Эрик дель Карло — об авторе

create it myself.

I started selling short fiction to small press magazines in my early twenties. The stories were earnest, arguably a bit literarily overwrought, but were genuine expressions of the kind of emotional work I wanted to produce. I probably most enjoyed selling to late lamented Figment magazine, whose editors Barb and J. C. Hendee have gone on to a successful joint writing career. I was swinging blind with my work, writing absolutely whatever I felt like, following any mood or impulse. It was hit or miss, sale or rejection, but the sheer giddy joy of that process was very valuable to me.

I moved fairly often. Without any higher education or anything resembling marketable job skills, beyond a willingness to submit to bottom-rung clerking gigs, I was free to go wherever I liked. I lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico; twice in New Orleans; spent time in the U.K.'s London. I wrote throughout, but it hardly qualified as a career. During my second stint in New Orleans, living in the fabled French Quarter and again eking out a just-above-the-poverty-line existence, I met Robert Asprin. My soon to be wife, Samala Ray, brokered the encounter. Asprin frequented a few of the Quarter's overabundance of drinking establishments; Sam had bumped into him one night. I knew Asprin as a name writer of science fiction and fantasy, though I'd never read his work. Neither had I been to many conventions, and so had never come in contact with anyone famous in the field. Bob Asprin was--this is predictable, if you're familiar with his humorous fiction--a funny guy, with jokes aplenty to put anyone at ease who might be a bit starstruck to find himself sitting on a barstool adjacent to someone who had achieved fame when I was still banging out awkward disjointed fiction on a manual typewriter in grade school. A friendship formed, and collaboration loomed, and we produced two novels of non-humorous fantasy, the Wartorn books. When Bob died, my wife and I had long since fled New Orleans, getting out a day in front of Hurricane Katrina. I had only been back once, to retrieve what we'd left behind in our apartment. I saw Asprin then; and two and a half years later he was dead. I had gotten a chance to publish on a greater scale than I ever had before. I saw my own name rendered in Cyrillic on the covers of the Russian editions of the Wartorn novels. I will always be grateful to Robert Asprin for those experiences.

Now I live in California again, in wine country, in the quiet and predictability of a small town. I don't work day jobs anymore. I do what I've wanted to do since sometime around the age of seven: I write, I write, and I write; and the words do not stop.