Writings
Back in 2006, I started toying with the idea of marrying my love of Japan, religion/spirituality, and fantasy into a novel set in quasi-historical Japan shortly after the Onin War. The protagonist was a yamabushi/shaman-type character named Kenji who wanders a land very similar to medieval Japan. Before I could make much headway on that, I began work on the Runes of Gallidon world, and it made sense to port Kenji into Gallidon.
While working on the Kenji story, two of the characters he encounters began to demand more page time. I tried alternating points of view in the novel to give them all a chance to tell their story in their own voice, but after a few months of struggling, I realized this approach wasn’t going to work. Now I’m experimenting with separate stories for each character to see if that helps or hinders the storytelling process.
Mia, a female noble in the Runes of Gallidon world, emerged as the character I most wanted to explore in a large fictional work. Kenji took more of a back seat (at least for now), and Sora – a young girl from a small mountain village high in the Illuminated Peaks of Gallidon – quietly but defiantly insisted that I not delete her voice from the story. Who am I, the humble author, to argue?
At this point in my story drafting, all three are exploring some of the evil that’s rearing its head in the Empty Lands (you can check out a flash fiction piece I wrote for Gallidon if you want a hint). I was able to complete the first draft of a novel during the 2009 NaNoWriMo contest.
Give a monkey a typewriter (word processor, computer, stick), and before long he’s banged out some scribble and called it literature. Go figure.
