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 Sorceress uses the play I had written earlier as the main plot point, and I make 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.

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 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.

Well, I got Covid.  This despite having been fully vaccinated.  Getting sick is just one of the many perks of being a teacher.  I’m about halfway through it now.  It’s no fun at all.  Lots of body aches and lack of energy.  Thankfully, I don’t have the respiratory problems that so many have faced (probably thanks to the vaccine).  The worst is the loss of smell.  Nothing smells and nothing tastes, so eating just isn’t that much fun anymore.  On the plus side, I’m losing some weight.  Anyway, enough whining.  Another week or so, and I’ll be back to normal.

Please take this pandemic seriously.  Wash your hands often.  Social distance.  Wear a mask.  Get Vaccinated.  Listen to your doctor.  Use common sense.

Chapter Five: In which I save the town and others do some fighting as well.

I didn’t have time to speak to Ellwood Cyrene and Ellwood Cyrene didn’t have time to speak to me either. Seconds after we had jointly dispatched the first giant, which is to say, killed him together, we were set upon by another.  In a great acrobatic leap and using this new giant’s bended knee as a platform, Ellwood launched into the air, stabbing the monster through the left eye.  Ellwood was always showing off like that.  It was revolting.  I was so revolted, that I turned and went off to find my own giant to kill.

I didn’t have to look far.  Another frost giant was ripping the roof off of a small house.  I jogged over to him, but he took no notice of me, being, by this time, engaged in looking down into the house like a decent fellow would have looked down into a stew pot, having just lifted the lid.  I thought about leaping up into an acrobatic display that would put to shame anything that Ellwood Cyrene could do.  I thought about it long and hard.  In the end though, it just seemed like a waste of energy, so I stabbed up into the giant’s manly bits.

I can’t say for certain just how manly the giant’s bits may have been.  Had they been exposed, I certainly wouldn’t have looked at them, and they were completely covered.  On the other hand, I feel certain that they were quite manly, which is to say, large, or giant, or even Brobdingnagian.  Even if they were proportionately very tiny, they still would have been very large because he was a very large giant.  He certainly reacted in a very manly way, which is to say, he grabbed his crotch and screamed girlishly before falling.

In my dispatching that giant, I did prove that though they may have had very large brains, since they had very large heads, the giants were not proportionately smart.  If I had been a giant, fighting, for the most part, beings that were less than waist-high to me, the one article of armor upon which I would have insisted would have been a cod piece, which is to say that piece of metal which guards the family jewels.  But while many, if not all, giants wore helmets, I cannot recall ever having seen a giant wearing a cod piece.  How often do you suppose a frost giant is hit upon the head, unless it be by another frost giant?

I looked around.  The battle seemed to be over, for while I could see four giants in addition to the two that I killed, I could see no living ones.

“You killed one frost giant,” said Ellwood Cyrene, “and I’m not sure he’s dead.”

“Of course he is dead,” said I.

“Look.  He’s moving.”

I walked over and stabbed the giant in the neck several times.

“Are you happy now?” I asked.

“You still only killed one giant,” said Ellwood.

“One and a half,” I corrected, “for I knee-capped that one before you stabbed him in the back.  That was rather a rather cowardly blow, if I may say so.”

“I had to stab him quickly in order to save your life.  At least I didn’t poke him in meat and two veg.”

I shook my head and looked around.  The town had been lucky.  In addition to myself and Ellwood Cyrene, a mercenary company known as The Bloody Dogs were camping at the edge of the village.  Evidently, they were as unhappy as I to be woken in the middle of the night by marauding giants.  They had taken down two and had apparently wounded another, for there was a trail of blood leading away to the north.

“At least I saved the mayor,” I said, pointing to the house from which that the giant had torn the roof.

“The mayor’s house is down the street,” said Ellwood.  “That home belongs to the local wet nurse.”

“Even better,” said I.  “A wet nurse is far more valuable to a town than a politician.”

“I’ve missed you, Eaglethorpe,” said Ellwood, eyes filling with tears, and lip trembling.  “It’s been eight years.”

“It’s been six years, eleven months, and sixteen days,” I said, “and some number of hours, minutes, and seconds.”

Chapter Three: In which I hear the story of Thurid Njärlbjörnsdöttir.

“So, my dear,” said I.  “How did you come to be sitting behind this tavern making pies, when I happen to know that your people live far to the north on the great icy glacier known as The Skagarack?”

“Aren’t all glaciers icy?” she queried.

“Not at all.  In the distant south there is a glacier they call Monoglyceride that is made entirely of oil.”

“If it’s oil, then why doesn’t it just flow away?”

“Oh, it does.  It just flows very slowly.  Not as slowly as ice, but slower than water.”

“That doesn’t sound possible,” she said.

“Many things that sound impossible, are actually possible,” said I.  “For instance, there is a giant animal in the fetid, stinking jungles of Ennedi called an elephant.”

“How giant is it?”

I looked at her.

“Well, not so giant that you would call it such, being quite large yourself, but it has five legs and horns growing out of the bottom of its head.”

“That doesn’t sound possible either.”  She climbed to her feet and stretched, before sitting back down.  “Now I don’t know what to believe.”

“All the world knows Eaglethorpe Buxton and all the world knows that he would never lie just to make a point.  But more to the point, or more to a different point, why are you here among humans instead of with your own kind?”

“You really want to hear my story?” she asked.

“If I don’t, then the title of this chapter makes no sense,” said I.

“Well, here is my tale, such as it is.  My clan lives in a fortress in one of the great rifts in The Skagarack.  We are just one of many clans of Frost Giants.  For as long as anyone can remember, the various clans would join together and go off to war.  We have always been naturally warlike.  We warred mostly with the Sky People and the Cloud Giants, but then they exterminated one another, and we had to go further afield to find enemies.  We went far to the west and attacked the lands of Catolan and Aerithraine, but the queen of that latter nation proved to be a match for our armies.”

“She’s a heinous bitch.”

I looked to see that Ethyl had returned from seeing to the horses.

“Did you see that the horses had oats and water?”

“Oats and water,” she said, rolling her eyes at me, “and ordered the stablemaster to give them both a good brushing.”

“I was just hearing the story of Thurid Njärlbjörnsdöttir,” said I.  “You can tell it’s an important story by looking at the top of the page.”

“Whatever,” said Ethyl.

She picked up a bucket of sand near the giant oven and turned it over, using it as a stool.

“Please continue, my dear,” I told the giantess.

“Well, with no enemies to war with, our people eventually went to war with each other.  My clan became embroiled in a bloody conflict with the Ice Peak Clan.  During one of the battles, we captured a dozen of their warriors.  Among them was the Ice Peak Jarl’s son.”

“Jarl?” I asked.

“It means king,” said Ethyl.

“I knew that, of course,” said I.  “I was just going to ask you if you knew it.  Thankfully you did, so we can continue the story without you having to be punished for ignorance.”

“You are a coxcomb,” said Ethyl.

“It is a term of affection,” I told Thurid Njärlbjörnsdöttir.  “Now, continue with the story.”

“We captured Gorm Birggersson, the son of the Ice Peak Jarl.  I was put in charge of bringing the prisoners their food.”

“I can see it already,” said I.  “The two of you met each day as you brought him his meals.  You talked.  You found out how much you shared in common.  Then you fell in love, a forbidden love, forever separated by the strife that separated your families.”

“No,” she said.  “That is not what happened.”

“Then what happened?”

“I brought him his food.  He told me that I was a horrible cook and that I was a fat ugly cow.  Naturally, I stabbed him.”

“Naturally,” said I.  “I hope he learned his lesson.”

“No,” she said.  “He just died.”

“This is the best story I’ve ever heard,” said Ethyl.

“It does have its charm,” I opined, “though it will need some major revisions to be suitable for the taprooms and alehouses of Lyrria.  I am thinking something along the lines that he fell in love with her so terribly that he committed suicide.  People like when someone kills himself over love.  Drunk people especially like it.”

“But he didn’t love me, and he didn’t kill himself,” said the giant woman.

“No, not yet,” said I.

“So, why the hell are you here?” asked my daughter.

“Ethyl!” I chastised her.  “Do not hurry a storyteller!”

I nodded toward the giantess.

“Killing a prisoner is against our laws,” she said.  “I was banished from my home.  And having nowhere else to go, I came south.  I had hunted as I traveled and took down several deer, so when I stopped here, I made a meat pie.  The townspeople were wary of me, but I shared some of the pie with them and they let me stay.  Master Turklewink offered me this job.  I have been baking pies for the last three days.  When I have enough money, I will build myself a cottage here.  There is plentiful wood in the forest, but I’ll need to buy some things to set up house.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” said Ethyl.  “That guy in there is named Turklewink?”

“That is his name.  I believe his first name is Claud.”

“Claud Turklewink!” snorted Ethyl.

“It is late,” I told Thurid Njärlbjörnsdöttir.  “We have a room here, and with any luck, we shall be able to eat another of your pies on the morrow.”

“Good night,” said the giantess.

“Come along, Ethyl.  Let us turn in for the night.”

“You go ahead,” she said.  “I’ve got to find the outhouse and drop a clod and a turklewink.”

Chapter Two: In which I ponder the theoretical limit of piesmiths.

I was very full and satisfied by the time I had finished my slice of pie, or at least by the time I had finished that portion of it that I had eaten.  I would wager I had eaten a good ten pounds of that slice, and despite the fact that she had claimed to be sick of pie, I would wager that Ethyl had eaten more than I had.  Even so, there was far more of that slice left than there was gone, which is to say, we ate less than half of it.

“My good fellow,” I called to the tavernkeeper.  “I did not see an inn when we rode into town.”

“We don’t get too many visitors up these parts,” he replied.  “We’ve got two rooms to let upstairs though.  For a sovereign, you can have both rooms, and I’ll have you a hot bath drawn.”

“That sounds excellent,” said I.  “I did see a stable.  Can you have a boy take our horses over?”

“That I can, sir.”

“Have him tell the stablemaster to give them oats,” said I.

“And a good brush down too,” added Ethyl.

“That is a good idea,” said I.

“And check their hooves,” added Ethyl.

“Also, a good idea.”

“Never mind,” she said.  “I don’t trust anyone else with the horses.  I’ll do it myself.”

She jumped to her feet and left the premises, which is to say walked out of the tavern.

“Girls and horses have a natural affinity,” I told the tavernkeeper.  “Now, about this piesmith…”

“What about the piesmith?” asked the man.

“That was a clever use of an ellipses in order to demonstrate that I want to meet your piesmith,” said I.

“Oh.  Right this way,” he said, leading me through the room and into the kitchen.

I had expected to find said piesmith in the kitchen, and not only that.  I had expected to find some amazingly large oven in which to bake an amazingly large pie.  That was not the case.  The oven was a normal sized one, incapable of baking the pie that I had seen and eaten part of.

“This way,” said the tavernkeeper, leading out the back door.

Behind the tavern was an oven.  It was round and made of fitted stones.  Sitting cross-legged beside it was a giant woman, or more precisely, a giantess.  She would have been a good fifteen feet tall, had she been standing up, and she was proportionately large all over.  Long blond hair hung past her shoulders, and she wore a jacket and pants made by the sewing together of dozens if not scores of thick furs of various colors.

“This is Thurid,” said the tavernkeeper.  “She made the pie.”

“Thurid,” I repeated.  “What a lovely name.  I must compliment you on it and your pie.”

“The choice of name was not mine,” she said.  “My father named me.  My full name is Thurid Njärlbjörnsdöttir.”

She had a lovely voice, though a trifle deep for a woman, and a trifle loud for a human being, which she wasn’t, because she was a giant.

“But I thank you for the compliment on my pie, though I’m a bit ashamed that it was so small.”

“It was a very fine pie,” said I.  “I would not say that it was too small, though I am generally of the opinion that most pies should be larger.”

The tavernkeeper turned to go back inside, but I stopped him.

“You should introduce me.”

“Oh, yes.  Thurid, may I introduce story-teller Eaglethorn Bucklenut.”

“That’s Eaglethorpe Buxton, with a thorp instead of a thorn and bux instead of a buckle and a ton instead of a nut.”

“Eaglethorpe Buxton,” she mused, as the tavernkeeper left us.  “I believe I have heard of Eaglethorpe Buxton.”

I liked the sound of my name when she said it, though truth be told, I generally liked the sound of my name, as long as it was pronounced correctly and not mixed with nuts and thorns and buckles.  When Thurid Njärlbjörnsdöttir said it, it sounded like it was being amplified by magic, or by being spoken by a really large woman.

“Perhaps you know me as the great and heroic adventurer,” I suggested.

“No,” she said.

“Then you must know me from one of my many wonderful tales, such as Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Mercenary Warrior Who Ought Not to be a Woman but Secretly Was.”

“I do not think so,” she said.

“How about Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Fury of the Monkey People?”

“No.”

“Eaglethorpe Buxton and the Fork of Destiny?”

“No.  I do not think I heard of you as a story-teller.”

“Well, some people know me as a playwright,” said I.

“I know,” she said.  “It was a human man named Eaglethorpe Buxton that caused a war between the Cloud Giants and the Sky People, which ended up destroying both their civilizations.”

“I remember it differently,” said I.

The Suncraft arrived in Honololu just before noon.  It took just over an hour to refuel and some of the passengers, Toby, Austin, Denise, and Penelope among them, went for a walk through the airport terminal to stretch their legs.  Christopher had fallen asleep just before they had landed, and nobody wanted to wake him up.  Astrid spent the time talking to the flight crew and going over the safety check with them.

“Look who I found,” said Penelope upon her return, pulling along a wiry young woman of medium height, with a strong nose, bright eyes, and massive waves of curly brown hair.

“Hello, Paige!” called Astrid, hurrying to give the newcomer a big hug.

“Hey, Boss.”

Paige Liebowitz looked much younger than her twenty-eight years.  She had been in charge of Maxxim world-wide construction projects for the past two years, but now, pending board approval, was the Senior Vice President of Construction, upon Astrid’s recommendation.

“Tell me you’re coming to Beijing with us.”

“I had to agree to come to stop Penny from whining about it,” said Paige, elbowing Penelope, whose sour face indicated that she was no fonder of Paige calling her by her childhood nickname than anyone else.

“Come on, boys!” called Paige, waving forward Austin and Toby, both weighed down with metal cargo chests.  “Here comes lunch, dinner, and snacks for the rest of this epic voyage.”

The five of them loaded the food into the plane’s kitchen area and were ready by the time the aircraft was prepared to return to the skies.

“Wait!  Denise came running across the tarmac, waving her hands.  “Don’t leave without me!”

“Where have you been?” asked Astrid, as the door was pulled closed and the two of them maneuvered toward their seats.  

Denise pointed to her face.  The tiny gold ring that normally hung from the center of her nose, just above her full upper lip, had been replaced by a ring, that while no larger, featured a tiny round coral bead in the middle.  It definitely made the jewelry more noticeable.

Astrid pulled out her phone and began typing.

“What are you doing?” asked Denise.

“I’m texting your brother that this wasn’t my fault.”

“No, you would never do anything as dangerous as help me pick out jewelry,” said Denise.  “You’re all about throwing me into shark infested waters or killing me in a…”

She stopped and looked like she was biting her tongue.

“What?” said Astrid.

“I was going to say killing me in a plane crash, but I don’t want to anger the aircraft gods.”“Good thinking,” said Astrid.

“You’re going steady?” said Denise with a frown, while looking around the Brown-Richards back yard.  “Is this the 1940s?  Have we gone back in time?  I distinctly remember telling you that I didn’t want to be part of your time travel experiments.”

She was seated, facing Astrid, as both relaxed in the family’s bubbling hot tub. “There’s no such thing as time travel,” said Astrid, “and quit making fun of us.  I think it’s sweet that he wanted to go steady.”

“Yeah, sweet like that artificial sugar substitute that makes you break out in hives.  We’re young, beautiful women and we should be out playing the field.  We should be serial dating, and not granola either but some cereal with lots of real sugar, that rots your teeth and makes you bounce off the walls like a hyperactive puppy.”

“Sometimes I wonder if even you know what you’re talking about,” said Astrid.

“I’m talking about dating.”

“But you’re dating Christopher.”

“That’s right; I am,” said Denise, “right up until I see somebody I want to date more.  And then I date that guy, unless I find out he’s not as good as Christopher and then I go back to dating him.”

“But you always go back to Christopher.”

“That’s because they never turn out to be better,” Denise grumbled.

“Doesn’t it bother you if he goes out with someone else too?” asked Astrid.

“No.  He can date Alicia all he wants… if he likes big butts and stupid faces.”

“Well, as long as you don’t mind,” said the girl inventor.

At that moment, Astrid’s phone rang from where her pants were draped over a patio chair.  She answered using her Maxxim Carpe wrist computer.

“Hello?”

“Astrid?  Hi.  It’s Michelle Pennington.  I hope you don’t mind me calling.  I got your number from Dr. Born.”

“No problem.  What’s up?”

“Arthur and I were going over our experiments and we think we have a winner.”

Astrid and the Pennington twins had, weeks earlier, set up an experiment to test a dozen compounds of Astridium to see which, if any, might absorb carbon from the air.

“You’re looking over the results now?  At school?  It’s Sunday.”

“It’s all right,” said Michelle.  “Dr. Born is with us, and Mrs. Frost is somewhere in the building.”

“Mrs. Frost,” grumbled Denise, evidently still upset about the aborted assault on her nose ring.“All right,” said Astrid.  “We can go over the results in class tomorrow and if it works out, we should start designing some kind of prototype device to use the product.”