I often find myself being disparaged as a has-been. It annoys me to have the accomplishments of a life time reduced like that. As if I had never done them.

I recovered from a fifteen year writer's block on fiction and found the world of publishing had changed. I also found that I no longer fit into it -- at least where the majors are concerned.

It is a given that things change.

It is also a given that we get old.

I will be 55 in October, ten days before Halloween (which is the day I prefer to celebrate my birthday). I still have all the drive that I had in my youth, but I no longer have the kind of energy I had then. Between the post polio syndrome and the fact that I have cataracts, it gets harder to push like I used to.

I've been told that what keeps me out of the majors is not the quality of my work, but my obsessions with relevance. I can't write simple tales of hidden princes and magic swords. I put all the nitty gritty of life into my stories. I consider that honesty.

I'm not hurt by those statements about my being a has-been at this point, but it annoys the hell out of me. It's rather like having a yapping chihuahua follow you down the street. At some point you just want to kick the holy hell out of the little beast.

My layout man for Daverana and Flashing Swords has been in and out of hospital for the past few months. Most of it is due to the need to repair the repairs they did on him following his wounding during Operation Desert Storm.

We have two books available from Daverana at this point, and will soon have more.