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Blogs by Francis DiPietro
ROBERT E. HOWARD, The Supreme Moment: A Biography 5/30/2008 11:36:21 AM
Discussion regarding Robert E. Howard, The Supreme Moment: A Biography in message boards such as the REH Inner Circle, the REH Comics Group, and Conan.com has caught me a bit by surprise, considering that I have not yet approved the final ISBN version of the book for publication and availability at B&N, Amazon, etc. I hope that any board members reading this will accept my apologies for not responding directly in each forum. I have a bit of a disorder when it comes to things like that. For example, recent Howard biographer Mark Finn said in the acknowledgments section of his bio Blood & Thunder "Many people had to endure endless readings, rants, late-night theories, musings, and explosions of frustration and euphoria ... I sent barrages of email..." Well, I have never been able to feel comfortable doing anything like that, and that is just my personality. I highly respect the excellent work of all the Howard scholars, and to them I offer my deepest thanks for and appreciation of their research, findings and essays. I am simply not social enough to consider sending "barrages of email" or asking people to "endure" anything related to my writing. I detest marketing and will gladly allow anyone to fill in the marketing crap that publishers ask of me. Even my own family doesn't read my writing, as far as I know, and that is just fine. I was thrilled when I read that members of the REH Inner Circle suspected a fellow member with a name similar to mine as having written this book, and if any of you are reading this then let me go so far as to say that I will not deny it was him. Go ahead and direct all attention in this matter to that individual if you wish, and I will be here in my little nest writing like a lugubriously demented hermit. As I said, it is a disorder, and if I have to apologize for it again I just don't think I'll have the self-respect to properly fondle myself anymore. (I realize that some of you are rooting for this outcome.) You had me pegged as a lurker, which sounds a little sinister, but I can live with it.
Please realize that a strong part of me would not charge anything for any of my books, and it is primarily the faces of my wife and daughter which cause me to approve this selling nonsense. So far I've produced over twenty books with pretty much no income to show from it, but when I offered free stories on the old Rocket eBook site before the birth of our daughter, I had over twenty thousand downloads in a few months. Ultimately I find it harder and harder to care about sales; all that matters is that I've done the best I can with writing.
For as brief a bio as I can manage, considering some folks have asked, I went to Harvard when I was 16 as part of my high school's Gifted & Talented program to study one-on-one with Professor Alan Lightman, mostly because a teacher or two had mistaken papers I had done on astrophysics and black holes as a love of that subject and not a love of writing. I edited a newspaper called the Mustang News when I was 17, spent a month in China when I was 18 as part of the People to People student ambassador program founded by Dwight Eisenhower (I was talking with students in Tiananmen Square in the summer of 1988--a year before the protests--and I passed my wallet around to use as a writing surface so that they could give me their names and addresses, and I watched my wallet make the large circuit and return to me, brimming with addresses and missing nothing.) When I got back I killed a man named Michael Ryan who had escaped from a halfway house, gotten drunk and walked in front of my pickup truck at night from the middle of I-93 just after the Assembly Square on-ramp in Somerville. It was the single worst experience of my life and I hope that it is never surpassed. Feeling low, I took an absolutely horrible desk job doing (drum roll) marketing. It sickened me, literally. That was twenty years ago and I haven't answered to a boss since. I started writing full-time and was published in various small pulp magazines that still existed in the early and mid 1990s. I got married in 1998 and moved from eastern Massachusetts to central New York, where I was able to purchase a good home for eleven thousand dollars. Did I mention that I am an excellent bargain hunter? Well, you're pretty much filled-in now. When I started I used to think that a writer had to list every damn piddly little publication on their resume, and it has been my salvation to realize that stuff like that doesn't matter to me, and I just don't care about that anymore. All I want to do is a good job, and be able to entertain people, and be satisfied with my work.
--Francis DiPietro
May 23, 2008
My Earlier Howard Credentials: In 1995 I wrote a parody to the REH Conan tale "The Hour of the Dragon" and in 1996 it sold to Yellow Creek Publishing. It was one of the first waves of both traditionally printed and e-books, and was offered on the now-defunct site e-pulp.com. I don't think any Howard fans realized there was a parody of "Hour of the Dragon" out there at all, if sales can be any meter by which to judge. As you may have inferred from earlier mention, I hate marketing and so I did little to help awareness of the book. Since Howard's work had fallen into the public domain, I used the framework of his tale, essentially paralleling the first third of the book, to create the novel "The Orange Phoenix" featuring brave King Kyle of Tarylia (Conan) getting mixed up with the nasty, resurrected (and rather flamingly gay) wizard Pomothus (Xaltotun). I was asked to write a sequel, which became "The Death Scrolls," and a sequel to that, which I declined to do. The stories are available today under the book title "The Phoenix & The Scrolls".
