Born in 1963 in East Harlem, I grew up faster than most. Even at a young age, I appreciated good writing, as I memorized most of The Beatles’ lyrics. I was then introduced to the maniacal and dark worlds of acid rock and heavy metal, where I followed artists like Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, and Led Zeppelin. This was all before my 10th birthday!
During my formative tween/early teen years, I fell in love with Elton John, Alice Cooper, then eventually….KISS. My life changed forever, as I now took an interest in writing my own creations, and not just listening.
At about the age of 11 or 12 I started writing song lyrics. Some of them were okay, while most were pretty horrible. In my high school years, I got into poetry and realized that there were many similarities between my juvenile song lyrics and the works of the masters. I soon wrote poems, as well as lyrics, which by this time were getting better.
When I reached my 20s I started getting serious about being published. My only taste of seeing my name “in lights” was having one of my poems published in a girlfriend’s high school literary magazine. Now I was sending my work out to reputable places, but only managed to get one writing credit.
Soon after being discouraged about trying to gain popularity through poetry, I went back to my first love - music. I formed a hard rock/heavy metal band in 1986 named Black Miracle. We were going to take the world by storm, but couldn’t overcome our biggest obstacle - we sucked. Musically, we couldn’t play worth a damn, although our drummer was good. Our song selection was good too - that’s because all the songs were written by me. There were catchy hooks, clever choruses, and the people who heard the songs actually liked them. However, we couldn’t get past the fact that we were very limited on musical ability, so we called it quits in 1988.
I turned back to writing poetry. Only this time, I added short stories to my repertoire. They weren’t great, but I enjoyed writing short stories. Soon enough, though, poetry would resurface as my “go-to” style.
In 1993, my future wife and I created Sophomore Jinx. SJ was a “small press” poetry magazine. In it, we featured writers who were both popular and never-before published. It was successful in terms of that and we loved doing it together. We both published our own work, as well as articles that we had written pertaining to the magazine and the writing life. Everyone was reading and enjoying our poetry and articles right alongside the contributors. This, though, was not meant to last long. After a couple of years we realized that we were doing an awful lot of work, but losing money. We regretfully closed the doors on SJ, but not our writing lives.
I went about ten years or so where I didn’t do much writing at all. My wife, however, freelances as a writer, copyeditor, proofreader, editor, manuscript evaluator etc... Finally, she enjoyed a brief stint working for Ravenous Romance. After telling me what they were all about, I became interested in writing again. I would take two of my favorite things in the world - sex and writing - and combine them. What a great concept!
So, here I am, sharing the best of my world with you through pages of love, romance, sex, and lust. I hope you enjoy a slice of my life as much as I love serving it up to you.
Tony Wards
April 2009
