With great delight and astonishment, I discovered several reviews of the early Fire-Rider books have gone online, and…a miracle!! They’re POSITIVE! Somebody, somewhere likes this crazy thing.

Amazing.

Yet maybe not so amazing: Fire-Rider was a labor of love. I wrote it during a time when I was exceptionally unhappy with my job. It created a kind of escape hatch into a fully imagined world with fully imagined characters, none of whom was as savage or as deadly as a band of crazed, demoralized academics. Several of the novel’s people — notably Kay, Tavi, Fallon, and Jag Bova — are what used to be called “three-dimensional characters”: figures whose entire, highly detailed lives dwell in the imagination of their writerly creator.

The novel was rewritten at least four times from beginning to end. Between the revisions and the nagging interference from the real world, it took about ten years to put the thing in its present shape.

The book is huge. Truly huge: War and Peace. A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. Oh heck…maybe even both of them thrown in together. If it were printed in a standard trade-book format, it would run well over 500 pages, maybe over 600.

Each of the installments contains several chapters, often about a half-dozen. Average length was around 12,000 words, as I recall. Some are much longer.

So, when I learned that people are serializing novels on Amazon, I thought this is the answer! Like Charles Dickens publishing his dark Victorian novels as newspaper serials, I could dispense Fire-Rider in civilized, READABLE chunks. Readers would not choke or expire from thirst or exhaustion trying to plow through the thing. They could proceed at their preferred pace, and if they decided it didn’t enchant them, they wouldn’t have to buy the whole magnum opus.

But I don’t think even I realized exactly what that meant: EIGHTEEN SERIAL INSTALLMENTS.

This week I decided to accelerate publication of the last four bookoids, so that we could move on to the Racy Books for Racy Readers. We have enough inventory to cover two months, with more incoming.

The Racy Books, it develops, are a great deal of fun to write. All of us here at Camptown Races Press (which, like Plain & Simple Press, is an imprint of The Copyeditor’s Desk, Inc.) hope our Racy Readers find them just as much fun to read.

So, in double celebration of the up-beat reviews and the achievement of mounting all 18 books online, Plain & Simple press is DROPPING THE PRICE ON THE FIRST THREE VOLUMES OF FIRE-RIDER, from $2.99 apiece to $.99. That’s a sixty-six percent price cut!

So, run on over to Amazon, dear readers, and grab the first three volumes while the grabbin’s good:

Book I: A Gift for the Kubna
Book II: The Spoils of War
Book III: The Journey Begins