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Copyright 1994 by Daniel Keys Moran.
All rights reserved.
I, Daniel Keys Moran, "The Author," hereby release this text
as freeware. It may be transmitted as a text file
anywhere in this or any other dimension, without reservation,
so long as the story text is not altered IN ANY WAY.
No fee may be charged for such transmission, save handling fees
comparable to those charged for shareware programs.
THIS WORK MAY NOT BE PRINTED OR PUBLISHED IN A BOOK, MAGAZINE,
ELECTRONIC OR CD-ROM STORY COLLECTION, OR VIA ANY OTHER MEDIUM NOW
EXISTING OR WHICH MAY IN THE FUTURE COME INTO EXISTENCE, WITHOUT
WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR. THIS WORK IS LICENSED FOR READING
PURPOSES ONLY. ALL OTHER RIGHTS ARE RESERVED BY THE AUTHOR.
DESCRIPTION: Original Afterward/About the Authors to several of
my novels.
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AFTERWARD FOR EMERALD EYES
Hi there.
Welcome to the Afterword.
If you're like me, you probably turned to the Afterword first,
before reading the book that it is the Afterword to. If you have done
this, <stop>. Go back to the beginning, and read the book. It's no
fair just skimming the good parts, either, you must read the whole
thing or you can't read the Afterword.
Hi there.
Are you back now? (And if you're <still> reading this even though
you haven't read the book, well, okay, except you should know you are
about to incur a shitload of really terrible karma.)
Welcome to the Continuing Time.
When I was thirteen years old, I had already been writing for
four years. This is not to say that I was writing anything worth
reading; but I was writing, constantly. It was compulsive behavior. I
knew I wasn't writing anything worth reading, but I wrote regardless.
My sister, Jodi Anne Moran, was my only loyal audience, and even she
could not, or would not, read any of my longer pieces.
�This is bad,� she would say.
I'm suspicious of coincidence, but here it is; I have only once
in my life kept a diary. It lasted for perhaps a month, and I grew
bored with it.
During the month that I kept that diary, I created the Continuing
Time. It says so, right there in faded green ink. I had about eight
series going at that time, in my head and on paper. Leaving out any
of the potentially embarrassing details regarding plotting and
characterization, three of those series concerned themselves as
follows:
1) A trader, named Camber, circa 3,000 A.D., who found himself in
over his head, embroiled in a war with these really bad news demigods
who were waging what they called the Time Wars;
2) A warrior telepath named Chauki; she was a Lord of the Royal
House of November, circa 3,000 A.D. or thereabouts.
3) This other telepath, named Denice, and her good buddy, a thief
named Ripper, who became a politician, in the mid-21st century.
There it is. One morning (according to the diary) I was home from
school, sick, watching I Love Lucy and writing in this neat new diary
I was keeping. Apparently I had a fever, which, looking back, seems
appropriate.
I was working on a story about Chauki November; whatever it was,
it did not survive, and I do not remember today what it might have
concerned. But I wanted to give her a romantic interest, and none of
the chumps who usually hung out in her stories were good enough for
her.
Trader Camber, now Camber Tremodian, presented himself. Before
that instance, I had never before merged together any of my series; I
simply kept inventing new ones when I got bored. But the details of
Camber's universe meshed well with the details of Chauki November's,
and in the course of reconciling the two series I created a universe
with a degree of depth�of <realness>�that was greater than the sum of
its parts.
I was struck, I think, more than anything else, by how <well>
these unconnected storylines had complemented each other. Looking
through my remaining stories, one character leapt out at me; Denice
Castanaveras, a telepath whose people had been destroyed, was,
obviously, Chauki November's ancestor.
In the course of that morning, cross-connecting the details of
Camber's universe with Chauki November's, and then working out the
way in which Denice Castanaveras' universe had, over the course of a
millennium, become Camber and Chauki's, I invented the Continuing
Time, essentially as it stands today.
For a very long time, I did not write any Continuing Time
stories. I <knew> my writing skills were insufficient; and <The Tales
of the Continuing Time> were, even then, an order of magnitude more
complex than any of my other stories. Instead I planned, and planned,
and planned. Outlines of stories, chronologies of events; I knew the
date of birth, to the day, for each of the thousands of characters
who appeared in any of <The Tales of the Continuing Time.> Most of
the time I knew the dates of their deaths, as well. The notebooks in
which I kept my work covered over two thousand pages of outlines,
lists of names and places, biographies, and indexes. I had three
different card catalogues, back in the days before I bought my first
computer.
The Continuing Time grew, and changed. In my mind, before I ever
put words down on paper, I grew to know, as I know the members of my
own family, the characters who populated the Continuing Time. The
thief called Ripper, who became a politician, was a bit too unlikely;
I split him into a pair of characters, Douglass Ripper, Jr., the
politician introduced in <Emerald Eyes>, and, of course, Trent the
Uncatchable.
I was seventeen years old before I first tried to write a
Continuing Time story:
"Sixty-two thousand years before the birth of Yeshua ha Notzri,
whom later humans knew as Jesus the Christ, the Time Wars ended, for
reasons which no sentient being now knows. With that ending, the
Continuing Time began."
That was how the first story started; I had already written three
books of varyingly bad quality when I wrote <The Song of Camber and
S'Reeth>, and learned that I was not yet talented enough to write
about the Continuing Time. It happened again when I was eighteen, and
I wrote <The Long Run>, a story about Trent the Uncatchable, and
again, when I was nineteen, and I wrote <When Your Name is November>,
an eighty thousand word story about the early days of the great House
of November.
It has been only five years since I last wrote about the
Continuing Time. The novel which you've just finished is only the
first novel in the thirty-three volumes which comprise <The Tales of
the Continuing Time>. I am a better writer today than I was five
years ago; in years to come I will, I hope, surpass what I have
written here, and by no small measure. I hope to become a much better
writer than I am now.
I have been writing, now, for fifteen years.
I have been planning the Continuing Time for over eleven. I
cannot today read what I wrote only five years ago without wincing.
Perhaps five years from now the same will be true of what I have done
with <Emerald Eyes>.
But you have to start somewhere.
Put your sunglasses on, chuckles, and take a deep breath, 'cause
here we go.
Daniel Keys Moran
Southern California, 1987
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR FOR -- "The Long Run"
(As written before the Bantam Bio Butchers got their hands on
it.)
Daniel Keys Moran is a twenty-four year old Southern Californian.
Jack Smith, columnist for the L.A. Times, wrote in a recent column
that natives of Los Angeles, you know, the �City of the Angels��who
are generally known as Los Angeleans�ought actually to be known,
simply, as Angels. So, then, the author is, basically, yes, an
<Angel>, yes, that's what it must be.
The author's prime goal in life is to become the world's greatest
science fiction writer, and the richest one as well. He lives in
North Hollywood, with Holly Thomas Moran, whom he recently found
himself getting more or less married to, along with a couple
quadzillion books and magazines, a middle-aged computer named
D'Artagnan, and a hot young stud computer whom they don't have a name
for yet. (Update: Computer's name is Raoul. And if you don't know
what that means, the book's name is <Twenty Years After,> and it is
the sequel to <The Three Musketeers>.) They did have two of the
author's sisters staying with them for a while, but they got rid of
them. Now his cousin from Pennsylvania and his cousin's best friend
from Pennsylvania are sleeping in the living room instead.
His role models are Mister Spock, Captain Kirk, Isaac Asimov,
Humphrey Bogart, and Hunter S. Thompson.
When he was eight years old he read <Stranger in a Strange Land>,
and when he was twelve he read <Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas>,
which is another explanation for how he turned out.
Other goals include running for God, on a platform that includes
more sunshine, rain on Sundays (for the farmers and those who like to
take walks in the stuff) and an abolition of parking tickets, the
goddamned evil drooling parking enforcers, and the fiction of Harold
Robbins; also being the first American to be knighted by the Queen of
England.
After all, John Blackthorne got to be a Samurai.
He has stopped waiting for <The Revenge of the Jedi> to come out.
Doesn't look likely at this point, does it?
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR -- The Last Dancer
Daniel Keys Moran lives somewhere in Los Angeles, though the
actual location is a closely guarded secret. He is the author of the
exceedingly well-written Tales of the Continuing Time, and as many of
you have suspected, does in fact much resemble his very popular
character Trent the Uncatchable, except that he is more handsome and
also wittier.
He's recently been hanging out with a new nephew, Kevin, The
Phone-Cord Chewing Devil Baby of Doom. He's a Mondo Huge baby and
will doubtless play in the NBA some day soon. He already dribbles
real good.
This was a bad year for the Lakers, the Once and Future NBA
Champions. Moran's hanging tight, though. Except for one gutless Game
5 no-call by refs in Phoenix, the '93 Lakers would have upset the
team with the best regular season record in the NBA during the first
round of the playoffs, and doubtless gone on to win the finals.
His favorite one-panel comic: Writer, pipe in one hand, at table
in restaurant, smiles charmingly at woman companion and says, "But
enough about me. Let's talk about my books." Moran is working on a
new Continuing Time book about Trent. You won't have to wait as long
for it as you waited for <The Last Dancer>. He promises. He was
Otherwise Occupied for a while, but he's better now.
His last several books have been so popular that Bantam allows
Moran the rare privilege of writing, unedited, the "About the
Authors" in the back of his books. (Update: well, I can dream.)
He made up a map of the Great Wheel of Existence for this book,
but the satans in eyeshades at Bantam took it and sent it to the art
department to have it redone. So if it makes no goddamn sense at all,
it's their fault. Not mine. I mean his.
Updates from previous About the Authors: the LaserJet with the
Snoopy-as-Joe-Cool sticker on it is on its last legs. The Snoopy
sticker will get salvaged, though, after it dies, and transferred to
the new printer, whatever that ends up being. Also, The Revenge of
the Jedi is still not out.
