Jane: A little. The stories we eventually decided to call the "Greenleaf Moms" series were all set in a small town somewhere off the beaten path. Bucholic and old-fashioned and almost wholesome.

Tad: Kind of "Mayberry." But with tits and dicks.

Jane: Right? The women were all homemakers or teachers or preacher's wives. With "Settling The Score" we decided that Mom should get her degree and move uptown. And in the process of urbanizing them the characters got a little harder-edged. So there's intrigue and ambition and avarice and revenge.

Tad: Kind of "Dynasty." But with tits and dicks.

Tad: Right now we're calling it "Mother: Hostile Makeover."

Jane: Not a sequel as much as a second book with similar characters and themes. There were one or two characters in the Greenleaf books that recurred from one story to the next, and that might happen here, too. But it's mainly new characters and a new location. Claire Henderson in "Settling The Score" was a lawyer - sort of - and Lauren Chase in "Hostile Makeover" is a businesswoman. And then there could be one more, about a research psychologist.

Tad: Whoever has the free time and wants to write, writes. Sometimes the first draft of whole chapters is one or the other of us. Revising is the same way.

Jane: There should be a system. There is no system.

Tad: She's better organized. She does most of the editing, and to tell the truth she does more of the writing lately than I do; I get distracted. And she's more into motivation and the backstories. I make up most of the really pervy stuff.

Jane: Excuse me, some of the sickest parts are mine.

Tad: Throw me a bone, here.

Jane: You come up with more of the scenarios? You're much more visual.

Okay, we're a couple. We've each been writing fiction for decades, and started posting stories online in the early days of the Internet.

Tad: "Tad" was conceived as a joke between me and a college roommate. Tad was the bastard offspring of boredom, exam stress and budget whiskey. We'd send these stories out to various places or post them online.

Jane: We call that Tad's "Dear Penthouse Letters" period. "Tad 1.0." I joined up later. The roomy was no longer in the picture. I eventually settled on "Jane Parker" in homage to Tarzan's mate.

Jane: I write a lot in hotel rooms, airport lounges and Starbucks. Occasionally the dining room table or the desktop computer in the den at home.

Tad: The desk in the den is hopeless. There's a plastic box of five-inch floppy disks sitting on it. I don't know whose they are or what's on them. I write on the desktop computer there.

Jane: I always wrote. I read books and wrote sequels to them. I watched TV and wrote "Buffy" fanfic.

Tad: Erotic fiction? Grad school. Not as graded assignments, I hasten to add. A couple of us did it for fun, to kill time in the evenings. I think we really did mail at least one thing to Penthouse.

Jane: "The Mom Next Door." Halfway through it I had the epiphany that (spoiler) two characters were really lonely and alienated. And where exactly does *that* belong in what are, at the end of the day, extravagant sex fantasies?

Tad: I have a least favorite, and it's not for purchase. It's one of the things "Tad 1.0" wrote and it's still floating around online because Internet. I won't even say the title; I want it to die. We were too faithful to the material we were parodying

Tad: In a way you can blame the pandemic. Idle hands. And more time spent online got me curious about self-publishing platforms. God's truth, I just don't think we ever thought about trying to sell before. It's scary.

Tad: Well, we had more time on our hands. You can only watch so much Apple TV.

Jane: Well, not as much more time as all that. We were very lucky that we both could telework through the crisis. And when you're at home all the time there are suddenly so many things that obviously need doing around the place. We're tearing down an old garage on the property. It's falling down. We're putting it out of its misery. We have permits!

Jane: This is the part where we talk about all the kinky things we do from morning til night, being marooned alone together for months on end? "Dear Penthouse...."

Tad: It’s true, all of it: the Force, the Jedi, it’s all true.

Jane: Did I mention we are tearing down a garage?

Tad: There's sex, sometimes.