Speaking of googling one's own name, whenever I google mine, up pops a myriad of sites peddling the three books I wrote 30 years ago. SNOWCASTLES seems to be all over the place, ICETOWERS is much less frequent (which might be frustrating, since it is the sequel to SNOWCASTLES) and STAR AXE, the first book, seems to be in a plethora of places, also.

My sister Susan, who is geophysicist and was traveling all over the world at the time, found my books in places like England, New Zealand, and the outermost island of the Aleutian Islands.

The English editions of SNOWCASTLES, published by a different publisher apparently, seem to be ubiquitous. Interesting, I only ever received the advances on these books and I've always wondered if royalties from England were exempt. Not that I think it probably sold will enough to get royalties....

Comments and reviews are pretty disparaging, which used to bother me but doesn't seem to anymore. Sword and Sorcery isn't the most esteemed of genres, even among nerds. Besides, I feel as though I got to be a much better writer later on, but by the time I wrote my sixth and seventh novels, the publishers didn't seem much interested in what I was writing, and I couldn't see my way to not writing the novels the way I wanted.

Besides, by then the glamour of writing had worn off. The marketing aspects of the business became too much. And when I bought Pegasus, my creative energy was just out and out diverted.

But I'm beginning to realize that these books are going to be floating around maybe a hundred years from now, little tidbits of cultural flotsam. They have a couple of nice covers by an artist named Romas, and a not so nice cover to the third book by a more famous artist named Carl Lundgren. (I think they were gearing up for a real push on ICETOWERS. They sent me samples of an embossed cover, hired a name artist. But by the time the book was published, they apparently backed off.)

It doesn't even matter if they are good or bad, just that they were published, that they exist. Without the internet, they would probably be lost. But the internet has probably stirred up all kinds of dusty backrooms of used bookstores and given new life to out-of-print titles.