John R. Phythyon Jr.'s Blog, page 20

Novel to Benefit Freedom to Marry

I have an announcement. Well, it’s not exactly an announcement, since I’ve made no secret of it, and I’ve included the information in my advertising. Regardless, I’ve got an announcement.

I’m giving some of the profits from my new novel, The Sword and the Sorcerer to charity. Specifically, I’m donating 20% of the proceeds (which is $1.00 of the eBook price; it’ll be more for the print price when I have the print edition out) to Freedom to Marry, the campaign to win marriage freedom nationwide.

I’m not telling you this to brag. I’m not blogging about it, so you’ll think I’m a good person.

Rather, my goal is to get you to help.

I believe in finding ways to give back to your community. Volunteering is big and so is helping fund the charities that are important to you.

I chose Freedom to Marry for a couple of reasons. First, the protagonist of The Sword and the Sorcerer is gay. He’s in a long-term, loving relationship, and it is what buoys him through the hardships of the novel. Thus, Freedom to Marry seemed like a natural fit for a charity to donate to.

Second, and more importantly, Freedom to Marry is fighting for equal rights under the law for all Americans. If you are married, you are taxed at a more favorable rate than if you are single. If you are married, you automatically have power-of-attorney over your spouse’s medical decisions and estate. Not so if you are in a long-term, committed relationship that isn’t an official marriage.

There are states, including my home state of Kansas, where, not only is gay marriage not legal and recognized, it is expressly outlawed. Many of these states, including Kansas, have enshrined this prohibition in their state constitutions.

That is discrimination, pure and simple. Legal rights and advantages available to one class of people are not available to another class. That is un-American, unconstitutional, and wrong.

Things are changing. Sixteen states now allow gay marriage. A few more are in the midst of legal battles to either try to establish it or try to overturn it. And the federal Defense of Marriage Act was struck down, allowing for the first time same-sex couples to have their marriages federally recognized.

But there are still obstacles. Here in Kansas, two couples are having to sue the state because the Department of Revenue will not allow them to claim marital status on their federal tax return, effectively forcing them to commit fraud. And if there are 16 states where gay marriage is legal, that means there are 34 states where it is not.

So there is a lot of work that remains to be done.

I’m just a guy. I’m one single person without the organization or the infrastructure to effect real change. But I’m a writer, which means I can sway opinions. And I know a group of people that does have the infrastructure to fight this battle and win it.

So I’m giving a portion of my profits to them.

If you purchase a copy of The Sword and the Sorcerer, you’ll get an epic fantasy adventure about a young man forced into the global spotlight when the world’s most powerful wizard is murdered. You’ll also be able to help me support the work of Freedom to Marry. You’ll be helping all Americans enjoy the same estate and taxation rights.

And if you’re not interested in buying my book, if it doesn’t seem interesting to you, I encourage you to head over to Freedom to Marry’s website and make a direct donation. How we treat one of us is a reflection of how we treat us all. Equal protection under the law is a right. I hope you’ll help me fight for it.

Below are links to where you can purchase The Sword and the Sorcerer and to Freedom to Marry’s website. Thanks for your support.

To buy The Sword and the Sorcerer from Amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HI9YMF0

To buy The Sword and the Sorcerer from Smashwords.com:
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/382099

To learn more about Freedom to Marry:
http://www.freedomtomarry.org/pages/about-us

To make a donation to Freedom to Marry:
https://secure.freedomtomarry.org/page/contribute/unite-for-marriage

Looking Ahead to 2014

It’s a brand new year, and I’ve got me some plans for it. 2013 may have been disappointing, but I am looking forward to good things in 2014.

Three Books

In 2012, I published three books. That led me to believe I could do the same for 2013. Of course, two of those three books in 2012 were short stories that had already been written. I only had to rewrite and publish.

In 2013, I was trying to write two novels and a short story from scratch. The short story grew into a novella, and I didn’t get started on the second novel until November.

I’ve got a better plan this year.

I will once again attempt to publish three books — two novels and a novella. However, the first novel’s first draft is already finished. It needs editing and rewriting, but I’ve gotten the hard part done.

Likewise, I’ve already got a second draft of the novella finished. It’s an older work I want to revive and publish. That greatly increases the likelihood I can get it all done.

Publishing Schedule

So what do I have in mind? Here is my plan for 2014.

April — Roses Are White (Book 3 of the Wolf Dasher Series)August — Ghost of a Chance (Book 4 of the Wolf Dasher Series)

November — The Secret Thief: A Modern Fairy Tale

I had planned to write a Wolf Dasher book each year, but I didn’t get one out in 2013, and, knowing how Roses Are White ends, I don’t think readers are going to want to wait a whole year to read the fourth book. So I’ll put that one out a few months later.

The Secret Thief is a story I developed several years ago. I’ll fit it into the Modern Fairy Tales series, but, unlike the others, it’s not based on an existing story. It’s a completely original tale.

That’s the plan for 2014. I think I’ve  got a much better opportunity to pull it off.

Don’t forget The Sword and the Sorcerer just released last week. Make sure you pick up a copy of my latest novel, and remember $1.00 of every sale benefits Freedom to Marry, the campaign to win marriage freedom nationwide.

Hard Year Comes to an End

It’s been a rough year. I was pretty excited for 2013 after 2012 seemed to lay a foundation for better success to come.

But it didn’t work out that way. Maybe it’s because there is a 13 in the year, but I have felt under a curse for most of my professional life this year.

Best Laid Plans

I had a pretty solid plan for this year. I was expecting to publish three books — two novels and a short story.

The Sword and the Sorcerer was scheduled for March/April, “Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale” would go in June-July, and Roses Are White would release in November. It seemed very reasonable, given that I published three books in 2012.

But almost from the get-go, things went off schedule. I got married in March, and I had thought that could delay the release of the first book by a month. But a series of delays in editing and rewrites pushed that book into the summer.

Meanwhile, the short story, “Beauty & the Beast”, grew into a novella. That was fine in terms of publishing it, but it meant it took longer to write and longer to edit. So rather than getting out in the summer, it didn’t go until the fall.

And Roses Are White didn’t get started until October as a result of all those delays, meaning there was no way to publish it this calendar year. I decided to write it during NaNoWriMo, and that worked really well for knocking out the words . . . until I got terribly sick in the first two weeks of December.

Scheduling SNAFU’s

As a result of all the delays, both The Sword and the Sorcerer and Beauty & the Beast: A Modern Fairy Tale were ready at roughly the same time. “B&B” takes place during football season. It is also set in my hometown’s largest high school. Thus, to capitalize best on the timing, I had to release it first. So The Sword and the Sorcerer, which was originally scheduled for March was pushed all the way back to Christmas.

I got Beauty & the Beast ready and attempted to upload on my scheduled release date of October 1. And Amazon publishing software went wonky. No matter what I did, I could not get my files to convert to Kindle format.

With the help of a friend, we found a workaround. I got a .mobi file uploaded, but the software changed my coding. The book didn’t look good. I spent the better part of a week fighting with Amazon’s tech support trying to get a new version uploaded that had everything lined up correctly. Eventually it got fixed. But it was a blown launch.

Promo Failures

In March, I launched an extremely successful free event with “Sleeping Beauty: A Modern Fairy Tale.” I raised my profile and discoverability very well and had encouraging sales for a couple months afterwards.

But by not publishing something new, I lost all the momentum I created. And then Amazon changed its algorithms so that free events didn’t generate the same results. By the time I finally got something new out, the market had changed.

I also tried to take advantage of the new Kindle Countdown program Amazon launched. I ran a sale on my three book-length titles, one each week, during December. But I was so sick those first two weeks, I couldn’t do any of the promotional work necessary to build awareness. The events generated sales, but they didn’t come close to their potential.

Looking Ahead

So this has not been the year I wanted. It’s been pretty terrible.

But I refuse to be depressed about it. On the upside, I published two new books this year, and both are strong works that reflect my growth as an author. In fact, I believe The Sword and the Sorcerer is the best book I’ve ever written.

I have an aggressive schedule planned for 2014. I’ll go into that in my next blog, but suffice to say that, among the things I want to accomplish, I will attempt to publish two Wolf Dasher novels. Since Roses Are White didn’t make it out this year, I’ll try to get it and the next book done this coming year. Plus, I’ll have some other things in store.

I’m very happy to see 2013 becoming a memory. Professionally, it wasn’t what I was hoping for. But it had it’s moments, and I’m excited for 2014. Here’s to moving forward.

Why Calibot is Gay

If you’ve been following my blog recently you know I just released my latest novel, The Sword and the Sorcerer. Last week I blogged about how it took me 30 years to write and how there were a lot of changes to the characters and story along the way.

One of those changes deserves a separate discussion. In this final version of the novel, I changed the main character’s sexual orientation from straight to gay. I wanted him to be in a long-term romantic relationship with the solider who accompanies him on his adventure. Rather than change the solider from male to female, I decided to change Calibot from straight to gay. It’s an extremely important shift in the novel’s makeup, and I want to blog about why I did it and what it means.

The Power of Love

There is a lot of magic running through The Sword and the Sorcerer. The plot concerns the assassination of the world’s most powerful wizard. Against all understanding, his spells live on after his death. And he uses that magic to manipulate his son into fulfilling a destiny he wants for him, rather than one Calibot chooses for himself.

But there is a more powerful magic than the sorcery of Gothemus Draco — love. I personally believe love is the most powerful magic of all. It can accomplish almost anything, and this idea is reflected in the novel. It is Devon’s love for Calibot that buoys Calibot along. It is Devon’s love that helps guide Calibot out of darkness. There are a lot of themes in The Sword and the Sorcerer, and the power of love is a big one.

And that’s one of the reasons it was important for me to have my protagonist be homosexual. I have known a lot of gay and lesbian people. Many of them are friends.

And the only thing I’ve noticed that makes them any different from me is whom they’re attracted to sexually.

They love with the same passion I do. They are good people or bad people based on the values with which they were raised. Some of them work harder than me. Some work less hard. But they are all regular, everyday people trying to get on with the business of life. Just like me.

It’s just that they happen to be attracted to people of the same sex instead of the opposite.

So, as I sat down to write The Sword and the Sorcerer, I thought that it would be extremely powerful to demonstrate a committed, loving couple in a long-term relationship that is different from “standard loving couples” in only one way — they’re both men. And given the vast number of committed, loving couples in same-sex, long-term relationships, Calibot and Devon are about as “standard” as they come.

And that’s the point. Love is the most powerful magic of all. And homosexual couples feel it no less and no differently than their heterosexual counterparts.

Fantasy World

One of the reasons I write fantasy literature is I like to imagine worlds where opportunity for heroism, career, and intelligence is equal. In the Wolf Dasher series, May Honeyflower is one of the strongest characters. She is Captain of the Elite Guard, she is an accomplished soldier, and it is often she who rescues the main character — a man. She is not held down by the gender biases of a male-dominated culture that for hundreds, if not thousands, of years viewed women as property.

Likewise, I wanted to write a world wherein bigoted superstitions do not hold sway over a sizable enough chunk of the population that legislators feel comfortable writing discrimination into state constitutions. Calibot and Devon are not reviled for being gay. They are completely accepted. No one thinks twice about their being involved.

All of the machinations aimed at Calibot have everything to do with the novel’s villains trying to accomplish their own ends. They want Calibot out of the way, because he can keep them from getting what they want, not because he’s gay.

Indeed, one of the novel’s main themes is Calibot’s estrangement from his father. He left home five years before the story’s events and hasn’t spoken to him since. With Gothemus’s murder, one of the things Calibot has to deal with is the thought that he’ll never get to reconcile with his father. In a key scene late in the novel. Devon and Calibot are discussing the source of Calibot’s estrangement.

“He didn’t know me,” Calibot said. “He didn’t care to. He let me walk away and was glad to see me go. He rejected me because of who I was.”

“Because you’re gay?” Devon said, confused. He’d never heard Calibot mention this before.

“Because I’m a poet!” Calibot shouted. “He didn’t care if I was gay or straight. . . . It only mattered that I wasn’t a sorcerer — that I didn’t want to be one. “

Like everyone else, Gothemus was unconcerned with Calibot’s sexuality. He only cared that Calibot was following a career path he didn’t approve of.

Straight Talk

Another of the reasons I wanted to write a novel with loving, gay characters is that I’m straight. I’m married, and the novel is dedicated to my wife.

I intend for that to send a powerful message to readers. One hears constantly from anti-gay conservatives that, if homosexuals are allowed to marry, it will destroy the very foundation of the marriage institution.  But I’m straight, and my marriage is neither threatened nor harmed by the same-sex couples who have married in the states that allow gay marriage or the long-term, committed, same-sex couples who stay together in the states where they cannot wed.

As members of society, we all have an obligation to stand up for justice. It doesn’t matter that more than 30 states are not discriminating against me personally or anyone in my immediate family. They are discriminating against other Americans, and as long as that is permitted, we deny justice to people who have a right to it.

Thus, in the small way I’m able as an author of fantasy literature, I’m attempting to battle hatred and bigotry. I know I will not be able to change every mind, nor can I stop those with hate in their hearts from trying to spread it. But hopefully, I can change the minds of reasonable people, who might be on the fence. Hopefully, I can encourage readers to open their hearts and minds to the magic of love, so that those who wish to spread their bigotry will be ignored.

That’s why Calibot is gay. I want him to serve as a beacon of hope — an inspiration to those who fight for justice and a reminder to all that love — not hatred — is the most powerful magic there is.

The Sword and the Sorcerer is available now from Amazon.com and Smashwords.com for just $4.99. Click the links to purchase it. One dollar from each sale benefits Freedom to Marry, the campaign to win marriage nationwide.

Novel Evolution Part 4: Final Touches

Today, I offer the concluding chapter of my four-part series on the evolution of The Sword and the Sorcerer. After 30 years, I finally put together a finished version of the novel I am proud of.

But it wasn’t easy.

Looking Elsewhere

Ironically, this wasn’t the novel I was supposed to be writing. I wanted to take a break from the Wolf Dasher series and write something outside it to give me a chance to recharge my batteries on Wolf’s adventures. However, I wanted it to be something I’d already written, so that there would be less work involved. I’ve got several novels on my hard drive in various states of completion, so I figured I’d dig through my archives for something that already had at least a first draft done.

I was fairly interested in a book I wrote back in 2003, Little Girl Lost. It featured a 12-year-old protagonist, had a lot of magic, and had a lot to say about abuse. I’d tried to publish it through the legacy system 10 years before, with no luck. My thought was that the story was good but the writing was pretty amateurish and needed some tuning. Plus, I have middle-schoolers of my own now and therefore have a better grasp of the age group.

As I read what had been the final draft of that book and pored over my notes, though, the story was not gripping me. I couldn’t quite figure out how to make the adjustments I wanted.

I’m not really sure why, but my mind kept turning to Calibot’s Revenge — the book I hadn’t really even thought about since before I penned Little Girl Lost. As I went back through my notes, things started to congeal in my mind. Most of the ideas I’d come up with for the unwritten third iteration really got me excited. I had the feeling Calibot’s Revenge was really going to happen this time.

Love Story

However, there were a couple of things that still needed adjusting. As I mentioned in Part 3 of this series, I had developed the idea that Calibot’s friend Zargax, whom I had changed to a female and renamed, was in love with him, despite his not knowing it. For the fourth and final edition, I decided to dump the subplot of Calibot seducing the duke’s daughter. It didn’t really add anything to the story. I got rid of Elspeth altogether and left Calibot and his companion clear to be with each other.

Then a thought occurred to me — why did Zargax have to become a woman? I believe in same-sex relationships and marriage. This was a fantasy novel. Anything could happen.  Why couldn’t my world support a homosexual couple as its protagonists?

The only thing I didn’t like about it was Zargax’s name. It sounded too 15-year-oldish. Like a deliberately fantasy name. Plus, Elmanax ends in that ax sound, and, since he is a fairy, I thought Calibot’s lover’s name should be more human-sounding. Thus, Zargax became Devon.

Because love is a major theme in the novel, I also set up Calibot to be estranged from his father. In previous iterations, they hadn’t seen each other in some time, but there was never this sense that anything was wrong. In this last version of the book, I established that Calibot and Gothemus didn’t get along. Calibot left home five years ago, and he and his father hadn’t spoken since. When his father is murdered, eliminating the possibility for any kind of reconciliation, Calibot is plagued with very complicated regret.

Girls and Boys

By keeping Devon as a man, I still had a problem with a lack of female characters. I’m a big believer in the idea of women being every bit as capable as men, and I wanted a more diverse cast of characters.

I started with Sir Lycius. There was no reason to make Gothemus’s murderer one sex or the other, so I thought Lycius would be fine as a female. However, the ius ending of the name had a very male sound to it (I studied a little Latin in college), so I changed her name to Vicia. that sounded both feminine and wicked.

I also beefed up the character to make her more capable. In earlier versions, Sir Lycius had been a spineless knight resorting to treachery to get what he wanted. I made Vicia a powerful magician — not strong enough to defeat Gothemus Draco in combat but definitely a menace for anyone who would face her.

In the third edition, I had ditched the plot of Elmanax manipulating Prince Therdien, but I brought it back in the fourth iteration with some variations. Elmanax was indeed trying to avenge himself on Gothemus and Zod for stealing the Eye of the Dragon, but he was now manipulating Vicia and the Council of Elders, the wizards who rule the city of Eldenberg. The Council sees an opportunity to knock off Gothemus and take control of the balance of power for itself. Elmanax is using Vicia to trick them into doing what he wants.

By way of contrast, I also added the character of Liliana — Gothemus’s apprentice. She is a failed magician, who is instructed to bring Calibot the sword he would use in his revenge. She is companion to Calibot, who helps him unravel mysteries and provides a little comic relief at times. Of course, she figures pretty prominently in the big climax.

Revenge is Out

As I got through the first draft of this new iteration, there was one final problem. While Gothemus has a mysterious, posthumous mission for Calibot, it ceased being about vengeance. Thus, the title, Calibot’s Revenge, was no longer appropriate.

The truth is the focus of the book had changed too. It was less a men’s adventure novel and more a story about family issues. So calling it Calibot’s Revenge was unlikely to help me find the readers it would appeal to.

After a lot of thought, I went with The Sword and the Sorcerer. People like alliteration, the story features a magical sword and the world’s most powerful sorcerer, and, thinking like a businessman, “swords and sorcery” is a subcategory of fantasy literature, and I thought that might aid me in search engine queries.

On Christmas Day 2013, 30 years after I first sat down with a blue, Bic pen, and a red, Mead notebook, I published The Sword and the Sorcerer. It was a long, long journey. I never planned for it to take that much time.

But I feel it is the best novel I’ve written to date. It was worth the wait.

You can purchase The Sword and the Sorcerer now from Amazon.com and from Smashwords.

Novel Evolution Part 3: Research into Celtic Mythology

Continuing today with my exploration of the evolution of my latest novel, The Sword and the Sorcerer, I look at some of the changes that occurred as a result of my work in the hobby games industry.

Back to D&D

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, the book has its roots in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. But that wasn’t the only place D&D would have an influence on this novel.

In 2000, Wizards of the Coast released a new edition of D&D, and they used an open license to allow third party publishers to produce rules-compatible supplements for the game. In the early days of this arrangement, there was a huge demand for this supplemental material, and both established companies and new start-ups dove into a pool filled with easy money.

Among the firms that got on board in the second wave (when it was obvious how much money there was to be made in D&D supplements) was Avalanche Press. They were a producer of historical war games, and, to carve themselves out a unique niche in an increasingly crowded market, they produced RPG game books that were set in historical time periods with rules that reflected the mysticism of the times.

In 2001, they hired me to manage their RPG line, with the directive to produce game manuals for a variety of different historical periods. Among our most successful ventures was a short line of Celtic-themed books. After a base manual establishing role-playing during the golden age of Celtic culture, I penned a supplemental book on fairies. The idea behind this particular piece was to give an historically accurate depiction of fae creatures as they were imagined by the peoples of Western Europe around the time of Christ.

In my research for this book, I came across an interesting, little fact of which I’d previously been unaware. Gnomes were not short humanoids who were distant cousins to dwarves. They also didn’t stand around in people’s gardens. They were actually, according to Celtic myth, a subspecies of fairies who lived under the earth and were responsible for guarding all sorts of magical treasures. They had a king named Cob, and they were not terribly friendly.

New Motivations

When I read that, Calibot’s Revenge immediately rocketed through my brain after lying dormant for approximately 11 or 12 years. What if, I wondered, Elmanax was a more traditional gnome. What if he had been assigned to guard the Eye of the Dragon, and Gothemus and Zod stole it from him?

All sorts of possibilities began to race through my head at that point. If Gothemus and Zod had stolen the Eye, Elmanax would be motivated to get it back. He’d be even more motivated if Cob the Gnome King had exiled him for losing it. Now suddenly, Elmanax wasn’t motivated by dreams of conquest; he was very personally interested in avenging himself on those who hurt him and ending his exile. That was a much stronger motive for plotting to kill Gothemus and take his things than simple greed.

My view of Gothemus and Zod evolved too. In the second edition of the novel, I was already moving them from the vaguely heroic to the sinister, but now they were much farther down the path of being irredeemable characters. If they stole the Eye from Elmanax, the question that naturally followed was, “Why?”

Here, the Wild Lands began to figure more strongly in the story. Gothemus conceived a plan to subdue the Wild Lands with the magic of the Eye of the Dragon, while Zod mined iron on the other side of the dark forest and shipped it down river to Gothemus. They put themselves in a position wherein they could become the top supplier of iron to a world dependent on it and that had no central ruler. In short, they set themselves up to control the economy and get rich in the process.

And that, of course, would mean more people than Elmanax would want to hurt them. Practically everyone would be motivated to kill Gothemus, so a new world order could be established.

With that one single fact about the origin of the gnome myth in Celtic culture I’d uncovered, I’d given myself a stronger, better setting for my novel.

Love

There was one other important change in the narrative in that third iteration of Calibot’s Revenge. I came to believe there needed to be a real love interest in the novel. It was otherwise, little more than a boys’ adventure story. I didn’t really like the idea of Calibot seducing Elspeth and then sort of leaving her behind. That seemed sort of crass to me.

From the beginning, there’d been a minor character in the novel named Zargax. He was a warrior and friend to Calibot. In the second edition, he’d been a soldier-courtier who helped Calibot gain his position with the duke.

For this latest iteration, I decided to change him to a woman. My thought was that Zargax (whose name was changed to something else I can’t remember now) was a faithful companion to Calibot and had fallen in love with him. Calibot didn’t notice at all and was obsessed with Elspeth. Zargax assisted him in his seduction of her. When Calibot impregnates her, Zargax helps him escape the city en route to beginning his quest to avenge Gothemus. That made Calibot a little more of a shady character too.

I made a bunch of notes for this iteration of the novel, but I never wrote a word of it. I was writing 4000 words a day for Avalanche Press at the time, and there just wasn’t time to really pen a novel.

But Calibot’s Revenge wasn’t dead. It would continue to lie dormant for another 11 years. But the next time I would come back to it, I would have all the elements to craft it into the finest novel of my career.

The Sword and the Sorcerer (as it came to be known) is on sale now. Get it at one of the links below.

Amazon.com

Smashwords

Novel Evolution Part 2: Graduate School

Continuing my four-part series on the evolution of The Sword and the Sorcerer, today I’ll look at the second version of the novel.

An Unexpected Discovery

In 1991, I moved to Kansas and enrolled in the graduate program at KU. As I unpacked a host of hastily filled boxes from the move, I came across a file of old papers and other creative endeavors from my high school days. Among them, I found the original, hand-written manuscript of Calibot’s Revenge. Amused and excited, I sat down with this blast from the past.

My amusement didn’t last long.

I was horrified at how terrible it was. I had a BA in English, was studying for a master’s degree in the same field, and dreamed of one day being a novelist. So it didn’t sit well that this first full-length novel I’d ever completed was so wretched.

Twenty-two years later, I’m not surprised and a little more forgiving. Novels written by high school students are bad. That’s just how they are.

But I thought there was a seed of a good story in that beat-up, red notebook, and so I sat down and started making some notes.

Major Changes

The second edition of the novel introduced three major new elements that would become staples of the final version. They all added something that was sorely lacking in the original — motivation.

The first was the Eye of the Dragon. This ancient stone enables the person who can master it to control the Wild Lands, a sinister, magical forest that dominates a large portion of the eastern half of the Known World. In this version of the novel, Gothemus controls the Eye, and Elmanax the gnome wants it. He has plans to master its magic for himself and turn the Wild Lands to his own purpose.

To accomplish this, he enlists the aid of an elf prince named Therdien. This was the second major change. Rather than operating as a sort of evil entity unto himself, Elmanax becomes a manipulator. He convinces Therdien that, if he controls the Eye of the Dragon, they can use it to start a war with humanity they can win. Therdien’s elves are persecuted by the human expansion and driven back into the Wild Lands. They are slaughtered if they emerge. Elmanax has no problem with Therdien’s war, but he’s only interested in his own aims, which are conquest-oriented.

When Gothemus gets wind of Elmanax’s plan, he crafts an elaborate scheme of his own. He plans to die, be reincarnated as a dwarf, and then poison the dwarfs against Therdien’s elves to prevent an all-out attack on humanity by a combined dwarfish and elfin army.

Gothemus hires Sir Lycius (the renamed Sir Ly) away from the port city of Dalasport, which thwarts Lycius’s plans to topple Duke Boordin. Then Gothemus disguises himself as Elmanax and orders Therdien to intercept Lycius and pay him off to poison Gothemus. Therdien does as he’s told, and, when he arrives at Gothemus’s tower, he finds he is to escort the famed wizard across the Wild Lands to visit his brother Zod.

So where does Calibot — the main character — fit into all of this? That’s where the third significant change came in. Rather than being a warrior, I changed Calibot to a poet. He was working his way up the court ladder in Dalasport and attempting to become the duke’s poet laureate. He succeeds at amusing Boordin with a racy poem and gets the job.

In the duke’s court, he meets and is immediately attracted to Boordin’s daughter, Elspeth. Calibot seduces her, and ends up bedding her. But afterwards, he gets word of his father’s murder (which Lycius successfully pulls off at Zod’s castle), is summoed to his tower, gets the magic sword, is transformed into a warrior by it, and is charged with avenging his father.

Epic Structure

With that massively complicated plot, I planned to write the book in three parts. The first would concern the build up to Gothemus’s murder. Gothemus travels to Zod’s, Elmanax steals the Eye of the Dragon in his absence, Calibot seduces Elspeth, and Lycius murders Gothemus. The second part concerned the rising action of Calibot getting the sword, Lycius being forced to help Zod and pretend he hadn’t been the killer, and Elmanax and Therdien’s army moving north to the dwarf kingdom. Part Three featured a giant battle of three armies and Calibot’s dispatching of both Lycius and Elmanax.

But the surprise at the end would have been Gothemus being restored to his human self, and Calibot being outraged at how he was manipulated and at how Gothemus has cavalierly played games with world politics.

Conceptually, at least, this was a much better book than one about a son avenging his murdered father (especially since the crime was unmotivated). I was pretty excited. At the age of 23, I had my first really good idea for a novel. I sat down and starting writing, trying to pen a chapter a night in between the heavy homework load of a graduate student.

I made it through the entire first part. To this day, I’m kind of proud of how I wrote that last chapter and had the three events of Gothemus’s murder, Elmanax mastering the Eye of the Dragon, and Calibot bedding Elspeth. I wove all three events together and had a pretty good cliffhanger at the end of Part 1.

And then the weight of finals in that first semester of grad school overwhelmed me. I had to stop writing for me and focus on writing for school (and studying for exams). I spent three weeks between semesters at parents’ house in Wisconsin — away from my computer. By the time I got back to Kansas in January of 1992, my focus on Calibot’s Revenge was gone. The book would lie dormant for another 11 years.

Novel Evolution Part 1: How this All Started with D&D

As I hope you know, my new novel, The Sword and the Sorcerer releases Christmas Day. (Pre-order it here!) I’ve been writing this book for 30 years, and it’s gone through several iterations. Today, I begin a four-part series on the evolution of The Sword and the Sorcerer — how it changed over the course of its history, and how it became what I think is my best novel to date.

Humble Beginnings

I am ever so slightly ashamed to admit that this book has its origins in a Dungeons & Dragons campaign. It’s not that I think there’s anything wrong with D&D. I played a lot of it when I was in high school, and I wrote supplements for it in the early 2000′s when I worked in the hobby games industry.

But a game wherein the basic object is to break into the homes of “monsters”, kill them and steal their treasure without real consequence isn’t usually good source material for a story that speaks to deep human themes. Moreover, it conjures images of guys who can’t get dates sitting around drinking Mountain Dew, eating pizza, and pretending they are actually important somehow.

I played a lot of D&D, and I’ve yet to sit in on a session that fulfills the geek stereotype, but that’s hardly the point here. Tell someone you wrote a novel based on your D&D campaign, and they start looking for an escape route and praying you won’t ask them to read it.

So, yeah, I wrote a novel that had its origins in Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s not that kind of book. At least, that’s not how it ended up.

Age of Wonder

I was 14 when I played the game that would lay the foundation for The Sword and the Sorcerer. That’s another potentially embarrassing facet of the story. Tell someone you got the idea when you were a young teenager, and they think, “Oh, I know what kind of book this is.” And that’s not a good thought.

Anyway, there were four of us playing, and we’d just defeated a band of orcs in combat. My friend Gary Hagerstrom was playing a knight he had oh-so-cleverly named Sir Ly, and he decided he wanted to mess with me. After the battle, he offered my wizard some wine. It was poisoned.

To this day, I couldn’t tell you why he wanted to poison my character. I’m guessing it had to do with junior-high boys wanting to screw with each other. He no doubt thought it would be funny to mess with me by killing my character. Murder is an abstract concept 13- and 14-year-olds don’t really understand the significance of, especially in a game with a lot of violence and killing.

I missed my saving throw. My wizard died from the poison. Gary laughed.

Because I was angry, his sister’s character, a cleric, cast a reincarnation spell. My wizard came back as a dwarf, and, in the early editions of D&D, dwarfs couldn’t be wizards (a strange rule since D&D dwarfs are based on Tolkien dwarfs, which are based on Norse dwarfs, which are master, magical craftsmen). So I had my character back, but he couldn’t use magic anymore.

So I made a new character, a warrior who was the son of the wizard, I gave him a special magical sword, and his mission was to avenge his father on Sir Ly.

Then another of our friends had his character, a gnome named Elmanax, kill Sir Ly. I never got my vengeance.

Budding Novelist

Unable to get what I wanted from the game, I turned to fiction to get justice. I took a brand new Mead notebook, a Bic pen, and proceeded to write the story of Gothemus Draco’s unjust murder and the righteous revenge perpetrated by his son Calibot.

I still have it somewhere. But I don’t go looking. I don’t want to read just how bad it is. But what I remember of it is pretty horrific. Hey, I was 15 years old by then, and I had yet to develop any craft.

Many of the events of the campaign were present. Gothemus was inexplicably murdered by Sir Ly. He was reincarnated as a dwarf. Calibot got a magical sword and was sent on a mission of revenge. Elmanax killed both Sir Ly and Gothemus’s brother Zod, so Calibot took his revenge against Elmanax.

It’s awful. But, at age 15, I didn’t know that. I was proud of myself for having written an entire fantasy novel.

New Tech

It was 1983, and the personal computer was just beginning to emerge. My father, who was fairly forward-thinking about such things, saw an opportunity to teach me something.

I was a faculty brat, which meant I had access to the facilities at the college where he taught. So, using my faculty dependent ID, I spent weeks typing Calibot’s Revenge into the available Apple IIc’s and saving my work to a 5 1/4-inch floppy disk using Bank Street Writer.

I never finished transcribing the whole draft, but it was educational, and that helped make me an early adopter of the new technology — a fact that would lay the foundation for my being able to start a small press publisher in 1996, which would in turn set me up to become an independent author.

It would be several years before I came back to this early attempt at being a novelist. Over the course of the various drafts it went through, it slowly transformed into something that is actually worth reading.

But it all began with a teenaged boy deciding to mess with one of his friends.

Home Repair Never as Easy as It Sounds

The Home Depot lies.

“You can do it. We can help,” they say in their ads.

This is a blatant fabrication. Not only is the second sentence an outright lie, I’m dubious about the veracity of the first one.

I had to install a new kitchen faucet yesterday. Aside from selling me the faucet and some tools, Home Depot offered no assistance whatsoever.

The thing is installing a new faucet isn’t really that hard. I’m no Bob Vila, but I was able to follow the instructions in the box and do a pretty fair job of getting the thing in and operating correctly.

It’s getting the old faucet out that is the real problem.

The first thing no one was told me was that I needed a basin wrench. I laid under the sink battling the highly inconveniently placed fittings with a pliers and a crescent wrench. Neither would fit well enough that I could make any real progress.

Frustrated and not sure what to do next, I went to that great font of information, Google. I was hardly surprised to see that when I started typing, “how to remove a kitchen faucet” in the search box, the phrase auto-filled after the “t” of “kitchen.”

I learned I needed a basin wrench. Home Depot could have mentioned that on the box of the faucet they sold me.

So I went back to Home Depot and got one. And then I spent an hour or so cranking on those fittings trying to get them to loosen. The basin wrench was much more effective than the pliers, but, after three and a half hours (and a lot of dirty words), the old faucet was still in the sink.

Home Depot did not mention that the design of the old faucet would make it impossible to remove it.

The thing had an L-shaped configuration and fittings that could be loosened but not actually removed. With my back and shoulders aching and my brain burning with anger I applied an old rule from childhood:

If it doesn’t fit, force it.

I went to the hardware store (much closer than Home Depot), and bought a hacksaw. Then I went back home and sawed through half-inch brass pipe. After four hours, the old sink was finally out.

I inspected the parts I’d sawed through to see if there was some step I’d missed, some thing I could have done to get them to come out. There was nothing. The design of the old faucet was awful.

Of course, I still had to get the new faucet in and, naturally, I had the wrong size water supply lines. So it was back to Home Depot to exchange the ones I’d bought for ones that fit. Again, Home Depot could have helped by telling me more than what size pipe was on the sink. Knowing that I would need a 30-inch-long water supply line would have helped. Don’t they know guys like me don’t really know what they’re doing but can’t afford a real plumber?

Anyway, there’s a new faucet in my kitchen. It works. We have hot and cold running water. There’s also a blister on my left palm and a lot of pain in my back and shoulders.

I don’t mind doing home repair. It’s fun, and, when I do it right, I feel manly.

But I hate plumbing. Every plumbing job I’ve ever had to do was awful, involved a fitting that didn’t want to come off, and took three to four times as long as it should.

The Home Depot doesn’t tell you that before you start. They lie and make it seem easy. But there’s a reason plumbers make a lot of money.

Because you can do it, but good luck getting any help.

NaNoWriMo Finally Finished

At last, it’s finished. Yesterday, I finally typed the words, “The end,” for Roses Are White.

I can’t even begin to tell you what a relief that was. And how sad it is I was relieved.

As I was coming down the homestretch of NaNoWriMo, I was excited. I was expecting to be proud of myself. Then, with just two chapters to go, I was felled by three concurrent illnesses that took two weeks to recover from. They prevented me from finishing Roses Are White; they kept me from doing promotional work for my holiday sales; they inhibited work I had to do for the launch of The Sword and the Sorcerer next week.

So, rather than joy and pride at my completion of the third book in the Wolf Dasher series, it was simple relief I felt yesterday.

When I set out on the NaNoWriMo journey, I had 12 chapters written, and I was hoping to finish the book in the 30-day-window of November. The final count was 40 chapters. I originally set out to write a chapter a day over 21 days (giving myself the weekends and Thanksgiving off to plot). I actually wrote on 24 days over the course of the month. NaNoWriMo calls for a 50,000-word novel. Before the fever stopped me, I wrote 63,023. The final two chapters were 4786 words, so, overall, it was 67,809. And that doesn’t count the 12 chapters I wrote before the month.

It’s not a bad output. In fact, it’s pretty good.

It’s also easy to see how I burned myself out and made myself susceptible to illness. Because when I wasn’t averaging 2626 words a day, I was thinking about the novel. I thought about it before falling asleep. I thought about it as soon as I awoke. I dreamed about it.

Essentially, I was fevered from about a week into the project. First, my obsession with writing the book dominated my brain, then the flu did.

It’s entirely possible I don’t have the right temperament for NaNoWriMo. In fact, it’s probable. I got the work done but at tremendous cost.

So it’s unlikely I’ll be doing it again. We’ll see I suppose. But if I get tempted next year, I’ll be going back through these blog posts to remind myself what happened.

Meanwhile, I’ve got the first draft of another novel finished. That’s a very good thing.