Before we begin, I gathered some authors and convinced them to give away free Sci Fi and Fantasy books.

A while back, I did a survey where I encouraged you lot to ask me anything, and I certainly wasn’t prepared for the questions that I would get. I also made the mistake of not asking people’s names and where they are from. So, for this first installment of Ask Me Anything. I’m just going to make up their names and locations. If you’d like to see your question here on Ask Me Anything, I made you a form.

Greldar from the Antares Star Cluster asks:

“How's your bum for lovebites?”

As a perpetually uncool citizen of Earth who is so out of the loop that I think TikTok is a Peter Pan literary reference, I’m not sure what the question means. But I do speak the English language as my primary mode of conversation, so I’ll take a stab at it.

I’m pretty sure bum can’t be a reference to buttocks because I’m happily married and love my spouse. So it must mean something else. There is bum like, “can I bum a cigarette?” and then there is bum like “get a job you lazy bum.” I’m pretty sure Greldar not being from Earth must be asking about the hobo that may or may not be murderous. Though if I did have a hobo of the murderous variety, I imagine they would be completely open to lovebites. Imagine the heroine slinking through a dark alley, and the murderbum creeps up on her with a lead pipe. She whirls around smacks a lovebite on the grizzled man. He softens, loosens his grip on the pipe, and it drops to the floor.

In all his time of murdering people and looting their bodies, he’s never been lovebitten before. She smiles, takes him home, and gives him a bath. He has quite the rockin’ bod after being cleaned up. They make love, get married, buy a house (from the money he made looting corpses), install a white picket fence, have 2.5 kids (the .5 was the result of a mad scientist’s experiment gone awry). Years later, they sit on their porch reflecting about their lives. One of their kids is in law school, the other owns an engineering firm, and .5 joined a mutant circus. They smile, reach out, and grasp each other’s hands. Then are murdered by a hobo who loots their corpse.

Gretchen from Ninjaville asks:

“What is the backstory on your obsession with cheese? LOL”

It all started when I was a little boy. I grew up on a Wisconsin cheese farm as an orphan displaced by war. I won’t say life was easy on the farm, but there is something special about waking up at the crack of dawn, the smell of freshly picked gruyere as you work the fields. Warden Jones as we used to call him said that if we didn’t meet our quotas and pick enough cheese, he’d send us back.

Every day, we spent hunched over in the baking sun, our arms scratched from cheddar thorns. Then there were brie bushes, thick and spiney, but nothing like the crestfallen look that Warden Jones would give us if we didn’t meet our quotas.

Warden Jones was a hard man, but a good man. He didn’t hit or mistreat us, and we all knew he would never send us back, at least not while he was alive. But cheese farming isn’t for those who are in it for the money. Not like the Jenson Corn Farm up the road with their private jets and yachts.

Cheese farming barely sustained us, and every time a new orphan showed up at his door, Warden Jones just couldn’t resist. He had to take them in, so we picked cheese we did. And some of it would go bad because there was no refrigeration in those days, but for every cheddar, mozzarella, colby-jack, parmesan, and feta we’d get to market, well that was just one more orphan that we kept off the streets.

We all played our part, but I was there to the end, grasping Warden Jones’ hand as he gasped his last breath. Right before he died, he said something to me that I’ll never forget. He looked me straight in the eye and said, “Well that was gouda.”

Don’t forget to check out Office Maxi on Royal Road, and if you’re enjoying the story, rate and review.

If you want to ask me a question that could appear on a future email like these, check out the Ask Me Anything page on my website.

Book Swaps

The following authors are kindly sharing my books with their readers. Show them some love and click on their links.

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