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Author's Note

 

 

A SPECIAL NOTE TO THOSE DECENT, HEROIC, AND TRULY NOBLE FANS WHO, BESIDES BUYING THIS PAPERBACK EDITION, ALSO SHELLED OUT THE $21.00 TO BUY THE HARDCOVER:

 

THANK YOU!

 

Now, you will probably have noticed that something is different here, namely that I have changed the ending. It happened this way:

I had originally planned to have the book end, as it does in this paperback, in a fairly upbeat way. After all, that's the basic formula for an enjoyable adventure story. You drop your hero (a decent person that your reader can identify with) into a large crock of shit, and by dint of hard work, adventurous actions, and dumb luck he works his way upward into the light.

But this was my first book for the very nice people at Baen Books, my contract said that I was to write 90,000 words, and I didn't yet know what I could get away with. Finishing the story but finding myself a few pages short, rather than going back and padding in something that I hadn't planned to pad in, I simply continued the story on a bit, adding a chapter into what I planned for the next book in the series.

Anyway, I told myself, it would be nice to win an award for something, and history proves that the best way to do that is to write something with a sad, tragic, or futile ending. It's that, or making your hero a black, handicapped, homosexual lady who, while confined to a wheelchair, goes around rescuing Jews from the Nazis.

Well, nobody suggested that I was deserving of a Nobel Prize for Literature, but while there were no actual death threats, a lot of people said that ending a book with " . . . and then the little boy fell out of bed and discovered that it was all just a bad dream!" was a shitty stunt to pull on your readers.

And, you know, they were right. I asked Jim Baen if I could change it, and he's letting me do it, despite the added costs.

So the paperback now has one less chapter in it than the hardcover. Don't worry about it. It will be resurrected as one of the opening chapters of the sequel, providing the next large crock of shit.

Waste not, want not, after all.

 

—Leo Frankowski,

October 5, 1999

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Framed


Title: A Boy and His Tank
Author: Leo A. Frankowski
ISBN: 0-671-57794-6 0-671-57850-2
Copyright: © 1999 by Leo A. Frankowski
Publisher: Baen Books