I was also perfectly miserable, both in my own mood and to other people. We had moved a year and a half earlier, and I still missed the large trees in the backyard of my former home. I was doing poorly in school, and had no wish to improve (I wouldn’t until the ninth grade). I skipped a lot of school and spent the time listening to records and reading.
Tolkien was my lifeline, as he was for so many unhappy kids. By the end of the school year, my grades had picked up (a smidge) and I had already lost track of how many times I had read The Lord of the Rings. I seldom went away without my copy of The Tolkien Reader. I read a wonderful novel called The Book of the Dun Cow. I read the romances of Barbara Cartland, more for her descriptions of historical setting than for the romances themselves. I discovered Norse mythology and Iceland's bloody, brooding history told in the sagas. I read a lot of things I don’t remember in detail.
And I began a story of my own, like many other kids with a penchant for science-fiction and fantasy. The long tale of this family of mixed Galactic heritage(Terran and Neoran) came to me in pieces. Scraps of the Lorrondon children’s childhoods, how treachery and lust for power tore their lives apart, and how they survived and in some cases, prevailed.
For years I wrote nothing but scraps. Episodes, incidents, family trees, charts, lists of planets. It wasn’t until 1990 that I began anything like a complete manuscript. I still have hundreds of pages of scenes, Many will be in the books, but much changed (and, I hope, improved). Many will not. All of the principal characters were there from the beginning, Rusorin, Rob Lorrondon, Enrik Ratt, Anna Helsak, Walsam (the earliest name still in use). The overall story of galactic war and the efforts to build peace has never changed.
Like the tales that inspired me, this story was never happy, but it wasn’t quite as grim as Njal’s Saga. A few years ago I read through some of those old sketches and was amazed at how many of the things I wrote down had to do with death, or battle, or estrangement.
From the beginning I was interested in the romance of space itself; the distances, the incredible things like nebulae and black holes, and the possibility of other peoples out there. My galaxy was never as crowded as Gene Roddenberry’s or George Lucas’s. Space travel is a lonely and dangerous endeavor.
Even as I wrote more and more things down, and filled in more and more aspects of this world, I knew I was years a way from being able to write this story, or to write it the way I felt it deserved. I served a long apprenticeship, reading everything, fiction and nonfiction alike. Tolkien, Faulkner, Le Guin, Clarke, Poe, Undset, Woolf, Lessing-these were among my teachers. In college I majored in English, and continued to write out scenes. If you want to learn to write, read. That’s no guarantee, of course, but it’s the best training you’ll get.
It wasn’t until the late nineties that I finished the first book, The Bretton Katt Alliance. For one thing, it took years for me to decide what was necessary to the story, and what wasn’t. How many books would I need to tell the story-or rather, how many books could I break this into. I decided on six. I didn’t want to put out eight-hundred-page tomes when three to four hundred could do the job.
The book was self-published almost two years ago now. I’m still foolishly pleased when somebody likes it. We’re never the best critics of our own work, but I think my book is pretty good. Will it Teach People Anything? Is it inspiring, enlightening, life-changing? Darned if I know. Those calls are for other people to make, not me. I’m just telling a story, one that’s important to me, and that I hope will become important to other people.
And after thirty years, I will see this through to the end, sweet or bitter.
