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| Read our interview with John the Eunuch Read our author interview See our reviews of: Two for Joy: First Review - Second Review One for Sorrow Eric Mayer is co-author with Mary Reed of the popular historical mysteries One for Sorrow and Two for Joy featuring John the Eunuch.  I was born in 1950. My childhood in Northeastern Pennsylvania was not unpleasant enough to provide any assistance in my future literary endeavors. After deciding I could not earn a living with my degree in English Literature I went to law school, where I decided I would not earn a living as a lawyer. Instead I found employment as a technical writer of legal publications, which I continue to do but on a freelance basis since losing my job in company-wide layoffs several years ago.The more important facts of my life probably begin with my grandmother reading to me from "The Wind in the Willows", and my friends and I regaling each other with running commentaries while drawing cartoon strip epics on rolls of adding machine paper. Starting in the fourth grade I spent more than a decade devouring science- fiction. Although my reading interests gradually widened, those years of immersion in unlikely futures and alien worlds left me with a taste for the exotic in literature and the nagging, uncomfortable conviction that things don't have to be the way they are. My first foray into professional writing came at age sixteen when I submitted a science-fiction story to the usual magazines. Unlike Isaac Asimov I was not destined to be a prodigy. The story came back as quickly as a defective Redstone rocket, but without the spectacular explosion. I first saw my byline in print while at college, when I wrote a column for a local weekly newspaper and garnered my first and only professional award, a Golden Quill from the Pennsylvania Newspaper Publisher's Association. During my twenties and thirties I was busy going to school, earning a living and raising a family, and only sporadically exchanged bulky envelopes of typewritten pages for small rectangles of rejection. I did write personal essays for what aficionados refer to as science-fiction fanzine/ fandom, a hobby involving the publicationof amateur magazines which, oddly enough, rarely have anything to do with science fiction. For years I published my own magazine, the first few issues of which were printed on a hectograph - essentially a pan of hard gelatin used to transfer an impression from a wet ditto master. The circulation for this publication was not very large. Eventually, however, I began to sell some of these essays to newspapers and magazines, so my time in fandom was not entirely misspent - especially considering that it was through fandom that I met my wife and co-writer, Mary. Writing nonfiction resulted in some interesting experiences. I had the opportunity to talk to people likeJeannie Moos of CNN and Jane Yolen, was asked to run in, and write about, a 10K road race at a Vermont ski-resort, got a behind the scenes look at a zoo. Mary and I sold our first story about John the Eunuch to Mike Ashley for his anthology entitled The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunits in l993. We have also co-authored, among other stories, a series featuring Inspector Dorj, set in modern Mongolia. Over the years I've engaged in other pursuits, which may or may not be reflected in my writing some day, including scripting comic books for a small independent publisher and drawing pocket sized mini-comics starring the cartoon characters my friends and I drew as children, and the household cats. Recently I've been programming text based computer games, or interactive fiction. Eric Mayer’s Reflections offer an insightful view of an author’s life |
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