The Dragon Ticket and Other Stories is the first of my thirty-five books. Although most of the stories in it take place on the Indian Subcontinent, I was living in Greece when I wrote them. I had lived in South Asia for about ten years, though, and my experiences in those enigmatic lands still filled my thoughts. Several of my first stories published in magazines and anthologies were set in Nepal, Kolkata, Mumbai, Kodaikanal, and Dhaka.
In Greece I faced numerous challenges in the path to publication. In the days before periodicals accepted electronic submissions, I had to print out stories and send them with a self-addressed envelope to the markets in the United States, Canada, England, and Australia. Since I couldn’t buy the relevant stamps in Thessaloniki, I had to find post offices that sold international reply coupons. These were few and far between, and by the time paper submissions became redundant, I had pretty much cleaned out those reply coupons from almost every post office in town.
In the late 2000s I became enthralled with the fledgling trend in self-publishing. I studied blogs such as those of Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith as well as comprehensive layout and publishing guides on sites like Smashwords to figure out how to do it right. During the school year I taught English as a foreign language, but in the summers I was free, and I took the time to learn to properly format my writing for both digital and print editions. However, when it came to the cover I got some help from 2Pollard Design, a graphics arts business owned by relatives. They produced a vibrant, evocative, and colorful picture and design that is perfect for the subject matter of the stories.
I was cautious when selecting which stories should appear in my first collection; by this I mean that I included mostly previously published tales. In fact, seven of the eight stories appeared in magazines first. In my later collections, after I became familiar with self-publishing, I added more original stories to the mix.
The blurb on the back states:
High in the Himalayas a young woman receives an extraordinary gift. Beneath the streets of Calcutta a man discovers a terrifying presence. In a palace full of sybaritic pleasures a demigod incurs terrible retribution. On a far desert planet teeming with venomous creatures a woman searches for ultimate truth.
In these and other strange and wondrous tales John Walters explores the ramifications of human/alien encounter.
As I explain, though, in the book’s afterword:
The stories are not really about human-alien encounters but about the human condition. Science fiction and fantasy for me have always been literary devices to use to unashamedly produce metaphors, parables, fables – whatever the imagination can conceive. When it comes down to it, there may or may not be aliens out there, but right now it’s all about us, folks.
What a thrill it was to hold it for the first time – a thrill that repeats, of course, with each new publication, but there’s nothing quite like that first book.
Click to buy from these distributors:
John Walters 