Salutations! I am the one known as Checkerboards.

I update my stories as often as I can. Sometimes that means every week, sometimes that means once every few years. I am, to put it lightly, incredibly, soul-suckingly busy in my real life, and writing often has to take a back seat to little things like foster parenting and regular parenting and quietly screaming out my stress into the nearest pillow. But you can rest assured that, like an embarrassing rash, I'll always return when you least expect me.

I've started up a tumblr at http:/// that hosts a variety of things, including some short stories that I haven't posted here. I also now have a handful of Batman music videos on YouTube featuring the Joker and Harley Quinn, the Scarecrow, the Mad Hatter, and Talia al Ghul. (If you're looking for my Poison Ivy video, YouTube removed it because I'm not one of the Beach Boys.) I don't do much with those sites anymore because, well, did I mention that I was busy?

If you're here to read "Get Out of My House!", a tale of wacky fun about the Riddler, you might be happy to know that it's the first of many in a series! The order is as follows: "Get Out of My House!", "Housemates", "Home Sweet Home", "Homesick", "Playing House", "Home is Where the Heart Is", "Beach House", "Housebreaking", "The Big House" and "Boarding House".

And if you're in the mood to read about an original villain's misadventures, I urge you to check out my stories about Sorrow. They are, in order, "Origins", "Breaking", "Shattered", "Reciprocity", "Reinventing", "Rejoicing", a cameo in "Beach House", and "Empathy".

Aside from that, most of the other stories stand alone in my little universe - with the exception of my crossovers, which stand alone in a field on a planet far, far away from the rest of this craziness in lands where just about anything goes. Crazed AIs with a thirst for Science? Happy little headcrabs? A wall of femurs? You betcha!

Let's talk reviews for a minute. I absolutely adore getting reviews, as I'm sure every writer does. They make me very happy, they give me incentive to keep writing, and sometimes they even give me new ideas that take stories in fabulous new directions. However, my time is so extremely limited that at this point, I've got two options - write stories, or reply to reviews. If you ask a direct question, I'll try to answer it, but that's about all I can promise at the moment.

Oh, and DC owns most of the characters used below, and I'm just borrowing them for a bit to give them a little adventure or two. Yeah, that's it. 'Borrowing'.

Speaking of DC, while you read these stories, bear in mind that I don't completely integrate my stories into comics canon. The Gotham my stories take place in is a Gotham that's never had an earthquake or a plague or a massive gang war or a complete reboot or a completely different complete reboot or any of the other stuff that's gone down in the past few years. (It is, however, a Gotham where ridiculous things happen on a daily basis, because let's face it - every city on earth is a place where ridiculous things happen on a daily basis. Why should Gotham be immune?)

"When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical may be madness. To surrender dreams, this may be madness. To seek treasures where there is only trash...Too much sanity may be madness, and maddest of all is to see life as it is and not as it should be." - Miguel de Cervantes