Jeanette, unlike most adventure story heroes, feels guilt when she has to hurt or kill her enemies. She can’t help but imagine the loss felt by their friends and families. She almost always has little choice, when someone must be killed to save innocent people from being hurt or killed, or made to suffer the destruction of their culture. How much guilt would she feel if, reluctant to take someone’s life, she doesn’t make the effort to save the lives of others? It’s always a moral choice, and it is never an easy one. There is always a price to pay.

There is a classic ethics conundrum. You are standing by a railroad switch. A car with six people in it has stalled on one track. A car with only one person in it has stalled on the other track. And a train is coming. The way the switch is set now, if you do nothing, the train will hit the car with six people in it. If you choose to throw the switch, the train will take the other track and, because of your action, it will kill the one person in that car. What will you do?

The choice is not always that clear. Jeanette has to struggle each time. It is especially difficult when a decision cannot be delayed for even a moment or two. She just hopes that whatever she chooses to do is the right thing. Even when it is obvious that she is right, each death she causes adds to the stain in the back of her mind. But she keeps on, knowing that whole cultures will suffer if she doesn’t accept that guilt. And always hoping that, the next time, maybe she will find a different solution.

The Tash Griaf is a powerful and strangely shaped sword, and is one of the hero’s five tokens. It had been taken by the enemy a long time ago, and had been perverted, which had increased its power and, in effect, had cursed it. But the enemy had quickly lost it. 

One of Jeanette’s predecessors had since then found it, and in using it, had recognized both its power and its evil. When she knew that her time as the hero was running out, she had hidden it to keep it from the enemy, who would not lose it a second time. When Jeanette came to the place where it was being kept, it frightened her, and all those with her, but she knew that she was meant to have it. 

It is irresistible as a weapon, and gives whoever wields it the power to command others, whatever their interests or numbers. But its curse tempts Jeanette to use it, even against her will, and all whom she kills with it leave a stain of guilt. 

Though its name is the Tash Griaf, it is called the troll sword, and now that Jeanette has it, her abilities as the hero, natural and acquired, are enhanced by it. And every time she uses it, she is hurt by it, and changed.

Jeanette Delgado assumes the form of the people of the alternate worlds, as if she had been born there. She speaks and understands their languages, and does not know how that works. Her name is pronounced differently in every world. She tries to correct it, but she cannot say it the way she does at home. She says it the way the people do. 

She has come to understand her role as a hero by the end of Book One. She has made good friends here, but she must leave them. When they say goodbye to her, addressing her as, “my Lady,” she tells them, “My name is Zhanai’degau.”

I really would like to sell The Black Ring, more for the readers rather than for the money. After all, I sometimes give my other books away. And The Black Ring is a marketing challenge, because it’s not a series like those by Stuart Jaffe or Jim Butcher or Mickey Spillane or L. Frank Baum, which can be read in pretty much any order. 

It’s more like the three books of The Lord of the Rings, which has to be read as if it were one big book — which it is — though The Black Ring is not similar to it in any other way. The Harry Potter books are a numbered series, to be read as they are numbered, though they are actually separate stories. They, too, are completely different from The Black Ring. 

The three volumes of the original publication of Pride and Prejudice were, in effect a numbered series, to be read from first to last, and that was understood by those who bought it. It didn’t have, as is true today, a separate designation as a numbered series at Bowker (ISBNs) or the U.S. Copyright office. Since it was paid for by her father it was, in a way, self-published.

The Disk World series, by Terry Pratchett, is not a numbered series, though I prefer to read the books in the order in which they were published. Like the Mike Hammer books by Spillane, there is a development in the author’s writing ability and story telling, and in his understanding of the setting and the growth of his character. The Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy L. Sayers are similar.

The Black Ring became unavailable when Double Dragon folded, and people have asked if it would be published again. I read it through and, discovering how much work it still needed, I decided on doing a complete second edition. I’ve updated my  book page http://allen-wold.com, and I have made the reading samples longer, and the books less expensive to encourage purchase. Check it out. If you like the first sample, maybe you’ll like the others too. Links to all six books of The Black Ring are on my website. Just remember, while you can get away with reading just book One, you can’t read Book Three by itself and have any idea of what’s going on.

The Black Ring is all the better for what I learned from editing and publishing my own books. It has taken more than ten years, but I feel that it was worth it. After all, The Black Ring, which has taken more than sixty years from first inspiration to final second edition, is why I started self-publishing in the first place. I know other writers who are far more successful at self-publishing than I am. 

I tried to learn promotion. I did some research, bought some books, got some help from a friend who knew how, but I did not understand it. It was like knowing the rules of chess but not actually understanding the game. I know the rules. I spent three years learning guitar chords, but I never figured out how to just sit down and play guitar. (Besides, I had something better to do…) It is said that one way to promote your books is to get a blog, and here it is. But I don’t understand  how to promote my blog, at least not without taking time away from my writing, and that takes me back around to now knowing how to promote in the first place.

I feel my time is better spent by telling my stories (which are all novels by now) than by struggling and failing at what I really can’t learn how to do. Getting someone else to do the promotion is expensive, and not always effective. I would like to have my books traditionally published, but that, too, sometimes doesn’t work out. And besides, I like having my books under my control. 

I like to sell them through dealers I know at conventions — which I hope will start up again. I like to sell them directly to people, sometimes at a discount. I can even give them away without too much cost to myself. And people buy them after looking at the covers, blurbs, essays, and first twenty pages in Allen Wold’s Books http://allen-wold.com. I guess my telling you about that is a form of promotion

I had written Slaves of War some years before, but it didn’t work for me as science fiction. I didn’t know how to fix it. I mentioned it on Facebook, and somebody told me that it sounded like space opera. I had never done space opera, at least not deliberately, but it seemed like that might have been my problem. I revised the story with “space opera” in mind, and this time it felt right. Darcy did a cover, and I published it.

A Thing Forgotten was another idea that had been brewing in the back of my head for years, inspired by dark music, a newspaper clipping a friend had sent me, a poster of a tragic heroic girl, and other things. The more I thought about it, the less I was able to do anything with it. It finally came together when I heard “The Hanging Tree” from Hunger Games. Inspiration comes from the strangest places, if you let it. It never comes if you search for it. I used a world that I had created for a different purpose, ideas about the fey which I had thought about for a long time in another context, and when the opening sentence came to me, it practically wrote itself. I found the image for the cover, did some work on it, and Darcy finished it perfectly.

I had written the first three chapters of what became The Gift and The Price, and another sixty thousand words which just stopped cold. It was like beating my head against a wall, and all I got was bruises, not progress. I finally realized, after six years, that I had been forcing my hero to go against his nature. I threw away everything except those first three chapters, and let my protagonist do what he really would have done, instead of what I was trying to force him to do. I had, as it were, stepped back from the metaphorical wall, instead of trying to force a way through, and saw a doorway to one side. Chapters and scenes came easily, to a very satisfactory conclusion. I did the cover myself, but with a lot of advice from Darcy.

I published Freefoot, a collection of all six of my Elf Quest stories, including the one which would have appeared in Blood of Ten Chiefs 6, if the series hadn’t been cancelled. The books were selling, so we had no idea why that happened. I revised each of the stories just a little, and corrected a few problems. I rewrote one of them completely, and put them in chronological instead of published order. I’ve sold Freefoot to Elf Quest fans who wanted me to autograph their copies of the original books in the series. 

Then I wrote Sturgis, something I had been wanting to do for a long time. It’s about a serial killer who turns out to be a vampire. I was inspired by Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not by the movies, which made vampires unable to bear sunlight, or repelled by crosses of any kind. Dracula did his own banking in London, and many windows have divisions in the shape of a cross, none of which affected him. I had only three plot points to begin with, and wrote the whole story without any other outline. It’s a very different story for me, but I really liked my protagonist and, were I forty years younger, I might have liked to have his job.

I published Dead Hand. I had developed it from extensive scene sketches which I had written years before. I had created a list of objectives for each scene, as I had done with The Planet Masters, and then developed each scene to reach its ending. I took it with me when we went to England for three years, and though my obligations there meant that I couldn’t make (not just take) the time to write, I decided to cut out all those scenes which didn’t actually advance the plot. Anything that doesn’t move the plot forward should be cut, according to received wisdom. 

But when we came back I rethought that. I still had those scenes and decided to put them back in. They did not advance the central plot, but they developed the characters and background, gave a larger context, and revealed more of what the story was about, which was not just a haunted house, but how the neighborhood was affected by the haunting that was leaking from it. On finishing that draft I knew that it had been the right thing to do. Had I not done so, the story would not have been so deep, nor would it have had so satisfactory an ending. I read through it again, made a few revisions, copy-edited it and published it.

I met with my student once a week, to talk about things which I thought an editor should know. It took her three or four weeks to bring back the marked-up typescript of Stroad’s Cross, with red comments on only about thirty pages. She told me what she thought the major problem was, and pointed out examples. This was why she hadn’t read any more. 

It was a huge problem, and I saw at once that she was right. I had written it as if it were non-fiction, which I had learned how to do when I was writing computer books and magazine articles. I had stopped doing that some years ago, but that kind of style had stayed with me, though I never thought about using it. I just had. 

Non-fiction has a distinctly different style. It is concerned with conveying information and with facts. It has no place for mood, or character, or plot. I was glad that Stroad’s Cross hadn’t been published in that form, but I wondered why, with such an obvious problem, the rejections had taken two years instead of two or three weeks. 

I re-wrote the book, revising and tightening, which reduced it from 225,000 to 150,000 words. Now it was more like fiction. The revisions had made the text rougher than it had been, so I had to go over it again to smooth it out, more than once, and the last time I concentrated on the storytelling. Reading specifically for story is something I do with all my fiction now. When I had done all that I could, I published it as an Ogden House book. Several of my readers have told me how much they liked it. 

My student had taught me a great lesson. Now I felt that publishing myself was going to work. But I still had a lot to learn about self-editing, and about book design, before I tackled The Black Ring.

I needed to learn more about publishing my own books, and I had to work with something larger and more complex, to prove again that I could do it. And I had to publish in paper, since it’s not possible to autograph Kindle copies at a science fiction convention, and you can’t put them on a dealer’s table. I decided to take a look at some short stories which I had written and filed away long ago, many of  which I had not submitted, to see if they might be worth publishing. There were many which were not. 

Among those which I finally chose were two which had appeared in print magazines, in 1983 and 1984, and I got permission to reprint them. Another had been published in an on-line magazine in 2011, and which the editor had included when she had published a print anthology. I included a collaboration with a friend, who had been good at fantasy but terrible at science fiction. And I added a very short story by my daughter, Darcy, who has no interest in publication. She writes better than I do. 

I also registered the book with Bowker, in order to get my own ISBN, in this way creating my Ogden House imprint, so that the book would be printed, bound, and offered for sale by Amazon, without the notice that it was published by them.  A Closet for a Dragon and Other Early Tales came out in 2014 — that seems so long ago now — and it is available on Amazon, both digital and paper. 

Now I had to try something really big. I chose Stroad’s Cross, which had been sitting around for a few years. It had been rejected several times and, after reading it through, I knew that it needed work. But I wasn’t sure what I should do with it. 

About that time I was contacted by a high school junior, who knew about me through her mother, who was a friend of Diane’s. Her class had been told to find people who would mentor them about working in the real world. She told me that she was interested in being an editor, so, since this book was a problem, I let her read it to see what she could do.

I was afraid to submit Book One of The Black Ring to a traditional publisher. If it were accepted, and the editor later decided that he didn’t want the rest — as had happened to me twice before — I would be stuck, unable to find a market for the remaining Books. The Black Ring was too important to me, and I couldn’t let that happen.

I knew a senior editor at a major publisher, who worked with a lot of science fiction. He overheard me talking about The Black Ring with someone at an SF convention, and asked me about it. I told him. He was interested, so I sent him Book One. If he thought his company would publish it, we could talk about a contract for the other five Books. 

He had it for three years before he told me that nobody in the office knew what to do with it. I was in my sixties now, and I couldn’t wait three years for another rejection. And maybe another. (An agent at one time had submitted Stroad’s Cross to two publishers, who each took two years to return it.) I had to do something myself. 

So, as an experiment, I took a collection of five speeches, which I had given at my Toastmaster’s club some years before, and revised them slightly to be essays. Then I published them digitally as Cat Tales (not a very clever title, I know), just to see if I could do it. And I could. I had demonstrated that I could publish my own work, and not through a vanity press, which I would not have done in any case. 

But Cat Tales is a small book, just forty pages. It is still available on Amazon, as both a Kindle book, and as a printed book published by Ogden House. I sometimes give printed copies away. 

I needed to prove myself again. I had a lot to learn before I could even think about doing The Black Ring.