Introduction

Welcome to my latest experiment. I've been publishing non-fiction since 2002, mostly dealing with my crazy ideas about video games and MMOG's. From my days at Waterthread.org and into my time at f13.net, I have published nothing but opinion pieces, some almost newsy without any real journalistic intent. My fiction has remained my own. I've decided it's time to change that.

My first novel began as a germ of an idea for a role-playing game, way back in the summer of 1994. The game went through a few alpha tests with friends, then fell apart with the revelation that I am really abysmal with ratios and odds math, something which is highly desirable when designing a dice-rolling based system. But the story, the story hung around, appearing like a polite yet uninvited guest many times over the years. I can blame my own laziness, or my obsession with Everquest for not having written the thing during the 90's. But something about the horrors of 9/11, or perhaps the passing of my 30th birthday in 2001, something about that convergence of events kicked my mind's internal ass into gear. I finally began to put fingers to keys and words to screen, and thus began the first novel I would complete since I was fifteen. That novel I don't count in my list of written novels. It was terrible, an adolescent rewriting of the plot of Christine with a Greek goddess as the seductive car in question. Yes, it really was that bad. I was fifteen, for fuck's sake, what the hell did I know about stupid?

With the resignation of my guild leadership in February 2002, I dedicated myself to finishing the novel. It took quite a while, but I finally did it. I finally finished that novel. A number of edits later, it was shipped off to publishers and agents, beginning in 2005. Almost three years later, it still remains unpublished. I've since edited it down for length, splitting the original book into two books as it was quite a weighty volume for a first novel. It had always been meant to be part of a series, with a very natural split in the middle, so the surgery required was bearable.

That isn't this novel. This novel is something related to that novel, in fact it's a prequel, though it will now be published before its predecessor so I suppose it really won't be a prequel after all. This novel will share some minor characters with that novel, as well as sharing the same world. The story's will be related, but only indirectly. They will all exist in the series I call Clockwork Engine.

The plan is to offer this novel one chapter at a time, released every two weeks. The best way to know when a new chapter is available is to subscribe to the feed, found to the right of the main column. Along the way, there will be other supplementary items, to be found under the GlobalPedia tag. These will go towards fleshing out the world and explaining some of the things that may be mentioned in the main body of text. I hope to release those within the weeks between chapters. And if my usual laziness cripples me in the midst of this, I hope the regular readers (if there are any) will ride my ass like an alien facehugger.

Tomorrow afternoon, Jan. 31st, will see the release of Chapter 1 of Under the Amoral Bridge. Be gentle.