The Story of Trolls 6

Any question asked of any group of individuals yields not different answers to the same question but answers to the different question that each of them heard. Somewhere there is a universal truth but no one much cares about it.

This continues the Story of Trolls 5.

Mac settled into many late nights, sending email inquiries out to various distributors and retailers and various and sundries. Fishing with a wide net he hoped to catch something from somewhere. He threw himself into the lists on the various list serves . . . in those days there were no message boards, or face books, or twitters, instgrams and what nots. He joined a host of lists, at first lurking, but as time unfolded began to chime in on discussions. He participated in retailer lists, and hobby market lists and lists where Wizards of the Coast was discussing some kind of open license for their D&D game. It all came in a flurry and he began making copious notes and painstakingly cataloging his emails.

In the meanwhile Davis spent his week days in the sweating hear of Wyoming digging in the dirt in a variety of anthropologic digs. He spent his weekend days hunkered over a computer library answering emails or at the desk in his one-shot, run down dive of a hotel room, hand drawing the elements that once combined would become the World of Erde map. Evenings were spent in drunken stupors at whatever local brewhouse or road flat served up the cheapest beer. Emails from Davis became rare and those on sunday often disjointed as if written in some type of haze.

Steve, taking a light class load of historical forget me nots, brushed off his computer, largely unused in his office. It was his first, acquired post-Army in 1995 and it had only DOS components and AOL on it; the friend who bought it for him swore off windows saying it was 'computers for idiots'. It so happened that the same friend had bought all manner of software for it and it had some dinosaur of a program on their called pagemaker, a book layout program.  It was an ancient breed and proved as cumbersome as it was comforting. Steve set out to learn the program while writing Erde and cleaning up Mortality of Green.

Meanwhile the crew booked the booth at Gencon, found some Best-western downtown and reserved a room and began taking stock of what they would need for the trip. It included a truck, now affectionately called Old Blue, but in 2000, still in her hey day.

All the pieces were falling together, but they would fall together much faster than ever anticipated as suddenly the Trolls found themselves with a distributor and offers from a consolidator with a little hook into Amazon.