The Many Deaths of Joe Buckley Read Online Free PDF Page A

policemen. He understood people would be scared of shifters. Not that he blamed them. There were some shifters that he was scared of himself. But the thing was, when people were terrified, they only ran away half the time. The other half . . . they attacked and killed the cause of their fear.
    “I’ll be okay. I have a four-wheel drive, and I’ve lived here all my life. This is not the first blizzard I’ve driven in,” he said. He was still trying to process the input of the lion’s nose. There had been a clear shifter scent trail throughout the aquarium. It had circled the shark area.
    The shark area where, yesterday, a human arm had been found—still clutching a cell phone—inside a shark. The aquarium had been shut down—though the weather provided a good excuse for that. And the relevant area was isolated behind the yellow crime-scene tape. The dead man had been identified as a business traveler from California, staying in town for less than a week.
    The question was—had he fallen in the tank or been pushed? And if he’d been pushed, was it a shifter who’d done the pushing?
    * * *
    “Uh,” Rafiel interrupted, “before you guys start arguing domestic arrangements, the other thing is, that I tried to find Old Joe, because, you know, since he was right about the last corpse—by the way, the name was Joseph Buckley; he was a software salesman—I thought he might be able to give me details and pinpoint who the woman might be he was talking about. But I can’t find him anywhere.”
    Tom sighed. “He’s very, very good at hiding. I think he’s been doing it for centuries. If he’s right about having been alive since before horses . . .”
    “Yeah. Probably. Anyway . . . I can’t figure out where he’s gone, so if you hear something let me know.”

John Ringo:
    So . . . Getting published is one hell of a thrill.
    I used to go to work every day in a geotextile mill and try to tease reality out of a bunch of quality control data so screwed up it wasn’t even funny. For not particularly good pay and surrounded by people who generally despised me for pointing out that they couldn’t find their butt with both hands. 
    In April 1998, due in part to a conversation on Baen’s Bar, Jim Baen took a look at the manuscript for A Hymn Before Battle and, after thoroughly and professionally eviscerating it, wrote, “If you change it the way I said, I’ll buy it.”
    I thought I could walk to the top of Mount Everest on the clouds. Seriously.
    Because they couldn’t find the paper manuscript, I’d emailed him Hymn along with as much as I’d finished of Gust Front , the sequel. In August I got an email from him that read: “Your mss ends in medias res. You have ten minutes.”
    Turns out he’d been reading Gust Front and it had suddenly ended. In the middle of a battle. In the middle of a sentence. In the middle of a prepositional phrase. The last word was “of.” 
    Fortunately, I’d finished it. And he bought that. Forty plus novels in hardback later and the rest, as they say, is history. (I wish I could find my fifth grade English teacher and just gesture to a well-stocked shelf in a bookstore . . .)
    But Gust was (and is) rough. When I write I write fast and sometimes, especially in those days, certain grammatical and spelling errors crop in. Example: Even in the book blurb at the front of the paperback version, there are three egregious grammatical errors including issues of plurality and tense.
    It was worse in the rough. Much, much worse.
    So I thought to myself: “Self, Joe Buckley is a detail-oriented guy! Send it to him and get some copy-editing help!”
    Turns out Joe’s editing persona is a lot like his online persona. There were 108 corrections, many of which were what he tends to call “peanut gallery” observations. (For many years Joe maintained a website called “Views from the Peanut Gallery,” which tended to not so much review books by his favorite authors but roast them. Think of