A Word From the Madman: Or, How I Came to Build This Peculiar Website
Allow me to begin with a confession, since confessions are cheap and I have several to spare.For an embarrassing number of years, the first volume of my trilogy sat upon Amazon’s shelves much as a forgotten jar sits upon a scientist’s shelf, quietly, gathering dust, its contents slowly fermenting, attended to by no one in particular and least of all by its creator. I wrote it, I published it, and then (in a display of marketing genius that would make even Lefty proud) I promptly wandered off and did almost nothing about it whatsoever.If you are one of the rare and discerning souls who stumbled upon that book in those quiet years and chose to linger, then I owe you both my gratitude and an apology. You are precisely the reason I have at last roused myself to do this properly, which is to say, with a website, an intention, and the faint, flickering hope that I shall not bungle it.
On the Nature of the Thing
Were I obliged to describe the trilogy in a single breath (and publishers, I am told, are forever obliging authors to do exactly this), I should call it comedic science-fantasy. Though that label, like most labels, conveys only half the truth and none of the flavor.On its surface the tale is an adventure. There is an exiled blue-skinned elf named Lefty, a sardonic and spectacularly unlucky outlaw who has long since concluded that the universe bends over backwards expressly to complicate his life. There is the eccentric gnome who refuses to let him march to his doom alone: a scientist of some six hundred years, brilliant beyond reckoning, cheerful to the point of derangement, and quite possibly out of his mind. Together these two walk into a cursed range of volcanoes that no living creature has crossed in a hundred years, not so much as a gnat, as Lefty would be quick to remind you.That is the adventure. But beneath it lies a deeper and stranger country: a world of ancient wars and alien sorcerers, of flying cities and dead empires, of a whole laborious cosmology I have spent rather more of my life assembling than I care to admit in polite company. And winding through the whole affair, like steam through a lava field, is humor, specifically the variety in which our heroes work themselves into a fine lather of dread, brace for some unspeakable horror, and are then ambushed instead by something perfectly ridiculous.If you are the sort of reader who likes a sweeping fantasy that does not take itself too gravely, or, conversely, a comedy with genuine stakes and a genuine world standing behind it, then I suspect you have come to the right corner of the internet.
On the Question of “Why Now”
Three circumstances have conspired, as circumstances tend to do.The first volume has been out for some time, and against all odds it endures. The second is finished and sits ready to publish. The third wants only its final edits and formatting before it joins its siblings on the shelf. For the first time, the entire tale stands nearly assembled before me at once, and a trilogy, I have come to believe, deserves to be devoured as a trilogy, rather than discovered one orphaned volume at a time, with years of silence in between.I have also come to suspect that I was doing my readers a quiet disservice. If you finished the first book and wondered whether more was coming, you had no earthly means of finding out, no list to join, no notice to consult, no signal of any kind sent up from my hillside. That oversight, at long last, I intend to correct.
On What You Shall Find Here
This website is to serve as the home base for everything that follows.Here you will find word of the second book’s release and the third’s slow march toward completion. Here, too, I shall offer the occasional glimpse behind the curtain, into the history of this world, its peculiar calendar, the great war that raised the cursed mountains, and the various characters you have not yet had the misfortune to meet. And before long, you shall be able to read a sample of the tale yourself, the better to judge whether Lefty and his impossible gnome are the kind of company you wish to keep on a long journey.Should you desire to be among the first to learn when the second volume goes live, the single most useful thing you can do is to add your name to the email list. I promise no deluge, no clamor, no endless pestering, merely a word when there is genuinely something worth the telling.
A Final Confession
Lefty, as I have mentioned, holds that the universe bends over backwards to complicate his life. I will admit that the writing and publishing of this series has, on more than one occasion, given me cause to suspect the very same conspiracy at work against me. And yet, like Lefty, I press onward regardless, though unlike that perpetually doomed elf, I find myself, against all reason, rather optimistic about how this whole mad enterprise turns out.Thank you for being here at the beginning. The mountains are waiting, and we are, at last, going in together. Coming soon: a first look inside Chapter One, and an account of the strange history of the world in which it all unfolds.
Tales From The Mad Wizard 