Icarus Volume I

Alexander Ferrar was born on a battlefield, and the first sounds he heard were the shots that killed his parents. He was reared by a cutthroat band of evil mercenaries, and he grew up hard, suckled as he was at the teats of war. He-okay, no, he wasn’t. He lives in La Antigua Guatemala where he owns a restaurant-art gallery and a very popular exotic ice cream company, and he has a beautiful wife. His grass is plenty green. He’s also the author of the Heresy series of crime fiction novels, the sword-and-sorcery comedy Saga of the Beverage Men, the forthcoming Memoirs of a Swine, and the art collection Variety is the Spice. But the other story sounded better, didn’t it? * * * * * * ＂I wrote my first book when I was four, but, just like Mozart’s first concerto, written when he was four years old as well, it was crap. In fact, every book I wrote up until I was twenty-three was crap, mostly derivative of my favorite authors at the time if not outright plagiarism (oddly enough, just like Mozart). Then I read Mark Twain’s advice on good writing: ＂Write what you know,＂ and I realized I didn’t know anything, at least not anything worth writing about, so I left the comforts of my ivory tower and struck out on a new life of adventure. There were chases, escapes, heroes and villains (of which I was both) betrayal and revenge, and no small amount of sex-drugs-rock-n-roll on three continents. I roosted in henhouses and wallowed in pigsties. Having managed to survive the seedy underworld into which I’d plunged, I have come back to tell the tales that my imagination never could have conjured up (with a bit of fiction of course--the names have been changed to protect the guilty) and invite you to enjoy them, learn from my mistakes, and see just what a dangerous world lurks just beneath the surface.＂ ---Alexander Ferrar