DECADENT DECADE MONDAY by Alice Gaines

I haven't been with Changeling since the very first, but I signed on right around Changeling's first anniversary.  It was a bit of a fairy tale happy ending that turned out to be a beginning.  It starts out sad, but bear with me...

My husband of twenty-five years died on December 29, 2004 after an illness of only six weeks.  He went from (apparently) okay to dead before I could hardly catch my breath.  And the day he died, his pension company and the Social Security Administration informed me that I was losing both sources of income.  Yoiks!

Until then, I'd been sort of casual about my writing schedule.  I'd meet my deadlines, but between contracts, I'd fool around with this and that.  I actually wrote a non-romance (fantasy) with no sex to see if I could.  Now I had to find money.  I sorted through all my unpublished stories to get them ready to submit.  I got recommendations on publishers from my friends.

One Saturday morning in February of 2005, I sent off a partial to Changeling Press.  I figured they'd find it on Monday morning.  Twenty-seven minutes later, my phone rang.  There was an editor with an offer to buy and publish my story.

The Siren's Challenge was published in April.  My happy ending!

The happy ending turned to be a beginning.  The Siren's Challenge became the first story in a series of three about Telesian women taking human men as mates.  But Changeling and I kept going from there.

I wrote my first werewolves for Changeling, and Angela Knight did this gorgeous cover.  Isn't the wolf amazing?

At some point, I decided that if wolves could shift into humans, motorcycles ought to be able to do it, too.  So my  heroes for the Mannhof series were the heroine's bikes as well as their lovers.

I wrote elves and demons.  I wrote a fairy who let herself into a guy's house through his cat door.  I wrote a little green man who visited Earth on a sex vacation...a sexation!  I wrote a statue with a huge...ahem...tool who came to life.  I wrote hell as a casino where the payoffs came in sex and everyone won and where Lucifer was an incredible hunk.  Any screwy thing that entered my mind could be a story at Changeling.

A writer's dream!

My latest (but not last) story is Love Goddess.  A woman from another dimension wants to unite humans in love, but she can't seem to manage without the help of her best frenemy.  What will I think of next?