We’re told what’s done is done, and that we should just move on to new works. We’re told to look forward rather than back. And why not? We laud Director’s Cuts of movies we praise new editions of non-fiction, but when novelists speak of revising old works it’s often met with criticism. I could even revisit Men of Bronze and rewrite it from the ground up, turning it back into what I had envisioned but could never fulfill: a Sword & Sorcery novel set against the backdrop of Egypt’s ruin. I could write a Conan novel, now (and perhaps I will), and it would not be an utter embarrassment. So, between 20 - under the guise of writing historical fiction - I slowly learned to write Sword & Sorcery. all of these served as world-building lessons, which prepared me to go just nuts with A Gathering of Ravens, Twilight of the Gods, and the forthcoming The Doom of Odin. Men of Bronze, Memnon, The Lion of Cairo. you, the writer, need merely pick and choose what you’d like to include. In historical fiction, I thought, the heavy lifting of world-building is done for you.
World-building was my Achilles’ heel, and that’s what spurred me to shift from fantasy to historical. I’d had a couple of short stories published by a local fanzine, but nothing longer than six or eight thousand words I’d tinkered with writing a cyberpunk novel while going through the Writer’s Digest Novel Writing Course (circa 1989), but that never got beyond the planning part of the course. Back then, I had no idea what I was doing. The strange thing about Men of Bronze, though, was despite its origins as straight-up iconic Sword & Sorcery, between 20 it turned into straight-up historical fiction. I secured an agent in 2003, and we’d sold it to a new small publishing house, Medallion Press, in 2004. It went through a few iterations, but by 2002 I had the manuscript for Men of Bronze in my hot little hands. Most of you probably already know this story: back in the year 2000 AD, I sat down with the bones of a Conan novel I’d been working on since the mid-1990s - meant as an addition to the Tor Books Conan line - and, on the advice of a friend who was a multi-published author and journalist, turned it into something uniquely my own.
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