About

The Dead End Streets universe started as a free online serial in 2007.  It was YA centered and featured a group of supernatural high school students in a low-income school.  It ran for a year and a half until I  wrapped up the main plot and didn't have any ideas for a 'second season.' It was pretty popular with a few hundred regular readers, and I made some $ off of it.

Over the years I've played with the idea of expanding on DES, and the original serial has been chopped and re-written several times. A 4th draft is sitting 1/2 edited in my office and one day I will get around to finishing it.

In the fall of 2012 I began to self-publish short erotica pieces.  I wanted to do a m/m paranormal romance and knew that I not only had a pre-made universe, but I had the characters as well.  Obsessive Jamie-boy and indifferent Damian.  They were minor characters in the original series, but I knew they would be a fun couple to write about as I already knew they had a long and turbulent relationship.

I published "Drain Me Dry" in October of 2012 and I started getting emails and requests for more, so I made a new cover, "Deadly Liaisons #1: Drain Me Dry" and a series was born. "Addicted to the Bite" came out in January of this year and #3, "Club Midnight" will be released late March, early April.

You can also expect other characters to get their time in the spotlight like Simon, Damian's long-suffering second in command and Detective Julie Nova, a bitter werewolf. There are also the original 9 main characters from the 2007 series, all grown up now and ready to get kinky.

A Note on DES and Other Vampire Works

You might have noticed some similarities between characters in DES and other vampire works.  I created DES in 2007.  I did not know Twilight even existed (thank god, or this series never would have happened), Vampire Diaries was not on the air, and I'd never read a Sookie Stackhouse book.

When I first started publishing the YA serial I got some flack for ripping off Twilight--which was how I found out it existed. One of the reasons the original DES book is still in draft form is because of the flood of teenage vampires in the market.

My inspiration came from the vampires I had experienced as a teen in the 90's. I watched the premiere of Buffy and did not miss an episode in 7 seasons. I read all of L J Smith's vampire books including the Vampire Diaries. I was a big fan of Christopher Pike and his vampires. I started reading Anne Rice when I was 14 and my favorite movie was the Lost Boys.

I wanted to play tribute to the great literary and film vampires and I wanted to poke fun at them as well. I named my vampires after vamps of the past (David, Barnabas, Carmilla). Damian was named after the Vampire Diaries' Damon (in 2007 it was an out-of-print YA book).  The fact that Damian is a blond nightclub owner like Sookie's Eric is a complete coincidence. (Jamie-boy, incidentally, was named after a 1940's pirate movie, The Black Swan.)

I started reading the Southern Vampire series a few years ago and was very annoyed that Charlene Harris came up with the perfect name for the vampire groupies: fang bangers, and I had to settle for the less poetic vamp tramps. All the same, vampire thralls have been around since Dracula, so you can't blame us for having similar ideas.

In some cases I have decided to eliminate instances from the first drafts that are too close--exact names for example (Stephanie Meyer and I seem to have similar naming tastes) but some of the coincidental stuff (like Damian's club) I kept.  And some of it I'm doing on purpose (you'll see some Anne Rice in Marcello, Damian's sire).

Vampires were a huge part of my teenage years.  I'm not writing these stories because vampires and paranormal romance are 'in.' I'm writing them because I love them and I love my characters. So I don't care that Detective Nova is not the only werewolf cop around (Hello Canada's Lost Girls) or that there are a hundred sexy blond vampires out there (Spike, Lestat, David, Eric, ect.). Because I love all of them too. (Just not Twilight.)