Author's Afterword
There is some confusion about my two fantasy novels Once a Hero and Talion: Revenant. I hope this afterword can clear the problem up. At conventions and in articles I have mentioned that my first fantasy novel was too long to be published as a first novel—that is, as a first novel by an author with no reputation as a writer and no commercial track record. After six years and eleven novels, Bantam Books published Once a Hero and a number of people assumed OAH was the book to which I referred.
It was not. Once a Hero was my first published fantasy novel.
Talion: Revenant was my first novel and first fantasy novel. It was completed in 1986 and while the editors who read it liked it, at 175,000 words it was seen as being too long to come out from an unknown author. Luckily for me the editors who read it thought highly enough of it to give me other work—my BattleTech novels from FASA Corp.—and, through Janna Silverstein, Bantam hired me to write Once a Hero and the best-selling Star Wars® X-wing series.
The text of Talion: Revenant is ninety-nine percent the same in this edition as it was in 1986. The changes my editor, Anne Lesley Groell, asked me to make in the manuscript were fairly cosmetic—adding that last bit of polish to it before it saw print. I also caught two errors that had lurked in the manuscript since 1986. I'm not sure I could write this same story today, being older and hopefully a bit wiser, but I'm very proud to have written it. I like the story as much now as I did when I wrote it and I'm happy people are finally going to get to read it.
About the Author
Michael A. Stackpole is an award-winning game and computer game designer who realizes that "About the Author" pieces tend to add context to a work, but he's not certain how valid that is concerning a work of fiction. For example, how does the fact that he was born on the same day as Caroline Kennedy influence the content of this novel? Perhaps more on point is his history degree from the University of Vermont. Directly applicable was his reading of Stephen Howarth's history of the Knights Templar, which planted the seed for the creation of the Talions. The development of the Shattered Empire comes out of his years spent working on fantasy worlds within the roleplaying game industry.
Talion: Revenant is Mike's twentieth published novel since 1988. He writes approximately three novels a year. That's a pace that is hard to keep up, but it also prevents boredom. If he's bored with a project, he assumes the readers will be too, and since his goal is to entertain, boring is not good.
In his spare time he plays indoor soccer, watches too much television and, recently, has taken to riding a bicycle for exercise. This has lead to the discovery that hills are steeper when you're going up them, unless your brakes aren't working, in which case the opposite is true.
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