There's a lot of people who helped make this book possible.

First and foremost, my wife--thank you, dear, for tolerating me talking about space turtles for three straight years. Secondly, my brother, who lent me his time and editing experience to help make this book far better than it would have been otherwise. My two writing groups: Aaron, Nidsa, Chris, Travis, Seth, Cole, Joe, Thomas, and all of our occasional guest participants. Thank you for tolerating the early drafts, and helping me find the rough edges that needed smoothing. A huge thank you to my two beta readers: Coral and Ashlynn. Thank you both so much--I know it was a huge lift to read the whole thing, and your feedback helped immensely. Seriously, it couldn't have happened without you guys. And finally, to all of you who have read this far: thank you. It's just a webnovel, and a deeply flawed one in a lot of ways, but thank you for reading this far. I can't tell you how encouraging and gratifying it's been.

The early threads of this book began in 2017. I had just graduated from college, and had taken a job at a gold mine in a small, rural town. Frankly, I hated it. To avoid having this devolve into a long rant, suffice it to say that I was not a good fit for the position. But I felt trapped, because my wife and I had taken on a non-trivial amount of costs to move out there and get set up. I felt that weighing down on me, and so I flogged myself awake every morning at 4:00am to drive out to the mine and dragged myself home again at 6:00pm, just in time to collapse into bed and do it all over again the next day.

While I was out working, I often thought about how trapped I felt. I couldn't quit, 'cause I had bills to pay and a wife to take care of. No other good jobs nearby. Nothing lined up back home. And thus was born Arcturus: a surly miner, trapped by a mountain of debt, trying to find some way, any way, out.

He didn't even start as a turtle, but I'd always loved sci-fi and decided I'd make him an alien, with a crew who'd been doing this for hundreds or even thousands of years. A lot of early ideas about a super isolated culture developing in isolation got thrown out or trimmed down (though traces of them still remain), and I'd just finished reading Uber and Uber Invasion by Kieron Gillen, so I decided I really wanted to set it in WWII. This was a mistake, as it vastly increased the amount of research required and made the book far less palatable to a larger audience (according to early feedback I got at the time, in the fallout of the 2016 election the political undertones of anything even vaguely associated with Nazis or Nazi Germany made the book a non-starter for a lot of people) but I still loved the concept so I pressed on.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

For those of you interested in the process, it took me five full drafts to get Turtles in the Trenches to the point where I felt comfortable putting it up online. If we're being frank, even after all that it's not great, but I learned a ton in the process. We've all heard about the 10,000 hour rule--10,000 hours of practice at something to become an expert at it and all that. Well, I'm probably only at about the 3000 hour mark, and I can definitely see an improvement. As I was making my final pass over each chapter of Turtles before posting it, I'd find numerous things that needed to be fixed, or that got rewritten entirely. Heck, if I'd had more time, there are whole chapters I would have thrown out and started from scratch. But the better is often an enemy of the good, especially when you're working for free.

The key thing about that 10,000 hour rule is that it has to be deliberate, guided effort. For me, working with my writer's groups to look critically at my own and other's writing, and reading professional author's critically to try and understand how they do what they do and why was helpful. I found several books on writing to be invaluable. "The Art of Fiction" by John Gardener, "The Elements of Style" by William Strunk, "Plot and Structure" by James Bell, and (don't laugh at this last one) "Writing Fiction for Dummies" by Randy Ingermanson. Seriously, stop laughing--it was one of the most helpful for me, with all that it implies.

I include that bit, because I know that a lot of us are writers who are working on our craft, and are passionate about getting better. So from me to all hundred or so of you--thank you for reading along, in spite of the bumpy road. I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I did, and I hope that if Arcturus and company get another book, that you'll come along for that ride too. If not, I'll see you out there in the pages somewhere else!

Cheers,

Kevin