Cia

Thank you, belann! I'm so glad you enjoyed the story. I know the weekly updates of only 1k were killer, though. Dunno what will happen with this story, though.

Thanks for the input and for reading the story, Delaneym!

Well I wouldn't stop writing on Wednesdays!

The lengths are killer! I'm so glad you enjoyed the story, Gary.

I don't usually do epilogues... I do like sequels, though.

Well, I don't know that I'd leave the Carthera universe--maybe just this storyline. It was all about Yuri and Benny, and I think they'd come where they needed to go. Then again, maybe not quite yet.

Hmm... all goods things to need to see.

LOL! Sure, Mrs. Deathwish--that's me!

Well, for those who can dislocate their thumbs, cuffs aren't an insurmountable problem. You'd have to worry about things like the edges of anything like wire, or even zip ties, because if they put too much force to separate them, they could seriously damage their wrists. Supposedly, if you tighten the zip tie down as far as you can to create a ton of tension on it, then smack your hands down on your butt real fast while you stretch your arms apart as much as possible at the elbows, the tie should snap. You could have the other character tighten the cuffs with his teeth or something, to make it tight enough. Of course, anyone with any brains would use a zip tie on each wrist and just connect them. But not all bad guys come with brains.

Benny sat up straight. He’d never heard Carlit speak a full sentence. His voice was deep, but he hesitated and mumbled, still staring at the floor. Peten turned to Carlit and lifted his head. “Hey. Look at me.” He waited until Carlit slowly listened, then continued in a soft voice. “That’s not you. What they did to you… to me. That isn’t our fault. You aren’t what they said.” He didn’t say breeder again. “We’ll never be hurt like that again.” Yuri slid away from Benny and moved quietly to knee

LOL. Well, remember that Yuri's injury was damage to his head, an actual physical issue. The venom helped create new synaptic pathways to reconnect the damaged areas of his mind that hindered his recovery. Peten's mate... well, he's another story. As for another Carthera tale, I'm not sure. I had ideas for another trilogy, but I always have other stuff going on too, so I come and go with the different worlds I create. Thanks so much for the review, LadyDe!

No questions for Dark? I'll start, then! How often do you write? Is it an every day thing, or when you can squeeze in the time? Do you feel your writing has progressed/changed since you wrote The Phantom to your current project, The Return? How? If you were to re-write The Phantom now, would you change anything?

So, the tables turn and the interviewer becomes the interviewee! This month the Discussion day is coming a bit early, but that's so Dark can do a live chat! Make sure you come back for the live chat at noon, Alaska time. Just cause that's not the usual zones, so that will be: Pacific 1 PM, Mountain is 2 PM, Central is 3 PM, and Eastern is 4 PM hours. On to the interview!! Single people work more. Are you single? Yup. Been single since 2008. Who do you like best, Jerry or Tom? That takes me back. I always rooted for the cat. Do you eat your fruits and vegetables? Being in a rural Alaskan village, fruits and vegies are a delicacy, so, yes, as much as I can get and as often as my mom sends them. What are you wearing (and no fibbing!)? Jeans and a t-shirt, normally, unless it’s during school hours, in which case it’s business casual. Are you a person who makes their bed in the morning, or do you not see much point? Most of the time I make my bed. I trace that back to my first cat, who would burrow beneath the blankets if the bed was left unmade. He also had a penchant for eating shoelaces, so I learned to put my shoes away, too. Chocolate or Vanilla? Definitely chocolate, the darker the better. What brought you to the site? I followed a writer to her blog and she had a list of favorite stories, among them DomLuka’s Desert Dropping. Do your characters try to make like bunnies and create ever more convoluted plots for you? Or do you have to coax them out of your characters? I’ve had characters do both. Ben and Rick from The One I Want just would not leave me alone for the longest time. They still pop back into my head off and on, harping about the ending to their story (they don’t think it’s done). Then there’s Mordred from The Return, who still takes a lot of coaxing. He doesn’t like being the main character. It’s maddening. Name one entity that you feel supported you in your writing endeavors outside of family members. I’d say the biggest supporter I’ve had in regards to writing is the woman who became my best friend. We first met on writing.com as part of a round-robin type of writing venture. We wrote together for years and it was only in 2009 (?) that I found out she was almost ten years my junior. I was a bit unnerved. Still, we got over that and she’s been my chief cheerleader ever since. Plus, she’s one of the few people brave enough to say “this sucks” when I write crap. Can’t beat that kind of feedback, lol. Is there anything you find particularly challenging in your writing? I find action scenes the hardest to write because words rarely seem like enough after watching the scenes in my head. It’s a repeated criticism I continue to struggle with, that the action gets confusing, that readers have a hard time figuring out who’s doing what in a scene. When did you first consider yourself a writer? I can remember writing my first stories about my GI Joes and my sister’s Barbies back in 5th grade. That’s also the year I wrote some role-plays with my best friend at school (though I didn’t have words for what we were doing then). I used to dream about being a writer. I would fall asleep at night to the stories in my head. Some of them are still clear even after all this time. I played around with role-plays and short stories (though again without really knowing what I was doing) through high school and wrote one novel in college. But in college I discovered Dungeons and Dragons and writing.com, which switched the vast majority of my writing to role-plays because I felt that I was missing some key element in my writing and besides, writing was just a hobby – engineering and the Air Force was my future. Eventually, I told myself, I would grow up and leave it behind. I didn’t, but my family thought I kicked the habit after that one novel I wrote (no, I never submitted it to a publisher). Sometime in 2007-2008, I got back into writing more seriously, found y-gallery, and wrote The One I Want, the first novel that I seriously considered getting published. It won a writing contest on that site (that was back when it was a series of novellas, one of which was titled TOIW). I think looking at the message from the contest moderators was the moment when I first truly considered myself a writer. How did you come up with the title for The Phantom? This was a story whose name was actually easy to decide on. The whole story revolves around Mark’s interactions with the entity he names the Phantom. It seemed obvious to me. Did the characters or the plot come to you first? For almost every story I’ve written, the characters came first. My inspiration was a picture and the characters just popped into my head. I asked the owner of the picture and the author of the characters for permission, and The Phantom began. Now the lead-up to that point is rather convoluted, so I’m going to try and make it understandable. First, there was y-gallery, a website designed for sharing pictures (as in what folks drew on paper or computer tablet) for the M/M genre. Pretty soon people figured out how to add fiction to the site. I was getting into online comics at the time and followed a link to a fansite (or “club” as they’re called on Ygal) for the comic I was reading and slowly started exploring the rest of the site. One of the clubs I discovered was for the old comic Spy vs. Spy. I started following an artist who drew fan-art, which she posted into the fan-club. At first, it was the old, original characters, then they evolved to be more human/realistic, and eventually the artist started adding original characters to the mix. Then the club exploded … with her art and with people clamoring to know more about this world she was building (that was based on the old Spy vs. Spy comic). It got to such a point that she formed her own club and moved all her comics there as she started adding fiction to the mix and inviting others to join in. Next thing I knew, there were alternate reality fan-clubs for these characters in different settings. “Bruce” is the spy name for Mark in the origina club, so named from the shark in Finding Nemo. How that came about is something I don’t remember anymore. I enjoyed all the nonsense as it was a break from the very long days I was putting in working full time and going to school part-time. I was taking 9 credit hours at the time, plus my volunteer hours. I spent a lot of time on the train, which left plenty of opportunities in my day to read. So, one day I saw a new club (spin-off of the new original club, do you follow me?) based around this superhero theme. One of the pictures posted was of Bruce and Sheila, intrepid reporters. I was hooked and just had to write a fanfiction to go with the fanart of the original characters that were themselves born from fanart of the original comic. Capiche? If The Phantom were made into a movie, who do you picture playing each characters part? I could see Taye Diggs as Bruce, perhaps. He has just the right blend of comedic and seriousness for the part (not to mention being really handsome). He might be too short, though. The guy who played the Hulk has the right look for Sheila, as I envision him, anyway. He was a villain on the latest Star Trek film, one of the Romulans. What sort of coffee would your characters order? Simple coffee, complicated soy-non-fat-extra-espresso-half-caff-nightmare? I think Bruce only drinks coffee thick enough for a spoon to stand upright, but Sheila probably drinks his blond (with cream). They both drink too much of it to worry about the fru-fru stuff. In fact, I find it difficult to envision Sheila waiting in line for one. What was your favorite part of the story? My favorite part of the story was finding ways to incorporate as many different references to the fan-clubs and various sci-fi films as I could. That and using the old text-speak. I know, I date myself, but it was fun trying to stump my readers, knowing that they also followed the same artists and infinity-loop of fan-clubs. There are hidden gems in there for the loyal readers, like a scavenger hunt, not like I do that with any of my other work at all…. What are your future projects? Currently, finishing The Return is my top priority. Next to that, I have waiting a story about teenaged ninjas in an alternate, future Earth, and a space opera featuring a sentient A.I., dragons, and time-travel. Some great answers! Thank you, Dark! Okay, don't forget to leave your questions for Dark or come back for the live interview.

Thank you, signstudent1!! We really appreciate readers who support authors by bringing situations like this to light.

Happy Birthday, hun!!

Happy Birthday, hun! I hope you have a great day!

There is a light on the horizon... not saying there won't be bumps, though.I think the end of the story is definitely coming soon... after a few hurdles left to overcome. Thanks so much for all your reviews.

It is, but I hope to have other stories starting soon, so you can get more of my work overall, though this story will stay with the Briefers. Yuri and Benny are strong men--no matter what has happened to them--and I can't wait to share the rest of their story. Thanks for the review, LitLover.

LOL, Carlos! No one has likened my writing to a hunk of well-seasoned meat before. Totally gave me a laugh! As for any challenges... well, we'll just have to wait and see.

Aww, thanks Impunity! Sorry they're killing you, though. I'm trying to fit as much action into each chapter as I can.

Well Benny has his hand in many pies atm. He's helping them settle in, as he can when Yuri doesn't need him, facilitating the meetings between Velaku and the fathers of the female victims, as well as trying to figure out how to be an Alpha for the broken clan--and where they can go from there. Sheshtun's breeding program is new, btw. He was doing a lot of assholish stuff before, but this happened after Yuri and Benny left the Clan. More will come about their future soon.

“Why aren’t you helping the others?” Yuri snuggled against his mate. They’d spent two days holed up in their apartment. He’d spent a lot of time on his phone, though. “They don’t need me right now. You do.” Benny ran his fingers through Yuri’s hair. It felt good when he tugged lightly on the ends. “That’s not being a good Alpha.” Sheshtun had run their Clan like his personal fiefdom, but Yuri had seen how it should be done. Velaku was nice, and all the Falcon Clan loved him. He was clearly in

The best way to see how people approach creating an About Me is probably just perusing their profiles. Some use traditional author bios in 3rd person, some list off facts but make it humorous, some are comic-like, and others are just basic hey, this is me. Pick any topic with a lot of replies and then right click on people's names or avatars on their posts and open the link in a new tab to bring up a new tab with their profile. Check out their About Me, then look at another one, then another one, etc...

Yeah... gay people do talk to members of the opposite sex. It is much, much harder to know how to approach someone you find attractive when you're outside the usual M/F pairing, though. And a place like the gym, which is often populated by people who like to be watched and don't care who does it (we all know it's true!) can make that even harder to decipher. But, you never know, right? Why does it have to be 'I wanna lick you all over' from the get go? Say hello, treat him to a juice or something, and maybe he'll become a friend--and then you can get a better idea of whether or not he prefers men or women.

That assumes that a person who is bisexual doesn't feel complete without having a relationship with both sexes... which is an assumption I really, really hate. It's led to a lot of bias against people who say they are bi--especially men. There's a lot of 'you can't like men, and date a woman, because really you're gay and you're just using them as a beard/suppressing your true sexuality' that also leads a lot to people assuming someone who is bisexual will cheat, no matter what, because they can't be fulfilled in a relationship with a partner of only one sex. Hogwash. Acting like that just means that person is a scuzzy cheater--not a bisexual. Bisexuality means people have the capacity to feel attraction for EITHER sex... not that a bisexual person needs a relationship or sex with both genders to feel fulfilled. Those stereotypical judgments, quite often from gay people, really bother me. I'm bisexual. I have had crushes and attraction to people of both genders as far back as I can remember. Even though I grew up with a bigot for a parent, I never worried about the gender of a person I was attracted to, though I did keep my same sex adventures to myself for self-preservation reasons. I had a wide open playing field as a bisexual woman... because for me, it was the person, not their personal bits, that would seal the deal when I found someone I really wanted to be with. By 19 I married the man I began dating at 16. He knows I'm bi. He actually appreciates that I'll point out hot women, or go to strip clubs with him, but I've never acted on any attraction I've felt for women in the 17 years we've been together. I don't feel like I'm unhappy or missing out on anything, either. So stop and think about how you view your sexuality if you're bi... because it may just be you need to change your mindset to approach it from a new angle.