Welcome to my worlds. 

Beginning in mid-November of 2015, I had an idea about a new project that wouldn’t leave me alone. I did one rough draft for some "we will pay you $200 for your story and all the rights... blah blah blah" as a way for some quick cash as life was taking a turn for the worse. But the story was too good. So I kept it.

 Here I am, three years later at the beginning of 2018, in therapy and trying to get my MOJO back. It has been 6 months, I have rewritten it, electronically edited it (because I am too poor for professional help), and now I am a review and a mouse click from self-publishing it (as of the moment I am writing this on 6-10-18).

 Here is the story. 

From the time of the Sorcerers Rebellion, The Regents of the Universe of Calissei have ruled their world unopposed. Or so they would have you think. Their secret army, the Warlock Corp, is a group of highly trained, magically gifted, intelligence agents. Troubled youths with the Spark are recruited and made into weapons of the state and keep the rabble in line.

In a modern world dominated by a minority of magical elite, those without the gift of power will do anything to gain it, even sell their souls for sorcererous gifts that always come with too many strings attached. They endanger the world with their unholy bargains.

Hedge Wizards, born without the Spark, but armed with the knowledge of science have reshaped the world with their technologies that threaten to destabilize the status quo.

...but that is just background, this is a story about one family. A young girl, and the grandfather trying to save her from the life he once knew.

A teenage girl fresh into her power does something stupid and gets in over her head. It is only a matter of time before the warlock headhunters come snooping around. So her grandfather takes her under his wing and lets her in on a secret. He was once a great and powerful warlock for the state before a secret conspiracy took it all away. Maybe she can learn from his mistakes, and not make the same choice he did when the headhunters came calling on him.

 Thomas Drury, aka Defenestro the Warlock, is a covert operative of the central government and the Regents of the Universe. When suddenly out of the blue and in the middle of a mission, he is declared excommunicated.  He is quite literally dropped out of the sky into the city of his birth Moira, and wakes to discover his credit trashed, accounts frozen, and most importantly of all, his spark has been extinguished. He has been reduced to a penniless, homeless, mundane with no name, and no one from his former life will speak to him, much less tell him what his supposed crimes were.

 He didn’t like his life as an operative, in fact, he was on the fast track for burnout. But they took his entire life away. So He wants it back, and he wants the people who took it to pay.

His first step, get his spark back, then collect enough fund to finance his own operation of redemption and revenge. Fortunately, Moira is a city of scum and villainy, ripe with opportunities. A former lover repays a favor that he performed for her in his youth and rekindles his spark, but it is just a fraction of what it was at his height. A former protégé give him a lead on a job. The job is impossible, and the pay is small, but he has to start somewhere and he is desperate, so he takes it.

An employee of a wealthy mining magnate is accused of aiding a robbery of his employer. If he is arrested, his son\ will become an orphan and be thrown out on the street. He needs his name cleared, the stolen loot recovered, the bad guys caught and prosecuted….he is offering his entire life’s saving to see it done. But it is a paltry sum. Small wonder everyone else told him no.

Set in a foreign world, that is analogous to America in the 1980s, it is a world ruled by powerful mages and the extremely wealthy with an iron fist from their central capital. Moira and its prime resource the mines sank deep into The Maw is the sight of an ancient meteor impact, far out on the fringe of the civilized world. It is a city set against rusting iron ore mountains set in the middle of a black glass desert where all the water is brought in by truck.  The Maw is the only source on their world for the mystical mineral Unilpentium, which some think is the source of all magic in the world. But they couldn’t be more wrong.

Warlocked : Out     by Rick Wasserman is currently a 47,000-word self-published work of fiction: science, urban, historical, magical, and otherwise, which is an alternate world analogous to our 1980's where the ruling elite have magic powers and rule with a velvet fist.



     This started life independently as a waking dream while walking the streets of Asheville. It has evolved into a series that lies somewhere between the current iteration of the Doctor Who series and Robert A. Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast". (ISBN 0449130703)

If every work of fiction that you have ever read really did happen, what would reality be like? Where would you go? What would you do?

      William De Planetae knows the answers. Anonymously he wanders freely among worlds with different histories and cultures, for the sheer joy of the experience.  Long ago he was possessed by the sentient cursed artifact known only as “The Book” and now he lives out his blissfully endless nomadic life free from mundane worries like money, age, sickness, or even death. He has lived for over 500 years and been in love for 150 of them to a beautiful woman named Marguerite. But the security of his idyllic lifestyle is threatened when Marguerite’s immortality is accidentally exposed on live television and a sociopathic mad scientist becomes determined to learn her secrets and make them his own. 

     Before Will and Marguerite can make their escape from this world, their airplane is blown from out of the sky, crashing in a ball of fiery death killing all aboard, all save one. William wakes up 24 hours later in a hospital with no memory of the last 500 years. The only clue to his identity is a page torn from a book with nothing but his name on it. Government investigators are wondering how he could have been on board the plane when there is no record of him on the passenger manifest. The Doctors are wondering how a man can be blown up in a plane and barely survive as a horribly burned near corpse, only to be perfectly fine 24 hours later. William has no answers; all he has is a single page torn from The Book, and it has an attitude.

      William has little choice but to embark on a quest to recover The Book and reclaim his lost identity, with the aid of a young and untried nurse named Emily, whom he has only just met, and the 3000-year-old Jewish “NOT a vampire” who claims to be his oldest friend. William eventually comes to discover that he has to save an entire world from that same sociopathic scientist, and his gleefully murderous mistress, in order to prevent the eradication of The Book from all of space/time and ensure his own existence.  No big deal. Unfortunately, it seems that the only way he can succeed is by failing to stop the bad guys from learning all his secrets…

…the same bad guys who have already killed him once.

“De Planetae: The Book of the Wanderers” by Rick Wasserman is currently a 111,000-word work of fiction: science, urban, historical, and otherwise, which is colored with alternate versions of history based on the broad spectrum of literary fiction and challenging the stereotypical roles of good and evil. I am the author and this is my first novel. 

 This work is the start of a planned series that explores the question: “If every work of fiction that you have ever read really did happen, what would reality be like?”

The first De Planetae immediately lead me into the second.   

   What if the act of writing a story really did create an entire universe around itself? What if every fictional story ever written really did happen? How would the fabric of reality reconcile all those incompatible storylines? What would this Interweave of independent universal timelines be like if it existed?

If you could visit the characters of your favorite story, what would they say to you?

My guess… They would probably ask why you keep screwing up their lives.

But that might be the medications talking.

In this second book, we really begin to explore the possibilities in the twisting rope of timelines known as the Interweave.

William has had a couple of years now. He has read a book or two, and now he is itching to explore this new life in all its wondrous possibilities. But there are rules to learn, new dangers to avoid, and no matter how big this multi-verse seems to be, old enemies still pop up in unexpected ways.

Bouncing from one mainline to the next looking for worlds captured in print by the hands and minds of the great mediums, William finds that time stands still for no man. 1984 never ends, it just gets weirder. Hobbits disdain the name they made famous, and a great darkness is spreading throughout the Interweave.

In the Mainline known as Charles John Huffman Dickens 1843 (or CJHD1843 for short) an incursion of the Type Three Vampires threatens to destroy one of the best known and most farmed over stories in the English language. William collects an army, pre-made for him centuries before by the scoundrel Saul King, and attempts to drive them out, to a disastrous result, and is captured.

The Knights of Order are crushed, the Muses are heedless and helpless, Gaia herself, the powerful giantess and goddess of Nature cannot save him from the Black Vampire's clutches.

Only the Professor Von Teasa can do the job.

But why should he?

"De Planetae: Wandering the Interweave" by Rick Wasserman is around 92,000 words.

The second book drove me further, so I  had to write a third. 

Order balances Chaos

Magic balances Science

Art balances Nature

It's obvious really if you think about it.

But what if the darkness dislikes balance?

The Interweave is in danger. The Tesseract Knights are still crippled as a society from their terrible losses at the hands of the Black Vampires. Gaia has been repeatedly attacked by them in her own home no matter where the Great Fractal Tree tries to hide her. Science is on the warpath and seeking allies in its fight against this Darkness. Art is being crushed out by the weight of a tyrant who has no interest in their cause. Magic is just an egocentric ass, and in the middle of it all is a simple man with a moderately intelligent cursed book trying to hold it all together.

This time we take the grand tour of all the various archetypes of the Interweave in their home mainlines in an unprecedented recruiting effort to finally put the monsters of Chaos in their place.

But the Monsters are not what they seem.

And Lord Chao, the one who leads them, has his own plans.

"De Planetae: Lords of Chaos and Entropy" by Rick Wasserman is currently 102,000 words.

I just have a rough outline and a partial manuscript for this. I figured I should take a break as I was trying to figure out what it takes to publish the first three.  I am still working on that.

Can I actually use this title? 

Oh well… too late now 

Besides… 

The King in question is this time is the immortal and immoral scoundrel known to us as Saul King. 

Some may recall how he met his end at the hands of Emily Von Teasa in the last throws of her madness at the end of book 2 before she was…. restructured. But the victims of the True Rabbi’s Mark of Cain are not allowed to die, no matter how much you kill them. For them, there can be no escape.  

Well, William made a deal with the Professor, a year and a day, and that time is up. 

Unfortunately, William has forgotten that due to the temporal differential principle, time spent in one mainline is not the same as time spent in another. 

Barbara, (AKA the Oracle) sends him out of their pleasant pastoral life on mainline Book in the city of Portland and back out into the Interweave, all in accord with her secret plan. (no spoilers!) William relents and decided to go for a quick run around the block, so to speak. 

But things are vastly different than what he expects them to be. 

The Renaissance has hit the sector of Art, and 10 years have passed. Gaia has gone mad in a matter of months thanks to Lord Chao's gift to her. The Professor has been out of sorts for three years caught in a conundrum of his own devising. And the great Arch Mage has grown more powerful than ever, seemingly overnight. 

It seems that both Time AND Space are relative. 

But we knew that. 

Fortunately, the murderously wonderful Kisa Von Teasa is on the case. She knows what to do and she will get it done even if the has to do it twice. 

Bring William to rescue Saul King from his (relative) thirty year prison of torment, and go find God to solve his ”little problem”. 

Or the next best thing. 

Easy peasy 

All they have to do is talk to God's Mother.

"De Planetae: The return of the King" By Rick Wasserman is currently in its first draft and coming along nicely despite the fact that I erased 4 months of work on it because I am also an IDIOT!

It doesn't matter
I still can't stop writing.... the voices won't let me. 

I would probably be further along if I hadn't spent so much time soliciting for an agent though

While I was taking a break from De Planetae to learn about publishing and other things. I decided I can write other things if I want to, you know. So there!

To that end.

I restarted this project in February of 2014 and as of 7-25-14, The rough draft was completed with a word count of 75,000 words and a plan for the future of this series.

Here is the thought that started it all.
Larry Niven once said that magical powers, if real, are nearly useless.

Moving from that premise, I am rehashing the most classic of formats: Werewolves, Vampires, and Wizards into a single work. This supposedly was going to be my inspiration for my imagined cult following. All the Vampire wannabes will embrace it (i figured) because unlike other works, they really can. Even though that way might lead to a permanent psychosis and detachment from reality.

Turns out, some already do. Just look up "Real Vampires" or the "Feral" branch of alternative sex cultures. It's a thing now, four years later. Shit, did I miss my window on this one? There goes my cult following. 

 Basically, if you are as observant as I am (pffft...right) you might have noticed that the personification and anthropomorphism of animals is not a one-way street. I know several people who act more like an animal that “people”. Not general “ANIMALS” but specific ones like a house cat trapped in a human’s body.

 Look around. The “infinite variety” of human behavior is not so infinite as all that. We are all little bio-organic machines doing exactly the same things at different times for the same reasons.

 Woo… I should add that last sentence to my secret T-shirt list. 

Anyway, what if you were a house cat trapped in a human body? 

Sound familiar? Like Werewolves?

What about magic? 

They couldn’t break the rules of physics, especially thermodynamics, but maybe they could bend them a little. It couldn’t be something you could learn, or else everyone would eventually be doing it. Then it would no longer be magic but just another thing like playing pool, martial arts, or throwing darts. So you would have to be born with it. It makes you different, sure, but not all that different. Just slightly better, a homo superior if you will….

 Aw crap, someone already has that one…. Better try something else. 

What about my new Vampires?

 It is well known, by people who are at least as well educated as I am, that humans cannot drink blood. Rather, if they do they will regret the decision and enjoy stomach pains and the vomiting of blood clots. No matter how much they may want to. Lord knows I get a hankerin’, but it just isn’t meant to be.
OK, even that is a little off. Humans can drink blood, all the blood they want, but there is a problem. Humans have certain chemicals and enzymes in our body that break down the things we ingest in our digestive system. Regrettably, we are all lacking in those particular chemical/enzymes that allow other creatures to consume blood. So as I said before, drink all you want, but you be seeing it again real soon.

 So, to be a vampire it is assumed that you actually do have those chemical/enzymes. But so what? There are far better and easier ways to get it than people, you soylent green loving vampire. So why bother with the hassle? 

Unless, there was a bonus to it, something everyone wants and can never get enough of…. 

POWER! 

Now, consider this. What if the ability to digest blood, as useless and pointless as it is, was not required for you to get that power? 

So we get rid of it. 
You must consume the blood to get the power, but you can't digest it. 
Now we’re cookin’ 
All you vampire wannabes…. This is your story. So close you can touch it. 
You will want it so bad to feed your delusions that you can very nearly taste it.

But I digress. here is what the story entails.

It is a story of a girl with an open mind. A boy with a split personality, a girl who might be unbalanced because I like those kinds of girls, and another guy who definitely is unbalanced but not in a happy fun way. He just wants to take over the world.

The girl is of that rarest of breeds, a mind hunter.(which it turns out I might have to change... thanks Netflix.)

The mind hunters are the last word in a war that has raged since time began.

Here is a portion of the back story.

Back at the beginning when humans were more animalistic, they had a profound connection to the spirit world we call the Eidolon. But Humans, unlike all the other creatures who continue to live in harmony with nature, began to change. They pulled away from living in harmony with the terrestrial world and strove to master it. The purposeful formation of tools and the command of fire were early examples of this. The Eidolon, in response, seeking to maintain the balance between the worlds began to take that excess spirit force that had been abandoned by humanity and channeled it to select humans who had not yet lost their contact with the natural world.

No one knows exactly when it started, possibly in the Neolithic age, but at some point, these humans began to be born with animal spirits. These hybrids of human and animal were two fully embodied spirits living in a single body.

 As any good writer will tell you

Who and what are a good place to begin, but without why, you are going nowhere.

Ooo... another one for the t-shirt list.