An Eighty Percent Solution

Author’s Note:

I want to thank you for reading An Eighty Percent Solution. I truly hope you’ve enjoyed it! Because of the curse or blessing of my creative side, I not only write, I also game master roleplaying games and undertake many other activities where I invent to entertain. It’s unlikely that in my lifetime my creativity will wane. Because I write to entertain, I must also take this occasion to drag out my podium:



/soapbox begin

It’s been my sad fate to have been in one too many classes, through my high school and college years, where some teacher of literature attempts to draw out some secret, hidden meaning to novels I’ve loved or tales that were just that.

I’m perverse enough to want to make it clear to my readers and fans that I write stories to entertain—full stop. My books, short stories, and other creative pieces are not being used to pass on some hidden message. I’m not obscuring political parallels in the background. I’m not offering a secreted religious message. Yes, I have many opinions—political, religious, and sexual—but I won’t use my novels as a medium for expressing them.

I conceive of an idea and try to flesh it out so it’s logical, believable, and most of all, entertaining to you, my public. You’re the ones who determine my success or failure, and I won’t make you work harder by veiling something critical. While I may have reduced my potential sales by not allowing some gung-ho teacher to force scads of students to use my work to illustrate parallelism or some other concept, I will be true to you, the readers.

/soapbox end



Now, I’ll give you some insight as to where the kernel of an idea for this first of the CorpGov Chronicles came from. It started, as many of these things do, with someone else’s work—to wit, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and his well-known detective, Sherlock Holmes. I watched an episode of their story just as I took a corporate training class on management practices. Sherlock’s addiction to a seven percent solution came on the screen just as I was dealing with the concept of “eighty percent of a problem can be solved with twenty percent of the effort.”

It took all of about seven seconds for my twisted mind to come up with the rough outline of this book from the title I envisioned from merging the two…and An Eighty Percent Solution was born.

As a shameless plug, I hope I’ve entertained you enough to interest you in the next installment of the CorpGov Chronicles. I’ve envisioned and mapped out several sequels to An Eighty Percent Solution. I won’t ruin either your anticipation or my ability to make adjustments to the stories’ flow by going too far into the future. Instead, I’ll whet your appetite with a brief blurb describing the next CorpGov novel, Thinking Outside the Box:



After replacing the evil business cabal with a responsible government, the terrorist organization known as the Green Action Militia thought their job was finally done. Instead, the newly formed CorpGov calls upon them to help prevent another coup, this time by the Metro police bureaucracy. The Metros want nothing more than to keep their lives of privilege and power in a world that drowns in the blood of injustice.

To this explosive situation, a previously unknown power block begins to forward their own agenda. Tony and his decimated crew of guerillas must dig deep to avert the chaos of a three-sided civil war.