FOREWORDThis novel was written during a twenty-two-day stretch back in January of 1989; while I usually write short fiction that quickly, I’d never done anything this long that fast; but I was working under a do-or-die deadline. My written-first novel, Dark Journey (that wasn’t actually the title I wanted, but that’s another story; from now on, I’ll just call that first novel Dark Journey, or DJ for short), had already been accepted for publication as a hardcover (which is yet another story, since it was dumped out as a tightly-spaced paperback less than a year after this novel was published), but my publisher had a small problem.
DJ was a very long, complex book which they supposedly wanted to release with some degree of care, but it was considered an unlikely “first” novel; so they want
