Personal Aside: Current Project

I don’t want this blog to be just about my rants and raves. So I want to take a little down time to let you know a bit about what I am up to, personally. And as always, this will be a little long winded.

First of all, I am a writer. I have been writing since the 1980’s and have a few rejections letters to prove it. All in all, I have written about 40 short stories, mostly science fiction. And I am starting to post them on my website.

But right now I am focused (or obsessed) with a fantasy series that started back in 1996. Before that, I had written a couple of connected short stories in a fantasy world I created for my Dungeons & Dragons group.

I was starting a third one but realized that I needed some background for the island; a history for the characters to drawn on and comment on.

Which is important, because we are a product of history. We use historical pinions in our conversations. And the characters in the Elegy Series did not have any anchor points.
So I started to work on a timeline, a bit of a history of the island and the world. The Elegy Series takes place around 1400 so I had quite a lot of history to fill in. Initially it was simple lines like:

• 182: Rhiogannedd is slain in battle, at 25 years of age, with no children

Yet when I hit 974, single lines became paragraphs. Paragraphs become prose. Suddenly I had about 10 pages of prose just for one specific time period, way before the Elegies Series takes place.

I realized that I was onto something. I saw a short story in the making. And I took the notes and prose with me to Ireland in August 1996 where I had planned a 3 week vacation.

I had no real plans save to explore the ideas and see where it might lead. When I left Ireland, I had written 70 pages of prose and realized I was not dealing with a short story.

What is important to note here, is that over the three weeks, I did not just focus on this. I wrote a travel journal, was sight-seeing, meeting many locals and drinks copious amounts of Guinness.

In Ireland, especially on the west coast, I actually felt my soul singing. Things just flowed. Be it sitting in a pub with a pint, or on a stone wall with grazing cows behind me or in a rickety chair, under a street lamp as thick fog rolled in and wrapped around me. I tapped into something special.

Thing is, I had never written that much in my life before. Not only had I written 70 pages of prose but also over 130 pages in my travel journal. And I met some amazing people, learnt Jenga and saw awe inspiring scenery.

When I returned to Montreal, I thought that was the end of it. The initial burst of inspiration would leave me and this would become a project forgotten as has happened before. But that did not happen.

During the next four years, I wrote a complete full draft of the first volume, much of a second volume and the beginnings of a third. Even with the dry spells, I was stunned by the amount of pages that came out of me.

Up to this point, I had written short stories and novellas. I had tried a couple of times to try writing a novel but the attempts just fizzled. I now had tapped into something which I could not explain. And it was fucking scary.

Almost every short story or novella I have written had a start and a finish. I just had to figure out the middle. But things were constrained. The piece would be finished in 10 to 20 odd pages. There was focus and control.

Not so with Tangled Threads. I had a beginning and a vague idea of the end. I found myself walking a tight-rope without a net. Something I have never done before.

To be perfectly honest, there were times I felt overwhelmed and wanted to regulate Tangled Threads to my nice try pile. But it would not let go. It had a life of it’s own. So I just resigned myself and gave into it. This was something I had to write, come hell or high water.

Well, the hell came. At the end of 2000, I had a complete and utter breakdown. Which was the main focus of 2001. At that time, my writing went to 0. Any energy I had was focused inwards.
It was in the New Year, 2002 that I thought things were changing. My focus started to change but the fates were conspiring against me. I was in a situation where I was living with a psychotic vampire that was trying to drain me of myself. When that didn’t work, I had to flee. But the damage was done and because of this, I ended up living on the streets for close to 10 months.

The funny thing is that is the best thing that could have happened to Tangled Threads. The first draft of the series was good but lacked any focus. I had no idea where the series was going. Great ideas but no underlying heart. The violent separation that occurred in March 2002 ripped me away from Tangled Threads and kept me away for some time.

A critical point needs to be addressed here. I had to leave the psycho’s place without any of my stuff. All my notes, books, CDs, videos, etc. were downstairs in her basement. When I tried to retrieve all my stuff, she flipped out and in the end, destroyed everything I owned, or so she said. That is over $20,000 of stuff.

The CDs, books, etc. is a bitch because some of that stuff will be hard to replace. The essential point here is that all my hand written notes, maps, etc. were destroyed. I lost invaluable material that cannot be replaced. And this is not just for Tangled Threads. I had notebooks from 1982 with ideas for short stories, novels, movies, etc. that were never entered into the computer. And for that, I will never forgive her.

Okay, this psycho bitch did all of this. The good part of it was that when I returned to Tangled Threads, I do so fresh. I was not bound by my notes and ideas. I could look at what I had put together from a new perspective. At least I had an electronic copy of the main chapters of Tangled Threads.

Things restarted in January 2003. To handle the boredom that comes with being homeless, I started to hang around McGill and the main library. This afforded me time to explore issues I wanted to bring up in Tangled Threads.

This allowed me to get deeper in Nietzsche, aspects of Christianity and other points. This research started to give me a focus for Tangled Threads. Unburdened by the old notes and ideas, the series started to finally congeal. I could see the beginning, middle and end.
The problem was that to get from the beginning to the end, I was looking at least 5 to 6 books. There was no way I could put it into a simple trilogy.

I cannot explain the extreme importance of that time in the McGill library. I was homeless, without hope and had no direction. But the research on the sixth floor of the McGill library gave me an anchor during the dark, cold months of a Montreal winter.

It wasn’t until September 2003 when I was able to move in with a friend and get a job that I could benefit of the fruits of the labour I had done earlier that year. It was then the new stuff poured out. Volume 1 went through massive revisions and Volume 2 was completed. And over half of Volume 3 became solid. Along the way, I wrote bits and pieces of the other volumes to the point where I now have over 1000 pages.

This does not include all the research material,which amounts to another 1000 pages or more. But to me, one of the key elements of creating your own world is having a comprehensive background. This is not just history. One has to consider the types of religions that are dominant. Current and past philosophical concepts. Legal issues. Types of governments. What plants are prevalent and what do they do.

Some people might complain I spend too much on the details. But they are important. Details on how a plant looks like and what is it used for may not be essential to the plot line but it gives the reader an anchor on the reality of the world I am creating. And builds a richness which I believe is needed for a proper fantasy series.

So what of Tangled Threads, you may ask? Well 2004 was the year where I pulled things together. And that is when I started to have people read what I had written. And I went deeper and deeper into my research on the origins of various religions, different philosophical thoughts, the use of strategies in conflict and different legal systems such as the ancient Roman law to the Brehon law.

All of that has lead up to today. Based on the feedback I got and the research I have done, I am now working on the final draft of Volume 1: A House Fractured. The first three chapters are done and I am now finishing the fourth chapter. At the same time, I am building comprehensive appendices for when I get the first volume published.

So my current project is a project that has been ongoing for almost a decade. I had no idea what I was getting into at that time and I still don’t, at times. But it has been a constant in my life which has pulled me through some of the roughest times of my life. And if the fates will let me, I hope that Volume 1 will get published in the autumn. But I don’t want to put any hard deadlines on myself because I thought Volume 1 was going to be published in 2001. Until then, it will be available on-line. And the writing will continue at whatever pace the fates deem.