Hi Dana,
Tnx for your kind words Dana, I really appreciated your opinions,.
I admit, this was more of a test project when it started, but soon some passion and love developed. I used only white hat SEO techniques at the beginning, even got a mention on imdb related articles, Over 400 visitors in a day from 1 natural referral, etc... Got a little bit of taste of a small snow ball effect.
Even with the great thing going on, somewhere along the way a "black hat" competitor, made me frustrated and impatient - I know... Rookie mistake 
He copied some of my article ideas, targeted same keywords, and outranked me with obvious BS "black hat" SEO (a couple hundred profile backlinks, 10-20 high PR spammy comments, some .edu and .gov in there, etc...).
Watching his website top the SERPs and mine struggling on the bottom of 1 and top of 2 page, made me loose my focus.
I admit, I went "Grey Hat", I pushed the limits with some manual backlinks from his shady backlink profile(IMO around 10% of his backlinks), and it fired back on me. Great lesson learned 
The best way to describe my situation:
If you had 4 seo related websites, would it make sense to join them?
example sites: seoreviews.com, seoaudiobooks.com, seobooks.org, seovideos.com
I know my decision to merge them and create 1 "brandable" website is the right one for users and SEO.
I hope that the quality of the new site will outrank the possible transfer of penalties from the old sites.
Hope it works, of not I have a great resource for a quality blog post: "What not to do...!"
Regards,.
Marko
