AUTHORS’ NOTES
The story of how this series of books came to be dates back to 2003. I, a college student at the time, wrote a short story called “So There I Was” on an online discussion board called The Firing Line. It was inspired by things like Cowboy Bebop, Kill Bill, and The Way of the Gun, and while I had fun with it, it wasn’t very good. It also wasn’t very serious. It was told in the first person, starring a character who bore an unfortunate resemblance to myself, and was posted in a serialized format . . . by which I mean, I made it up as I went along.
Fast forward to 2006: I was living in a new state, I had spent a year and a half as a security contractor in the Middle East and post-Hurricane Katrina Mississippi, and my friends and I were hanging out on a new internet discussion board, this one called The High Road. (For the younger people reading this, please understand that this was before social media was ubiquitous. There was only MySpace, and that was relegated mostly to teenagers. People gathered on discussion boards relevant to whatever particular interest they held, and this is how I met a lot of my friends.) My time in the Middle East had given me a little bit of inspiration, and with that I decided to write a sort-of sequel to the original story. This one was entitled, “Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler”, as Nightcrawler was my handle at the time. (In case you’re wondering, no, it wasn’t inspired by the X-Men character.)
This story was more serious in tone, and was quite popular on the board at the time. Something else also happened then, something that would change my life forever. An accountant and gun store owner named Larry Correia (Correia45) approached me and asked if he could write scenes in my story, starring a different point of view character. This is the true origin of Lorenzo, my friendship with Larry, and indeed my writing career.
The readers loved the story as it continued. Two point of view characters facing off against one another, foiling each other, their stories separate but intertwined, doubled the fun to the audience. While it was fun for me, it was also a shrewd move for Larry, as in this way he began marketing himself. His first novel, Monster Hunter International, became very successful for a print-on-demand, self-published work. Eventually it was picked up by Baen, and now here we are.
By 2009, Larry’s Monster Hunter series was becoming quite successful, and he insisted to me that we ought to turn our story into a novel. He’d already written something like seventy thousand words on a sequel we were planning, and he argued that people liked it and that it was better to get paid for all the effort we put into it.
I initially and repeatedly turned him down. I had no aspirations at being a novelist, and in any case I thought the story wasn’t fit to print. I was a hobbyist, I said, and didn’t have the talent to make it as a real writer.
Larry finally convinced me by reading a section of a novel from a best-selling thriller author, one who is widely known, famous, and doing quite well for himself. There were inaccuracies that a little bit of research would have prevented (Mormons aren’t the least bit shy about discussing their beliefs and customs), a traditional tough-guy hero character (former Navy SEAL), some eye-rolling wordplay, and cringe-worthy dialogue.
Larry’s argument moved me this time, and I agreed. I spent the next year and a half rewriting my entire portion of the novel, turning the character who became Constantine Michael Valentine from an unserious author avatar to a character with a life of his own. The book was published. Baen sent me my first copy while I was serving in Afghanistan as an explosive ordnance disposal technician in the US Air Force.
The moral of this story is perseverance. Larry never gave up, even when he had nothing to show for his efforts but a draft copy and a stack of rejection letters. Through practice, effort, and some luck, I went from being a hobbyist to having a writing career of my own.
Writing is a skill. Like any other skill, you get better at it only through practice. Innate talent is a factor, but it’s a much smaller factor than planting your butt in the chair and typing the words. It can be hard work, tedious and frustrating, but this is the hill you must climb if you really want to write for a living.
I would like to thank Larry for everything he’s done for me, including convincing me that I could do this. I would also like to thank Baen Books for giving a then-new author and his nobody coauthor a chance with an unconventional novel. Most of all I would like to thank you, the reader, from the bottom of my heart. Without you, none of this would be possible, and I sincerely appreciate your continued readership.
Mike Kupari
April 2019
When I first started reading Mike Kupari’s online fiction serial, Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler, he was only a few chapters in, but I was impressed. He was just posting new bits every few days, so it was rough, but it was a great story, and Mike was really good at dragging you in.
In fact, I got sucked in enough that after I read one scene in particular, I got the idea for the story of one of the side characters, and I really wanted to tell it. So I emailed Mike—who keep in mind, I only knew through talking about guns on the internet—and asked him if he would mind if I did a bit from that character’s perspective and dropped it in there.
Mike said yes, and Lorenzo was born. I hurried, wrote a scene, and posted it. The readers went nuts. They thought we’d been planning this all along.
At that point, Mike and I figured what the heck, people are enjoying this, so I would keep writing scenes of Lorenzo reacting to the chaos caused by Valentine.
Keep in mind, we didn’t really know what we were doing, and didn’t have an outline. It was crazy. Every couple days Mike would post another scene. Then I would post a scene. Back and forth. Then as the inevitable clash of these two characters got closer, we actually had to hurriedly brainstorm a few things out, and then post it a couple of days later. Readers got to watch a real time rough draft taking form, and they participated by posting comments, feedback, and even soundtrack suggestions. After a few months, by some miracle, this slapdash story managed to have a coherent beginning, middle, and end.
And it was actually pretty good!
It wasn’t until after writing a book with the guy that I actually met Mike in person. He’s been like my brother ever since.
A few years later my writing career had taken off, and Mike has already told you the story about how I nagged him into turning Welcome Back, Mr. Nightcrawler into an actual novel. But honestly, it was good, and I knew he was good, way more talented than he gave himself credit for, and I wanted more people to read this cool thing we’d made.
Years later, we ended up writing this whole trilogy, and both of us having writing careers, all because a couple of guys decided to tell stories to their friends on the internet.
Larry Correia
April 2019