Bitterwood has spent the past twenty years hunting down dragons, one at a time. But he is getting old and the hate that he has carried in his heart since a group of dragon-soldiers killed his family is beginning to fade. When he kills the royal prince dragon, the king decides the only retribution is genocide of the human race. Bitterwood is forced to enter the Free City, the grand trap designed to eradicate mankind, with thousands of others. Can he lead from within, or can a select few dragons unite to stop the king's madness from becoming reality. Full of rich characters and drama, this is an amazingly astute vision of our own culture by way of a feudal kingdom where dragons rule, and humans are used as workers or pets.
I started writing my first novel when I was seven. It was about pirates and ghosts. I got to 100 words before I reached my first case of writer's block.
When I was ten or eleven, I dictated a story called "The Invincibles meet Santa Claus" into a cassette recorder. It was about a group of superheroes called the Invicibles. Members of the group included Monkey-Man, the White Tornado, the Sunshine Kid, and Sonic Boom. They met, and fought, Santa Claus. I think they mistook him for a burgler or something. Motives leading characters into violent confrontations weren't particularly important to me back then.
Something that was particularly important to me back then was discovering that my Mom took the tape to Roses for her coworkers to hear and it wound up getting played over the intercom for the whole store. I was mortified! It brought a swift end to my tinkering with audio books.
I kept writing stories, mainly about superheroes, through high school. In college, however, I tossed aside such foolish pursuits and dedicated myself to a life of pure poetry. Man, after sweating over short stories for days and weeks, poems were great! I could knock out three or four in an hour! Boom! Boom! Boom! I was a poet!
And so I remained until I turned 25. I hated my day job, and my total income from 7 years of cranking out poetry was roughly $25. The plain path forward was to switch to prose. Bang out a novel over the weekend, polish it up in the evenings the following week, and have it in the mail by Friday. The book was to be called "A Distant Invisible Ocean."
Things didn't go as planned. The weekend turned into two long years of sweating blood as I stared at the screen of my word processor trying to figure out what happened next. I'd read that a novel should be 60,000 words long, and my original storyline, about a homeless man who is secretly wise and wonderful and knows all the secrets of existence, kind of fizzled out after about 10,000 words. I was impeded a bit by my lack of knowledge of the secrets of existence. But, the homeless man (his name was Union Whitmore, based off a highway exit sign in South Carolina) had picked up a girlfriend in the course of the story, so I decided that I would throw a serial killer into the plot. He would kidnap the girlfriend, Union would have to elude police who thought he was responsible, find the serial killer, and then, in the plot twist that would prove I was a serious author and not some mass market hack, he would fail, and the killer would succeed. So, I tacked this plot onto the first 10,000 words and wound up with 40,000 words. Hmmm. 20,000 to go. But I'd been working on this for over 18 months. I hated every character in the book. So, for the last 20,000 words, I killed them. Just jumped around in time, and showed some of them dying of heart attacks, others dying quietly in bed in their old age, others going quickly in an auto accident. The serial killer dies when he meets another serial killer who specializes in killing serial killers. When I hit 60k words, I wrote "The End," and that was that! I was a novelist! I showed the manuscript to friends and most confirmed that I had, in fact, written a book. Luckily, I had one bastard among the group, a guy named Ken Ward, who read the book and wrote up a critique that said, "This reads like a novel that was written by someone who's never read a novel."
Of course, I read novels all the time. I had tried to write something completely unlike anything I'd ever read. But, it dawned on me that maybe there was a reason that most books had linear plots and likable characters and didn't pause for fifty page speeches where a character explains their world view. (I'd made the mistake of reading Atlas Shrugged just before starting.)
Sitting "A Distant, Invisible Ocean" aside, I started writing a science fiction novel about a teenage genius who genetically engineers dragons in the lab at college. The novel was called "Dragons." It was fairly dreadful, with implausibility heaped upon implausibility. On the other hand, the book had a recognizable beginning, middle, and end. It was readable, though a long way from publishable.
On to book three. I decided I'd look at the world a thousand years into the future, after the genetically engineered dragons had taken over. This became my novel Bitterwood. When I finished Bitterwood, I was a little surprised. The book was actually, kinda, sorta, maybe pretty good. Maybe worth trying to publish. But, I felt like, before I sent the book to publishers, I needed some other writing credits. Whip out a few short stories, sell them to Asimov's, then include those sales in the cover letter for the novel.
I'll spare you the blow by blow narrative, but when I finished my first draft of Bitterwood, I was barely thirty. When the book finally hit bookstores, I was 43. In the intervening years, I wrote about 75 short stories and wound up with a fair number of them getting published. I'd also reverted to my high school prose roots and written a story about superheroes, which went on to become my first published novel, Nobody Gets the Girl.
I continue to write stories that the kid I was in high school would enjoy. Back then, I loved stories where superpowered men slug it out with other superpowered men with the fate of the whole world at stake. The secret that I hadn't quite figured out when I was 25 was that the magic key to good writing is to write what you'd most want to read.
My four novels to date, Nobody Gets the Girl, Bitterwood, Dragonforge, and Dragonseed are all heavy on adventure and feature larger than life characters struggling to protect the world from dark forces. Unlike the stories I wrote as a teenager, I'm writing as an adult who actually understands a thing or two about life. The world's problems are rarely solved by finding the right person to sock in the jaw.
I have more books coming soon! 2011 is probably going to be a gap year in my US writing biography (though I have translations coming out in France and Germany), but I do have more books written and in the hands of publishers. Contracts are being negotiated, and you'll definitely see new books from me in 2012. Watch this space.
