A lot of work arguing with sad Wix AI later; here we are.

I don't really think that Wix understands people who aren't selling anything. "You don't want to go through 14 steps of SEO optimization to play the Google game properly, whaaaaaat?" "Yeah, really doing need any of that marketplace crapola at all." "But people won't be able to see you up top of the search results!" "That's okay, kid, not everyone needs to be." Anyway, hi, welcome, I don't play the social media "notice me" game any more. I just write stuff. Some of it's not too bad, we're making progress forward. Someday I'll hire a twenty-year-old to do the marketing and try to publish an oh-so-serious profitable book, but it won't be this day. I don't have time for marketing, either. I just write for fun. Some of you might enjoy some of it. If not, that's okay too. The initial book was loosely based on a 1920's hotel I worked at in my 20s. Not the haunted part so much as the ancient WW2 brass gas light fixtures, ratty old laundry room, and broken down staircases leading to nowhere. And the Italian marble floors I recall fondly because I once had a nasty rich woman jumping up and down on them screaming like a three-year-old, in high heels and a mink coat. Good times. Courting Stone and Scale came second, as a prequel to NM&BW. I pondered and thought and tried to imagine just how Gary & Yuri ever met, let alone had three children together. Fascinating bit of world building to figure out how the heck that happened. Ella's their eldest daughter, got written into a much larger part during the third revision of NM&BW. So, in Wire & Muse, I followed her off to college. The challenge in that book is handling both Freshman Washout Syndrome and sensitivity to nineteen-year-olds. Thought about a why and how college freshmen flunk out in such vast numbers, and then a counterbalance to it. Sysop & Shelter grew up around the magic accumulation that drives most of the world building in all four books; magic accumulates, changes its environment, and things exposed to magic absorb it over sufficient time...and...chaos. Really unusual romances. Life always finds a way, as Dr. Malcolm said. It's all quirky and whimsical, and I make no apologies for any of it.

--PAB