cops continually drilling down on the manhunt until someone gets lucky. Or good. Usually both. Because the problems of catching serial killers is usually a matter trying together a connection between victims killed (most likely) by a total stranger. In a world where most people are killed in the middle of the night, in their own bedroom, by their nearest and dearest, murder by stranger is a great way to get away with it. Strangers on a Train works for a reason.

When I was designing Codename: UnSub, it was simple: how do you catch a serial killer, trained to be a professional assassin, in a city where half the population is psychotic, and there are no cops?

And then, to up the ante, I made certain that one of the victims has the power to end the world,

But, hey, no pressure.

One of the reasons I wanted to have this be a murder mystery is that mysteries have always been a snapshot of culture, and cultural assumptions. When Sherlock Holmes assumes that a man is a bachelor by a frayed button on a sleeve, it's a bit of a snapshot of 19th century Victorian London.

For Codename: UnSub, I decided that this nightmare San Francisco needed more personality, and more depth. I was going to spell out some of the sects and factions. Because in order to find one killer in a city of killers, Kevin Anderson is going to have to dig through plenty of insanity.

Obviously, I'm not going to get anywhere near as deranged as real life serial killers. There will be none of the Ted Bundy "strangled while being raped" victims. There will be no Dahmer cannibalism or pederasty. There will definitely be no Ed Gein "ashtrays made from human skin." There will be no "stab a victim in the gut and then have penile penetration of the wound."

We're just not going to go there.

There are sadistic murderers, there are sexual sadists. There are hunters who like the stalking of victims and do little about the kill. There are some who really like to take their time.

Though don't worry, if you want something gruesome, I can manage that. I've got a killer who basically likes to beat people to death. And fight them until they fall down. Then drag them to their feet and simply continue breaking things. And then, when they can't stand anymore, continue to break every last bone in the victim's body.

So, hopefully, serial killer fans will not be disappointed in just how much of a sick son of a bitch we have in this one. 

Review: Specter

NOTE: I WILL HAVE MY OWN RADIO SHOW, THE CATHOLIC GEEK, STARTING JUNE 7TH.

In Bleeder, by John Desjarlais, we were introduced to philosophy professor Reed Stubblefield, who thought in Aristotle quotes. During a bit of R and R in the countryside, in a quiet, sleepy little village right out of a Miss Marple novel, he meets a priest, the local stigmatic. When the priest is murdered, Reed becomes the primary suspect.

What follows is an intricate, brilliant work that Agatha Christie would have been happy with.  Desjarlais' prose is tight, erudite and powerful. His vocabulary is well-used. He knows how to engage the reader, and is very good with turning a phrase.

I enjoyed this book, and I was surprised by the villain-reveal at the end. Five stars all the way.

In Viper, new names appear in the local church's book of the dead.  Except, none of these people are dead yet. When the names on the list begin to correlate to the fresh homicides in the neighborhood, it's clear that this is a hitlist.  At the bottom of that list is the former undercover DEA agent Selena De La Cruz. Selena's passions are guns, shoes, fast cars, and kickboxing, so if someone wants to kill her, it's going to be a fight they're going to regret. It was more of a thriller than Bleeder, though it's set in the same universe -- Selena is even dating Reed. This was a fun, solid ride from start to finish.

My only problem with the book was the unrealistic character of a DEA agent who was not only racist, but whose solution to everything was a SWAT team breaking down the front door (Seriously, how did the guy not get fired? Did he have a relative in the hierarchy? Was he a nephew to the AG?).  Even that only knocks it down to a 4.5 star rating.

Finally, we come to Desjarlais' third book, Specter.

In our opening prologue, a Cardinal is murdered in an orchestrated hit that looks like the end of a brilliantly executed caper movie ... only with an assassination.  The incident is loosely based off of the death of Cardinal Ocampo in 1993, which was presumed to be the worst case of timing and luck on the planet Earth.

But what if it wasn't?

16 years later, former undercover DEA agent Selena De La Cruz (of Viper) is about to get married to Reed Stubblefield (of Bleeder), and then the Vatican comes by and says "Hi, we think your family was in on the hit, and you were in town at the time."

Desjarlais

And we're off to the races.

A fun part of this is the dynamic between Reed and Selena.  Bleeder was very much Reed's book, where Selena first appeared. Viper was all Selena, with a few cameos by Reed.  Specter is their book. Even the alternating points of views (third person personal) are very distinct. Their chemistry is very much a part of the narrative as it is part of their relationship.  She's very a very tough, outgoing modern woman who has little problem with a shootout, and he's a quiet, bookish, old-fashioned gentleman who thinks in Aristotle quotes. And I really like these two together, even though we hadn't seen much of their developing relationship.  Looking at the two of them deal with the trials of dealing with the wedding is more than enough evidence for why these two belong together.

There's even one entire conversion that sums it up quite nicely.

Him "We're incompatible. I'm North Side, you're South Side. I'm Cubs, you're white Sox .... I'm publicly-employed pro-union Democrat for gun control and you're small-business owner-Republican with a gun....I drive a Volvo, you drive a Charger."
Her: "My godmother is very traditional and is having a hard time thinking of me as Selena Perez de La Cruz Stubblefield."
"You don't have to adopt my last name..."

See what I mean? They work so well together, I'm surprised more of this wasn't a romance novel.  I would have read it twice for banter like that.

Okay, the fact that John Desjarlais has a female badass teamed up with the nerd just like I did in The Pius Trilogy really doesn't have anything to do with my enjoyment of the book. Honest. It just works really well.  It's like Baldacci's King and Maxwell series -- they just have this great dynamic together. And if you don't like Baldacci, don't worry, that's the only overlap I can think of.

As for the rest ... if you're thinking that this is going to be exactly like Bleeder or Viper, it is and it isn't. The overall plot feels like an excuse to watch Reed and Selena on screen, which, frankly, I'm happy with. If you read Desjarlais' books for the intricate puzzle solving (like Bleeder), you're going to be disappointed. If you're in this only for a knock-down shootout (like Viper), you're going to enjoy the second half of the book a lot.

There is also the best look at supernatural phenomenon I've seen in years.  Even little conversations like "ever have a seance or use a ouja board? Those things attract all sorts of nasty things." Awesome.

However, if you want to read this book to follow Reed and Selena, dive right in.  As far as I'm concerned, these two are right up there with Nick and Nora Charles. And, from what I've heard, Chesterton Press wants more books in this universe from John Desjarlais, despite that it's "just" a trilogy.

Frankly, I own all six Nick and Nora Charles movies, so I'm perfectly happy with the idea that we'll see more of these two.

Taking a stand, for the last time.

Last week, I said that A Pius Stand is coming.

It's finally going to be over.

If you've been with this blog since the beginning -- or if you've read "Pius Origins" link on the sidebar -- you know that this started out as a history paper gone amuck. It was a graduate paper in which I examined the truth behind Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.

SPOILERS FOR A PIUS MAN, but, what I learned from my research was simple. Pius XII did more than any one person to save people in Europe during World War II.  More POWs. More Jews. More refugees. Because life was precious, and if they didn't like it, they could just come and get him.

But if you read any media around Pope Pius XII, you get Hitler's Pope. And Susan Zuccotti. And John Cornwell. And Gary Wills and Michael Phayer. The Wiki page on it has become more balanced, but still incomplete. You don't even want to know what it looked like when I started writing.  All of these great big names trying to spin a story I know to be false, and I spent a whole four months looking at primary documents as a grad student in America. They were journalists and historians. They should have known better.

I don't like liars.

The Pius Trilogy started out as a devotion. One that I tried to make readable for everyone. I wanted the opening to be dark and ominous to trap anti-Catholic to reading on, until they are so hip deep in the book that by the time that the revelation is given, the trap springs shut.

END SPOILERS.

The short version is, this was a devotion.  This was to sing the praises of God and His followers. This was a devotion to the truth, and a war on lies. At the same time, I was making it readable for other people. Heck, one of my friends on Facebook became a friend of mine BECAUSE of A Pius Man, and she's Jewish, I can't make it too much more open and readable than that.

The reason my cast was so big was simple -- I wanted to make it clear that the truth was not some subjective moving target. I needed a doubter, a neutral party, two red herrings, confirmation of the mystery ... well, you'll just have to read it to perform that matching column.

But my premise was that of philosopher Peter Kreeft -- this was an ecumenical jihad, a war against one very specific force of darkness, and one that the religions in A Pius Man could get behind. Because the liars I've been fighting since the beginning all have one thing in common.  What is that thing? Read A Pius Legacy.

But then I couldn't get the Catholic Writer's Guild Seal of Approval for APM. Why? Because the book was too violent, and some poor little dear was squeamish. I know this happened because I had officers of the Guild come up to me and suggested that there needed to be changes in the was the Seal of Approval was handled. Devotion to truth? Devotion to God? Who needs it? I've got a gun-toting Catholic! Run!

Then I had one or two of those officers write positive reviews. I'll take it.

The reason I kept going was that some things needed to be said. Some things needed to be put out there and thrown at people's heads until they either take notice or are bludgeoned to death.  Because the truth is not a game, or a weapon, except against lies. Truth is what happened, and maybe we can speculate about reasons, or about the why of things, and sometimes people will leave a diary detailing what and why they did. Then we hope the poor schmuck isn't a schizophrenic or a pathological liar.

And I kept going because I had to. Because writing is all I have.

This trilogy has been my life for ten years. And now it's time for me to say goodbye.