Weighing in at 417 ready-pages in its print incarnation, this complete tale has a story of its own. Initially banged out on a tiny iBook G3 700 in the year 2003 over a two-week window starting with spring break, this novel has NOT had an easy adventure. Submitted three times to various slush piles, cut apart into four pieces and formatted for print once as a sequence of YA Novellas only to have the publisher go under, the magazine die. And lastly, every single ‘single quote’ was mangled in a software glitch.
A Word Broken
Ya. Some unnamed ancient version of the most popular document editing software on the planet ate my apostrophes! On its way through wrecking the work, all italicized or underlined text prepared for the typesetters was deleted. Half the line breaks were trashed, and to add insult to injury, “definitely” was replaced with “defiantly“. Everywhere.
For half a decade this novel bounced between hands and chilled in stacks. It was once selected as the origin material for a videogame and green-lit by investors to begin mocking up art and writing code. Oh, did I also mention it was lost on an encrypted storage device too?
I gave up and set the work aside to stew in the backlog. And there it sat, broken, abandoned, full of misdelivered autocorrections and overly helpful smart quote glitches. Until this winter.
Forged in Time
Thawed from its vault, the words, and friends behind them came out in the light. I was reunited with Janis, Tirny, Aailo and Kris. Reminded of the fate I had crafted for them, the struggle to understand what a soul meant, how something so vital was controlled. Or destroyed. And I was reminded of the core reason why I wrote those characters into a dark bind. Mistakes.
Mistakes are made all the time. Each day, people die in this world who might not have had to. Think on that. Think about the number of deaths in hospitals, on the roads, in war. How many of that staggering number were from mistakes? How many were avoidable?
Watch your surroundings. Question everything from the car driving past you in a snow storm to the medications your mom’s nurse sets out on the table. Be vigilant. This novel is dedicated to those who catch mistakes daily, and to the memory of loved ones lost due to errors. We need more vigilance, we pray for less needless suffering.
In a few short days, The Last Necromancer has risen multiple times to the top 100s in Dragons & Mythical Creatures Fantasy (Kindle Store) and is on path to cross the line into the top 50 this weekend!
By the way… I found book 2, and it’s a lot farther along than I remember.
One year from today, bring your guild! I’ll meet you at the gates for Tirny’s continued journey into the depths of knowledge hidden by the Mages Guild, and the harrowing history that created the ancient artifact called The Burden of Casters.