A History of The Demon in the Chain

In 1983, I wrote a book for children called The Seventh Princess, which was published by Scholastic Canada, and was later brought out in a number of countries by other divisions of the Scholastic organization. I wrote that book the old-fashioned way, at a typewriter in my living-room. As I finished each page, my son would snatch it from the typewriter to read the next part of the story.

Soon after the first book was finished, I set about writing a sequel - in fact, it was to be the second book in a trilogy - but this time I decided to use a computer. After an exhaustive technical evaluation of the various available models, I bought a Commodore 64, the only one I could afford.

I eventually finished the second book, The Demon in the Chain, and duly sent it off to Scholastic, but they asked for changes I wasn't prepared to make, so the book was never published. And that was that. Afterwards, I wrote more computer code than fiction on my C64, and the floppies containing The Demon in the Chain gathered dust.

Later I switched to the Amiga as my main working computer, and later still went to Windows. At each stage, though, I made it a point to convert the text files for the book to some format the current machine would handle. I thought that if I ever wanted to do anything more with The Demon in the Chain, I would at least have it in a usable form.

I never did, of course. Years and more years went by - years during which The Seventh Princess continued to sell in generally small but respectable amounts. Periodically I would receive mail from children who had read the book and wanted to know what else I had written. The answer was nothing, at least not for kids, at least not in print. There was only this batch of old files containing The Demon in the Chain.

We now have at hand a new means of distributing information: the World Wide Web, and finally those old files are on the move again. Nowadays, if you ask me what else I've written, I can say, "Well, there's a sequel to The Seventh Princess that you can try if you want. And you can download it for free off the Web."

I hope you enjoy the book.

Nick Sullivan