Mona’s World
In Mona’s world, an extinction event, the devastating plague killed off the bulk of humanity and destroyed all animal and vegetable sources of protein. Today, humans are severely lacking in critical proteins necessary to maintain not only life but the species.
Find out about the world Mona shares with her family and friends. Discover the ins and outs of her culture and how it came to pass.
Click any of the links in this section to find out more about Mona’s world. You might find out more than you bargained for.
Club Lothario
Owned and operated by Richard Verry
Congratulations, you have found Club Lothario, where you can learn all about the stories and ramblings of Richard Verry – Writer, Author & Artist. Typically, you can find him in his office working on his next project, writing his stories over a cup of coffee or a glass of his favorite spirits.
Why Club Lothario?
The club is the primary gathering place in my Mona Bendarova stories. Introduced in The Taste of Honey and known as only ‘The Club.‘
Broken Steele revealed its name. It serves as a place to relax, do business, and host the monthly community parties. The Club Director owns the estate on which it resides and serves as the political center of the community.
People from all over the community come here to socialize and escape the day-to-day politics and obligations. It’s a place to unwind, have fun, and enjoy each other’s company in the arms of a plethora of female attendants selected from all of the houses to serve the guests. I hope that you, too, will find comfort and happiness when you come to Club Lothario.
Contained within the reading lounge of the Club is Richard’s library of works, just waiting for you to pull a copy off the shelves and read. Many include a free sample of the first chapter or two to tease your senses and perhaps shock your wits. One thing he strives to produce is works that will cause you to wonder if what happens in his stories could happen to you.
Mona & Honey Come to Life
In 2012, I began working on an idea for a full-fledged book. I never thought of publishing it. They say, ‘write what you know.’ That was the biggest challenge. I asked myself. What to write? I knew I wanted to write something I could turn into a novel, with an interesting topic that no one had yet done. For years, I thrashed, developing concepts and tossing them all.
Then I stumbled upon an idea and wrote notes and concept drafts. As I thought about the storyline, I wrote an encyclopedia of the world I was creating, so that when the time came, I would have a reference to keep the story realistic.
That storyline turned into ‘The Taste of Honey.’
Within two years, with only the title of the novel, I began writing what turned out to be a dozen different drafts. With each draft, the story became more and more refined. At the beginning of 2015, I wrote the final version. As the book progressed, I would awaken in the middle of the night, dialogue running rampant in my semi-conscious mind. I had a choice. I could either roll over, go back to sleep, and lose the perfect dialogue, or get up and write until I got it all down. What was I to do? I got up and wrote it all down. This happened repeatedly for months. To this day, I still wake up in the middle of the night, full of ideas and dialogue running inside my head.
Determination
By early 2015, determined to finish the book, I wrote and edited. By June, I had finally published the novel. While being edited, I learned how to format the manuscript so that it is suitable for eBooks and paperbacks. I also learned how to create the book cover and completed all the other necessary tasks for publication.
My editors and other friends who read preview copies insisted I publish the book and then write a sequel. Which became ‘Broken Steele.’ ‘Lucky Bitch’ takes Mona off in a new direction. She’s ripped from the only family she has ever known, her life filled with uncertainty. ‘Angry Bitch’ finds Mona at odds with her community as attack after attack on her house forces her to close ranks and elicit help from the few that support her. Book 5 in the series is planned to continue the story to its conclusion and possibly beyond.
A few years after I first published The Taste of Honey, after I learned more about writing and self-publishing, I rewrote the story … again. Then submitted it to editors and copy editors, and republished it with a new book cover. Sales jumped. The plan is to edit it once more to create an audiobook. I’m looking forward to that and revisiting how Honey and Mona came to life. With so much on my to-do list, I’m not sure when I will get to it, but I’m determined.
In a nutshell
Mona lives in a feudal world set a thousand years in our future. She lives in a culture without a central power or government. Instead, her community comprises loosely linked estates, commonly referred to as houses, each named after the owner of the estate. Residents who live on the estate refer to the owner as ‘Master’.
Loosely tying the estates together is Club Lothario. The club serves as a central meeting house, civic center, and relaxed governing body. The club ensures that each house meets its quota to the community.
Their culture developed in response to a near-extinction event more than a millennium ago. Cultural roots go back to a time when gene manipulation of the food-producing animals and plants was commonplace. Pursuing larger profits, mistakes allowed aggressive genome manipulation to run out of control.
Unsurprisingly, the plague nearly wiped out all life on Earth.
The Purge Plague
The ‘Purge Plague,’ as it became known, caused the extinction of nearly every insect, animal, and edible plant life. It left the planet devoid of all sources of consumable protein. As the plague spread over the century, the world began to die.
Humans were about to follow suit and become extinct.
Through extraordinary and expensive measures, scientists at the time halted the extinction of the human species. In one massive, last-ditch effort of gene manipulation, humanity survived by accepting a repulsive alternative.
Despite halting the extinction, the stigma of genetic manipulation survived. Over time, gene splicing was abhorrent to the population. It didn’t take long before they banned all gene manipulation worldwide.
As with all actions, there are consequences. The most significant outcome was that, for humans to survive, they learned to consume the only source of protein available … themselves.
Chaos
Following the ‘Purge Plague’ and over hundreds of years, societal rules have changed to accommodate the new reality. War, religion, and social injustices fell by the wayside. Gone also was the concept of money, love, marriage, and monogamy. In Mona’s contemporary time, they have no comprehension of these concepts. Survival of the species became paramount.
The last-ditch effort to save humanity caused other consequences, and society continued to adapt. People perished by the billions. Genetic changes within females caused them to become acutely submissive to males, while males suffered extraordinarily high mortality rates.
Within two generations, population disparities between men and women became utterly unbalanced. Within a century, only one male in 10,000 survived to adulthood, leaving about 66 men for every million women.
A system emerged to regulate and manage the progeny and food supply to compensate for the disparity. Live births surviving to maturity. The community categorized live births that survived to maturity and graded them for the quality of their meat. Meat that one day will feed their community. An elaborate system has been developed to secure equitable conversion processing for everyone. Out of necessity, progeny remained unnamed until maturity and were bound to a house.
With the imbalance between men to women, the society accommodated the shift by distributing a single male and master per estate.
