Hey there friends and foes! Welcome back to Crooked Letterz—the blog for your most villainous desires, now new and improved for the Grown and Sexy set. It’s March and that means a few things: the sad closing of my 40^th birthday extravaganza (yes, it was the extended dance remix birthday), college basketball tournaments, and another hearty helping of villainy goodness.

I know I’ve been away too long—aww baby don’t be like that, come back lemme explain: I was incarcerated committed out of fucks to give on hiatus for a little while, trying to get my head together. You know at the end of Star Wars how Darth Vader is about to blow Luke Skywalker’s shit out the sky then Han Solo rolls in with his Millennium Falcon sending Vader flipping in space and giving Luke the greenlight to blow the Death Star up? And you know how then in The Empire Strikes Back Vader comes back raw, choking MFs through the TV and cutting off people’s hands and freezing them and shit? I’m right in the middle of those two movies: things were clicking along and then The Boy shows up with his little teenage X-wing drama bullshit, the Day Job Dragon swooped in its Millennium Falcon, the Honey Badger was roaring like Chewbacca, I cool missed two book deadlines, and the next thing I knew I was spinning in space watching all my shit blow up.

Godammit.

Now the movies don’t tell you how Vader went from overseeing the largest intelligence snafu in Empire history (losing the stolen plans), letting his high-value prisoner escape cuz he fucking with some old man and allowing some punk farm boy blow up his Death Star to the shiny helmeted cat talking about “You have failed me for the last time,” and snatching Han Solo’s gun away from across the room. He even ended up with his own theme music.

I like to imagine Vader in some distant bar, maybe a strip club even, sucking down cheap drinks, trying to get the smell of smoke and stripper glitter out his cape, wondering how he sunk so low. He was the most fearsome cat in the galaxy and then some punk without hair on his balls comes along and fucks everything up? You gotta think Darth Vader is second-guessing himself hard, right? I mean, he spent years hunting down and killing the coldest folks in the galaxy, sending the last ones standing to the desert and the jungle—alone—and a girl with CinnaBons on her head outwitted him? A man in a vest ENTIRELY too short for his body and his walking dog got the drop on him?

And at some point, after Cinnamon and Paisley gave him his last lap dance, Vader had to finally look around and get his Richard Pryor on: “I’m Darth MF Vader! I ain’t even got no daddy: the Force made me! They said I’m the Chosen One! I’m gonna find the MFs who did this shit and MAKE THEM PAY!” And pimp walked out the club. Next time you see him, he’s sending his fleet to Antarctica and choking people for coming out of hyperspace too soon.

The point here is there is only so low anyone of us can go before we have to get up and choke out our misery. For me, that means getting on the ball with my book and my blog, taming that damn Day Job Dragon, and making the Boy as miserable as possible.

In the meantime, here are a couple Muppet NewsFlashes for you. First, some of you may be wondering what the hell is going on with my second novel. I have a release date for ya! Earth Day is Monday, April 22—I’m gonna let my girl Terra Harmony release her final book in the Akasha series and let you celebrate the planet before Lucifer gets about the business of tearing it up. That means Come Hell or High Water drops on Tuesday, April 23! Second, you probably wanna know where this blog is going. Back to the villains! We’re done with the Disney villains (for now) and will be rolling out a new slate of baddies for ya! That starts tomorrow!

That’s my word! The March Madness villain series kicks off tomorrow with Barnabas, the vampire from Dark Shadows!