Having a baby on the way always causes me to turn nostalgic.  So here I go again. 🙂

Eleven years ago today I was nervously biting my fingernails, wondering if readers would enjoy Resurrection, the novella I wrote for The Halls of Stormweather. 

Resurrection featured a then-unknown assassin and spy named Erevis Cale.  My notes from that time describe Cale as a tall, bald, intimidating, deadly-serious man of action, trained by the Night Masks first as a killer then as a letters man (a forger).  While he played a decent game of chess, he tended to solve difficult problems with fists or sharp steel rather than subtlety or deep thinking.  He was loyal to a fault, and possessed a slow-burn temper that, once it caught a flame, went up like a wildfire.  I remember worrying a bit that his, uh, flexible moral code might turn off some readers.

And maybe it did.   But it seemed to resonate with many more of you, and here we are, eleven years later.

If you’d told me back then that the story of Cale, Riven, Mags, Jak, Abelar, the Uskrevren, and all the rest would stretch across eleven years, eleven novels (counting The Cycle of Night), and four short stories, and that one of the trilogies would be collected into an Omnibus edition, I’d have thought you were crazy.

Well, I’m very glad to have been wrong.  I mentioned how I got my start writing here, so I won’t reshash that, but I do owe thanks to an enormous number of people, and want to mention a few — Keith Strohm, for pulling me out of the slushpile; Ed Greenwood for his encouragement over the years, not to mention, you know, creating the Realms; Bob Salvatore, for his support and advice over the years; Peter Archer, for sticking with me; and most of all, Phil Athans, who believed in and backed my work right from the beginning.

Of course, I want to offer my sincere thanks to all of my readers, too.  I appreciate all of the support you’ve given Cale and crew.  It’s been a great ride and I hope it continues for another eleven years.  🙂

(Incidentally, while The Halls of Stormweather and Shadow’s Witness, the first two books featuring Cale, are out of print, I have reason to hope that ebook versions may become available in the not too distant future; fingers crossed; meanwhile, if you’re a new reader interested in picking up the Cale story, I recommend starting with either Twilight Falling or just grabbing the entire Erevis Cale Trilogy Omnibus).