I searched through thousands of love poems to curate the very best that celebrate romance and put them into Crimson Leaves: Poetry Celebrating Romance . I also searched through thousands of quotations about love to add the best as companions to the poems. And to those I added some meditations, Bible verses, a romantic game, famous love letters, and more.

Before doing all that work, bit by bit, I expected that such a book must already exist, and every few years I looked for one, but without success. I had in mind something like my mother's copy of Leaves of Gold, except focused on romance, and more specifically on positive aspect of romance. Eventually, I concluded it didn't exist, so I started compiling one myself, and while I was reading all those thousands of love poems, I was inspired to write some of my own, a few of which I decided to include in Crimson Leaves. I think my mother would have loved it.

I've been a voracious reader all my life, thanks to my mother. When I learned enough to be able to read but didn't have much desire, she'd often start reading a book to me, and at a very exciting part, she'd claim she had something else she had to do, but I could read the rest without her if I wanted to.

While researching for Crimson Leaves, I came across Between Her Sheets, by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, which mentioned the name Lindamira, and that got me curious, and I put Crimson Leaves aside for a while.

While researching the name Lindamira, I discovered the 1702 romance novel, The Adventures of Lindamira, which is a great story, in my opinion, so I decided to bring it back into print, and with eBooks and print-on-demand, it can stay in print indefinitely. I also discovered the ~1704 fan fiction short story, Indamora to Lindamira, and made a free 2023 eBook edition available through my website, since a 1994 print edition is already available from Juvenilia Press.

The Adventures of Lindamira was published anonymously, so I'm not the author of the novel, but I am the editor of the 2023 edition, and I'm the author of a substantial amount of commentary and annotations (including a case I present as to who I think wrote the novel), so I tagged myself as an author on Amazon to give me access to some marketing options. My edition of Lindamira was released on July 1, 2023, in eBook, paperback, hardback, large print, and OpenDyslexic font versions, and then I got back to work on Crimson Leaves.

Crimson Leaves was mostly finished in 2024 when I got an itch to try writing a novel again. I'd started many novels over the years, in different genres, but the longer the manuscript got, the harder poor memory made it to keep a consistent story going. But this time was different. I finished it, and I don't really like the story I wrote, but I like how I told it. After waffling over whether or not to publish it, I decided to go ahead, and named it Spectrums of Romance and Redemption. It's an odd cross between a Christian romance, a contemporary romance, and a literary novel -- its leading characters are Christians, but the story includes a moderate amount of plot-related sex via dialog, and it confronts some social issues. I expect very few readers to like it, and I don't mind that.

Crimson Leaves, on the other hand, is for everyone from age 16 and up, and I hope readers love it as much as I loved creating it.