Embarrassing as it is to admit, I was in a bad slump.I hadn't completed a new novel in four years. Oh sure, I'd started several projects, some of which I think were/are pretty good. But I'd only get so far into them and then hit a brick wall. I just couldn't push myself beyond that point, and then I'd lose interest in them and give up.

I needed something that would sustain my interest, something that would keep me going. Something, in short, that was so much fun I'd keep on going because I didn't want to stop.

Quiet Post was my answer. I love comedy, I love surrealism, I love making people laugh with offbeat humor. I grew up loving the Oz books and graduated to Discworld, and have started doing post-graduate study in Jasper Fforde's bizarre alternatives to sanity. I'm not as witty as Terry Pratchett or as twisted as Fforde, but I think my Quasiverse (the first syllables pronounced as in, "You kwazy wabbit!") will offer readers some chuckles along the way.

The heroine is Martia Rosenthal, a normally sane and competent young woman who is thoroughly depressed at the end of a bad love affair. To jolt herself out of her funk, she signs up for a term of service in the Quasiverse, a place where anything can happen and often does. Martia will find her patience, as well as her sanity, tested.

Though Martia is the book's central character, I think the show is stolen by a lady whom some people call Bright, who appears briefly in the Prolog and then doesn't show up again until midway through the novel. Once she does, I believe she'll steal the show--like Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

This is a thoroughly silly book. It has no meaning, no message, no reason for existence other than pure entertainment and enjoyment. If anything serious accidentally slipped in, I deeply apologize.