THE DRAGON LORD was my first novel. There was a heroic fantasy boom in the latter ’70s. andy offutt (as he then styled himself) had a contract with Zebra Books to write novels about the Robert E. Howard character Cormac mac Art. Because andy found plotting difficult, in 1977 he asked me and at least one other newbie writer to plot novels for him. No terms were discussed, but I expected to get a few hundred dollars (and no credit).
1984 hardcover dust jacket; Cover art: Michael Whelan
BIRDS OF PREY was the first novel I tried to write. It was a very long time before I succeeded, but I think in this case the wait was worth it.
While I was still in law school I got and read the two-volume Teubner (Latin text only) edition of the so-called Scriptores Historiae Augustae, the Augustan Histories. This is a collection of lives of the later emperors (Hadrian through Numerian), purportedly by many contemporary authors but probably by one man of much later (5th century?) date with political axes to grind. While the SHA is in many respects a fictional text, it does incorporate material from books that haven’t survived–and is, for my purposes as a writer, very evocative. continue reading…