Meet Mary Ann D’Alto.

Social Media Links:

Twitter: @AnnDslto

YouTube Channel: is He Counts Their Tears

Check out her author interview Part 1 and Part 2!

Guest Post – “As every Writer knows, we are the true Keepers of Magic”

I was the little girl who did not like dolls.  How could I?  They were the characters in the horror stories I made up in my mind.  

“Some day I will be a famous writer.” I told myself.  

Eventually, those doll were stored away.  I imagined them chatting in the crate in the attic.  “Good idea for a book”  I mused.  

The years passed. 

“You write about Death and creepy stuff?” was the usual comment whenever anyone read my work.  “You don’t look like that sort of person!”

“And what” I always wanted to reply “does a Writer look like?”  

“A Lady is never rude.” I had been taught. So, I would just smile and pretend not to be curious.  But of course I was.

I wrote all during College.  I had already made a difficult choice; my art or academia.  In the end, I chose academia, but my art never quite left me.  You see,  I am a professional  puppeteer, marionettes, actually, and that is what I nearly did for my career. I was really quite good, so good in fact that there was more than a bit of chatter about my moving towards it, professionally,  in lieu of College.  I nearly did.  There had been some real encouragement from those who knew enough to recognize true talent.  

“However do you do it?” I would be asked, because they no longer seemed like wooden marionettes once I held the strings.  

But how do you explain that imagination is more powerful than anything?  You don’t . 

By the time I arrived at law school, my marionettes had found their place in the attic, next to the dolls. I never forgot them, or the feeling of transforming thought into something else entirely, which of course is what art is, whether it is puppets or prose.   The experience was not for naught, because no courtroom could ever intimidate me; I had held my own in competitions for years.  

“You should write again.” I heard over and over as my career flourished.   

I tried, several times, but the words did not scream. They were as lifeless as were my wooden marionettes when I was not pulling the strings.  But one day I picked up a pencil.  It was the middle of a long, exhausting  day and I had been thinking about  the human mind, and how it can be manipulated, like the strings of a marionette.  I started writing, “Aaron had never noticed how thin his shoe laces were.”  It was, at the moment, as I remembered it, during a performance  when the puppets stopped being wooden. I kept writing.  This time, the words screamed.  And that is how I wrote He Counts Their Tears.

Book Info:

A handsome, successful, charming man. Healer. Miracle maker. Aaron Stein is all those things. Behind the benevolent facade, however, hides a monster: a destroyer of souls who lusts after power and control. Aaron plays his ruse again and again with unsuspecting women who genuinely believe that they have met their new “best friend,” their “soul mate.” Covert hypnosis, edgy trysts, psychological warfare – they’re all part of the sick game he plays “to have all the power”

…until his secret life is threatened by a series of events he never sees coming. Will his devoted cousin, Constance, succeed in protecting him, just as she has throughout his entire life? And what exactly is it that she does to protect him? Is she a murderer, or is she simply devoted to him? Are they merely cousins (possibly, once, long ago, lovers), or are they partners in crime? Did Aaron learn his evil ways from her, or was he born a psychopath? In the end, these answers will make no difference in the lives of the women who, each in turn, are charmed into becoming his victims.”

Youtube link

Goodreads link

The Sequel, The Suffering Room is due out in late 2017.  The Suffering Room picks up right where He Counts Their Tears left us.  Aaron’s life has taken a rather “Public” turn, and circumstances require that he seek out the very women he destroyed.  How will they react to his return?  And why in the world would he take such risks?  There is also the very annoying matter of so many questions about Mirelle’s  death.  Will Aaron be found out at last?