I'm gearing up, with the help of my webmaster Bradley Schenck and cover artist Ben Baldwin, to self-publish the first of my trunk novels in the next couple of weeks.

For those who don't know the term, a trunk novel is a book that the author couldn't sell. That doesn't always mean the book is not publishable; sometimes things go wrong in other parts of the forest. The book I'm bringing out, Paroxysm, was written in 1996 when I had a Canadian agent in Toronto. For reasons I've never been able to understand, the agent (who gave me notes on the original draft and helped me ready it for submission), never sent the book out. It sat on her shelf, along with a second novel, for months until I fired her.

In 2001, it was in the hands of a New York agent who did send it out to at least one editor who said good things about it without making an offer. Then the agent suffered a near-tragedy in her family and went into a tailspin that lasted months. I took the book back and moved on.

But here's the rub: because Paroxysm had "been out" from an agent and hadn't sold, it was dead. No other agent would touch it. So it went back into the trunk and there it has remained ever since.

It's a perfectly serviceable present-day thriller, with just a tinge of science fiction to the premise. Rob Sawyer told me that if it had had a little more sfness to it, he would have taken it for his imprint (instead, he took The Commons , for which I am grateful).

Paroxysm could be shelved next to Invasion of the Body Snatchers, except that it involves military-industrial rogues and a mad scientist instead of seed-pod aliens. And it has a "Keep watching the skies!" message to it, except that it's not the skies we need to watch -- it's the people who keep inventing interesting new ways for us to kill each other.

Nuff said to make a teaser. Check back here before the end of the month, and it ought to be available as a $2.99 ebook and a $12.99 POD paperback. I'll also put up an excerpt.