Dallas Dunlap's Blog: Dallas's blog

Learn what happens to Denise, Terry, Chrissy, Luther and all the other people who inhabit post-apocalyptic Narvaez County.

There are a lot of good books coming out.
One of those is mine: "Slave Margaret," which is the 3rd volume of "SLAVE GIRL AT THE END OF THE WORLD.:

SLAVE MARGARET GOES LIVE on Feb. 7. That's tomorrow, folks. Check it out on Amazon.

Well, I've already sent "Slave Margaret" off to Amazon. It's available for pre-order and will go live on February 7.
Hint: Buy it. It's a great read!

What's next?
As many of my literally dozens of fans know, my "Story of Nikki" series featured a place called the Nevada Facility, which was discussed in the background but was not described in detail.
In my next book/series, I'm bringing forward characters from the Nikki-verse for a detective series featuring a black Detective Sergeant named Robin Meadows. She's in her late thirties, has a troubled marriage, and is drawn to the decadent lifestyle of the likes of Austin Trask, Nikki Moreno et al.
I'm aiming for an April publication date for "The Nevada Facility." We'll see how it goes/

My latest book- Slave Margaret- is now available for pre-order on Amazon.
"Slave Margaret" is the 3rd and final volume of my "Slave Girl at the End of the World" series.
It is exclusively available as a Kindle e-book.

Hi, folks!
Finally, finally, I've submitted my book to Amazon.
Titled "Slave Margaret," it's the 3rd and final volume in my "Slave Girl at the End of the World" series.
You'll remember Margaret from the 2nd book, "Buying Chrissy."
I'll miss those characters. I may look in on them in a year or so. We'll see.
RIGHT NOW, though, the book should be available for pre-order within 72 hours and will be available to download and read on February 7.

What's next? Well, I've got a new work by Badger Therese to read and review, as well as a new book by Badger and Erik Svalbard coming up, as well as a collaboration between Badger Therese and Lena White.
I also want to read/review Asling Rawle's book
"The Compound," and finally get back to Nira/Sussa by Julius Darius.

As for writing? I'm going to drop in on the Nikki-verse for a murder mystery series called
"The Nevada Facility."

As a writer I appreciate all you readers out there. You keep us going and you keep our culture going. Thanks.

I'm sitting here killing time before uploading my latest book, "Slave Margaret." It's the third book in my "Slave Girl at the End of the World" trilogy.
Why am I killing time? Officially I'm waiting until after lunch. But in reality, I'm just feeling dilatory. Whatever, "Slave Margaret" will be available for pre-order early next week and will launch on Feb. 7.
But I've been thinking about a classic short story that deals with some of the same issues as my trilogy.
It is "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas," by renowned science fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin.

Omelas is a beautiful utopia, but its beauty and prosperity are dependent on the suffering of a single child. The title refers to Omelas citizens who, having seen the child's misery, can't bear the guilt of living such a comfortable life knowing that, by doing so, they participate in the evil inflicted on a child.

In my "Slave Girl" series, things aren't so clear cut. A plague has killed most of the people in the world, including nearly all of the men. In order to simply survive, such legal system as still exists, conscripts women to do the hard demanding work. IOW, they institute slavery. And, in order to accentuate the difference between slaves and free people, they remove legal personhood from slaves and require slaves to be kept nude and in chains. (After all, this is an erotic novel.)
Our heroine, Denise, is sentenced to die. But, at the last second, she is bought by a Florida farmer, Terry McNally, to serve him as a sex slave. He has other slaves who work his fields. He keeps them in a prison compound outside, and ensures that they are worked relentlessly.
Denise, though, is kept in the house to serve her master's sexual needs as well as do housework.
Terry is ambivalent about slavery. He can't "walk away," though. He is responsible for producing food for the surviving 2000 people in the nearby town.
Denise, though, has benefitted from slavery. She was enslaved and not executed. Unlike the field slaves, she lives in a comfortable house, eats good food, and - best of all - she has a sex life with one of the few remaining men. Even the most prosperous of the free women don't have that. So, she is not a hard-core abolitionist.
Life isn't as simple as Le Guin suggests. It isn't that any system has a comfortable population based on the oppression of the few.
Did you know that - although slavery was abolished in the US in 1865, child labor was legal until 1938? And what were these kids but slaves? In "Capital," Karl Marx writes movingly about the children laboring in British mills and factories and shows how they enabled bourgeois prosperity.
But, he doesn't consider the alternative. What would happen to the excess children of Scottish farmers if they couldn't go to London and Birmingham and Manchester to work in the mills?
Today, our cellphones and notebooks rely on the slave labor of Congolese children. Many African kids who are forced to pick cacao will never taste chocolate. Our smartphones and computers are assembled by people who live in dorms on factory grounds, and work in buildings which have nets under the windows to keep them from jumping to their deaths.
But remember, people move from the countryside to get these "jobs."
My novels don't discuss these issues. But the transition from modernity to a slave society is not that big a leap. And, unlike Le Guin's child suffering in a cellar, the system works for everyone...for some more than others.
Anyway: Read my book. Enjoy the hot sex scenes and the adventures of my characters. But also check out Le Guin's short story. My work is pure entertainment. "Omelas" examines the issues behind it.

Question for other Indie writers:
How do you set the price of your books?

A week ago, I described the inspiration and development of my first book, “The Cabin: a Time Travel Adventure.”
I had a great time writing my second book as well. I titled it "The Food." You might recall that the early oughts was the era of the vampire story – novels, movies, TV series. Some were pretty good: The works of Anne Rice, Charlaine Harris’s “Southern Vampires” series. And some, I have to say, were rather ridiculous. Why, after all, would a 150 y/o vampire be in high school?
So, I asked myself what a real vampire be like?
Michael Dalton came to mind. The novel was set during the Great Recession of 2008-2011, and in my beloved Narvaez County. Michael was working on an MFA degree in nearby University of South Florida. But a series of misfortunes left him unable to finish his degree. What he needed was more time. As luck would have it, he had become aware of a vampire living in Tampa. If Michael could become a vampire, he would have all the time in the world.
But what is a vampire besides a type of serial killer?
So, a realistic vampire novel becomes a police procedural.
On to Narvaez County, which was the setting of “The Cabin.” It was a place I knew thoroughly. I had fantasized about Narvaez during each phase of its history and prehistory. And I was most familiar with the Sheriff’s Department.
My protagonist was to be Paul McCready, a taciturn, hard nosed cop inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry as well as Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer. My love interest was a young deputy named Donna Parker.
But something strange happened. As I wrote, I discovered that, tough as he was, Paul McCready was damaged. A divorced Iraq War veteran, he was plagued by chronic pain. And he had a hard time staying motivated in his job. Only his friendship with Sheriff Watson kept him in his job as second in command of the department.
And I fell in love with Donna Parker. Her mother had died when she was quite young. Her father died while she was in college. Her friendship with the Sheriff had landed her a job in the Sheriff’s Department. She was promiscuous, had a drinking problem. But the other cops liked her, dated her, nicknamed her “Blondie” and so she was popular – almost a mascot in the department.
Assigned as a partner to Paul McCready, Donna wastes no time seducing Paul. And she and Paul are on the front line in the hunt for the vampire Michael Dalton when he shows up in Narvaez County.
The novel goes on to deal with the world between worlds, known as the Miasma. The greater vampire Community is discovered. We learn of Donna’s deepest, kinky desires. As well as the iron core that makes her a formidable enemy of the vicious vampire, Michael Dalton.
Writing this novel was a transformative experience for me. I didn’t feel that I was inventing the characters. I was discovering them, learning about them. I learned about their dreams, about the supernatural beings that influenced their lives.
I learned that it is possible to love my characters, to hate some of them but to see the world through the eyes of the villains.
This book showed me why people become writers. To write a novel is to live in the minds of other people, to walk around in other worlds. It is an amazing experience. It becomes an addiction.
Unfortunately, I’m well on in years and so can’t make long term plans. But if I last for another year, I think I will rewrite “The Food” as a special Kindle edition trilogy. Donna, Paul, and the other characters have lived on in succeeding novels. But I would like to revisit them when I first got to know them - one more time.

Here is the review I posted to Amazon

This is a very well written work: Not just erotic but quality literature. The definition of Erin, the main character, is as good as I've seen in this genre. Erin, the 18 y/o heroine runs away from a dismal home life and, because she has a juvenile shoplifting record, becomes eligible for a sentence of slavery. All this in a present day America in which "captive servants" are a thing, and alien space craft circle ominously overhead.
Meanwhile, a young German is in the Hamptons for seasonal work but finds himself hijacked for a different job.
This is a great read. A great way to spend an evening. Well worth buying. I can't wait for the sequel.

What do you folks think about a table of contents for an e-book?
How about a hyperlinked TOC?

In my first books I made up TOCs and in the e-books I hyperlinked the TOC.

But that was when I was doing the whole works: e-book and print on demand.
And I was writing academic papers with hyperlinked TOCs.

These days, I've simplified things. I'm only writing Kindle books. I'm also using Word 365 and I'm not that practiced with it.

So: Is it worth it to put a hyperlinked table of contents in a Kindle e-book? What do you think, readers? Authors?

Also: Anybody with experience with Audible?
I've never been a fan of audible books, but now that I'm having vision problems, I can see why audible books might be really valuable to someone with severely impaired vision.
So: Writers out there: Do you publish with Audible? Why or why not?