You can't learn about being a professional writer in school. Being an author is a vastly better job than being a school teacher, and any school teacher who could do it would promptly quit his job. You've either got to teach yourself, or you've got to join up with a bunch of serious wannabees and teach each other.

Ann Tonsor Zeddies was a prominent member of the group, and easily the best poet among us. Her book 'Deathgift' was the second book a member published.

Other people included Laura Harding, who is now doing exhibitions of her lovely paintings. Her daughter Halina wrote a book, but what with completing medical school, getting married and unmarried a few times, raising a gaggle of kids, moving to Hawaii and back and so on, I don't think that she ever got around to sending it out to the publishers.

There were some interesting people at the Writer's Club. Guy Snyder had one book published, with five more that he had written later but couldn't sell. Ted Reynolds had published his first S-F short story when he was twelve, but never a novel.

Once, in the course of conversation, somebody said that the sound of an H-Bomb going off must be very loud. Ted said that the only time that he'd seen one explode, he couldn't hear a thing! On questioning him about this remarkable statement, it evolved that Ted's father had been one of the first nuclear protesters. They were in a sailboat off Bikini Island when the government set off the first big one.

Interesting people.

But after a few club meetings, I became convinced that I could write better than they could, so I dusted off my typewriter to prove it.

I'd become interested in Medieval Technology. I started toying with writing something along the lines of "A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court" or "Lest Darkness Fall", but with accurate technology . If there are any new plots in the world, I've never seen one.

When I read some of the first bits to the group, Charles Oliver slammed it. He said that my narrator was nothing more or less than Leo Frankowski, and he didn't see how anyone could call that real writing.

Miffed, I went home and outlined a character who was absolutely NOT me. I'm a fat, unatheletic person. Conrad became tall and muscular. I'm a dyed in the Kevlar capitalist, so Conrad became a socialist. I'm an Atheist, so Conrad became a devout Catholic. I hated my mother, so he was still living happily with his at twenty-eight. And so on.

Now, many fans I meet are saddened to find that I am not Conrad. Go figure.

The book came along fairly smoothly, until I noticed that while I had plotted it out to cover a ten year long period, I was only six months into it and had four hundred pages of manuscript in the stack. Writing "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" wasn't in my game plan.

So, I wrote "Book One" on the title page, slapped on a hurried ending, and shipped it. It bounced, rejected.

I shipped it again and it bounced again.

I shipped it eight times, with depressing results. The one from Avon Books was particularly nasty. I started to miss club meetings, and was beginning to think that fishing would make a nice hobby. Then

Owen Lock dug my manuscript out of the Del-Rey slush pile, and liked what he read. Owen was good at that. He was the one who had fished Jim Hogan's first book out of that same pile a year before. (If you haven't read "Inherit The Stars", you've been missing something wonderful.)

I told Owen that I'd been planning a trilogy, and he liked the idea, asking me to write up an outline. I wrote a fifty page letter doing just that, but discovered that the story broke naturally into four parts not three.

He said that this was fine, and sent me a contract, the first one I'd ever seen, for four books and $20,000.00 in advance. It was the first money I'd ever made with my writing after twelve years of trying.

Anyway, the story is about an engineer who, in 1986, gets drunk and falls asleep in a time machine. He wakes up in 13th century Poland, nine years before the Mongols are due to invade and kill everybody.

Thus, the fun starts. Oh, yes. Throughout this series, I deliberately used elements of fairy tales and ancient legends. These things have worked their way into our mythos, and into our souls. Before too many pages in, Conrad acquires a magic (or very high-tech) sword, a magic horse, and a Fairy (heterosexual) Godfather.

Enjoy.