Tales of Dunham – MORIAH JOVAN

“Twice.”

Moriah — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 21:00:36 +0000

“I am in my prime. Professionally. Financially. Intellectually. Not sexually. All things considered, my sexual prime came in the back of a 1970 Nova and went out the door of a judge’s office three months later.”

I crack me up. I really do. Yesterday, I randomly tweeted the above out of one of my books that I thought was one of my better lines. That’s Finn Marston,¹ from Lion’s Share narrating the circumstances of his shotgun wedding at 19.

That’s funny (yes, it is; fight me), but the real story is in Lion’s Share’s opening line.²

In 1998 (I think) my mom, brother, and I set out on a road trip to Salt Lake. I cannot, for the life of me, remember why. I stayed in Provo with an internet friend, who was getting divorced from her asshole ex-husband, and her two single-digit kids. She was broke, her soon-to-be-ex wasn’t paying child support, and she didn’t have a job so she was on assistance. We had a couple of late-night heart-to-hearts. She had re-dedicated her life to Jesus, in non-Mormon evangelical Christian parlance. She was going to church, paying tithing (on her meager income), and had just gone to the temple to take out her endowment (fornication and adultery are verboten). She was wearing her garments appropriately and faithfully. She was focused, determined, locked in.

Fast forward a year or so. We were in a Mormon singles chatroom, and we were in DMs, chatting about her life. She was still broke. Ex still wasn’t paying child support. She was doing well with church and she was dripping with new zealotry.³

I had noticed that in the general chat, she was flirting with this guy from a state somewhere far northeast of Utah.⁴ I remembered his deets,⁵ and as far as I could tell, he was a very nice, decent, hard-working, spiritually upright fellow who loved his kids. Said his ex cheated.⁶ There were no warning bells as to his person. However, there were some warning bells as to how life with him would be:

divorced
paying a shit-ton of child support
lived in a broken-down mobile home in a broken-down mobile home park in a broken-down small town (bonus points for honesty!)
didn’t have a job
didn’t have a trade, marketable skill, or defining occupation

Keep in mind: You don’t go to any chat room looking for a sugar daddy. Men with money aren’t there, they don’t want women over thirty and/or divorcées with eight kids, and moneyed Mormon men aren’t single anyway.⁷ I didn’t care what anybody else’s motives were, but mine was to find a nice, decent guy to marry and have children with.⁸

So she was chatting with this nice (I’m sure) gentleman, and I asked her very delicately WTF she was doing talking to a down-and-out dude when she was also down and out.

“He’s nice.”

That was a plus, but I thought she should be looking for someone a tidge more solid. Say what you want about a woman’s material target-seeking, but love does not conquer all, especially at the beginning when you’re thirty-five, broke, and have at least four kids between you.

I left her alone about it because it was not my business and she was a big girl and she was going to do whatever she wanted to do regardless of any wisdom I might throw her way. Free advice is almost always worth what you pay for it.

Over the next few weeks, she regaled me with the wonderful gestures this dude made. She was in luuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuv. Nobody saw that coming, nosirreebob.

Then one day, in the general chat, this happened:

WE’RE GETTING MARRIED!

Well, that was alarming. I immediately opened DMs.

Me: Um … you’ve got 2 kids. He’s paying child support and he has no marketable skills and has a two-bedroom shack.

Her: BUT WE LOVE EACH OTHER!!!

Oh boy.

The plan: She would fly to his state with her kids, who would effectively be their chaperone. They would meet in a hotel by the airport, as it was some distance away from his home. They would have 2 hotel rooms, one for him (I can’t remember if he brought his kids), and one for her and her kids.

Me: Whatever you do, don’t fuck him.⁹

Her: Oh definitely not! I’ve been to the temple now.

Uh huh.

Me: You never know. And the last thing you need is another kid.

Her: No, we have promised to save that for marriage.

Ooooookay.

So she and her kids got there. He’d filled her room with balloons and flowers and just all-around romantic goodness. Normal getting-to-know-you IRL-post-internet stuff ensued … for about 1/2 hour. The kids got put in the other hotel room so they could make out. That was all it was. All clothes on, everything above the neck. I nodded approvingly.

“But then it just slipped in.”

… … … “BECKY! THE FUCK?!”

“Twice.”

• • •

I waited for years to be able to use that line in a story, but it never fit. Then one day I had a dream about a widow getting together with her widowed-father-in-law-turned-BFF, woke up, said (out loud) “Oh, that’s an interesting idea,” forgot about it, went about my day, which included a stop at Young House Love DIY blog, and an idea was born.

And fuck me if I wasn’t going to start that out with

It just slipped in.
Twice.

______________________________

1. Readers of The Proviso (Director’s Cut) won’t remember this, but Finn makes an appearance very close to the end.

2. Apologies, my friend. I’ve been hesitating posting this for almost 20 years, but you cannot possibly know how much this has delighted me and my husband. Yes, we’re laughing at you, but it’s with great affection. You helped spawn a story of grief, loss, conspiracy, love, loving, and a twist on the late-husband’s-dirty-little-secret trope.

3. New zealots of anything are the worst. Jesus, veganism, Cross Fit, colon cleanses. Doesn’t matter.

4. No, I’m not going to say which one, although I do remember it clearly.

5. I don’t bother trying to remember things about internet people. I make a database. Yes, you are on a list. I’m not stalking you. I’m trying to remember you so you won’t think I’ve completely forgotten you. Because I would have. Without the spreadsheet.

6. You always have to take this with a grain of salt. It might be true. It might not be. It’s probably some blend, but you know what they say. There are three sides to every story: Yours, mine, and the truth.

7. Moneyed Mormon men have been married since they got off their mission, their wives put them through law school or business school (while also having enough kids to do a Family Feud episode), and they’re in a courtroom or boardroom somewhere displaying the only rampant male aggression that is socially acceptable in Mormon culture. They have money because they’re married.

8. Twenty-three years later, I can definitively say I did, indeed, find a nice, decent guy to marry and have children with.

9. I don’t advise abstinence out of religiosity. I advocate for any woman to develop a heightened sense of self-preservation.

Once upon a time when I thought I was edgy

Moriah — Wed, 16 Jul 2025 17:14:48 +0000

When you say stupid shit and read it back almost 2 decades later when you’re cleaning up your blog
Part 2 of a series

Magdalene: a contest and a prize.
03/28/2011
[link removed]

Magdalene, the third book in the Dunham series, will be released on Sunday, April 24, 2011. This is the last book in the series with contemporary characters; book four, Dunham, is an historical and book five, tentatively titled Delilah, is post-apocalypse.

Delilah.

Post-apocalypse.

Polyandry.

Delilah and sisters Jezebel and Lilith, daughters of Duncan Kenard, granddaughters of Bryce and Giselle Kenard.

It, like most everything I’ve published, is an outgrowth of something I wrote in the 1990s that I wrung into the Dunham universe or cannibalized for something else in the Dunham universe.

I was all into it when I was forty and my libido was super-charged. I researched other polyandrous fiction and realized someone else did it better than I could, ever would, and mine would be seen as derivative, even though the added twist was that these people are Mormons, and given our history, i WaS gOiNg To TuRn PoLyGaMy On ItS hEaD. I don’t remember who wrote what or when. I just noted that someone else had done a good polyandrous novel, so I shelved Delilah.

It’s the late 21st century and a prototype chemical weapon is accidentally released (in Los Alamos, where else?). It was intended to kill selectively based on DNA (mitochondrial DNA?); its target was supposed to be people who trend to alpha, risk-takers, smart. It was not age-selective. Instead, it kills the weak. (Basically, it culls the US population for the best and worst, leaving not much in between.) It wipes out more than 2/3 of the US population, and what’s left are basically the barbarians. Further, it kills far more males than females. It amps up the males’ aggression and the females’ fertility. So of course, the Dunhams are barbarians anyway, but now they’re just more barbarous.

Pre-writing this post:

Then I went and re-read. Shit, I’m good. I was, even back then when I started it, in 2008. Well, of course, I’m good. I wrote the Great Mormon Novel™.

★★★

PROLOGUE

I’M JUST ANOTHER middle-aged woman who thinks she can write a book.

At almost a hundred twenty, I still have a good hundred years of life left in me. We live longer than the previous generations, you see. It was one of the ways in which our biology was changed at the chromosomal level way back when, or so my father tells me. My grandmother died young—she was only ninety-two—but he says that generation considered ninety-two to have been a long, good life.

I never know what to make of that.

Anyway, we’re doing marvelous things with technology now, my husband and children and I. We’ve revived the internet somewhat, pioneering the mining tools to dig through the archives of the data detritus of the people who went before us. In fact, that’s our family business, investigating people’s histories, their ancestries, things that had been recorded in oftentimes excruciating, tedious, and mind-numbingly boring detail.

The mining of Facebook and Twitter alone have made the fortunes of several of my grandchildren and great-grandchildren and great-great-grandchildren. The Church was one of our first clients, and we have been its chief (sometimes only) mining company for forty years or so.

People have a need to know where they came from, especially after having spent so many years trying to hide their ancestry that they simply forgot what it was. They want to know the names of those who didn’t survive, what they thought, how they lived, why they mightn’t have lived, if their personalities were somehow indicative of the genetics that doomed them to death.

My husband is the ringleader of this enormous family—and business—we created. One day, he came home from work and said, “Del, I think you should write a book.”

“A book?” I asked. “What about?”

“You. Us. You know, from the beginning of us. The stories the kids beg you for, only not so sanitized. All the gory details. In forty years, I have yet to come across any memoir of that time, much less a good one.”

I thought about that a minute. I didn’t have anything much else to do lately since my daughters had decided I needed a housekeeping staff. I don’t like to travel, you see, and I wouldn’t without my husband anyway, and he’s too in love with his work to leave for long. We are wealthy and I have not had to manage our farm for four decades now.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t remember. It’s to my advantage that I remember—as do my contemporaries.

That was another thing that changed in our biologies: our memories, which are long and detailed. There is no Alzheimer’s, no dementia. My father marvels at that.

He—my dad, that is, Dr. Duncan Kenard—assists the family in the business, contributing his medical knowledge and research here and there, his hypotheses and theories, but for him it’s a hobby. His real love is in treating patients, to study how much more superior the human body became after the change. What we take for granted—robust health, “long” lives, few chromosomal defects—he considers miracles.

“Just tell it from your point of view. That way, it won’t exactly be incomplete, if you know what I mean.”

I did. “That makes me uncomfortable,” I said slowly. “I’d feel funny, putting myself out there like that.”

He gave me a strange look. “You’ve been mining blogs again.”

It’s true. I like to read the old blogs, the ones from the twenty-first century, and I start talking they way they wrote, which my family thinks is hilarious. They were incredibly, ah, “emo,” those generations. Too whiny by half, but their internet culture was alive and well with its own limited vocabulary that was incredibly expressive for a medium that couldn’t convey tone, body language, or facial expressions.

And their obsessions!

Would that we had had that kind of time when our lives fell apart, and especially—

Their obsession with sparkly vampires and dominant billionaires can entertain me for hours. Oh, would that the vampires we had had to deal with had been sparkly and emo, instead of a treacherous government. I would have even taken the dominant billionaire over what we had to go through.

“What you should do,” my husband continued, “is write it like you’re telling someone else’s story.”

I thought about that another minute. “I suppose I could manage that. Sometimes it does seem like it happened to someone else.”

“There you go. And,” he added brightly, “maybe it’ll keep you occupied while you get through menopause.”

I slugged him in the arm, but he laughed.

After a hundred and four years of marriage, I probably ought to be used to his little digs. On the other hand, I’ve been having hot flashes for the last twelve years and things are critical.

I’m losing my libido and fertility, you see, the thing that defined me for so many years—to myself, to my family, to the government, to my church and neighborhood and community—and I can’t wait until the process is over.

Ah, but with a lifespan three times the length of my ancestors’ comes a longer fertility cycle, so Dunc says, which makes a ten-, fifteen-, twenty-year menopause about proportional (and that’s not counting half again the number of years of perimenopause). My best friend is in her seventeenth year and menopause, like the post-catastrophe libido, is a beast.

The source of my husband’s amusement is his gratitude. He hasn’t been able to keep up with me for several decades now. He’s enjoying the slowdown, the relative infrequency, the ever-increasing occasions when we can take our time, when the infrequency makes it special and not, for me, a need akin to breathing.

“What about Lil and Jess?” I asked, wondering what my sisters would think about being equally exposed. Their lives were inextricably bound up in mine. I couldn’t leave them out of the telling of such a tale.

He shrugged. “They’ll get over it.”

Yes, I remember how it was before we changed—we all do, those of us of the First Wave—but it just seems like an extraordinarily vivid dream.

So I’m going to write it that way.

★★★

No. No, I’m not.

← Part 1

Part 3 →

Say You’ll Go

Moriah — Mon, 25 Aug 2014 17:00:55 +0000

After twenty years and five children, love just wasn’t enough anymore—until, five years after the divorce, it’s the only thing they have left.

Janelle Monáe: Say You’ll Go

“Tess … ” She stopped cold at the breath of a whisper, her heart slamming into her ribs so hard she thought it would fall out right there on the table and flop around. She turned slowly—so slowly.

She opened her mouth to scream at him for ambushing her, but she realized just in time that he was as stunned as she was.

And he was beautiful. More beautiful than he had been when he was nineteen. More beautiful than he was the night he’d left her. Yet nothing about him had changed.

His hair was still a mass of long mahogany-red waves past his shoulders. Bunches of hair at his temples had been braided into tiny plaits fastened behind his head. His earrings were medium-sized gold hoops. His stark art deco sun tattoo still spread its rays down along his neck, chin, and jaw. His shirt was blousy white linen floating untucked over oxblood leathers, the ties at the neck hanging loose. His wrist tattoos were on full display. Then she looked at his hands.

He was wearing his wedding ring.

She blinked and looked down at her own left hand. There they were: the circuit board wrist tattoo that matched his and the diamond he’d presented to her in an elaborate, public proposal. Because why do it privately when you could put on a show?

She looked back up at him, knowing all her heartbreak and joy and sorrow and love for him were written all over her face—and it was reflected in his.

“This is exactly what I wanted to avoid,” Sebastian drawled with great irritation. “If some people had picked up her phone!”

She should’ve picked up the phone.

Tess didn’t move—couldn’t—but Étienne could and did, skirting his chair and striding toward her with that look, the pirate king, the one who wouldn’t be denied.

She sighed when he slid his big hands around her face, tilted it back, and brought her up to him for a kiss that scorched her soul.

It was magical. He was magical.

She closed her eyes and opened her mouth, feeling his tongue, so familiar, so talented. Tasting him as he had always tasted with an undernote of Dr. Pepper. She whimpered into his mouth when the pressure lightened, but he only tilted his head and went after her at a different angle. Sensation shot downward, and she moaned softly, ready to spend the next few hours feeling his bare chest against her naked breast, his legs twined with hers, his body inside hers, stroking her and assuaging this ache for him she’d never been able to contain.

“GET A FUCKING ROOM!” Sebastian roared, standing and pounding the table. “You two drive me fucking insane!”

They parted. Slowly. So slowly.

“I did not sleep with her,” he whispered, dropping his forehead on hers, his chest heaving.

“I know.” That surprised him, and she was strangely gratified.

“Mon cœur,” he breathed.

“I love you, too,” she whispered back, equally out of breath. Then she gulped. “But love isn’t enough.”

He drew away from her, dropped his head back, gripped the back of her chair so hard it creaked. His chest heaved.

But somebody began to clap. A golf clap. Hushed. Mocking.

Someone else joined in. Then someone else.

Her heart was breaking—again—but she couldn’t hide her smile. Nor, it seemed, could he.

“Étienne!” Sebastian snapped. “Get your ass in this seat right now. Tess, siddown. Somebody has to be the adult in the room. As per usual.”

“We need to talk,” Étienne murmured, looking at her with those heartbreaking—heartbroken—ice blue eyes.

She nodded. “I know.”

“To a therapist! I do have other things to do, you know!”

Étienne tossed Sebastian a bland smile over his shoulder. “Keep it up. You know we like to put on a show.”

Sebastian snarled but sat, and somebody began to chuckle.

He turned back to her. “You drew those for me?”

Tess, as in love as she had been at seventeen, could only nod. “I draw everything for you.”

from We Were Gods

Book updates

Moriah — Sun, 17 Aug 2014 23:19:45 +0000

1. ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE MYSELF

My story, “Allow Me to Introduce Myself,” that appeared in Monsters & Mormons has been ready for me to put up for sale for quite a while. I just haven’t gotten around to it. I hope to get that done before Christmas. Kidding. Not really. It won’t be on the Dunham site, so if you want to buy it from me (please do!) it’ll only be here, in the sidebar.

A Mormon nun battles demons and insecurity in the Louisiana bayou—with a baby alligator by her side and weapons powered by cold fusion.

2. SEEING RED

I’m almost finished with the first draft of Seeing Red, a category-length novel, an offshoot of Paso Doble. I plan to make it permanently free, but I change my mind a lot.

Anti-bullfight activist Pilar Bautista and star matador Alejandro Molina give each other what they need most—but can they keep each other and their integrity?

Sadly, I have no release date.

3. IT CAME TO ME IN A DREAM

A couple of weeks ago, I, like Stephenie Meyer, woke up from a dream and thought, “Damn, that’s an awesome idea.” Unlike Stephenie Meyer, there were no sparkly vampires involved. Then I began my daily routine, which includes checking in at Young House Love. Voilà! A plot bunny was born. Well. That plot bunny grew up into what will be a full-length novel, and I still haven’t named the poor little thing.

Blythe Marston was widowed at 28, nine years and four children after she and her high school sweetheart had married. She’d had the perfect life: husband, marriage, kids, house, in-laws, parents, friends, health. Until the cops showed up and told her a drunk driver had taken it all away from her.

As the condolences drifted away and she started putting herself back together, only one man stayed with her to guide her to her independence: Phineas Marston, her father-in-law. Six years after her husband’s death, she’d raised her kids, gotten an education and the most unlikely career, and learned how to be happy again.

But not alone. Never alone. There has never been anything between Blythe and Finn, no spark, no desire, no thought of anything. Her dead husband binds them and Finn grieved along with her. There has never been anything more than that between them—

—except kid drama, school events, family dinners, conversations, opinions, arguments, celebrations, work time, chores, advice, and the dozens and dozens of cookies she bakes for him to take to his office on the holidays.

There’s nothing else between them.

Nothing at all.

This is marginally part of the Dunham world, although I may or may not mark it that way. That said, I not only don’t have a release date, I don’t have a title, either!

4. EXTRAS!

Remember, there are lots and lots of extras on the Tales of Dunham site you may not have seen. A Dunham family tree, new vignettes, and rebooted soundtracks are among them. In the future, I’ll attempt to update you when I do put stuff up. Which is why …

5. I’M BUILDING A NEWSLETTER MAILING LIST

If you get a newsletter email from me any time between now and the Rapture, it will be because you indicated to me you wanted to be on my newsletter or you bought a book from me directly. I don’t mean to offend, honestly, so please feel free to tell me to bug off when (if) you get one.

6. I’M PLANNING TO RE-EDIT THE PROVISO AND THEN PUT IT OUT A HARDCOVER EDITION

Can you believe it’s been almost six years since I published it? Eventually, they will all be in hardcover because I’m snobbish that way and, yes, I still like paper books.

7. A CRAVEN PLEA

Lots of authors have great marketing strategies. I don’t. I’m lost in a sea of advice, coupled with an aversion to marketing tactics, a lack of followup skills, and a desperate need to lock myself in a room and pour words out into my hard drive.

Doing a newsletter to alert fans and buyers of new books and new material on the website is my first step, but now I’d like to ask you readers who enjoyed my work to tell your friends. Now, I’m going to write regardless of sales (or lack thereof). I can’t not write, but wouldn’t you like to discuss these people around the watercooler?

Two new books

Moriah — Thu, 01 May 2014 22:13:32 +0000

They’re
just friends …
right up to the
first kiss.

Sometimes
love isn’t enough …
until it’s the only thing
you have left.

PASO DOBLE

WE WERE GODS

go on sale today!

The print books are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the regular places.

The ebooks are available from me (see links above), Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all the regular places (iBooks coming soon). From now until May 15, 2014, they will be priced at $1.99. After, they will be $5.99 and $4.99 respectively.

Get ’em now!

Oops

Moriah — Wed, 16 Apr 2014 15:00:27 +0000

That awkward moment when you’re a book designer and you design your own books and the print is even too small for you. (The re-do added 100 pages to it.)

The Paso Doble & We Were Gods release

Moriah — Mon, 14 Apr 2014 15:00:37 +0000

Paso Doble & We Were Gods

May 1, 2014

from May 1, 2014 – May 15, 2014
the ebooks will be $1.99 each

On May 16, 2014,
the ebooks will go to a regular price of
$5.99 and $4.99, respectively

On parenting

Moriah — Sat, 12 Apr 2014 22:00:04 +0000

Tess: “You know this makes us like all the evil meddling parents in all those novels who pay off the boyfriend from the wrong side of the tracks, and then are responsible for the seething hatred between their daughter and her boyfriend until they meet up twenty years later and have angry sex.”

Étienne: “You say that like it’s a bad thing.”

Tess: “But by that time, the boyfriend has used his seething hatred to make a billion dollars just to show her father up and comes back as a master of the universe to get his revenge on the parents and his girlfriend, even though she has never stopped loving him and was heartbroken that he never tried to contact her—”

Étienne: “This is the part where the evil parents had never passed his letters along to the girlfriend, right? And hers got waylaid on the way to the post office? And then she finds out her parents threw money at him to get him to go away, and she turns on them?”

Tess: “Right. So it’s all a giant drama, and the evil parents get their comeuppance.”

Étienne: “I don’t think we need to fear a raging billionaire coming after us in twenty years.”

Tess: [sighs dreamily] “I love those books.”

Étienne: “You know what I like about you, Tess?”

Tess: “Which thing?”

Étienne: “You’re worse at being human than I am. You just have a better filter.”

On credibility

Moriah — Sat, 12 Apr 2014 15:00:13 +0000

“I,” Emilio said to his youngest brother, “am a manslut. That is a direct quote. Don’t be that. There will come a day—”

“A girl you like says, ‘Let’s be friends.’”

“You’ll turn forty-two and find out the woman you’re in love with thinks you’re the scum of the earth.”

Paso Doble

On fetishes

Moriah — Fri, 11 Apr 2014 23:00:52 +0000

The problem with exhibitionism is that sometimes people watch. —Tess LaMontagne

We Were Gods