Hey, it’s 1:06 now, but what the hell, right?

I’m going to assume you don’t know jack shit about me and so I’ll tell you: I have three kids. They all think–are convinced, in fact–that they should be able to read my debut novel, Dead Weight.

They’re wrong. That book is not for kids. Some people have taken to calling it young adult, but that’s a pretty loose categorization. That’s like saying It is a book about clowns, or Ender’s Game is a coming-of-age story. Technically true, but what the fuck? For the record, Dead Weight has–and in no particular order–endless profanity, sex, rape, mutilation, graphic death scenes, and murders. Plural. All of those are probably plural. It also features a protagonist in his teens. So I guess that makes it for teenagers?

Sophistication. I won’t even get into it. This book makes Dead Weight look like The Sound of Music.

Point is, my kids can’t read my stuff. And they can’t listen to my stuff, either. So I got to thinking that it might be nice to write a novel that they could read, and that’s when The Deep, Dark, Down was born.

A while back, I started in on it. I do this–juggle multiple books–because I’m a bloody idiot. And after a chapter or two, I realized that, nope, sorry, I can’t write a kids’ story.

Here’s the briefest setup. Three kids and their dog find themselves lost in the woods. For days. And one night, as a massive storm pummels them, they discover something that maybe was never meant to be found. Something wonderful and terrible. And shit goes real bad from there.

That’s as spoiler-free as you’re ever gonna get.

Point of all this is, I’d be a liar if I tried to sensor the thing in my head. The kids are going to drop f-bombs because they’re fucking kids–one a teenager–and that’s what kids do. Also, I do it because I possess the maturity of a child. And there’s going to be violence–some of it gory, most likely–because I’m sick in the head. If that hasn’t been established yet, hopefully this post clears all of that up.