The book you hold in your hand began as a short story written in late spring or early summer of 1980 or 81. I remember the time of year because I’d used my income tax refund to take a creative writing class offered by the University of Georgia’s adult education program.  (I'd moved from Young Harris where I’d been getting my feet wet in the “real world,” back to Athens, Georgia, where I’d begun dating a certain young lady.) And I remember taking off a week in August to hibernate and write like a mad man for about a week, crouched over the typewriter in a little attic bedroom. In that time I produced what probably amounts to about half the text of the current novel.

 “I also remember how that genesis story – basically David in the barn loft being  deviled by his kid brother, and the first encounter with the Sidhe – all but wrote itself, and changed very little from draft to draft, with the obvious addition of the first “Lookout Rock” scene.  Still, David’s dialog with Little Billy about the funeral procession and the hearse is almost exactly the same as when I first wrote it.

“And I remember that the darned thing wouldn’t leave me alone, and that I rewrote it three times before I ever sent it to a publisher.  Each time it got longer, and each time I trimmed the timeline further.  In the original version, the story took place over an entire year, with one chapter per month – which was a format that, while it gave me some structure on which to hang visuals and “atmospheric effects”(things like autumn leaves and snow), also required me to spend a lot of time explaining why nothing had happened since the last chapter.  I also kept having to ask my country-reared mother what status corn would be in during the “David and Little Billy first meet the Sidhe” scene, because the time of year in which that scene was set kept changing.

“Eventually I got it down to six weeks, and that kept my characters sufficiently off balance that they couldn’t ever quite get a handle on one crisis before another kicked in.

“There were a lot of other changes, too, notably of the ending.  Especially of the ending, in fact, since the first publisher of this book, Avon, wanted “more fantasy.”  That’s why the book acquired a prologue set entirely in Faerie: because otherwise nothing overtly fantastic happens for about fifty pages and the publisher wanted to assure readers that the thing was, in fact, fantasy.  So I must give credit where credit is due: to Ms. Chris Miller of Avon Books, who not only bought this book, but shaped it as well.

“In any case, I was lucky enough to have the book debut at the World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta in 1986, and it’s done well for me, by and large.  As is common in the fantasy field, it generated sequels, though I’d planned none.  But sequels gave me a chance to get to know my characters better, to create additional new characters, and to add to the various worlds of which they were a part.  They also gave me a chance to watch those characters grow up.  And they all gave me a chance to take my own country and invest it with magic – an idea, I am proud to say, I borrowed from the late North Carolina writer, Manly Wade Wellman.

“And so I wrote more of what I came to call “The Adventures of David Sullivan,” and eventually got him through a degree in English at the University of Georgia (though never into grad school, which he certainly would have attended.)

“And then, in the way of many good things, the realities of publishing changed and David’s adventures came to an end.

“But he’s always been there in the back of my mind – he and his friends.  He had to be, because I realized at some point that in creating David and Liz and Alec and the rest of the Mactyrie Gang, I was essentially creating the friends I wished I had had in high school, and David foremost among them.  I’m not him – the main things we had/have in common is being bright, somewhat flakey, lads growing up in a situation where such things are both misunderstood and undervalued, and the fact that we both wear glasses.  In fact, personality-wise I’m much more like Alec.

“But enough of that.  A few years back I was lucky enough (that word again), through the good auspices of author Sharyn McCrumb, to come in contact with High Country Publishers – and to find that they were interested in reprinting this, my first and favorite novel.  More time passed; contracts were sent and signed; the whole MS was scanned into a computer; and I had a chance to go over it with a mental fine-toothed comb (as detailed in the introduction).

The rest, as they say, is history.