It’s funny how things work out. The first novel I ever wrote — way back in about 1988 or ’89 — was The Prometheus Syndrome. My seventh book published will be the first book I wrote. Didn’t something like that happen with Robert R. McCammon and his novel The Night Boat?

That’s right, a publisher has accepted The Prometheus Syndrome for publication. I don’t have a contract yet, or an estimated publication date, so, all I’m going to say is that it’s a publisher I’ve already worked with. And that I’m pretty excited to place my first full-length novel sans werewolves. Don’t get me wrong, I love my werewolves, but I don’t want to only be known for the furries.

So, what is The Prometheus Syndrome about? Those of you steeped in horror history and schooled in Greek mythology probably can guess the basic premise just from the title. Yes, it’s about harnessing the life force. I think this is a fun novel that isn’t likely to tweak your subconscious too much. Set in the magical decade of the 1980s, when the great Ronald Reagan was still president, the novel features deranged hillbillies, a mad scientist, a zombie, a ghost, and heavy metal.

Of course, the novel was completely rewritten a couple of years ago. As I tell my students, I didn’t pay enough attention in my high school English classes, so my grammar wasn’t so good when I first began trying to write seriously. Also, I originally wrote this novel on my old Smith-Corona Electra XT typewriter. At the time I thought “rewriting” simply meant retyping the manuscript and fixing typos (while making new ones, of course). You young’uns who have never written a novel on a typewriter can’t imagine how lucky you are to have a computer! The next draft of The Prometheus Syndrome was written on a Smith-Corona PWP 3 word processor, which was a fine machine that allowed you to save your work on diskettes. It took about seven diskettes for a novel, as I recall. Of course, those diskettes were not compatible with any computer. When I worked at Conoco I used their copier to scan all my old novels and save them as MS Word files that I could edit, and that’s how the current draft of The Prometheus Syndrome came to be.

I’ll let you know more about the publisher and the expected date once things are put to paper.