Conversing with my Younger Self

Going through some older writings, more than 20 years back, I came across this:

“The quest is shown and mine alone,
though you may join me for a while.
Your leg is lean, your vision keen,
your doublet a suitable style.

These things seem well, one cannot tell
what may annoy us hence a mile.
So rouse, signor, we go to war –
yet pray, divest that vapid smile.”

I had utterly forgotten these lines. I confess – I like them. There’s a good rhythm, and some humor, but the thing that most affected me was how these verses are a metaphor for many of life’s journeys, marriage not the least.

These verses are from THE DEMONS OF THYLARK, an epic fantasy I first began in the 1980’s. Word processors were in their infancy then, but over about 2 years I produced this:

This manuscript, THE WARRIOR FROM THE CRIMSON PLAIN, I typed on an Apple IIe and printed on a dot-matrix printer, to produce a bolus of 517 double-spaces pages and about 10 lbs. weight. An acquaintance of those days worked for a publisher and I submitted the MSS using her intro. The publisher passed (not sure I retain the rejection letter) but I recall the gist of their feedback … “Not enough clarity about the goal of (the hero) Dalin’s picaresque journeys.”

That was entirely fair. An old chestnut about writing, but with some truth, is “write what you know.” What did the 29-year-old me know? At that time of life, for me, things seemed as one unconnected adventure after another. Not that my life was action-packed in the fictional sense, but I was moving through a lot of things: a new marriage, the Society for Creative Anachronism, my studies of Aikido, learning how to program (including 6502 and 68000 assembler), and trying the whole writing thing.

Of course back then there was no internet with its copious examples of “how to be a writer” – I just did what seemed natural. What to me back then was the most important thing in writing was style, or “atmosphere”. My favorite author then (and now to large extent) was Jack Vance and I tried to emulate his ironic and often-erudite manner, as in this example from the story SMALL MAGIC:

Dalin was never without a sword, it was his occupation and single important possession. He took it from where it leaned against a wall and laid it across his lap; taking a sip of ale, he appraised the tightness of the sword-fittings as he listened to the discourse of his companion at table, Bashtir Yellow-eye.

” … comes down to money. Everything is money. Why, give me enough, and what a change in old Bashtir! Gone would be the skulking, the tricking, the waiting-in-dark-places-to-collect-payment for illegal goods and services. There would be a new Bashtir: noble, generous, a student of the arts. In short, everything I am not now: Good!”

“Here’s to that,” Dalin mumbled, raising his mug.

“But it’s a matter of money. We all need it to live. If I am to continue my life, I must earn a wage, and there’s only one way I know how to do that.”

“Robbery.”

“Not to put too fine a point on it, yes. A trivial minded person might argue that my specialties, extortion and deception, were not exactly robbery, but that is over-fastidious. They all represent non-beneficent transfer of wealth; therefore, they are all robbery. Alas, if only I could free myself from the vicious cycle that enjoins me to unlawful behavior!”

In truth, I still use this style, but very, very sparingly, for example in a short passage in order to set-off a particular character or event. In my early writing, what you see above was non-stop, all 500+ pages.

In the 90s my pace of writing dropped significantly. I did little bits of story about my fantasy hero Dalin, and made a start at an SF story where the hero, Kenneth Iborgan Teele, was a medically rejuvenated back-from-the-dead person. Teele’s story was to have been INTO THE OUT, where Teele is hired to find the runaway daughter of a wealthy family. The “Out” of the title refers to the area of space beyond the control of laws and normal order. In the story, Teele would of course find the girl, who was disinclined to return. Then they discover a threat to human civilization in the form of a human colony who’s members had mutated into a new species – this new type of human has an altered brain structure that changes their processing of ethics and morality.

Alas, it was not to be. 1990’s Fernando both had a lot going on, and lacked the writer’s discipline to understand and structure a story. Back then I just started writing and when the story started flailing about, I had no idea what to do about it.

But Teele did return, in INTRAFLECTION TO A KILL, where he investigates a terrorist who is killing intelligence agents. There’s a lot going on in that story:  a killer inspired by the Finnish epic Kalavela, a brain-controlled artistic medium, and a group of suspects who are all attendees in a seminar about the brain-medium thing. When I wrote the story, I was in the midst of attending a real-world writing workshop, the Ultimate Science Fiction Workshop, led by Jeffrey Carver (who sadly this year passed away) and Craig Shaw Gardner.

But back to THE DEMONS OF THYLARK. I’m just at the 2/3rds point in my current work-in-progress THE HUNGRY JUDGES, and lately I’ve been casting about as to what to do after that draft is done. I’ll certainly do work on the third book of the Irá and Judd trilogy, but I expect as a side-project I’ll be going through the body of stuff from DEMONS and CRIMSON PLAIN – all told those are about 250,000 words, so there’s a lot to work with. Not exactly sure yet what I would do with any revised form of those things, but for now I do enjoy looking at the thoughts of my younger self.

I’ll leave you with another bit from the story SMALL MAGIC. In this part, Dalin is questioning a wizard, Mivviffer the Mystologue, on the nature of magic. Mivviffer answers through an animated manikin:

“The first principle a mystologue apprehends is the coaecervate structure of the universe. All of creation is bound by insensible wefts, so that the slightest stress at one point is instantly transmitted throughout. This simplifies the creation of grandiose effects; consider how a devastating avalanche may be created by jostling a single pebble; also consider how the jostler is inevitably pulverized to minute fragments.

“The universe, however, also admits to a sense of equilibrium. Its connecting wefts are easily disturbed, but soon right themselves; and most often in a pattern that excludes the disturbing influence. Imagine the avalanche vaulting uphill, but the plucker of the pebble still pulverized. At this very instant, the universe may be repairing the efforts of an inept mystologue; the rain of frogs falls, next instant all is destroyed, then re-ordered in a pattern where the rain never occurred, but without the rash mystologue who attempted so much.”

Dalin looked around the room, suddenly uneasy. The mannikin continued.

“Among themselves the mystologues use the term ‘small-magic’. It includes such marvels as Mivviffer presented tonight; these are properly understood as the acme of the mystologue’s art. It means to create a magic potent enough to be perceived, yet subtle enough not to upset the wefts of the universe. Only in the demonstration of this ‘small-magic’ does a mystologue show mastery of his art.

“Understand too that this concept possesses a wide applicability. But now, I speak no more.”

With that, the mannikin sagged back lifeless.

Till next time …