I’m still working on my “collect all F. Paul Wilson books” effort. The endgame approaches, with just a handful remaining.

First of the final books is Ephemerata, The Odds and Ends of a Writing Life (2024). At some point, Wilson started collecting his “non-fiction” and selling it to interested readers as an eBook. The first “edition” was published in March, 2017. The benefit of eBooks, as Wilson stated, was that as he added more material, he could push out an update. As if by magic, the readers would just need to refresh or update something, and suddenly have more material on their devices. In 2024 he released this collection in print. That’s a benefit to me, as I don’t (and won’t) read eBooks. On the other hand, it’s unfortunate, as the stroke he suffered a couple of years ago has robbed readers and fans of Wilson’s fiction and non-fiction in any future stories.

Weighing in at nearly 600 pages, the hardcopy publication of Ephemerata appears to be a “print-on-demand” book. Wilson split his non-fiction into the following sections: Forewords, Intros, and Afterwords; Appreciations; Memoirs; Puffery; The Byte Columns; Fictions; Reviews; and Opinion (here I use semi-colons between each section, as the first section has commas, so otherwise would appear to be three different sections). Rounding out the book, there’s a timeline of the Secret History, and a bibliography. It’s not the “ridiculously detailed bibliography,” which appeared in the third volume of The Compendium of F, but more a listing of books.

With almost 600 pages of material, one could spend hours trying to read each item. In my case, I jumped back and forth, sampling a bit here, then going elsewhere for something entirely different. Prepended to each item is a snippet of text that establishes the context of the piece in question. As a huge F. Paul Wilson fan since back in 1986, this is a book I will long enjoy. As a print-on-demand book, it’s not a “collector’s item,” but rather an insight into a writer’s life, going back all the way to the beginning. Any fan of Wilson would enjoy this book, I think. Then again, maybe most of his fans just want to read the fiction. In my case, there’s far more out there than just the fiction. Maybe I just want to know what makes a writer a writer. To read only a brief diary of his writing life was worth the price of admission. Wilson is dedicated to his craft. Even with a full-time job as a doctor whose saw scores of patients daily, he kept writing. That’s both impressive and humbling.