2007-2009

Publishing Princess of Amathar, even if only for myself, inspired me to write again.  Over the next fourteen months, I crafted an 800-page steampunk fantasy that I called The Steel Dragon. I printed up a dozen copies (in 5” binders) and friends read and edited them over the summer.

His Robot Girlfriend

That summer, I discovered Smashwords, where one could self-publish ebooks.  It was a brand-new thing, and I thought that it would be a good idea to get my name out there as an author.  I decided to piece together my earlier flash fiction, seven or eight small vignettes, into an actual story, by smoothing it out and adding an ending.  That summer, while teaching summer school, that’s what I did.  His Robot Girlfriend was the 1,864th book published through Smashwords (now there are over 330,000).  I also uploaded it to Feedbooks, Manybooks, and a few other sites.  I offered it for free, expecting only to get my name out there.  Well, it worked.  His Robot Girlfriend was huge, mostly because I was entering epublishing on the ground floor, though I didn’t know that at the time.  His Robot Girlfriend was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, and when iBooks started, it was at the top of their free books list for a long time.

Eaglethorpe Buxton

His Robot Girlfriend was very popular online, and I was done editing The Steel Dragon, so I began sending it off to publishers, but I needed something else to write. I had recently read Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, and I really liked the idea of an unreliable narrator, but I had also read Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, so I was feeling like something silly might be in order.  I decided to set my story in the world I had created years earlier for a Dungeons and Dragons game I played with my kids. I had placed stories there before.  In 1996, I had written a play for our school drama club set in the same world.  The play was called The Ideal Magic.

So Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Elven Princess was born.  Eaglethorpe himself was a new creation, as was Jholiera the elven princess, but the places, Ellwood Cyrene, and the Queen of Aerithraine were all pulled right out of our D&D game.  I finished in less than a month and was still in the mood, so I wrote another one.  Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Sorceressuses the play I had written earlier as the main plot point, and I made Eaglethorpe the author.

I published both stories as ebooks and then decided that I would publish Princess of Amathar as an ebook and see if anyone would actually pay for one of my stories.  It was Smashwords book number 2,287

1975-2006

I started writing in Junior High.  I wrote a series of science fiction stories in comic book form. My cousin wrote his own science fiction comics and over the summer, we would get together and write crossovers.  I also started writing poetry in Junior High and all through my high school years, I considered myself a poet.  The only school activity I was involved in, besides a very brief foray into JV football, was on the staff of the Student Arts Magazine.  Part of that was because I worked full time all through my high school years.  After High School, I went to college and dropped out after a year and a half.

In my twenties, I began writing novels, though I never finished them.  They were mostly fan fiction.  I imagined that I had taken over the duties of Edgar Rice Burroughs, so I wrote sequels to John Carter, Tarzan, Pellucidar, and Carson of Venus.  I also crafted two new stories. I reasoned that if ERB were still alive, he’d come up with something new too.  The first was a fantasy about a reality just beyond our world reached through random doorways—kind of an edgier The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.  The other was Amathar—a story about a man transported to another world, with all the Burroughsian elements modernized.

Princess of Amathar

I met and married my wife, and soon, had a baby on the way and I realized I needed to do something with my life. I had a baby daughter, bought a house, and started back to college all in the same week.  After graduating, I became a teacher, and that and two children occupied all my time, though I wrote a few bits of flash fiction here and there—notably some little stories about a robot girlfriend.  After several years, I decided to get back to writing for real, so I dusted off Amathar and began working on it.  Over about five years, writing off and on, I finally finished the draft and went through many revisions.  I printed up four copies for fellow teachers to help revise and edit.  When I was done, I sent Princess of Amathar off to publishers.  After many, many rejection letters, I put it in a drawer and never thought about it.

One day, I was talking with a colleague and mentioned my story.  He suggested I publish it through Lulu, just for myself and friends.  So, in 2006, that’s exactly what I did.