Writing with an eye toward publication is a strange alchemy of ego and self-loathing, mixed with healthy dollops of perseverance, synchronicity, luck, and talent. It is a journey, and like every journey its beginnings can be traced back to a single step . . . or, in this case, a single email sent to me in 2007. An email about the use of scimitars in Men of Bronze . . .

The email's author was one Morgan Holmes, noted REH scholar, and after much conversation I ended up sending him a batch of paperback MoB's to hand out to interested readers at the Windy City Pulp and Paperback Show in Chicago that May. Here's where synchronicity enters the fray: one of the people he gave a copy to was Howard Andrew Jones, editor of Black Gate magazine and of the Bison Books' edition of Harold Lamb's Cossack tales (and himself a writer). Howard sent me a note in October of '07, telling me he'd enjoyed Men of Bronze. I knew who he was, of course, and I gladly corresponded with him about all things adventure, fantasy, and Harold Lamb. Along the way, we became friends. He read Lion of Cairo in its early stages and made some fine suggestions that improved the book; I, in turn, read his Dabir and Asim novel (characters he introduced in a short story in Black Gate).

It was and is an excellent book. An Arabian Nights-inspired swashbuckler, tightly-written, poetic, full of the blood and thunder that echoes in the works of REH and Lamb. So impressed with it was I that, after making sure he didn't mind, I passed the manuscript along to my editor at Thomas Dunne. Like any writer worth his salt Howard fretted and steeled himself for "the inevitable rejection". That rejection never came, though. Quite the opposite. Proving he is ever a man of discerning taste, Pete Wolverton at TDB snapped up Howard's manuscript in what has become a nice, two-book hardcover deal!

So join with me, Gentle Readers, in offering a round of applause for Howard Andrew Jones . . . author of The Desert of Souls, coming soon from Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press! Long live the Arabian swashbuckler!