Ahhh… Done with making corrections based on reader feed-back for the moment. It’s amazing how hard it is to whip out some high-quality hackneyed purple prose. 🙂
While fixing all the things you and the other readers/commenters pointed out, I found a number of other typos. Nothing like a rewrite, just lots of little things. Buffed out a few places, etc….

The Castalia House blog post on the barbarian had a bit of food for thought. When you present a man fully formed, it’s got it’s good points and bad. One of the things I liked about the Conan was he “just was.” You took him as he presented himself, as a blank slate upon which much could be projected. The downside is that you didn’t understand how he got to where he was, and I’ve always liked a good back-story.

So that is what “Career Choice” (tentatively retitled as “Making a Mercenary”) largely was: the start of a barbarian-adventurers back-story, showing the life and environment that would create such a man. Likely turn it into the first segment of a normal-length book, maybe a year of his life, maybe one that takes him up to 20 or so. Enough background to be fun, not so hole-free that there is nowhere to back-fill with references and flash-backs in later stories.