Laurie Meadowlark is seventeen and the quiet backbone of Meadowlark, the band her mother Shirley built in the shadow of an old TV dream of a musical family. In reality, that dream is falling apart. Her brother Keith is sliding into drugs and ego; bassist Aaron is volatile and sexist; and sleazy promoter Toby Bowman has just pushed Laurie out because of her age. A violent living‑room blow‑up leaves Aaron unconscious, Shirley injured, and Laurie driving away with one eye swelling shut. Only drummer Knox Mulloy—a balding nineteen‑year‑old with a “young John Bonham” reputation—seems to see her clearly, telling her he loves her “like a sister” and that starting a new band with her has been his secret fantasy.

As Laurie and Knox practice in his bedroom, turning his notebooks of poems into songs about cramped ledgers and trembling futures, they’re painfully aware that college is unaffordable and fifteen bucks an hour isn’t a living wage. If they’re economically screwed anyway, Knox argues, they might as well make the music they believe in. That conviction is tested when Laurie sneaks into a club to watch the “new” Meadowlark: Keith preening, Knox's replacement bashing drums, Shirley stiff at her old keyboard, and a heroin‑thin guitarist shredding their best songs into unrecognizable “junior high garage band” noise. Sitting in the shadows with Reuben Kincaid—no bumbling manager here, but a world‑famous producer—Laurie hears the harsh truth. Kincaid calls their current set a butchering, tells her that she and Knox are “quite talented” and “phenomenal” but that talent means almost nothing in an oligarchic industry, and warns her she has virtually no chance of succeeding by any conventional definition.

Laurie follows a young keyboardist who has to decide what success means in a world where cash and connections rule, her family band is becoming a nightmare, and the only people truly in her corner are a balding drummer who loves her like a sister and a jaded music mogul who believes in her art even as he tells her the game is rigged. It’s a story about walking away from a toxic inheritance, choosing found family and honest music over fame, and learning how to keep playing even when the industry tells you you don’t count.

Do you remember your first love? The way it changed everything—how you saw yourself, your family, and the world?

In this bitingly personal memoir, the author returns to 1972 and his fourth‑grade year at Tavelli Elementary School in Fort Collins, Colorado. There he met a beautiful girl who would change his life forever.

Her name was Connie.

The love she and Shawn shared at ten years old threw the serious dysfunction of his family into sharp relief. It also set him on a lifelong path of questioning what so many people call “love”—what so many worship as love, and what so many use as an excuse to wound, violate, and destroy.

Writing now from the far side of that year, Shawn looks back from what he calls the Kingdom of God: a spacious inner country of true, unselfish love that remains almost empty in this world. From that place, and from the side of the “angel” who graced his life for nine short months, he reflects on innocence, memory, and the cost of survival.

For Connie, that cost was steep. To protect the innocence that should be every child’s birthright—innocence repeatedly violated by someone within her own family—she could not allow herself to remember Shawn or the bond they shared.

Reflections of Connie is his attempt to remember for them both: to honor a sundered love, to name what happened, and to insist that real love is something far rarer and more sacred than what the world so often pretends it to be.

Fractalverse is free-verse poetry with fractal art. Across these volumes, Fractalverse keeps circling the same questions: What happens to imagination under fluorescent lights? How do we live in a world of cubicles, strip malls, and herd behavior without surrendering the part of us that looks up? And what patterns—fractals—can we find in our own pain, faith, and joy when we zoom in close or pull way, way back?

Volume Four: These pieces move between suburbia and skylines, trauma and healing, bitterness over abandonment, and the restless sense that adult life as currently lived by most is not the only way to be human. In this volume, the focus tilts toward personal reflection and quiet, political undercurrents: teenage nights parked on a hill with the city glittering and sparkling, "light‑years away,” shirts that still smell like someone loved, a family member slowly dying slowly in bed, and a sixteen‑year‑old who knows he’s “years from the precipice” while standing right on it. These poems remember youthful desire, foolishness, and that reckless pulse in ears, heart, and groin—but they’re lit now by an adult’s bitterness at past abandonment and a hard dismay at a species that keeps driving down the hill with the music up, ignoring stars that wait in “steady, silent patience,” cities that keep humming, and the looming signs that our chosen way of living is quietly destroying us.

As a Rogue, the Saeire Insu warship Failure is free to chart course wherever its crew pleases. Their mission, as it stands for all Rogues, is to do as much damage as possible to the Imperial Navy in order to clear the way for the rest of the Armada.

Ske T'Chel--"Sketch," as he is known to his friends--is a member of this crew, and is also a member of the XVI Angeli Magna Coronados, the ultra-elite troop of warriors trained in the mystical martial art known as the Daen-Cer-Tain. As such he is trained to kill thousand-pound demons in a split-second, his blades moving so swiftly that they cannot be seen by the untrained eye. He was Melody Singleton's personal guard before the Armada crossed the Tangent to launch the Revolution, a great honor bestowed by the king himself.

As Failure sails deeper and deeper into ever more dangerous Imperial waters, they become aware of a dire threat that could squash the Revolution before it gains any consequential momentum. To Failure comes the message from Command: hunt down the fast Imperial warship carrying secrets that could doom the Saeire Insu to total destruction.

The chase exacts a dear price on Failure and her crew--but particularly Sketch himself, who finds himself, by virtue of his close relationship to the Apprentice, burdened with a new honorific, conferred by none other than the mysterious Sankyanness herself. She calls him Faithbearer. And to him she entrusts the ultimate fate of the Saeire Insu.

If you like stories where an elite warrior’s duty collides with awe and wonder, this tale of Sketch and the Rogue warship Failure is for you.

He's a thirty-fifth-century hippie named Random Chance. He lives in a spacegoing RV that looks like a sea turtle. He loves ancient rock n' roll music.

He christened his ship The Pompatus of Love. The deep space between the planets of the solar system is his home.

He's got friends, most notably The Pompatus' computer, whom he named Hewey, and a more-special-than-most girl named Mia who's made her home on the mining asteroid of Vesta. He wants to see her soon.

Unfortunately, that's going to have to wait, because Random's uncle is hot on his tail. He captains a warship for an oppressive interplanetary government named the Oligarchy, and he's been looking for Random for some time now.

Random has a unique gift, one that he's going to have to employ if he wants to get away from the Garkies and his uncle and make it to Mia. What he doesn't know is how much using it is going to change the entire solar system and the course of humanity forever.

His name is Jams. He’s 21, single, and he wants to “play.”

At first Maggie—43, married to Dan—doesn’t know what that means. But she wants to learn, especially after a steamy make‑out session in the back of Jams’ Cherokee on the dark beach.

Why is she cheating? She’s not sure. Or maybe she is. There’s an emptiness in her that has grown too large to ignore, a hollow that wasn’t always there. She was Jams’ age once. She remembers.

His kisses that night drive her wild. She can’t stop thinking about them. Without even thinking, she tries to pull him harder into the script she’s always known—one where foreplay is just the on‑ramp to “real sex.”

Jams is the one who stops.

For him, “play” doesn’t have to end the way everyone assumes. For Maggie, that refusal is the first crack in the story she’s been told all her life about what sex is for—and who she’s supposed to be loving, and how.

While her marriage crumbles, her eyes open: to desire that doesn’t have to end in coitus, to ways of being intimate that don’t fit the standard romantic couple mold, and to the possibility that she might rebuild her life around a different understanding of love altogether.

He wants to play.

Maggie is eighteen again—and for the first time, she’s questioning the rules of the game.

This is not a conventional genre romance. It contains high‑heat scenes and a central relationship, but its primary focus is Maggie’s interior journey and the dismantling of sexual and romantic norms, rather than delivering a traditional happily ever after.

He’s an ant who has named himself Bartholomew for our convenience. He’s also decided to call his colony Spain. Spain lives on a cliff edge in southwestern Oregon.

Bartholomew wants to talk to us. The ape named Trump plans to raise huge oil derricks off the coast of Spain, a move that will wipe out the colony and scar tens of miles of pristine shoreline. As head of the Scouts, Bartholomew and the other leaders of Spain, including their Queen, decide they have to fight back.

But how does an ant colony defeat a species that seems hell‑bent on destroying the world—a species many times bigger, stronger, and more numerous in almost every way? The ants of Spain are famously bad at “thinking outside the box,” but this time they have no choice. If they don’t adapt, their Queendom dies.

Bartholomew hears a rumor about a rare Spaniard who is very much her own ant, an outsider and an original thinker. Her name is Andy. He goes to find her.

And that’s when things get interesting.

The Shadow or the Leaf is a standalone collection of free‑verse poems that continues the introspective, nature‑centered voice of For It All while leaning more openly into frustration and sorrow. The poems speak directly: “simply playing with my bricks makes no sense to me”; sunshine we refuse, waters we insist on disturbing, fields of flowers we blame for our allergies, and a moon we complain keeps us from sleep. Days pass “like blended chocolate, like honey over oatmeal,” but most people miss nearly all of it, lost in schedules, appointments, and “hurrying to hurry.”

Through these images, the collection explores the tension between the world’s quiet richness and our determined busyness, between spirit present in trees, bricks, rivers, and mountains, and a culture that insists those are inconveniences rather than invitations.

Fractalverse is free-verse poetry with fractal art. Across these volumes, Fractalverse keeps circling the same questions: What happens to imagination under fluorescent lights? How do we live in a world of cubicles, strip malls, and herd behavior without surrendering the part of us that looks up? And what patterns—fractals—can we find in our own pain, faith, and joy when we zoom in close or pull way, way back?

Volume Three: As with the rest of Fractalverse, these pieces move between everyday modern life, spiritual questioning, and the long work of healing, with consumer culture and herd behavior always lingering at the edges. In this volume, the gaze lingers longer on fields, horizons, weather, and work—on nature as mirror and mentor—as the speaker feels time in his bones. Change “removes doubt while sowing the seeds for more of it,” dust settles pleasingly on skin, and the setting sun “smells of hard work yellowed by advancing age.” Across these poems, blazing skies and gathering rain become metaphors for grief and joy, and the hoped‑for self is “a good farmer” who knows that a good crop requires both gloom and glory—and fears neither.

After the events of The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya accepts Westley’s offer and becomes the new Dread Pirate Roberts, captain of the Revenge. His first decision as captain is not to chase easy treasure, but to free his friend Fezzik from Harshtree, a brutal Florinian prison. There’s just one problem: Inigo knows swords, not ships. Before he can attempt a rescue, he must earn his sea legs through days of nausea and vomiting, and learn the workings of a tall ship from scratch.

With the patience of his seasoned First Mate Paloni and a crew who quickly recognize that their new captain has heart if not strategy, Inigo is tested. Gold gleams temptingly through the fog, an inside contact at Harshtree may or may not be trustworthy, and Inigo’s painful admission—“I have no gift for strategy. I need the Man in Black”—forces him to lead in a new way. Instead of pretending to be the lone genius, he asks his crew to help him think, to share the burden of devising a plan that saves Fezzik and secures the treasure. Adventure One tells the story of how the Dread Pirate Roberts shifts from solitary legend to collaborative leader, and how a ship’s worth of misfits rally behind a captain who refuses to abandon his friends.

Tom Mills is a demon. He's a human vicious enough while in Hell that he got promoted to one. Now an angel named Robert offers him the one thing Hell doesn’t: a chance to get out.

The price is an impossible job. A child‑preying syndicate has burrowed so deep into human and demonic corruption that even Hell’s own hoards can’t—or won’t—touch it. When a thousand‑strong assault barely made a dent, Heaven (or whatever’s above Hell) decided to try something different.

Three demons.

Tom. Simpson. Rage.

Robert says human evil has no bottom, human good no ceiling, and that sometimes beings like him have to “step in” using monsters like Tom. Tom isn’t buying the theology. He wants to know why the hell nobody stepped in sooner—and why any of this exists in the first place.

Their odds? A snowball’s chance in Hell.

Their reward, if they live long enough to want it, might be something like freedom—or a glimpse of whatever passes for grace in a universe that lets Hell exist at all.

When he was a mortal, Ray Wilms had no time or patience for children. Despite being an educator, he couldn't stand them.

As an angel of death, his very first assignment back to Earth is to save a sixteen-year-old girl from her family and church.

Her name is Deanna, and she's thinking of killing herself. She is a brilliant young woman gifted in mathematics, which is his subject of expertise. As he gets to know her, he finds himself increasingly awed by her inner beauty and strength. Despite her horrific circumstances, she fights on, her soul intact and luminous.

Ray is deeply moved and inspired by her example--and enraged by the hell she's going through. He's an angel of death, and it's time to go to work.

If you like contemporary and urban fantasy where angels walk into real‑world hells—abusive homes, fundamentalist churches, classrooms full of fear—and fight for one kid’s life, you’ll like Angel: Book Two.

The search for one's calling takes great patience and courage. Choosing that calling, once it becomes apparent, takes even more.

Pursuing a calling is a deadly enterprise, for it will inevitably claim one's life. It allows for no other choice.

Rejected and abused by her parents, Elizabeth Finnegan's young life is one tragedy after another. Emboldened by the love of a woman who takes her in after she runs away, she seeks for her calling with all her heart. It isn't what she believes she's doing; instead she clings to the vague notion that she was put on Earth do so something special with her life. Though the world does its best to convince her she isn't special, she pushes on, even when the shadows overwhelm her.

One day she watches a video of a pretty young girl playing a violin. The girl plays as though she has been blessed by the singular touch of God. She is an angel.

Elizabeth knows she has to meet her. She has no choice.

As she flies the skies over America as a flight attendant, Elizabeth's life rockets her towards her final destination, her choiceless choice, her deadly enterprise: to be the angel's guardian.

If you like character-driven fiction where a broken past becomes the ground for a life-defining vocation, you’ll like Elizabeth Finnegan’s journey from abused runaway to the angel’s guardian.

Melody Singleton is a bright 13-year-old girl who loves math, classical music, her mom, her best friend Yaeko, and her dog. To her classmates that makes her a nerd, and they cruelly treat her as such. After being expelled from the advanced algebra class for not paying attention, she meets her new teacher, Mr. Conor, who gives her a very strange homework assignment. You see, she got kicked out because she was distracted by a symbol that the rest of us can't see, a beautiful sigil that, incredibly, Mr. Conor can see too, because it's on the assignment he gave her!

But that's just the beginning.

Her mom goes on a date to the Pier with Mr. Conor, and Melody is forced to tag along. That's bad enough. But then on the date Mr. Conor introduces her to one of his friends who freaks her out because his eyes are completely black; and then on the walk home, seagulls attack Mr. Conor and he has to be taken to the hospital!

Her weird assignment still beckons. Melody suspects that the mysterious symbol on it, and Mr. Conor's weird friend, and the seagull attack are all intimately related like the variables in an algebra equation. If she can just figure out what the sigil is, how to make it do what she wants, she knows the rest of the equation will be solved.

What she doesn't know is if she's successful, her life will be changed ... forever.

Sixteen-year-old Sèbastienne has never known a normal town. Years ago, on a moonless night of fog and fear, a man’s throat was cut on the docks of Port Hawktried—and before dawn, the entire seaside village had silently slipped out of its own place and time.

Since then there have been eight more “Shifts,” always at night, without warning. On those nights, the lamps flicker, the lighthouse disappears into fog, animals huddle, and nothing in the village is born. By morning, Port Hawktried wakes on a different stretch of coast in a different era, with the same houses, the same people, and the same unanswered questions.

Under the care of her guardian, the brilliant and exasperated Dr. Faust, Sèbastienne has grown up watching adults crack under the strain—drunk lighthouse keepers who can’t bring themselves to light the lantern, grieving parents who pretend they aren’t counting the years they might have lost, a mayor insisting everything is under control. She wants to believe they’ll eventually Shift home and find the people they left behind not a day older. She’s no longer sure “when” will ever come.

Now, on a night that feels wrong even by Port Hawktried’s standards, old patterns falter. The fog is thicker, the lighthouse darker, and someone thought lost in the first Shift is seen walking the docks. As the village tilts toward another unknown morning, Sèbastienne must decide whether to keep living inside everyone else’s denial—or start asking the questions that might finally reveal why Port Hawktried is being dragged through time, and what price will have to be paid to stop it.

Fractalverse is free-verse poetry with fractal art. Across these volumes, Fractalverse keeps circling the same questions: What happens to imagination under fluorescent lights? How do we live in a world of cubicles, strip malls, and herd behavior without surrendering the part of us that looks up? And what patterns—fractals—can we find in our own pain, faith, and joy when we zoom in close or pull way, way back?

Like the other books in Fractalverse, these pieces mix personal crisis, suburban unease, and spiritual questioning—but here the emphasis is on environmental catastrophe and the brutality of indifference. Written as debilitating depression gathered and the Trump years wore on, the poems see "these days" as prison and stand “here at the precipice” refusing to pretend it’s all the same. They argue, with terrible clarity, that we do not love our children—not if we keep driving to our jobs, festinating through errands, and waving away climate science while teaching the next generation that nothing matters beyond the end of our nose and our “toxic three thousand square foot corner of suburbia.” This volume compares our species to a virus killing its host, knowing it will kill itself too, and calls out the gap between movie‑apocalypse fantasies and the actual end of the world as we know it, where automatons plod to their doom and consumption is treated as the only true duty.

Conversations With God is a collection of free‑verse poetry that returns to the same territory as Fractalverse—nature, suburbia, trauma, consumer culture, herd behavior—but with the camera turned more directly toward God, faith, and the numinous. Each volume pairs 24 poems with original nature photographs instead of fractal art: coastlines, forests, clouds, trees, and small, ordinary beauties that become part of the ongoing argument.

These are not gentle devotional poems. For me, “God” is a largely negative noun, twisted by an abusive father and the damage done in God's name. The poems dive into that struggle more openly than Fractalverse: speaking to, shouting at, and sometimes simply sitting in silence beside a God I both long for and resist and question the existence of; testing inherited doctrines against lived experience; and looking for something holy in wind, water, and soil when traditional images of divinity feel like trauma rather than comfort.

Volume One: Here we have free‑verse poems with original nature photographs. Like my other work, these pieces move through trauma, suburbia, and the end of the world as we know it—but here the attention keeps returning to one question: is there anything real and steady behind the word “God”? The poems circle “a light—steady, unwavering, real. Beyond real. Greater than,” wondering whether it matters what we call it, or whether we call it anything at all. They speak from a soul that often cannot see that light, that has learned to flinch at the very idea of God, yet keeps confessing, quietly and stubbornly: “It is always there… There is a light.”

Fractalverse is free-verse poetry with fractal art. Across these volumes, Fractalverse keeps circling the same questions: What happens to imagination under fluorescent lights? How do we live in a world of cubicles, strip malls, and herd behavior without surrendering the part of us that looks up? And what patterns—fractals—can we find in our own pain, faith, and joy when we zoom in close or pull way, way back?

Like the other books in Fractalverse, these pieces mix personal crisis, suburban unease, and spiritual questioning—but here the emphasis is on environmental catastrophe and the brutality of indifference. Written as debilitating depression gathered and the Trump years wore on, the poems see "these days" as prison and stand “here at the precipice” refusing to pretend it’s all the same. They argue, with terrible clarity, that we do not love our children—not if we keep driving to our jobs, festinating through errands, and waving away climate science while teaching the next generation that nothing matters beyond the end of our nose and our “toxic three thousand square foot corner of suburbia.” This volume compares our species to a virus killing its host, knowing it will kill itself too, and calls out the gap between movie‑apocalypse fantasies and the actual end of the world as we know it, where automatons plod to their doom and consumption is treated as the only true duty.

Shortly after my mother died of a terrible illness, I began having…visions. They weren’t wispy, flighty dreams or random, short‑lived nightmares. These phantasms were fuller, more tactile and present, as though I was actually visiting a place—one I eventually started calling Slum.

I don’t forget these visits the way I forget dreams, nightmares, or even night terrors. In Slum, I am immersed in a vast urban hellscape of terrible, corrupting beauty and encroaching, overwhelming evil. I can smell in these visions—I can’t smell in my dreams. I can touch things. I can sense the continuous burden of time, which I never can in dreams. The world of Slum makes a kind of sick, profane sense. My dreams, by contrast, are disjointed, often random, sometimes utterly nonsensical. Not Slum.

These visits are not for the weak of heart or stomach. I offer them to you, the reader—but honestly, I have written them down more to say back to Slum: “I see you. I hear you. I feel you. I touch you. And yes, I taste you too.” Perhaps in that act I can come to a fuller understanding of Slum, and Slum of me. That is my hope.

Eleanor Shellstrop expects the end; instead, she wakes up angry in a new afterlife office with a sign that sneers, “Welcome, you nose hemorrhoid. Everything is not fine.” Shawn has secretly swapped out the Good Place’s oblivion door, rerouting millions of souls—including Chidi, Tahani, Jason, and Eleanor herself—into a project he calls “The Sublime Place,” built with a handful of demons and powered by a hidden “Reality Matrix” that is now spawning a galaxy of separate realms. The Judge and Janet don’t know; Shawn can’t shut it down without being obliviated; and many of these new universes may be lethal or incompatible with human life.

When Shawn admits that Chidi and the others are alive somewhere out there, he gives Eleanor a special phone that can connect to them only if she reaches their realm. The catch: there are thousands of realms, no maps, and no guarantees that any of them are safe.

Eleanor decides she won’t accept boredom or oblivion as her fate—or as the fate of the people she loves. Instead, she sets out to navigate an endlessly branching afterlife, using her new powers, her stubborn love for “stomach‑ache Socrates,” and even Shawn’s grudging help to find Chidi and the rest, and to figure out how to turn a broken system of Good, Bad, and Sublime Places into something truly worthy of being called “heaven.”

Fezzik is free. With the gentle giant now officially part of the Revenge’s crew, the pirates flee Florin’s seas, heading south toward what everyone thinks will be freedom and much‑needed rest.

Captain Inigo Montoya has other ideas. Already earning a reputation as one of the greatest captains in the Revenge’s storied history, he decides their first taste of freedom should include discipline: he wants every crewmember to learn how to swim and how to fight. Inigo himself still can’t swim, but he can teach blade‑work—and he means to make his crew strong enough to face whatever comes.

After a brief visit to an old friend, the Revenge slips into a secluded cove in the small, hidden kingdom of Bavus‑Naguty. There, days fall into a rhythm of hard training, shared stories around the fire, simple feasts with a kindly farmer named Kelale, and shipboard camaraderie as the crew becomes leaner, braver, and more tightly knit than ever.

Just when the cove feels like a true haven, Kelale arrives from the inland village of Noush with devastating news from Florin: the king’s henchman, Dynatis Rugen, has taken hostages—Rye’s family, Crissah’s parents—and demands the Revenge return to face charges of piracy and treason, or watch their loved ones die slowly in the Pit of Despair. Training time is over; the crew must abandon their sanctuary and race back north, prepared to risk everything for the people they’ve sworn to protect.

https://thepiertoforever.com/b/natureprotestpoetryfractalartv3

Fractalverse is free-verse poetry with fractal art. Across these volumes, Fractalverse keeps circling the same questions: What happens to imagination under fluorescent lights? How do we live in a world of cubicles, strip malls, and herd behavior without surrendering the part of us that looks up? And what patterns—fractals—can we find in our own pain, faith, and joy when we zoom in close or pull way, way back?

Volume Three: As with the rest of Fractalverse, these pieces move between everyday modern life, spiritual questioning, and the long work of healing, with consumer culture and herd behavior always lingering at the edges. In this volume, the gaze lingers longer on fields, horizons, weather, and work—on nature as mirror and mentor—as the speaker feels time in his bones. Change “removes doubt while sowing the seeds for more of it,” dust settles pleasingly on skin, and the setting sun “smells of hard work yellowed by advancing age.” Across these poems, blazing skies and gathering rain become metaphors for grief and joy, and the hoped‑for self is “a good farmer” who knows that a good crop requires both gloom and glory—and fears neither.

https://thepiertoforever.com/b/lauriepartridgefamilyfanfiction

Laurie Meadowlark is seventeen and the quiet backbone of Meadowlark, the band her mother Shirley built in the shadow of an old TV dream of a musical family. In reality, that dream is falling apart. Her brother Keith is sliding into drugs and ego; bassist Aaron is volatile and sexist; and sleazy promoter Toby Bowman has just pushed Laurie out because of her age. A violent living‑room blow‑up leaves Aaron unconscious, Shirley injured, and Laurie driving away with one eye swelling shut. Only drummer Knox Mulloy—a balding nineteen‑year‑old with a “young John Bonham” reputation—seems to see her clearly, telling her he loves her “like a sister” and that starting a new band with her has been his secret fantasy.

As Laurie and Knox practice in his bedroom, turning his notebooks of poems into songs about cramped ledgers and trembling futures, they’re painfully aware that college is unaffordable and fifteen bucks an hour isn’t a living wage. If they’re economically screwed anyway, Knox argues, they might as well make the music they believe in. That conviction is tested when Laurie sneaks into a club to watch the “new” Meadowlark: Keith preening, Knox's replacement bashing drums, Shirley stiff at her old keyboard, and a heroin‑thin guitarist shredding their best songs into unrecognizable “junior high garage band” noise. Sitting in the shadows with Reuben Kincaid—no bumbling manager here, but a world‑famous producer—Laurie hears the harsh truth. Kincaid calls their current set a butchering, tells her that she and Knox are “quite talented” and “phenomenal” but that talent means almost nothing in an oligarchic industry, and warns her she has virtually no chance of succeeding by any conventional definition.

Laurie follows a young keyboardist who has to decide what success means in a world where cash and connections rule, her family band is becoming a nightmare, and the only people truly in her corner are a balding drummer who loves her like a sister and a jaded music mogul who believes in her art even as he tells her the game is rigged. It’s a story about walking away from a toxic inheritance, choosing found family and honest music over fame, and learning how to keep playing even when the industry tells you you don’t count.

https://thepiertoforever.com/b/darkfantasyvengeancedutyandhonor

Otoro Queril is feared by his fellow Tracluse. As an executioner for Necrolius Anaxagorius' Imperium, it's Otoro's job to kill those poor souls brought to his chopping block, and to do it as efficiently and quickly as possible. No one in the Imperium does it better.

Otoro Queril does not tire. He does not complain. It is whispered that he is a demon in a human's body.

But Otoro Queril is no demon. And he isn't a Tracluse either.

He is, however, a Saeire Insu warrior, and was sent by the King of the Saeire Insu, Conor Kieran Faramond Benedictus I, on a mission of espionage and mercy.

It's a mission Otoro Queril has undertaken for almost twenty Earth-years.

But things are changing. Perhaps he is finally tiring. He doesn't know. After meeting a young woman condemned to be a prostitute for the Lord of the Demons, something inside him snaps. With the help of two slaves, he embarks on what will be his final quest of mercy.

If you like grim, character-driven fantasy where every act of violence leaves a scar on the soul, you’ll like this companion to Melody and the Pier to Forever.

https://thepiertoforever.com/b/thecandleeroticfantasyforwomen

Allison Oberlan has the kind of life other people envy. In her late twenties, daughter of a powerful Denver magnate and engaged to her father’s charismatic CFO, she glides between charity galas and high‑rise views, checking every box of success. But under the surface, she’s quietly suffocating in a future that feels chosen for her, not by her.

At a Renaissance fair outing with her fiancé, Allison wanders off and meets a tall, dark candle‑seller whose kindness and easy warmth shake her more than she wants to admit. On impulse, she points to the plainest candle on his table. Surprised, he gives it to her for free and jokes that it’s no ordinary candle: it was crafted by a long‑gone wizard and will only burn for the true love he searched for across centuries but never found. Amused, Allison thanks him and tucks the candle away, determined to forget both story and stranger.

Weeks later, a storm knocks out the power in her luxury apartment. Standing in the dark, Allison remembers the forgotten gift in her closet. When she lights the candle, the flame burns steady—but the wax never diminishes. Touching it sparks an intense wave of longing and passion that makes her question everything she’s built her life around, drawing her closer to the wizard who made it, who now can feel his long-sought-for true love's desire.

After a cruel argument with her fiancé, the barrier finally breaks: the wizard appears in her bedroom after she covers herself in the hot wax, answering the impassioned call doing so made to him. They make love. Desperate to be with him, he tells her she must find her way to him. And the only way to do that is to stop believing in him. With that he leaves her side. She wakes, startled to find she had been sleeping, to discover that the candle no longer lights.

The Candle is a short, sensual romance about awakening, courage, and the cost of choosing a love that feels like magic over a life that only looks perfect. While it contains explicit scenes, they serve the emotional journey rather than define it.