David Madison lives in Southern California where he is currently expending some of the best lead, sweat, and tears of his life on Lucifer’s Lexicon: A Devil’s-eye View of Life on Earth. Consequently, he continues to entertain the hope, more than a little pollyannically, of completing the first book in the series, What Are You Wedding For?, “shortly”—if he can just keep himself from moving the goalposts back long enough to give the damned thing one final excoriating end stop.

Nevertheless, he believes that there is life after Lucifer, and thinks to write some one or several (certainly not more) nice things about it should he ever run across them. However, a bargain is a bargain (even if it is with the Devil), and given his advancing years, the ever-receding goalposts, and his curious compulsion, to say nothing of his agreement, to make a laughingstock of himself, he has every reason to believe that the final end stop will be none other than… (he cannot bring himself to contemplate it). “And yet,” he is inclined to hope in his unique clutching-at-straws manner, “if I could just find some currently-under-indictment CFO for a bankrupt multinational corruption who could sell devastated stockholders (hereinafter known as the lynch party) on the wisdom of underwriting* a second mortgage on my everlasting soul, in case the First Mortgageholder (hereinafter known as He) defaults....”

* Like every other scribbler, the author (the one instance of his not being exceptional) firmly subscribes to the belief that no one who writes could do otherwise than write under him.