C.L. Stegall

Allow me some fan­boy rev­elry dur­ing my birth­day week, if you will.

I’ve been down with a ter­ri­ble sinus infec­tion for the last few days (hence miss­ing my usual Mon­day link post­ing).  But things are look­ing up!  Read on to see what I mean.

I spent ten years in the mil­i­tary, three as an engi­neer and the remain­der as a lin­guist for Mil­i­tary Intel­li­gence (hold the cliché com­men­tary, please). Dur­ing that time, I did a two-year stint in Cen­tral Amer­ica, in Panama, right after Oper­a­tion: Just Cause. I was part of the clean-up crew that had the dubi­ous honor of walk­ing through a cou­ple of Noriega’s strong­holds. I’ll leave the rest to your imag­i­na­tion. Once you’re down there in the jun­gle, there isn’t a lot of escape from the envi­ron­ment, if you know what I mean. As a writer and vora­cious reader, that out­let became my main escape. For bet­ter or worse, I began read­ing a par­tic­u­lar sci­ence fic­tion series that soon became one of my trea­sured imag­i­nary worlds. (I have many of course… I mean, don’t we all?)

The series was writ­ten by Allan Cole and Chris Bunch.  It told the tale of an orphan kid, Sten, who was born into what amounted to slav­ery, but rose through the mil­i­tary ranks to become the right-hand man and con­fi­dante to the most pow­er­ful being in the uni­verse, the Eter­nal Emperor.

To say that Sten’s adven­tures were thrilling would be like say­ing rid­ing a roller coaster while attached to a short bungee cord would be kinda cool.

Once I had read the first in the series a cou­ple of times, other sol­diers in my unit began ask­ing me about what I was read­ing (I car­ried it around with me every­where, in the cargo pocket of my fatigues). So it came to be that Sten made the rounds among the read­ers of the unit.  Need­less to say, the dude was hit!

A few of the guys even took to call­ing me “Sten” just for the fun of it. (A nick­name far from earned and one that did not fol­low me out of the jun­gles of Cen­tral America.)

Skip for­ward many years to this week, when I had this lit­tle exchange on Facebook:

Allan Cole wishes me happy birthday

Oh, my freak­ing gawd! Yes, I’ve been geek­ing out ever since. As a writer, it is inevitable that we have influ­ences in the lit­er­ary world. As a genre writer, it is more like heroes. And, Allan Cole and Chris Bunch (God rest his soul) have been two of mine for decades. For some­thing so sim­ple as a birth­day wish from a hero… hell, it just doesn’t get any bet­ter than that.

And, if you haven’t read the Sten series, you should!

So far, my birth­day week is get­ting bet­ter and better!