The last spotlight post for 2012… I hope you’ve been enjoying this feature of the blog. I have enjoyed being able to show off some of my talented friends/acquaintances/occasional strangers. And now I have one last one to do… Allan Cole.
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I met Allan Cole in 2007 at AggieCon in College Station. He stepped in and took over for Gene Wolf who had to cancel. Jimmy and I were there – I talked my way in as a panelist – because Ruth Thompson was supposed to have been their Artist GOH (but also had to cancel). I’d stopped to talk to Jana Oliver who had the same guide/handler as Allan and we all hit it off.
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What was important about Allan wasn’t that he is a fantastic novelist – I loved the Sten series he did with Chris Bunch. I also liked the high fantasy stuff he did because his agent told him too. He’s rare that way. The Sten novels are more my “style” – they’re tight, fast, and have snarky humor in them – like the Bujold Vorkosigan novels and the Butcher Dresden Files – but the fantasy novels though big and epic don’t take “getting into” as much as some series that I haven’t been able to absorb. The only issues are that the reprints have slightly different names – so I got a couple and said, “Hey, I’ve read this…”
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But wait, that’s not all! Allan and Chris were also “behind the scenes” influences on me that I never knew about. Allan Cole and Chris Bunch wrote for all the television shows that were my core inspirations in the mid-1980s. I am and always will be a Steven Cannell girl (and truly grieved when Cannell passed) – which then also extends to Frank Lupo and Donald Bellisario. These were the shows that combined action with humor and had great character actors and solidified my “THIS is what I want to do with my life.”
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Allan Cole was part of that structure. He was also (and still is) one heck of a nice guy. He was just lovely to me then – and still is to this day. He is active on social media. He tells GREAT stories. And he is super encouraging to younger writers. We started working on a project together a while back that I’m sad to say has fallen by the way side… and needs to be picked up (and most of it is my fault). I think we both had to replace computers – and a program we were using for a script project didn’t transfer or maybe work on my Windows 7 computer and now… the file doesn’t open.
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So, Allan, if you’re reading this…I still have all that research, I just can’t open the file to see where we left off and where we need to go forward – I haven’t REALLY forgotten. I do forget for periods of time when I get busy with other projects….I do still want to work on it.

Check out Allan Cole if you haven’t already. You won’t regret it. I think he has most of the books in electronic format as well. Actually, yes, it looks like they all hit KINDLE this month.