Annotation Alcatraz Chapter Seven Unwittingly made a friend’s pants fall down. Humor is hard to write. Not only is it subjective, but in a book you don’t have the benefit of a laughing crowd to help you get into the mood. Because of these things, I know that everyone who reads this book is going…

Annotation Alcatraz Chapter Six Kindly pretend that you own a mousetrap factory. This mousetrap example is exactly the sort of thing I can do in a children’s book that I haven’t ever been able to make work in an adult book. I’m not sure why it feels so good in this format, while doesn’t quite…

Annotation Alcatraz Chapter Four Smedry Talents We’re hitting our stride now. I think that this is where the book starts to really reflect what I imagined for it. Here, we’ve got some genuine tension, some worldbuilding, and some utter silliness. One of the early ideas for this book was a magic system where the characters…

Annotation Alcatraz Author’s Foreword This is probably a good place to talk about the shift from third person into first person. The book was originally written in the third person. There was a narrator telling us this story–someone listed as “Cecil G. Bagsworth the Third” on the title page. (Cecil, by the way, was invented…

Annotation Alcatraz Dedication This book is for my father. It’s a tough call, to match all the people you want to honor with the right books. My mother got my first book, which was a good match for her because it was very easily appreciated by people who don’t read fantasy and sf. And, of…

Annotation Alcatraz Half Title Page This will be my first book ever published that doesn’t have a map in it. There was never really talk of one. For reasons that will be explained in the book, I didn’t want to start with a map that might give away interesting plot elements about the geography of…