Originally titled: Murder Happens, been trying on new titles (on the advice of an astute editor who shares the same initials).

This is Dr. Karl’s story. He’s a brilliant and cynical psycho therapist with radical notions that get him entangled in his patient’s unwholesome proclivities…while he dreams of hammering his beautiful wife to death with a claw hammer.

The story was originally conceived as a mash-up project with a unique story rendered as a graphic novel within the novel. The graphic novel would work as a stand-alone piece and drive the plot of the bigger story.

The project wasn’t completed. The Kickstarter pledges were fulfilled with another book titled Fresh Cuts, the Breaking Volume (available in Kindle and print on Amazon). I’m not a chiseler. The book was well received. The reviews are full of words like twisted, demented, hilarious and delightfully perverse.

The first draft of the Murder Happens novel was completed. Like all first drafts, it needed work. But without the finished illustrations, it languished and other stories moved into the vacuum.

The original version of Murder Happens was actually written back in the Y2K era after I read Stephen King’s memoir On Writing. I thought, hell yeah, I can do this. Almost twenty years later, I’m starting to feel like that might be coming true. Writing has been an evolutionary process for me. It’s continuous learning.

And that’s become the end game, not the latest gimmick or trend to catch someone’s eye, but becoming a better writer. That every novel and short written shows improvement, and changes me in the process.

Ignore the chapter posted here, Dean is unable to update it.