You knew that. Of course you did. Very few people had the capability to do what I did. Nobody else had a motive. And, of course, I admitted it when asked. That's usually a dead giveaway.

If you haven't already guessed (by reading the title, or, I don't know, by having already clicked on a link to get here called April Fools' Pages) it's that I, Ros, the son of the author, made many, many fake Prey novels for April Fools' Day. Six of them, every year, for seven years (with maybe more in the future, but we'll see what happens).

I started because... well, I thought it'd be fun. And it was. I learned a lot of Photoshop in the doing of it, and by and large people enjoyed them. And really, that's the chief goal: to entertain other people. That I have some fun along the way is almost incidental.

Mind you, they're not all of the same quality. Some work on all levels — art, design, text, humor, all of it. Some fail on all counts. But every years I'd deliver six of them, and they'd be up from the start of April Fools' Day on the east coast of the US until the end of April Fools' Day on the west coast. 27 hours per year of exposure.

This year the site could probably have used them, but 2020 was such a cripplingly bad year for so many people on so many levels that I just felt... drained. Nothing was working, nothing was funny. Maybe I've stopped for good. Maybe it's a rest year. I don't know. We'll just have to see if, next April, some mysterious hacker takes control of the website for 27 hours (give or take).

Oh. Some of the books (not all of them, but I'm working on it) have short essays afterward about the thought process. They're collectively called Explaining the Joke Ruins the Joke because, well, it's true. But some people want to know anyway. So there you go.

Please enjoy them. Don't judge me too harshly.