(Thank you Jacquelyn for inviting me to post to your blog - it is both an honor and a privilege. I'm deeply grateful.)

Ever read a book and think to yourself, "that woman was too stupid to live!"? This thought usually comes when said heroine is staggering blindly over a monumental truth but a millisecond before trotting out an insight brilliant enough to make Einstein weep with envy. There are days when I am her poster child...lol! Honestly, I am the dumbest smart person you will ever meet.

I was going to give you guys the canned bio, but then I got to thinking you deserve better. In short: I am a wife of sixteen years to a delightfully deviant Irishman who lives for me having an unusual idea for a sex scene so we can see if things work right (believability is totally important). I am the mother of a fifteen year old Drama Llama (male) who is addicted to the online game World of Warcraft. I'm the happy owner of two horses; Classic Jack Supreme the nosy, bossy Belgian and Leo's Bright Investment aka Magic. Really, who names horses anymore...yeesh. Also in the menagerie are Fling the Manx, Salem the calico (cats of course) and my "puppies" - Fling, Boo and Maximus. Yes, I really really liked Gladiator when we got Max. Ironically, the name fits. As a Chihuahua he feels he is the rightful ruler of Rome...I mean the home. Once each week I go to a very patient lady and take violin lessons on top of everything else (meaning laundry, writing, dishes, planting corn, writing, baling hay, practicing and all that goes with it).

Getting back to being the dumbest smart person...that comes down to what I (now) jokingly refer to as the Head Cracking Incident of 2004. You guessed it, a nasty car accident. I was left with permanent central brain damage among other neat injuries. It isn't just chicks that dig scars, sometimes the guys think they're pretty neat too - for which I am eternally grateful. My husband was incredibly supportive, not only did he do the housework I couldn't, but he insisted I perch at the new computer he bought me and type. So I did. See, I got knocked well enough that I developed aphasia and a severe stutter. Obviously, public speaking didn't rank high on my list of things to do - but I slowly managed to get my reading back on track. During this time of neuro-rehabilitation I wrote my first novel, Ware Wishes.

It was daunting as well as liberating. What makes being a writer so hard for me is my loss of memory. Every time I sit down to add to a work-in-progress I literally have to read over everything I've written up to that point. Embarrassingly enough, I still have mistakes that glare from across the room. Like a character that mystically changed names half-way through one tale and another who morphed from being a curvaceous brunette into having a willow-thin build with black-hair. Talk about multiple personality disorder...lol!

As for being smart, that was something I used to be quite the jackass about. When I was fourteen I was sponsored and tested into Mensa. Talk about something going to your head *rolls eyes* I was a bit of an oddball. On the debate team, competitive gymnast, award winning linguist, one of the tops in my high school class - and I had pink hair, multiple piercings, ripped jeans and the bug shield hairdo of the 80s glam rock groupie down to a science. Add in being a certified genius and the combination was pretty annoying. At least that's how I see myself in retrospect. A little brain damage does help sometimes. I now have patience and I think before I leap.

I guess I am still a bit of an oddball. When I was in college (Hofstra) for engineering, I used to go into the City with friends. There I had a tendency to strike up conversations with gang members, the homeless and start arguments with street walkers. My friends weren't too keen on accompanying me on my trips given the people I chose to chat with. But I'm grateful for the memories because they, along with the incredible character Marv from Frank Miller's Sin City helped fuel my imagination in creating Fool's Gold.

Short term memory is shot and long term is sort of wobbly so I've learned to never let anything escape being recorded. Given the importance of family history, I've always been fascinated by the unusual romance my parents had. To hear them tell it, their story is so earthy as to be normal, but in the early sixties it wasn't done to have an Orthodox Jew marry an Orthodox Greek. As a teenager I would imagine the kind of pain my mom went through, being ostracized and of course having a fertile imagination there were scads of stories born. Especially since when my parents first got married, my dad was drafted to go to Vietnam. A lot of modern marriages fall apart due to military service and it seemed even more incredible they stayed together in that time period given he nearly died and she had only his family to fall back on... All of this worked to inspire my short story The Ballet".

Now, anyone who has read my posts at My Space or my Live Journal knows that being a homebody (due to my disability I'm not exactly engineer material let alone my fall back job as news reporter anymore) means you get involved in the gossip chain. Due to a bit of gossip dropped about an ancestor and an infamous friend I picked up a little known book on local history (Southwestern Pennsylvania) and discovered The White Rocks by A.F. Hill. In the middle of his story there was a poem he wrote about a riot at a harvest fair that cracked me up. It was fast, fun and an utter hoot. But I just couldn't get behind starting a riot over men pilfering melons. Then my gutter brain short-circuited and melons become a euphemism spawning my contribution to the Summer Fantasies anthology The Watermelon Riot.

But I read more than boring old books on local history, I managed to find some old occult books from the seventies. Sadly, only the 1970s...lol. But one partial report snared my imagination...vampires in the Philippines. Not just vampires like those envisioned by Bram Stoker or the vrykolakas of the Ancient Greeks, these were awful creatures that targeted the dead and only when there were no more dead to feast on - they attacked the living! The original tale was recorded in the 1890s with no follow-up. It seems our Asiatic specter was trumped by the vampire of Highgate Cemetery in England. Again my mind combined the two and spawned Night Lights, a historical dark-erotic tale of two vampires set in the Sulu Sea in 1899, which is due out very soon at Aspen Mountain Press.

By now, you guys can see that there is very little to nothing linking the stories I write together, save that they are all penned by me. I utterly fail at "branding" but I hope I succeed at writing stories that readers are genuinely interested in reading.

I have many more releases due out this year - some paranormal with shape-shifters, some contemporary, some...well if you're interested I hope you drop by my website or my blog to find out more as details become available. My dogs are featured characters in one series called Dog Wild - you can see them on my website too. Even the horses manage to get in the occasional tale.

Thank you so very much if you've managed to stay with me and read all the way to the bottom. I want to thank those of you who did - I'll draw a winner from everyone who comments good, bad or just a hello, for a copy of the ebook of your choice from my line up tomorrow. For every five people who drop by, another ebook will be added to the pot. *hugs* for everyone 😊

Melissa Glisan
Dog Wild, My Blog