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Photo of Eric S. Nylund Eric S. Nylund
Near the beginning of Dry Water, Eric Nylund gives directions for driving to Seco County and the ghost town Dry Water: Take Highway 40 into New Mexico to the 605; go north into the Cibola National Forest; turn right onto the 509, point straight toward Mount Taylor, go five miles, then go on Agua de Viva Road, and wind "through aspen groves, into the honey mesquite and creosote covered hills of Seco County."
DRY WATER by Eric S. Nylund The first half of these directions are on the map, says Nylund. "Then they take a left turn in reality, and you get there. It's a totally imaginary county wedged between Albuquerque and Grants and Chaco Canyon in northwestern New Mexico." The route is not unlike Nylund's fiction, where you proceed solidly in this world and suddenly take a left turn into the hyper-real. It happens that way for Larry Ngitis, anyway, the protagonist of Dry Water, who forsakes a job in computer programming to pursue science fiction writing in an out of the way town billed as "the next Taos."

Are there autobiographical elements in Larry? "All my books are autobiographical," Nylund replies. Including the hyper-reality? "When I write, I tap into that dreamlike semiconscious state, yes. But I also research the physical sciences, history, geography, and anthropology. For Dry Water I did copious amounts of research in New Mexico. It's such a historically rich place, you stumble over all sorts of interesting stuff, some going back to the Conquistadors and Anasazi."

Author of two previous novels, Pawn's Dream and A Game of Universe, Nylund is a 1994 graduate of Clarion West writer's workshop. But his writing career started earlier, while he was in graduate school studying chemical physics (the physics of atoms and molecules). "I was reading a novel by a favorite author, who shall remain nameless because the book was really lousy," Nylund recalls. "I thought if this person could publish this stuff, how hard could it be to write a novel? I never finished that book and started writing my own. Forty thousand words into it, I realized it was probably a little more difficult than I thought. So I went to the University of California at San Diego's wonderful library and started reading books on how to write. I read two hundred treatments on writing fiction, including Harlan Ellison's thoughts on the writing business, and writers in general. Then I started again and wrote my first novel, Pawn's Dream.

"Someone asked me what it's like to be a writer," says Nylund. "I told them it's like a cross between a religious calling and a heroin addiction, sometimes you love it and sometimes you hate it, but you gotta do it everyday -- you gotta have your fix."

Nylund eventually had to choose between writing or science. "As a graduate student, especially in the sciences, you've really got to devote all your time to studying, teaching, and lab work. I decided to leave graduate school and be very poor for a while so I could write full time."

Nylund spent his early childhood in Truckee, California, near Tahoe, and his teenage years in Lancaster, California, in the Mojave Desert. "So those two environments filter into my writing quite a bit." He continues to lead an outdoor life, camping out on the Olympic Peninsula -- backpacking, kayaking, rock climbing and spelunking.

Soon after mass market publication of Dry Water, look for the hardback publication of Nylund's Signal to Noise. "My editor says it's a whole new subgenre of cyberpunk," he laughs. The genesis of the novel, he says, resulted from working at Microsoft. For a year and a half he was a physical sciences editor for Encarta, Microsoft's CD-ROM encyclopedia. There he was immersed in "technology, physical sciences, and corporate politics all at the same time. I got a lot of inspiration," he adds, "on how cybertechnology, corporations, other segments of the modern world come together into something new."

Nylund is currently finishing a sequel to Signal to Noise.

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