Toy Wars (40 page)

Author’s
n
ote:

I want to thank you for reading
Toy Wars
. 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 has 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 meaning to novels that I’ve loved or tales that were just that.

I’m perverse enough to want to make it clear to my readers/fans th
at I write stories to entertain
—
full stop.
My books, short stories
,
and other creative pieces are not being used to p
ass 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 that it is logical, believable
,
and most of all, entertaining to you, my public.
You are the one
s
who determine my success or failure and I won’t make you work hard by veiling something critical, like my point of asking that you read this work.
While I may have reduced my potential sales by not
allowing
some gung-ho teacher
to force scads of student
to use my work to illustrate parallelism or some other concept, I will be true to you
,
the readers.

/Soapbox End

As with any other book I write, I
will give you some insight as to where the kernel of
its idea came from.

The original
Toy Wars
idea was long before the age of realistic war movies
where
characters
showed their
fear.
It was the age of John Wayne charging in fearlessly, of Clint Eastwood enigmatically and coolly taking his revenge
,
and of simple messages of good and evil in our movies.

Toy Wars started with nothing more than watching the antics of several old style cartoons on Saturday morning TV at the same time I was playing an old style board game named
Panzer Leader
by Avalon Hill.

As I stared at the simple cardboard counters
Panzer Leader
used to represent large numbers of actual
h
uman
s fighting and dying on the battle
field
s of World War II
,
I wondered what they felt.
How did they do what they did?
B
ehind this introspection of a young man played the comic relief of
Looney Toons
by Warner Brothers.
It doesn’t take
many
rotations through my twisty mind to come up with
t
oys fighting
t
oys.
How would they feel
?

The rest came by trying to fit the above thought process into the logical world.
How are toys really going to fight toys?
It took many months of ponder to come up with
a
full concept of Project Infuse being raided by Foxhunt.

Again, I hope you have enjoyed Toy Wars, the first in the Toy World series.
If you did enjoy, please visit my
publishing
website at TANSTAAFLPress.com
for other upcoming novels.

Also by Thomas Gondolfi throug
h
TANSTAAFL Pres
s
:

An Eighty Percent Solution

In a world where corporations suborn governments as a part of good business practice and unregistered humans can be killed without penalty, Tony Sammis, a midlevel corporate functionary, finds himself unwittingly
a pawn
in a guerilla war between a powerful cabal of business leaders and an elusive
but deadly
underground movement.
His final
solution to the biological terror unleashed mirrors
Tony’s
own twisted sense of justice.