Welcome

If you're reading this, then either your Google-fu is strong, or it's December 2015 and Wild Thing has launched.

If you found this blog via the link at the end of the book, then first I'd like to thank you for reading Wild Thing, and I hope you'll find some content here of interest.

My plan for this blog is that it should be a place where I can interact with people who are interested in my books, in the ambitious hope that there will eventually be one or more people on the planet who fit that description. So my idea is that this is the place to come if you have questions about the book, or if you have spotted errors and want to be the first person to tell me about them (and earn yourself a free copy of the next book), or if you've had some cool idea that you want to share with me.

I suppose for this first post, it makes a kind of sense to talk about the creation of the book...

I started writing it, in pencil on paper, in 1991, and completed that first draft in 1993. (It occurs to me that it might be vaguely interesting to include a photo of the very first page and the "lucky pencil" I used for pretty much the whole book...)

Transcribing it to the computer (in troff/mm, for any Unix geeks), was a big effort. Over the following years I polished and revised, and sent the MS to a few publishers, each time waiting patiently for a reply. Only one ever did, with a polite “hmm, not bad” encouragement. I kept polishing, and in 1998 entered it into the inaugural George Turner contest run by Transworld. I was one of the ten finalists, but not the winner.

I continued working on it, improving my writing skills (tip: using a full-length novel makes for a lot of work fixing stylistic problems!), even putting it aside for something like eight years (appeasing my conscience with “Well, I'm just waiting for Baen to reply”), but last year I kind of looked up and around and noticed that the publishing landscape had changed substantially. So I decided to self-publish it. (I've been recording what I learn at my blog, A Toe in the Ocean of Books.)

Anyway, I think that's enough for the initial post, especially since I'm trying to get the print editions ready.