I graduated from college in 1981 with a degree in Communications/Media, specializing in Technical Writing. I had done very well in school and so, when I graduated, I expected to land a great job in the growing computer industry. It didn't work out quite that way. I found myself working ten-hour days in a plastics factory, then working working nights as a bouncer in local clubs. It was good, honest work, but I was dying. Every morning, I'd go in, stand on a little metal bench beside a big metal table, earphones on, and dump barrels of scrap lumps of plastic on the table, feeding them slowly into the whirring grinder. The only thinking part of the job was that I had to remember to change the catch barrel every twenty minutes or I'd get plastic flakes all over the floor.

Then, one day in mid-1982, my girlfriend (now my wife) suggested that I write the book I'd been talking about since we had begun dating early that same year. And so in September, I sat down on the edge of my bed, writing longhand (because that's the way I thought real writers did it), in a spiral notebook, by candlelight (because that's the way I thought real writers did it), to Fleetwood Mac's album Tusk (yes, I said "album"). I'd come home from the nightclub at about 2:00 A.M., sit down and write for an hour or so, then get up and go to work at 8:00 A.M.

I was young then.

Six months later, in March 1983, with two such spiral notebooks full, I finished my novel. I remember the night vividly. I finished the book during one of those beautiful New England spring snowstorms, with big puffy flakes drifting down lazily past the street light. I went downstairs to find Diane (my wife) and my mom and dad waiting for me with a bottle of champagne -- you know, the ones wrapped with ribbons that you give someone when they have a baby. I don't remember if it was a boy or girl, but it hardly mattered. I didn't write the book to get published, I wrote it so that I wouldn't be just another number, buried in just another grave. I wrote the book to steal a litle piece of immortality.

And that's what happened, in a roundabout way. Those spiral-bound notebooks got me the opening to submit a proposal for my first published novel. And a couple of years later, I sold that first book, Echoes of the Fourth Magic, along with the sequel, The Witches Daughter. When I got the rights to those books back, I was thrilled to sell them, along with an as-yet-unpublished third installment, to Del Rey. It's funny, but when I was re-reading Echoes of the Fourth Magic in preperation for the new publication, I was sent back in time, back to my room in my parents' house, on the edge of the bed in the candlelight, with Tusk playing in the backround. Never could I have imagined that those hours spent in a land called Ynis Aielle would lead to all of this.

For more on R.A. Salvatore and Echoes of the Fourth Magic, visit:
www.randomhouse.com/delrey