Once upon a time, I wrote a book that wasn’t published. (And I mean only once: this has never happened to any other of my books, before or since.) Now, of course, I sold it twice, but — Well, wait a moment, I’m getting ahead of myself.
The book had its genesis in the 1980’s when, with friends, I went to George Scithers’ place in Philadelphia for a fannish gathering. (Was it a PSFS meeting? I can’t recall.) Among various folks there was a young cover artist named Daniel Horne. He was showing George some of his paintings. One of them in particular got my attention — a painting of a young woman on a creature like a horse, but with stag’s horns, against a snowy, mountainous background.
Something about that painting got under my skin and started me wondering just who that girl was, and why she looked so haunted. I went home that evening slightly haunted myself, and the subject burrowed down into my brain and lay there gestating for a good while as other things went on. A story-editing job here, a bunch of novels there, a marriage, a relocation… 
Life did what it does, and the story continued to develop. Finally it assembled itself around a deep-seated passion for the Alpine regions and a fascination with European history, and became a fantasy novel which was bought in the early 1990’s by Transworld UK (that’s Corgi, as well as other imprints). At that time Corgi was bringing out the new UK editions of the Door books, as well as the “Young Wizards” novels: they thought they’d publish this one too, the beginning of a series called “The Raetian Tales”. This first book’s title was A Wind from the South.
Along the way, though, my stalwart editors, Mark and Julia Smith, left Corgi to concentrate on their own writing careers: and not long after that, the publisher decided to change its direction, as others have before, and let many of its “midlist” writers slide, or returned the rights for their books to them without publishing. A Wind from the South was one that suffered this fate.
Naturally the book was offered to other publishers over time, but none of them went for it — the reason I heard several times was that it was “too Swiss.” Uh…okay: much of the book’s action being based in that part of the world, this was hard to rebut. Then, a few years ago, the publishers Heyne Verlag in Germany acquired Wind. I was charmed by the idea that for the first time, one of my books would be having its first printing in a foreign language. But shortly Heyne itself was acquired by a conglomerate which downscaled its SF line (Peter was a victim of this as well: they were preparing to publish his “Clan Wars” books at the same time), and once again Wind was returned to me unpublished. In both cases I got to keep the money…but there comes a point, for a writer, where that doesn’t count. What counts is the book itself in people’s hands.
Between Corgi and Heyne, while the book’s rights were mine to use as I liked, I made an attempt to self-publish it. It didn’t work out terribly well: the technology (mostly my home laser printer, and comb-binding) wasn’t up to it, and didn’t satisfy. But times have changed, and technology definitely has. Things are now possible which I wouldn’t have dared dream of ten years ago, or even five. So —
In September 2004, under the “Badfort Press” imprint, the Owl Springs Partnership will be publishing Raetian Tales 1: A Wind from the South as a large-format, perfect-bound “trade” paperback (and possibly as an e-book as well) via Lulu.com — and featuring Daniel Horne’s lovely cover, which he has graciously given permission for us to use. The book will be available via online retailers such as Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, and will also be available for order via chains and local bookstores. Additionally, if we can swing the space and resources, we’ll launch the book officially at Noreascon Four.
As soon as we have the book’s ISBN, I’ll publish it here.
Let’s see how this goes…
