Gilbert M. Stack Books have long been one of the centers of my life. It started with my mother reading Dr. Seuss and quickly moved on to the Hardy Boys, The Land of Oz, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. These were books that ignited my imagination and made me crave more. By sixth grade I had discovered J.R.R. Tolkein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Neil Hancock. The book store was a six mile bike ride and by eighth grade my best friend and I were making the trip every week where I spent my paper route money on new novels and new adventures. In high school I joined the Science Fiction Book Club and my reading horizons broadened even further—Roger Zelazny, Robert A. Heinlein, C.J. Cherryh, David Eddings, and Terry Brooks to name a few.
In high school I also started getting serious about my own plots and my own books and tried to develop interactive stories through role playing games. These weren’t my first ventures into fiction—those stretched back to my imaginary friend when I was still in preschool—but I started for the first time to think about publishing and to try my hand at longer work. I started to understand that I wanted to be an author.
In college my fiction started to take off and I completed my first full length novel. I also discovered a passionate need to understand how the analogous periods in the fiction I was writing really functioned, so I began to study history to enrich my fantasy writing, eventually going to graduate school and earning a PhD. During these years I wrote a lot of stories and one novel and started to collect rejection notices, but it was only after I completed my doctorate that my fiction really started to take off.
My first sale, Pandora’s Luck, was to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and focused on a bare-knuckle boxer and a lady gambler traveling together in the Wild West. It was an action packed crime story and was followed by fifteen others, mostly in the same series.
While the AHMM mysteries began to sell I continued to explore other markets. I sold a super hero story to Cyber Age Adventures, but it went out of business before it could be published. That was a common problem with online ebook companies, many of which published my growing library of stories but couldn’t stay in business in the long run. So my urban fantasies—historical and modern—made their debuts but didn’t stay around long enough to let me build a following. These collapses were terribly disappointing and it eventually became apparent to me that the publishing world was moving in the direction of the independent author and if I wanted to reach readers I had to learn a new business model.
Now I’m pursuing my dreams by self-publishing my work on Amazon and through the Smashwords distribution network. I’m writing High Fantasies based in an analogue of the Roman Empire (my Legionnaire series) and my own medieval fantasy world (the forthcoming Winterhaven series), and supplementing them with urban fantasies, paranormal adventures, and science fiction stories I’ve written but not yet published over the years. If you’re interested, the currently available books are listed below and if you want to learn more you can check out my website at gilbertstack.com. (There’s a free newsletter, book reviews, my blog and, of course, news on my upcoming releases.) You can also follow me on my Facebook page where in addition to news about sales and upcoming releases, you can read my Today in History posts.
Legionnaire 1 The Fire Islands 2 The Sea of Grass 3 The Jeweled Hills 4 The Battle for Amatista 5 The Centinela Gambit 6. Morganita Burning 7. The Bridges of Morganita
Winterhaven 1. Winterhaven 2. The First Snows (forthcoming June 2019) 3. The Blood of Torons (forthcoming)
The Pembroke Steel Series 1 Lazarus Key 2 Hearts of Ice and Other Stories 3 The Shore and Other Stories
Novels: Blood Ties Forever After High Above the Waters Panic Button Ransom
Books have long been one of the centers of my life. It started with my mother reading Dr. Seuss and quickly moved on to the Hardy Boys, The Land of Oz, and Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators. These were books that ignited my imagination and made me crave more. By sixth grade I had discovered J.R.R. Tolkein, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Neil Hancock. The book store was a six mile bike ride and by eighth grade my best friend and I were making the trip every week where I spent my paper route money on new novels and new adventures. In high school I joined the Science Fiction Book Club and my reading horizons broadened even further—Roger Zelazny, Robert A. Heinlein, C.J. Cherryh, David Eddings, and Terry Brooks to name a few.
In high school I also started getting serious about my own plots and my own books and tried to develop interactive stories through role playing games. These weren’t my first ventures into fiction—those stretched back to my imaginary friend when I was still in preschool—but I started for the first time to think about publishing and to try my hand at longer work. I started to understand that I wanted to be an author.
In college my fiction started to take off and I completed my first full length novel. I also discovered a passionate need to understand how the analogous periods in the fiction I was writing really functioned, so I began to study history to enrich my fantasy writing, eventually going to graduate school and earning a PhD. During these years I wrote a lot of stories and one novel and started to collect rejection notices, but it was only after I completed my doctorate that my fiction really started to take off.
My first sale, Pandora’s Luck, was to Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and focused on a bare-knuckle boxer and a lady gambler traveling together in the Wild West. It was an action packed crime story and was followed by fifteen others, mostly in the same series.
While the AHMM mysteries began to sell I continued to explore other markets. I sold a super hero story to Cyber Age Adventures, but it went out of business before it could be published. That was a common problem with online ebook companies, many of which published my growing library of stories but couldn’t stay in business in the long run. So my urban fantasies—historical and modern—made their debuts but didn’t stay around long enough to let me build a following. These collapses were terribly disappointing and it eventually became apparent to me that the publishing world was moving in the direction of the independent author and if I wanted to reach readers I had to learn a new business model.
Now I’m pursuing my dreams by self-publishing my work on Amazon and through the Smashwords distribution network. I’m writing High Fantasies based in an analogue of the Roman Empire (my Legionnaire series) and my own medieval fantasy world (the forthcoming Winterhaven series), and supplementing them with urban fantasies, paranormal adventures, and science fiction stories I’ve written but not yet published over the years. If you’re interested, the currently available books are listed below and if you want to learn more you can check out my website at gilbertstack.com. (There’s a free newsletter, book reviews, my blog and, of course, news on my upcoming releases.) You can also follow me on my Facebook page where in addition to news about sales and upcoming releases, you can read my Today in History posts.
Legionnaire
1 The Fire Islands
2 The Sea of Grass
3 The Jeweled Hills
4 The Battle for Amatista
5 The Centinela Gambit
6. Morganita Burning
7. The Bridges of Morganita
Winterhaven
1. Winterhaven
2. The First Snows (forthcoming June 2019)
3. The Blood of Torons (forthcoming)
The Pembroke Steel Series
1 Lazarus Key
2 Hearts of Ice and Other Stories
3 The Shore and Other Stories
Novels:
Blood Ties
Forever After
High Above the Waters
Panic Button
Ransom
Short Stories
What Child Is This?