If you're a fan of my Demonata series, you hopefully remember the poem about Lord Loss that appears at the very start of the first book of the series -- and which also makes a surprise reappearance close to the end of the final book. But were you aware that the poem actually saw the light of day several years BEFORE I wrote the book?!?

I wrote the poem in the early or mid 1990s, and it was supposed to be published in a book called Quiet Moments, in January 1997, by International Society of Poets. There are certain money-making publishers (also known as "vanity publishers") who publish books with hundreds of poems in them, all by amateurs. They then sell the finished books to the people who contributed. I sent "Lord Loss" in out of curiosity, to see what the process would be like. I never bought a copy of the book, which I was a bit sad about in later years, until a very generous fan tracked down a copy of the book, to give to me as a present, only to discover that the Lord Loss poem hadn't been included!!! I guess they only bothered to print the poems of people who had agreed to buy a copy of the book. What a swizz!

Anyway, I wrote a lot of poetry in my teens and into my early 20s, but I quickly forgot most of them. (They were usually morbid, cynical rants -- the sort of stuff moody teenagers excel at.) But "Lord Loss" stuck with me. I often thought about the ghoulish character I'd created, and wondered if there was more of a story to him than I'd first thought. One day I was playing around with ideas for a werewolf story, and trying to find an original way to write about wolven shapeshifters. I recalled my poem about Lord Loss and wondered what would happen if I introduced demons into the mix -- and I was off!

Anyway, the reason I'm mentioning all of that is that a fan over on YouTube, with the user name of AsherTheBlack, recorded a very impressive version of the poem a while back, and uploaded it to their page. It's suitably menacing and put a big smile on my face when I listened to it, not having thought about the poem in quite a few years. I hope you enjoy it too, by clicking on the following link:

https://youtu.be/7JyN6LEfTQQ