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About Mel Keegan
Mel Keegan's first novel, ICE, WIND AND FIRE, appeared with GMP as long ago as 1990. In the following years many other novels have appeared, including the sci-fi thrillers, DEATH'S HEAD and EQUINOX, which have become cult classics. DEATH'S HEAD was nominated for the mainstream "Science Fiction Hall of Fame," and the historical THE DECEIVERS won a Stonewall award. At this time there are 35 Keegan titles on issue with DreamCraft; and Mel has completed both the series, HELLGATE and -- yes, NARC, albeit after a long delay caused by a battle with ill health. Most readers were extraordinarily patient, waiting for the NARC series to be completed ... just a few became unpleasant about the delay, but of course, grave health concerns do, and will, interrupt real-life writing plans, and emailing ugly language to the author won't speed up the process by one instant! In the end, NARC is done, finished, and currently available in Kindle, in mid-2018, with the paperbacks of SCIMITAR, BASILISK and the enormous ENDGAME to follow as soon as these titles have made it through the "proof" process. Remember that CreateSpace prints in the US, and proof copies are mailed to Australia, which takes time! Patience, grasshopper. Following the GMP years, the first first fresh Keegan titles appearing with DreamCraft were THE DECEIVERS, DANGEROUS MOONLIGHT, NOCTURNE and THE SWORDSMAN, and since then many more were issued, spanning the spectrum of creative genres from thriller to SF to Historical and Fantasy. For almost a decade the Keegan novels were published by GMP (the Gay Men's Press, London), but after their merger with Prowler and later, Millivres, GMP became more or less 'dormant,' selling only old titles, and apparently publishing only those novels which had been in pre-press at the time of the merger. Eventually, Millivres discontinued its paperback division, and Mel turned to a local South Australian studio, DreamCraft, to manage his intellectal properties. DreamCraft was actually a multimedia studio specializing in book packaging and also CD-Rom for PC. Aha. Jade and Dave had seen the immense potential of ebooks years ahead of the impending ebook revolution, and in the 1990s were experimenting with "books on disk." The original plan was for a reader to buy a CD-Rom loaded with all the book formats popular at the time, shipped in a DVD case cover designed to look exactly like a paperback. This was your ultmate file backup, and you would have access to every format you would ever needed, no matter how often you changed devices. Neat idea. The downside was, of course, it was "hard goods" which had to be manufactured and shipped. Manufacture wasn't a problem, but the rising cost of shipping airmail was. It didn't take long for the Internet to begin to gallop, download speeds increased exponentially, and downloadable goods very soon eclipsed hard-goods. So ... The switch to ebooks hosted online was simple, and DreamCraft's other strength -- book packaging -- came into play. PDF, EPUB, MOBI, paperbacks ... the Mel Keegan digital list was born, with print on demand paperbacks if anyone could afford the postage (always the factor Mel and DreamCraft could do nothing about). In the first five years the books were hand-crafted by DreamCraft, and each copy was personally signed by Mel. A few copies of these rare collectors items are still out there, and they change hands at ridiculous prices. From 2002 to 2012, Mel contiued to work as a writer, though writing time became limited since he worked full-time and played "den uncle" to his brainchild, GLBT Bookshelf, which was online for seven eventful years until the basic "rot" at the heart of the immense website outstripped anyone's abilities to cope with it. The Bookshelf was a user-generated wiki, with free membership, open to all writers and publishers who produced GLBT materials. Alas, far too many users chose to abandon the pages they had made, never editing them to keep their content current, with the result that after seven years, the site was so corroded with dead links, it would have been a thousand-hour job to fix it ... and no one was on hand to help. It was a great idea ... at first. One prominent writer did refer to it as "faff," however, and in retrospect, MK has come to wonder if she had spotted the weakness inherent in any such user-generated project. If so, time proved her correct, and GLBT Bookshelf went the way of so many privately run, non-profit sites, though it lasted a great dead longer than most! As ill health began to overtake Mel, the volume of his writing fell away -- and at the worst possible time. He did produce the 300,000 word finale to HELLGATE, and do it on time, back in the Bookshelf years, but the immense project hurt and he took a much-needed year to recover. In this same time, Jade retired, and to save the digital backlist from vanishing, Mel bought DreamCraft for a peppercorn ... yes, MK has owned DreamCraft since 2014, so all the books at Amazon, CreateSpace, Smashwords and Lulu have remained in place. Then the struggle began in earnest with his health -- while NARC languished, unfinished, on a pivot point! He always knew it would take a trilogy to finish it out: SCIMITAR - BASILISK - ENDGAME. It just took time to get the whole thing done, all of a piece -- and MK knew that readers would be reluctant to reinvolve themselves with Jarrat and Stone before they knew the whole thing was finished. The project ran a whisker under 400,000 words, but it was completed in mid-2018 ... ...which brings us to the present moment, and the re-edit of the website here. Much has happened in the last few years, and this site must have taken on something of an "abandoned" appearance, especially since the collapse of ARe, which was a very major ebook server (last MK heard, they were being investigated by the FBI for something like cyber crime). As ARe went down, something like 150 links acros this website turned into "404 errors," and of course the PDFs and EPUBS of virtually everything became unavailable, unless you wanted to navigate the maze of Smashwords. It was always going to be a monster job to fix this -- The job is about 90% complete at the time of this writing. Jade to the rescue, with something like 15 hours of work, threading through the site, tracing and fixing the dead links. Next: the ten (yes, ten!) titles which were never uploaded to Smashwords will be sent there in the next couple of weeks, and she'll return to the browser pages for MORE THAN HUMAN, HOME FROM THE SEA, SHADOW AND FLAME, HELLGATE: EVENT HORIZON, and the entire NARC series, to build in the Smashwords links. This will bring the PDF and EPUB links back to life. Whew! But Mel wanted to have the site functional before uploading NARC: ENDAGAME OMNIBUS to Kindle. In the early 1990s, the name of "Mel Keegan" soon become synonymous with fast-paced action/adventure thrillers with pivotal gay characters and themes, in paperback with GMP. Almost thirty years later, readers are asking, will Mel continue to write after finishing the NARC series? Nothing is impossible. It's a question of health, strength, energy. Key on those words: "thirty years later," and remind yourself that the GLBT marketplace is neither very large nor very rich (no, there's not much money in it). So crafting such novels can only be a labor of love, to coin a phrase, and it all begins with the aforementioned health and vitality. Keep your fingers crossed. To reiterate: nothing is impossible. A self-confessed science fiction and fantasy devotee, Keegan is known for novels across a wide range of subjects, from the historical to the future action-adventure. He still lives in South Australia with an eccentric family and a variety of pets, and for years has actually owned the DreamCraft "brand" after having been known to work as a part-time, standby editor in the "Jade and Dave years," going back two decades now. Have you just discovered Mel Keegan, and would like to know more about the author and the books? Click here!   
  
     
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