The Fiddleback Trilogy Omnibus

In between cleaning and baking for Thanksgiving, I managed to finish off and upload The Fiddleback Trilogy Omnibus to my webstore. The Omnibus contains all three of the novels that I wrote for Game Designer’s Workshop back in the early 90s. Individually they sell for $5 as ebooks, but I’ve collected the three of them here for $12.

Writing these books was interesting. Frank Chadwick of GDW approached me about doing a single novel, A Gathering Evil. Loren Wiseman, another friend from GDW, had said, “Releasing a new roleplaying game without a novel just can’t be done these days.” GDW sent me the basic material they had, since the game was still in development, and I got the okay to set it in Phoenix and write in first person—both of which would let me do the job quickly enough to meet their deadline.

I was about halfway through AGE when Frank called. He started dancing around the subject of whether or not the bad guy, Fiddleback, was going to die at the end of the novel. I said, “You want to know if he survives so we can do a sequel.” Frank replied in the affirmative, so Evil Ascending got added into the contract. And later, after AGE had been turned in, Frank called and suggested we just make the whole thing a trilogy.

Writing that third book, Evil Triumphant, turned out to be an interesting challenge. In each book the threat to Earth escalated. In this third volume, I needed another Dark Lord to make a double- or triple- or quadruple-cross work. I’d made up a couple Dark Lord names for color and tossed them into EA, then had to make one of them a real character. It just so happened, completely by chance, that I’d used a detail in the description of a character in the first novel, which served as a link to this Dark Lord in the last novel. It’s that sort of serendipity that makes writing a lot of fun.

I also recall John C. Bunnell, on the old GEnie network, making a comment to the effect of “It’s impossible to have a book like this live up to the title Evil Triumphant.” His thought was that if evil really did win, then the book wouldn’t be a heroic adventure story. If evil didn’t win, then the book couldn’t live up to the title. (I’d chosen the title because I’d always liked the novel, Tarzan Triumphant.)That got me thinking and, again through luck, the solution to allowing the title to be true, and the book to be true to its genre made itself apparent.

These books have a bunch of inside jokes about Arizona and politics or events back in the 1980s. Charles Goyette, the radio host mentioned in Evil Triumphant, is still on the air here. Phoenix isn’t covered over with solar panels yet, but there are many more clusters of high-rises now than there were then. And probably the funniest bit about Evil Triumphant is that it saw print before the Roger Zelazny novel A Night in the Lonesome October came out. I’d been at a convention in Salt Lake City and heard Roger read great chunks of the novel aloud. I was able to write it in to ET and was able to hand him the book only four months later, which tickled him no end. (That reminds me of another Zelazny story that perhaps I’ll relate at a later date.)

In addition to the epub version of the trilogy, I’ve included the mobi file for Kindle readers in this package. Amazon’s pricing structure is such that I get penalized for giving its customers a price break. Amazon doesn’t like any book to be priced over $9.99, so any book priced higher than that returns 35% to the author. Selling each book individually nets me 70% of $15, which beats the heck out of 35% of $12. So, if Kindle Users buy from my store, they get a break, I make more, and we’re all happy.

Though I wrote these books almost two decades ago, I’m still pleased with them. There’s a lot of action, and wonderful twists and turns in the plot. I managed to work some great lines in, and there are characters I’d still like to use in stories. They are great fun and I am confident you’ll enjoy them.

To purchase The Fiddleback Trilogy Omnibus, click on the link and go to my store.