A big hello to all of you out there.

My name is Dale West. I just passed my 81st birthday. All my life I have been a devotee of fantasy.

As a child, I was not a good student. I graduated high school, but just narrowly. I believe that they moved me on just to get rid of me. I didn't have a lot of interest in books, but I did read the classics; Mark Twain, Jules Verne, Herman Melville, and Stephen Crane.

Late in 1968, I had the good fortune to move into a community of artists, writers, college students, and hippies. We would pick a book to read, then get together, drink a little wine, and discuss it. We read Stephen R. Donaldson's The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Neil Hancock's The Circle of Light, Anne McCaffrey's The Dragonriders of Pern, and many more. Of course, my all-time favorite was J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

I began writing Maya Lethe in 1970 because I was trying to tell my five-year-old son what I did on my job as a power station operator, what it was like when things went wrong, when we had an outage and things went dark. I imagined a dragon that spat fire and raised havoc on the world. To battle the dragon I invented two heroes; one, an 18-year-old boy, the other, a 70-year-old General who is on the verge of mandatory retirement. In their travels through Maya Lethe they are thrust into unexpected adventures. They face an evil wizard, escape many perilous dangers, run from unsavory villains, and do battle with ominous demons.

I worked long hours in a factory most of my adult life, while at home I had a wife and three children who needed my attention. There was little free time to write. As a result, I didn't finish Maya Lethe until this year.

That's how it started. If you want to see how it ends, I invite you to read it for yourselves. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it.

Dale West
April 2022