Here's a question you might ask me, (although I doubt you ever would):​

     "Hey Dann, if writing about sex and other stuff that alienates a great majority of your potential readership means so much to you, why are choosing to stop doing it now?"

     Answering that question is the main reason I wanted to do this essay.

     There's a couple of reasons. Reason number one would have to be age. The declining libido. Is that something I mourn? Not even close. I've gotten a big kick out of every life stage. The atheist George Carlin used to say, "I'm just here for the show," and that pretty much says it for me. From my vantage point, scribbling away in my notebooks decade after decade, getting up to "live" only when I had to, reality scanned as The Greatest Artistic Production Ever, and a lot of what I value in my own fiction is its' funhouse mirror refraction of that production. I know this is going to sound nutty, considering the inner fantasy driven crap I write, but I've always, in my own manner, tried to "tell the truth", to be authentic.  

​     I'll tell you something about that epilogue I'm writing even as I'm writing this essay: I think it's pretty obvious by this time that I intend to let the main characters from ​Adam Forwarder "party", which, in Dann language, means orgy time, and you know what? That's how I intended to end the entire series, anyway. Yeah, after the super battle at the end of the saga, I was going to let everyone relax and let off a little steam, as it were. I'm enjoying writing the epilogue very much, it gets my blood boiling, which has always been yet another added plus for me writing fiction, my own fantasies get me excited as I write them, but, hey, with this turning 70 business, the T-levels are dropping, folks, and that situation is not going to improve with time, quite the opposite. At 82, when I originally slated myself to write the final scene, would I have been able to authentically write its' epilogue as intensely and from the pit of me the way I can now? 

     I am extremely proud of the fiction Dann O'Keefe has produced over the last three decades, and I would have defended my right to create such fiction from the highest court and to my dying day. I willingly traded readership for Total Creative Freedom. The question increasingly became, though, okay, I'll die for my filthy fiction now, but would or even should I be so strident about it if even I myself feel no passion in writing it?  

CONTINUE