First Draft to Published

  1.  The Canker Death is my first full-length novel.  It's an adventure story about a reclusive, cynical computer geek who finds that one of his own servers has been cracked late one night and gets far more than he bargained for when he decides to track down the perpetrator.  What his search uncovers thrusts him, unaware, into a mad shifting between worlds, time and alien minds 2.  The Canker Death is not easy to classify.  I realize that many authors say this of their novels.  I only started saying so after my literary agent, editor, and, later, my readers all told me so.  Oddly enough, I wrote the book with both the literary and the sci-fi, fantasy audiences in mind, which is a bit of a strange mix.  I've been happily surprised to find that people with many different reading preferences have enjoyed the book.  If I were to really narrow it down, I'd say that science fantasy is the closest classification – sort of like Star Wars, w...

There were a number of inspirations for my debut novel, The Canker Death .  On the factual plane, the inspiration came from the fact that an FTP server I was running on one of the old Unix systems in my basement got hacked.  I have a collection of unusual computers that run esoteric operating systems.  Where most people's computer knowledge ends is where mine begins.  This fact alone gave me the idea for a main character who was based quite a bit on various facets of people I know – computer geeks, that is.  But, I didn't want to write a novel that was only tailored for sci-fi lovers.  I wanted to write something that was accessible to everyone, so I worked hard to make sure that the technical stuff was accurate and true, but that understanding it in any detail was not at all required for enjoying the novel.  Additionally, as I was getting started, I made a number of decisions about where the book was going to go.  I had been a high school English...