Virgin Verses is a collection of poems written under heavy doses of inspiration with lines so vast it deals with a variety of subjects every person can relate with.I'm an odd dude. But I write some decent stuff, and here's my way of sharing my odd dude thoughts.I'm the author of three 'major' series; Adrian's Undead Diary, Elmoryn's The Kinless Trilogy, and the Reemergence Novels, the first of which is Tesser: A Dragon Among Us.To help folks get a taste of my writing, I've put At Least He's Not On Fire together. Inside this wonderful electronic tome of my words, you'll find a healthy sized sampler of each of my major works, as well as several short stories that are mixed in for your entertainment. All in, Hell Hole, and The Vampire of Menlo Park are all great fun, and I hope you enjoy them.Dark Recollections: Book One of Adrian's Undead DiaryBeheading a zombie isn't easy in a world where you're more afraid of the living than the dead.Adrian Ring's simple life is thrown into chaos when the world is ripped apart by a plague of undead and legions of desperate survivors. Retreating to Auburn Lake Preparatory Academy, Adrian attempts to rescue friends and family on the way while dancing around his impending insanity over who and what he left behind, and evading maniac survivors. He saves his cat Otis, but shoots his mom. Pretty successful, all things considered.Dark Recollections is the first part of Adrian's own story of how he survived after "That Day." Told through his eyes as he talks to his laptop, affectionately named 'Mr. Journal," and through short stories that entwine with his tales that bring forth dark visions of a world being eaten alive by an unimaginable evil. Adrian's Undead Diary is an eight part epic about a solitary, guilt stricken man that didn't think he deserved to live, but realizes very soon that he survived, and suffered for a reason.The Wrath of the Orphans: Book One of The Kinless TrilogyMalwynn and his twin sister Umaryn live in a small town in northern Varrland. In idyllic New Picknell nearly nothing happens, and when their day to day routine is interrupted by a skirmish between an invading patrol of the dead from The Amaranth Empire and a defending force from Varrland, their world begins to come undone.With international war looming on the horizon New Picknell becomes the center of quite unwanted attention, and the twins have their world shattered. With nothing left to lose, they set out on a mission of vengeance that will take them to places they'd never dreamed of visiting, discovering mystical powers in The Way that will change their lives forever, and revealing dark knowledges best left undiscovered.Tesser: A Dragon Among Us A Novel of the ReemergenceImagine for a moment that you are a Dragon. A creature of unimaginable power, unending intelligence and strength, and you've just woken from ten thousand years of slumber. Worse yet, you've awoken underneath a city; Boston, an alien and strange place that defies everything you've ever known.Your last memories were of primordial forests, erupting volcanoes sculpting a developing world, faeries, witches, vampires, krakens, and monsters that feared where you turned your eyes.But all that is gone. Humans, only barely coming into their own in the world from your memory, have taken over. They have erected cities made of stone and steel erupting from the earth like stalagmites reaching for the high blue sky, and developed sciences that have overshadowed even the glory of old magic.This was not the way it was supposed to be.Meet Tesser, the Dragon. He who walks in any form, and flies the skies free of fear.A Dragon Among Us is Tesser's story. Walk with him as he learns the human way, and discovers the dark truth about why magic has really faded from the world he calls home.And just maybe, humanity will remember why dragons were most noble, and most savage creatures again.Welcome to The Reemergence.

Norman Babbit is the smartest kid in Petaluma. He is also the youngest kid in junior high and his teachers, his little sister and the school bully are driving him crazy. If only his science project qualifies for the Nationals in Washington DC...The smartest kid in Petaluma never thought seventh grade would be like this! When Norman Babbit skipped a grade and entered junior high a year early he thought his life would be great. But the school bully forces Norman to do his homework, his younger sister is a brat, his English teacher hates him, his older brother is trying to fill in for their deceased father, and his mother thinks all Norman's problems are dietary. If it weren't for his best friend Chris and his pet owl Luigi, Norman would go crazy. With the deadline for his science project approaching as fast as a showdown with the bully, Norman simply has too many problems and no solutions.

Ellie Washington lost her husband in a tragedy five years ago at Christmas. She wouldn’t have made it through her grief if not for her husband’s brother, Nick, who helped her pick up the pieces of her shattered life. And with every year, her feelings for Nick have grown. Now she realizes she might be in love with him, but that’s not fair, because Nick deserves a life that isn’t about his brother’s widow and son. Sharing his life with Ellie and her son has been the balm that soothed Nick’s soul after losing his brother. Now that friendship has turned into something deeper. Nick doesn’t want to upset the status quo, but someone has to make the first move, and it’s time they figure out if their feelings are real. Nick believes in what they have. He also believes in Christmas miracles, and he thinks they’re both long overdue for one.

Ms. Kane writes like no other, says Romantic Times of Andrea Kane's breath-catching, dramatic mixture of romance and danger. Now, in this dazzling sequel to The Gold Coin, she continues her suspenseful tale of two beautiful cousins, so alike even their own family mistakes them, so enmeshed in a web of deceit that their very lives are at risk.... All her life, Breanna Colby has lived on the precipice of fear, her only joy the recent reunion with her beloved cousin Anastasia. With her violent father now locked away in jail, the repressed young woman can emerge from her cocoon and pursue all the joys she's been denied. But she finds -- to her terror -- that not all the shadows have lifted, and an evil from the past stalks both her and Anastasia. When authorities are unable to help with this assassin lurking in the darkness, the Colbys turn to the brilliant, unconventional Royce Chadwick, England's foremost expert on finding people who don't want to be found. Hard, detached Royce has always been a loner who operates by his own set of rules. He has little patience for weakness. Delicate Breanna Colby is an eye-opener to him, for beneath her fragile exterior ties a core of steel. As the two face overwhelming danger side by side, Royce discovers a woman he never dreamed existed -- one who, despite his cynicism, he is losing his heart to. But their future together can never be -- not unless Royce kills the assassin before the assassin kills them.

Stepping Up is back!This season is going to be hotter—and more scandalous—than ever! After the roaring success of the first season, the pressure is on America's most popular reality dance show. And no one is feeling it as much as guest judge and TV presenter Darla James. This opportunity could make her career soar…or sink. But when her nemesis, the very hot and infuriating Blake Nelson, is asked to join the show, too, Darla wonders exactly what she's signed up for! But the sparks—on camera and off—between Darla and Blake are brighter than a Georgia firecracker, and all the tension between them has turned into wicked, mind-blowing, melt-your-brain sex. If anyone finds out, it will be the end of both their reputations—and the scandal of the television season. Then again, with chemistry like theirs, it might be worth it!

Four years ago, I lied. I stood in front of the police, my friends and family, and made up a story, my best one yet. And all of them believed me. I wasn't surprised. Telling stories is what made me famous. Fifteen bestsellers. Millions of fans. Fame and fortune. Now, I have one last story to write. It'll be my best one yet, with a jaw-dropping twist that will leave them stunned and gasping for breath. They say that sticks and stones will break your bones, but this story? It will be the one that kills me. This book is not a romance. It is contemporary fiction, but very suspenseful in nature. It is about a famous romance author and a dark secret she keeps. *

By the writer Milan Kundera called Czechoslovakia's greatest contemporary writer comes a novel (now in English for the first time) peopled with eccentric, unforgettable inhabitants of a home for the elderly who reminisce about their lives and their changing country. Written with a keen eye for the absurd and sprinkled with dialogue that captures the poignancy of the everyday, this novel allows us into the mind of an elderly woman coming to terms with the passing of time. Praise for Too Loud a Solitude: "Short, sharp and eccentric. Sophisticated, thought-provoking and pithy." --Spectator "Unmissable, combines extremes of comedy and seriousness, plus pathos, slapstick, sex and violence all stirred into one delicious brew." --The Guardian "In imaginative riches and sheer exhilaration it offers more than most books twice its size. At once tender and scatological, playful and sombre, moving and irresistibly funny." --The Independent on Sunday Praise for I Served the King of England: "A joyful, picaresque story, which begins with Baron Munchausen-like adventures and ends in tears and solitude." -- James Wood, The London Review of Books "A comic novel of great inventiveness ... charming, wise, and sad--and an unexpectedly good laugh." --The Philadelphia Inquirer "An extraordinary and subtly tragicomic novel." --The New York Times "Dancing Lessons unfurls as a single, sometimes maddening sentence. The gambit works. Something about that slab of wordage carries the eye forward, promising an intensity simply unattainable by your regularly punctuated novel." --Ed Park, The New York Times Book Review

Night Train to Lisbon follows Raimund Gregorius, a 57-year-old Classics scholar, on a journey that takes him across Europe. Abandoning his job and his life and travelling with a dusty old book as his talisman, he heads for Lisbon in search of clues to the life of the book's Portuguese author, Amadeu de Prado. As he gets swept up in his quest, he finds that the journey is also one of self-discovery, as he reencounters all the decisions he has made - and not made - in his life, and faces the roads not travelled.

A memoir of astonishing power, savagery, and ashen lyricism, 'Storm of Steel' illuminates not only the horrors but also the fascination of total war, seen through the eyes of an ordinary German soldier. Young, tough, patriotic, but also disturbingly self-aware, Jünger exulted in the Great War, which he saw not just as a great national conflict but more importantly as a unique personal struggle. Leading raiding parties, defending trenches against murderous British incursions, simply enduring as shells tore his comrades apart, Jünger kept testing himself, braced for the death that will mark his failure. Published shortly after the war's end, 'Storm of Steel' was a worldwide bestseller and can now be rediscovered through Michael Hofmann's brilliant new translation.

Within the pages of this transformational book, Dr. Wayne W. Dyer reveals how to change the self-defeating thinking patterns that have prevented you from living at the highest levels of success, happiness, and health. Even though you may know what to think, actually changing those thinking habits that have been with you since childhood might be somewhat challenging. "If I changed, it would create family dramas . . . I’m too old or too young . . . I’m far too busy and tired . . . I can’t afford the things I truly want . . . It would be very difficult for me to do things differently . . . and I’ve always been this way . . ." may all seem to be true, but they’re in fact just excuses. So the business of modifying habituated thinking patterns really comes down to tossing out the same tired old excuses and examining your beliefs in a new and truthful light. In this groundbreaking work, Wayne presents a compendium of conscious and subconscious crutches employed by virtually everyone, along with ways to cast them aside once and for all. You’ll learn to apply specific questions to any excuse, and then proceed through the steps of a new paradigm. The old, habituated ways of thinking will melt away as you experience the absurdity of hanging on to them. You’ll ultimately realize that there are no excuses worth defending, ever, even if they’ve always been part of your life—and the joy of releasing them will resonate throughout your very being. When you eliminate the need to explain your shortcomings or failures, you’ll awaken to the life of your dreams.

Of all the sovereigns that have worn the crown of England, Queen Elizabeth is the most puzzling, the most fascinating, the most blindly praised, and the most unjustly blamed. To make lists of her faults and virtues is easy. One may say with little fear of contradiction that her intellect was magnificent and her vanity almost incredibly childish; that she was at one time the most outspoken of women, at another the most untruthful; that on one occasion she would manifest a dignity that was truly sovereign, while on another the rudeness of her manners was unworthy of even the age in which she lived. Sometimes she was the strongest of the strong, sometimes the weakest of the weak. At a distance of three hundred years it is not easy to balance these claims to censure and to admiration, but at least no one should forget that the little white hand of which she was so vain guided the ship of state with most consummate skill in its perilous passage through the troubled waters of the latter half of the sixteenth century.

The Beast is out for revenge. Mary Wilson is the target. How can she hope to get away from a mad man who wants to make her suffer.The Beast is out for revenge. Mary Wilson is the target; She is responsible for putting him in the institution for the insane. But It has turned him into a potential psychotic killer.

London, 1816 Cavalry captain Gabriel Lacey returns to Regency London from the Napoleonic wars, his career ignominiously over. He stumbles onto the case of a kidnapping, the accused a prominent MP. Lacey's search for the girl leads to the discovery of murder, corruption, and dealings with a leader of the underworld. At the same time, Lacey must face the everyday troubles of his own life.London, 1816 Cavalry captain Gabriel Lacey returns to Regency London from the Napoleonic wars, burned out, fighting melancholia, his career ended. His interest is piqued when he learns of a missing girl, possibly kidnapped by a prominent member of Parliament. Lacey's search for the girl leads to the discovery of murder, corruption, and dealings with a leader of the underworld. Lacey faces his own disorientation upon transitioning from a soldier's life to the civilian world, redefining his role with his former commanding officer and making new friends--from the top of society to the street girls of Covent Garden.Book 1 of the Captain Lacey Regency Mysteries. This is a full-length novel.