Name: My pen name is as close to my real name without using my real name, in fact they have been nicknames as well as mistaken identities of mine in the past. So, even though I may be a private person and I might not be ready to put my real self out there just yet; using this name is as close to the real thing as possible at the moment. And no, I am not the heir to the Bacardi rum empire.

In case you wanted to know about me: I'm a high school English and Social Studies teacher working on his Masters of Education degree. I have been writing for close to twenty years now. It started as a hobby, but I've always had desires to write full time. I am working on some original stories and ideas, but until they are done I am polishing my craft posting fanfiction on this site.

A little bit about my work: I am a romantic, in both the emotional and literal sense of the word. Hence, my stories might be dramatic, adventurous, intellectual, sometimes angsty, mysterious, and even horrific at times; they will rarely ever be dark and depressing, it is just not in me to write that way. As they say, write what you know and I am not a bleak person so my work will reflect that. So while my stories might wind down a sad road, try and remember that I will most likely pull out some sort of happy ending or at least a comfortable resolution to the narratives conflict.

Not into "happy endings"? Find other stories. That is the brilliance of this community, there is a wealth of narratives here, enough to cater to everyone's interests.

Regarding Reviews and Comments: In general I will let most reviews made by those with user accounts stand. However, I will be monitoring guest reviews more closely. To be fair, if the review is just a generic good job or this story sucks, I will delete the post. While I welcome the praise, I don’t care for someone telling me they don’t like my story without giving me a reason. Hence, if I am going to do a blanket deletion of all the guest reviews that offer general negative comments, I will balance it out by also deleting non-specific positive comments from guest users. So if you are a guest, either take the time and create an account or at least write a halfway decent review with supportive arguments as to why you either like or hate my story.

If you have a user account and take the time to review my story, than you are confident in your arguments that you are willing to make yourself known to me. For this, I will generally let your comments stand and will rarely delete any review made by a FanFiction.net user. The only time I will delete a post by a user is if said user is being belligerent, profane, or ignorant. As I said, constructive criticism is always welcome but flamers will be eliminated. So, again, if you are going to say my story sucks, give me a reason why. This shows that you have at least read part of my story to know what you are commenting on.

A/N 10/11/14: I did not abandon Heart on the Mend you might say it is on hiatus, but I hate that word because it usually means that the story is on life support and is about to be ditched. That is not the case with Heart on the Mend. It's just going to take me a bit longer to finish it. As you can see, I'm working on some other stories, again this does not mean that I've abandoned Heart on the Mend. I just need to get my creativity mojo going and the only way to do that is to write.

Now onto the main topic of this A/N, the fact that updates and new stuff will be slow in coming for the rest of the year. From now until December, I will be working on completing my Masters in Education. Part of that is completing my Instructional Design Project (IDP), a five chapter document complete with appendices. As you can see, I will be quite busy for the next couple of months. Since my IDP will take up most of my time and energy, I will not have much left for fan fiction or any other personal writing. That does not mean that a fluffy one shot won't pop out now and then, but they will be few and far between until I finish my project. When I'm done with my degree, I plan on re-committing more of my time to fan fiction as well as some of my own original writing projects. I will try to keep all of my followers updated on these developments as they come.