I hope I’m not raising cruel hopes among my millions thousands hundreds dozens (!) of longsuffering fans, but I guess I can tell you I’m in the process of trying to produce a new paper version of The Year Of the Warrior. Ori Pomerantz helped me out in the early stages, and now I’m proofreading a file to submit to a printer. (As you may be aware, Baen Books continues to sell the e-version, but our contract gives me the right to produce a tangible book. I note that the cover above was designed back in 2018, so this has been a long time coming.) It’s always a little awkward, when I’m selling books at Viking events, to tell people that the one Erling book I have for sale in dead tree form is Number Two in a series. TYOTW on paper will mean I’ll have books One and Two both (or One, Two and Three if you count TYOTW as a double. Which it is.). I think that’ll go over well.

Assuming there is a Viking Season this summer. If there isn’t, the money I plan to pay a printer will be sunk costs in my basement for a while.

So I’m re-reading The Year Of the Warrior for the first time in… a decade? Two decades? A long time. What do I think of it?

All in all, I’m pleased. There’s some weak spots, some sentences I’d recast or streamline. And the plotting, especially at the beginning, is occasionally forced. But a lot of the prose reads just fine to me, even moving in spots.

There are errors of fact. Some things I got wrong about Viking life, which have been clarified for me in the many years since. I wish I’d known that Erling’s father, according to a saga I’d never seen when I was writing, was killed in a thrall uprising while he was a boy (I spackled that story over in West Oversea). Other errors I won’t mention, because I’ve already repressed them.

I’m not fixing any errors in this version. “What I have written, I have written,” as a not-so-great Roman said. I think I need to own my mistakes along with my successes. It’s all on the record.

I’d forgotten some details. Erling’s shield shows two eagles (I need to mention that again; it’s thematically important). Father Ailill has a box bed in his house.

Anyway, I haven’t gotten an estimate from the printer yet, but I expect it won’t be cheap, especially with that beautiful cover by Jeremiah Humphries. So that’s where my stimulus money is going. Which is too bad, because I just got brake work done on the car…