Thoughts on My Books 1: Digital Knight

I posted this series of posts on my FB a bit ago, but it occurred to me that they would be perfect as a series of public posts on my Patreon as well, especially knowing how Facebook DOESN'T show my posts to everyone anyway. They are thoughts on my books, in order of publication. I hope you find them interesting.

My first published novel was Digital Knight, later reissued as Paradigms Lost (see later for the details). 

I have often described this book as "MacGyver meets the X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer". The main character, Jason Wood, is an ordinary guy with no special powers who keeps running into supernatural problems and having to deal with them through improvisation and quick wits. 

The ideas that became DK/PL are some of the earliest in my published fiction, dating to the mid-70s. The "novel" is something of a fixup, consisting of four main stories/adventures connected with a couple of interludes/minor adventures. These adventures are all based around a sort of "trick" -- that is, a way in which the non-powered, very mundane Jason defeats a very supernatural/superhuman threat -- and originally I had only three such "tricks" in mind. As an example, the first was "Jason defeats the vampire by trapping it in a tanning booth". 

I wrote the original three stories – “Gone in a Flash”, “Photo Finish”, and “Viewed in a Harsh Light” -- separately, the first one initially in the mid-80s, the last one in the early 90s. None were published initially -- I had multiple rejections, all of which amounted to "It's good but we don't publish stories this long" (all of them are novella length). Eventually, the original three stories were published by Hyperbooks, an early ebook retailer, as MORGANTOWN: The Jason Wood Files. 

Some years later, however, Baen Books published Digital Knight (following my getting in a flame war with Eric Flint -- I've told that story elsewhere); to get DK to publishable length, I'd added two bridge sections (“Lawyers, Ghouls, and Mummies” and “Live and Let Spy”) and one new adventure (“Mirror Image”).

In the following years, I wrote two more Jason adventures: “Shadow of Fear” and “Trial Run”, and when Digital Knight went out of print and the rights reverted, I decided to assemble them into a single book with the title I'd originally wanted: Paradigms Lost, since the whole book consists of Jason's worldview (paradigm) being continuously destroyed and rebuilt. 

To my surprise, Baen was willing to do the reprint version themselves, which was gratifying, and so the newest and current version of Jason's adventures is Paradigms Lost, discussed in a separate post later. 

In terms of where this sits in respect to my other work, DK/PL is sort of the NEXUS of all the work in my main original universe (which I've been building since about 1977). Jason, unbeknownst to him, is not just a weirdness magnet but also a sort of primary intersection point for everything significant in the universe. He and his immediate circle have direct connections to the world of magic, Zarathan, and thus to my epic fantasy trilogy The Balanced Sword (Phoenix Rising, Phoenix in Shadow, and Phoenix Ascendant), to the space opera trilogy Demons of the Past, and even to my superhero novel Legend, all of which are in that same universe (as is Godswar, the dualogy I'm currently working on, and The Spirit Warriors, a trilogy following the five young people encountered in the Phoenix books)). 

I do plan on doing more with Jason, and in fact I already have one other adventure (“Bait and Switch”) completed, which was given E-publication on Baen's site a few years ago. 

Writing-wise, even though I did some editing and cleanup when I converted DK into PL, the early parts of Paradigms Lost are still clearly earlier writing work. I think it still works, but had I been writing them today they'd probably be somewhat different. But that is a discussion for another day and article. The link at the beginning of this article connects to the Baen Free Library version of the original Digital Knight.

Jason's "voice" comes somewhat from Archie Goodwin, but influenced also by modern culture in such a way that he's less sarcastic and more geeky. Conceptually, he's an information and computer expert who ends up in a Kolchak position a lot of the time. His single greatest strength for purposes of his adventures, though, is his ability to be absolutely terrified but still think quickly, rationally, and accurately. 

If you've never read this one, it's a good urban fantasy intro to my writing, and as it's my earliest, any of my later stuff will probably read more smoothly, so if you like it, you'll probably enjoy the rest.