My Wife Made Me Do It

So my best friend, webmaster, and all around business manager, Mark Buckley, thinks I've harped too much on my wife Pauline's influence in regards to writing the book. I should present myself as more self-motivated, he says. I guess I should clarify a bit.

I've wanted to be a writer since freshman year in college when my composition teacher convinced me to become an English major. I wrote a handful of horror short stories in the 90s, sent them out to a few magazines and got back all rejections. A lot of things happened then. We bought a house, had our first child and the construction boom happened. As a hardwood floor installer and sander, I could work as much as I pleased. We could work every day of the week, nights, weekends, whatever. So I did. What guy with a new fixer-upper home and new baby doesn't need more money, right?

Writing took a back seat. Life happens, you know? It was always in the back of my mind, but I didn't have the time or energy. Floor sanding is back-breaking work and I was always exhausted and sore when I got home. We had our second child in 2000. I went five or six years without writing a thing. So I can't say exactly what got me thinking about writing again. I'd guess I was a little older, work had slowed down some and I was retired from sports. I finally had more free time. I met a customer once who was a writer. I showed him my short stories and he said he loved them and would show them to his agent. The feedback I got from the agency was, the stories were good, but they don't deal with short stories, so get back to them when I have a novel. If I was going to try writing again, it had to be a novel this time.

Stephen King has always been my favorite writer, so I was naturally going to write a horror novel. This is where Pauline came in. Maybe it was the lack of success at getting the short stories published or whatever. I don't know exactly why, but she steered me in the direction of writing a fantasy book. She thought I could use D & D as an inspiration and write some sword and sorcery type of tales. I know she never expected me to go in the direction I went with this, which involved creating a mythic world full strange and unusual denizens. I even sort of came up with my own mythology. It's a mythology that connects all mythologies. Read the book if you want to understand that.

So, that's the impact Pauline had on my first novel. She is the reason I wrote Lightbringer instead of Vampire Cop or something like that.

Lightbringer - the World

Okay, so you might want to know where I got the idea for Lightbringer and the series of books to follow. You might not want to know either, since no one is reading this blog, but someday, someone is going to read this blog, and they might want to know. So bear with me, all right?

Blame my wife, Pauline, she was always nagging me, "David, why don't you write a fantasy book already, ya lazy bum!" You should use Alice Kramden's nag voice (from The Honeymooners) when you try to imagine that. That's the truth, really. Well, okay, except maybe for the nagging part. She probably said it much nicer than that. "Dave, I really think you should write a fantasy novel. It would be brilliant," said in the voice of Carol Brady from the Brady Bunch. Yeah, that's a little closer to the truth. I wanted this to be different from the other types of fantasy books out there, since many of them had a similar feel to me. I grew up loving Greek, Norse, Celtic, and many other world mythologies and imagining myself in those stories. Yes, I wanted to create a myth. So I did what George Lucas is reported to have done; I read Joseph Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces," and I got to work.

It was around 2003 that I started hashing out this whole idea. The biggest problem I had to address, was the world. The fantasy world is crucial to every fantasy writer's story. I played Dungeons & Dragons growing up and that was the initial inspiration for wanting to write a book of this type. Problem there, is that they have all this trademarked, copyrighted D & D world stuff and they already have their own authors writing books based in that world. I didn't want to go there and I didn't really know how. Frankly, creating a brand new world from my imagination terrified me. I thought of all my favorite fantasy writers like JRR Tolkien, Michael Moorcock, Fritz Lieber, and Piers Anthony, and the worlds they had created. I did not think my imagination was up to the task.

So I decided to set it on earth, sometime in a distant, post-cataclysmic future, where technology has ceased to exist. This allowed me to change the landscape a little, when I felt the need. That was the answer then; earth, long after the Apocalypse. Who doesn't love some good, post-apocalyptic, references? I know I do. I figured I'd even throw in the occasional Statue of Liberty sticking out of the sand. Irradiated mutants, walking corpses, and talking apes seemed cliche', so I needed to come up with some other kinds of monsters to populate my world. This is where mythology came back into the picture. I was creating my own myth, so I would use the creatures of myth, legend, and folklore. Now, it's not that this sort of thing hasn't been done in other stories, like the Percy Jackson series, for instance. The trick to was to dig deeper and and use the less familiar creatures of folklore. So while you might find ghosts and witches in my story, you will also find exotic creatures you probably have not heard of, like the Scottish Nuckelavee and the Icelandic troll, Gryla. I decided to have my hero go on an epic journey around this not-what-you'd-expect type of futuristic world so that he could encounter some of the strange beings in it. At the beginning of Family Guy's Star Wars parody "Blue Harvest," they say "a long time ago, but somehow in the future..." If you just flip that around, you get what I did to create my world "sometime in the distant future, even though it feels like ancient history..."