DAVID SHERMAN first tried writing when he was discharged from the US Marine Corps. He didn't really put his heart into it at that time, and soon stepped back from writing in favor of the visual arts. Years later, he returned to writing. Soon enough, he decided that he was going to succeed at writing or die in the attempt. He hasn't looked back. Now, thirty-odd novels later, he is putting forth his first collection of short works. The first several pieces, mostly two or three pages, are from that initial time after the Marines. They are followed by a paper he wrote for a telecommunications course at the Annenberg School of the University of Pennsylvania, a paper that convinced him he could write. The remainder of the book is short stories and novelettes that he wrote mostly during the first year after he began writing seriously, along with his first two published short stories, and a quartet of poems he wrote during his first year of writing. He projects this collection to be the first of three. Over three decades of writing, he is the author or co-author of about three dozen books. Most of them are military science fiction about Marines in future wars, or US Marines in Vietnam. In most of his writing he has drawn heavily on his experience as a Marine infantryman in Vietnam.