I am honored, that in a single week, three new fiction readers have written in concerning some aspect of that work. At this point, I have crossed the furthest finish line I had ever been able to imagine in this life. With 70-odd books still not in print I have been giving those away to young folks for publishing as proofs. It is just the writers ego speaking at this point, wanting to push off that message in the bottle before the cannibals gather round…

Good evening Mr. LaFond,

I have processed the weight of your message and I'm truly honored to be afforded an opportunity to curate the Sunset Saga. I hope to stay true to your vision and get it in front of new readers with all its blood-curdled grit and wild cosmic strangeness!

I am honored to contribute to your ongoing web soliloquy, however I hope that it is simply one of several grumbles not quite from the grave, out of my own selfish want to learn more from the Supreme Hobo of Letters. I've spent many years writing academically and professionally, a military stint, raising a family, and yet not quite finding the inertia to return to fiction writing and worldbuilding. I'm approaching 40 now and feeling the weight of having let life go by without a single book publication! When I learned that you spent the greater part of your life reading voraciously and working and only released your first book some 25 years back (source: Danica Lorincz's preface to Writing Unchained: Prolific Writing by Design), well...

All I can say is that was the very datum that I needed to see that all is not lost! Like a good alien anthropologist, I've observed and lived in the world and now it's time to share the decades of findings.

Was it Hunter S. Thompson that advanced the idea of two types of authors: the author who lives life first and then writes, as opposed to the author who writes while living life? I forget who it was that said it, but it's apparent that we're in category alpha. Neither are wrong approaches, by the way.

I would definitely like to find some time to chat more personally with you about all matters Sunset Saga, particularly where you would like to see it go and that fabled final book WhiteSkyCanoe. Would you be open to allowing another versed in your work to pen that final novel? What immediately comes to mind is some arrangement similar in scope to the posthumous Spider Robinson and Robert A. Heinlein novel Variable Star, where the former author utilized an RAH outline to complete the novel. Do you see some such opportunity to realize that final novel, or would you prefer to leave it as, ending with Seven Moons Deep? Forgive me if I'm being too bold in my excitement here, but I figure now is as good a time as any to inquire.

As for my juvenile science fiction manuscript, I must say that in all these years of wrestling with it, you've got me now considering an angle that I had yet to consider. My original plan was to edit out the corny pre-military me naivete, but now you're suggesting that I retain it but add a curmudgeon's voice to dial it down and balance it out. This could very well serve as the vehicle by which the young author and the more mature author wrestle with ideas. Thank you for presenting that option.

Finally, I want you to know that I purchased a good 25 additional physical books off of Amazon of which Sunset Saga is included. I meant it when I said I'm going to collect a small LaFond library for my end of the world bunker ha!

Respectfully,

—

Tyler Wright

…

Tyler,

The honor is mine, really—I spent 5 years posting fiction that had less than 5 reads. I even gave people money to buy the Sunset Saga online so that the webmaster would not feel as though he was wasting time—and half of them pocketed it.

I had no real vision for Of the Sunset World other than to base the character interaction on my relationship with a nerd named Charlie. The first couple of chapters, with Jay and Charlie in school, that was autobiographical. But, Jay is physically based on Dante, a boxer I coached, so instead of doing 117 dips like I did, he could do 150. It was going to be an excuse to write historical time travel with the subtext the looming realization that the time travelers journeying back to Khronos’ dim lair, were engaged in a sort of bio-piracy.

Of the Sunset World, about 1300 pages, which was split into Big Water Blood Song and Ghosts of the Sunset World, so it could be printed, began as a means of keeping my mind. I was working long hours as a manager for a corrupt pair of sisters trying to keep their business afloat. When I declined to have sex with the older sister she became vindictive, on top of hating me for being a high school dropout and yet having the inventory and people skills to get the business above water that the combined masters degrees she and her sister owned had taken it under. So the tension between the bad faith science/management team based in the future, operating out of the present, to pillage the past, and the good faith Time Jumpers actually taking the risks and doing the deeds, is based largely on that horrible time. I was not mentally designed to manage, and it was toxic. I had a dream every night during my short sleeps, in which I had already cut off her head, but could not find a proper course of action… The extreme brutal violence came from those dreams. It was then forged in the Harm City experience, the fact that hoodrats and cops hunted me at night as I left that job and went to work for $10 per hour. I had the first 15 chapters done when I quit that job, written over a year from 2009 to July 5, 2010 when I threw the tie in the trash.

I finished Ghosts of the Sunset World on Christmas Eve 2010, after rewriting the three-volume Broken Dance. I went back to writing non fiction mostly as no readers bothered with the fiction, writing When You’re Food and Winter of a Fighting Life in early winter 2011. The bug hit me again, as I worked only 24 hours a week, just enough to eat and rent the room for 100 a week. In August 2011[might have been 2012, but I don’t think so] I wrote Thunder-Boy, at 96,000 words on a myopic whim. That was my best word count ever, amybe the best novel in the series.

The Randy Bracken character, initially a supporting character, began gaining a life of his own, largely because he was based on two men I knew and motivated by my worst sentiments.

Writing Unchained is a book close to my heart, which I do not have a copy of, as it is the property of that fine lady who saw me as literary puzzle.

I am excited that you are going to settle into the art. I could not write when I was a young man and used gaming rules and world building as a means to learn. Reading Grumble from the Grave, Heinlien’s letters really helped me approach writing. You probably have grammar skills I cannot comprehend. It would be nice to do WhiteSkyCanoe as a collaboration, with you taking some characters on their threads and editing the thing.

My teacher was Stewart Weick of White Wolf Magazine, who coached me with a red pen. I did write Tribes, a setting for role playing games, in 1992 when my overtime was cut. It exists in two manuscripts I gave away, one with my blood all over it from a seizure. I have used the setting, in my mind, for Supplicant Song and Confessor. I had no choice but to be the late kind of writer. I could not read until I was 10 I think, end of 4th grade.

WhiteSkyCanoe, has been written in my mind since 2009. The final battle is stuck in my head. I have two different endings I have toyed with in manner of an epilogue: But the fate of Jay Bracken and Three-Rivers I sketched in my mind many times and it is there. There are many characters I would leave loose. It is really something I could write in a few weeks if that’s all I did and would come in at about 80,000 to 100K words. Jay bracken is up to a world bending caper at the end of Seven Moons Deep. The Three-Rivers timeline makes it until 1865, with no USG, but an intact British Empire, in which Sir Richard Francis Burton from our timeline and the Three-Rivers timeline will be on both sides, the one that gets snatched in the World Is Our Widow advising the tribal confederacy, and the one that is a few years younger, instead of being stuck in Brazil as a Crown agent, is working as a reporter/anthropologist for the Royal Geographic Society, but also as a secret agent for John Company, which did not suffer the Sepoy Rebellion in this time line, and still had its American possessions.

One of the epilogues is a total buzzkill, and I might do both, why not, with splintering Time on the table. Other letters have been written about this on the site, including a spoiler. I don’t know where they are. Charles did set up a search function—one is a note on the spoiler epilogue. The important thing to me is to have savage tribesmen battling British troops in the Appalachians in 1865, at Three-Rivers, Pittsburgh and trying a Khartoum at Baltimore in a timeline where USG never came to be. Alexander the Great and Archimedes would be the ancient recovery mission for WhiteSkyCanoe. If you had a few time jumpers left, and your tribal confederacy was at war with Britania, well, you would want the best general, Time could provide on the eve of their demise. Archimedes is short and fun. Randy goes back to get him. The future, base time line, would be the minor thread in volume and be addressed in a prologue, 3 chapters and an epilogue.

Tyler, I’d like to meet in person to discuss these things. Thank you so much for buying those books, that should cover the 7 pints of stout I unwisely drank at the Canyon Tavern the other night. Congratulations on the return to writing. I hope to be of help.

My service in this part of the Rockies is almost nothing. My number is 443 686 0598.

Send me a text and when I get good service, I’ll call.

I have retained your whole name here, because you should start building some name recognition and, well, we are just discussing science-fiction, a fantasy about what might have crazily been.

-JL