Writing fantasy
Origins...
Growing up, although I didn't realise it at the time, I read a significant number of fantasy books and developed pleasure in reading them. Books like Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising and Over Sea, Under Stone, Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three, T H White's The Sword in the Stone and many others formed the foundation for what was to become a writing passion. Ironicaly, it was Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers that cemented my love for fantasy stories. The Three Musketeers is not a fantasy novel, but it contains a key element common to those tales - a heroic stand against seemingly impossible odds where a sense of goodness must triumph over evil.
I didn't come to Tolkien or Eddings or Feist or Wurts or McCaffrey until after university years, but once I did I devoured their books. At the same time in the late 1970s/1980s, I became an avid D&D gamer and DM, which fostered world and character concepts and encounters that became the starting point for my first attempts at writing fantasy. Out of those attempts, the world of Andrakis emerged. And that, in turn, spawned the early Guardians drafts.
Currently, I have eleven fantasy books published, and another six awaiting publication. Together, all seventeen stories and lands and characters share a common world and background world history, and source of magic, although each series is set in different eras and places of that world. Following is an outline of the world's history and where the series exist in that history.
The world behind the books
Let's begin by knowing that
The Before Time
Nothing is really known of the origins of life. Oral histories are conceptual and vague and contradictory. Eventually, written records identify myriad beliefs in how the world as each community knows it came into existence - tales of gods and goddesses and demi-human and natural forces abound, but no one really knows and no one agrees. What is known is that there was a time when several humanoid types existed, each having adapted over many thousand of years to their various environments. Across the same periods of time, dragons evolved to become serious competitors with the humanoids.
There is no common name like Earth or Venus for the world in my fantasy tales because the characters and their communities do not fully conceptualise a single planet, or even the idea of a planet, much as early human civilsations did not understand the concept of a single planet. In the Andrakis trilogy, for example, the characters know of other cultures and nearby nations, but no one has ventured off of the continent on which events take place. By the time of the Dreaming in Amber books, trade and history are evidence that the world is a large and diverse place with other continents in play across the oceans, but the world is still not fully known, much like the people in the medieval period knew of other lands but weren't aware of anything beyond their sailing and travelling capacity.However, a major event is repeatedly recorded across multiple cultures with various names like The Star Fall,
The Andrakis Trilogy
The story of Andra and A Ahmud Ki's clash with the Drag
Growing up, although I didn't realise it at the time, I read a significant number of fantasy books and developed pleasure in reading them. Books like Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising and Over Sea, Under Stone, Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, Lloyd Alexander's The Book of Three, T H White's The Sword in the Stone and many others formed the foundation for what was to become a writing passion. Ironicaly, it was Alexandre Dumas' The Three Musketeers that cemented my love for fantasy stories. The Three Musketeers is not a fantasy novel, but it contains a key element common to those tales - a heroic stand against seemingly impossible odds where a sense of goodness must triumph over evil.
I didn't come to Tolkien or Eddings or Feist or Wurts or McCaffrey until after university years, but once I did I devoured their books. At the same time in the late 1970s/1980s, I became an avid D&D gamer and DM, which fostered world and character concepts and encounters that became the starting point for my first attempts at writing fantasy. Out of those attempts, the world of Andrakis emerged. And that, in turn, spawned the early Guardians drafts.
Currently, I have eleven fantasy books published, and another six awaiting publication. Together, all seventeen stories and lands and characters share a common world and background world history, and source of magic, although each series is set in different eras and places of that world. Following is an outline of the world's history and where the series exist in that history.
The world behind the books
Let's begin by knowing that
The Before Time
Nothing is really known of the origins of life. Oral histories are conceptual and vague and contradictory. Eventually, written records identify myriad beliefs in how the world as each community knows it came into existence - tales of gods and goddesses and demi-human and natural forces abound, but no one really knows and no one agrees. What is known is that there was a time when several humanoid types existed, each having adapted over many thousand of years to their various environments. Across the same periods of time, dragons evolved to become serious competitors with the humanoids.
There is no common name like Earth or Venus for the world in my fantasy tales because the characters and their communities do not fully conceptualise a single planet, or even the idea of a planet, much as early human civilsations did not understand the concept of a single planet. In the Andrakis trilogy, for example, the characters know of other cultures and nearby nations, but no one has ventured off of the continent on which events take place. By the time of the Dreaming in Amber books, trade and history are evidence that the world is a large and diverse place with other continents in play across the oceans, but the world is still not fully known, much like the people in the medieval period knew of other lands but weren't aware of anything beyond their sailing and travelling capacity.However, a major event is repeatedly recorded across multiple cultures with various names like The Star Fall,
The Andrakis Trilogy
The story of Andra and A Ahmud Ki's clash with the Drag