On Monday, June 10, 2019 at 5:46:44 PM UTC-4, Dimensional Traveler wrote:
[snip]
Post by Dimensional TravelerIIRC Ringo at one point saying he wrote 'Ghost' to get the "ickyness"
(my word, not his) out of his system with no intent to ever submit it
for publishing. Somehow it did get submitted and published and he was
both surprised and, again IIRC, scared by how well it sold.
A little googling finds the following LiveJournal comment, apparently
posted by John Ringo in 2008 --
https://hradzka.livejournal.com/194753.html?thread=760769#t760769 . It
includes a number of relevant statements:
"If YOU think you were thinking 'OH JOHN RINGO NO!', be quite aware
that that is what I was thinking most of the time. Especially in Ghost.
The book was so over the top, my working title was 'The Wanker Piece.'
(Marketing forced me to drop the title. :-) [snip]
I decided early in the book that I was simply going to ignore reality
whenever possible.
[snip]it got voted Best Romance of the Year in 2005, OMFG, I giggled
for WEEKS[snip]
The truth is that many people who choose to be in positions of
conflict are, at some level, what most people would call 'truly evil.'
They are infested by demons if you will. (Strong id if you prefer.)
But they CHOOSE to manifest that side of themselves only when necessary.
They keep it in a box and bring it out when they face others who don't
so choose, who revel in their own evil. It is their Killer, their
Machine, their Stranger. (Billy Joel song.) Cops, military, what have
you. They are 'the rough men' who keep us safe in our beds at night and
many of the very best... are more like Mike than they care for.
For those people, Mike is both a hero and a cautionary tale. Given the
situation, what would you choose?
And, by the way, women tend to love them and men follow them. :->
We are a very screwed up species."
Another relevant comment by James Cochrane from the same thread:
"John isn't exaggerating when he said he called it the "Wanker Piece".
He was griping for days that the story just WOULD NOT LEAVE HIM ALONE,
and was getting in the way of his REAL writing. So he wrote it to get
it out of his head. Then everybody wanted to see it. So, as he headed
out the door to DragonCon, he posted a large chunk of it to Baen's Bar.
I live closer to Dragon, by the time I left, two or so hours later,
there were almost 300 positive comments, including many from females
I'd never seen post before (the section posted included most of the
first book in Ghost [snip])
The look of HORROR on John's face when I told him that was quite
amusing. Then he considered selling it under a pseudonym to some other
publishing house. Then Jim heard about it, and wanted to see it, and
was insulted that John would even THINK about going to another
publisher. And, of course, it HAD to be published under John's own
name, no pseudonyms, uh uh."