Well, it has been a long and harrowing journey from inception to completion, but my first book "The Wizard of Roaming Hall" is finally finished. The book, which began as little more than a passing thought 14 years ago, left a burning desire within me that didn't really come to fruition until about 6 years later. While on a year-long volunteering stint in Puerto Rico, I sat down and hashed out a rough outline that would form the foundation of what was becoming a multi-book epic. About 9 months after returning to the states, I had my first draft.
Then I got married.
Now, here we are, nearly 5 years later, and the book is in its 3rd and final revision, and has recently been published in eBook form and is available from Kindle (link). I know people don't like being sold to when they read what is meant to be a casual, free and informative outlet such as a blog, but as a writer, the first lesson you learn (other than that the bulk of writing is simply rewriting) is that you have to be more-or-less a shameless self-promoter, because no one else is going to sell your book for you.
Right, so, shoe on the other foot, let's talk a little bit about the book, and why I chose to begin (let alone spend 14 years finishing) a story that is, at its core, a fantasy tale about a sword-fighting duck.
"You wrote a book?" is the most common initial question I get when I explain to people that I actually do work (other than being an occasional handyman and stay-at-home father), and that that work is writing. "What's it about?"
This is usually followed by a long, somewhat awkward pause on my part, in which I have to avoid immediately saying: "A sword-fighting Duck," and formulate a sentence that includes such shameless name-dropping as "Tolkein" and "Lewis" while mumbling something about it being a fantasy adventure story with magic and swordplay and stuff. Somehow or other, it always comes around to the main character being half-human, half-duck, and then the conversation gets weird. People are usually either immediately turned-off by anthropomorphic characters, or else they ask "why a Duck?"
The answer to that question is as convoluted as the process for churning out this first attempt at a novel has been. It all started back in middle school, when we were tasked with creating a cartoon drawing/painting in art class. I drew on one of my myriad inspirations of the day, which included "Garfield and Friends," and decided I'd do a woodland scene complete with a pair of comically disproportionate songbirds, a surfacing fish, a turtle and a duck, all along the bank of a little pond.
I don't consider myself a great artist by any stretch, and this drawing was perhaps one of my most mediocre, excepting the duck's bill, which I discovered I could render in perfect 3-dimensional clarity with a few dazzling pencil strokes. From that point on, I made it my quest to replicate this duckbill as often as I could, and so I began drawing duck after duck after duck, eventually outfitting the character in garb to make him look like James Bond, Indiana Jones and all sorts of other characters from my beloved action, adventure, sci-fi and fantasy books and films.
On one such productive day during social studies class, I made the very first rendering of what would eventually become the character Duck Ducaine. It was a simple drawing, with the ubiquitous duck's head attached to a person-like body outfitted in the same "rugged leather traveling garb" that would carry over to the story, and the "indigo cloak with the rose-colored lining" that would become Duck's signature outerwear. protruding from the cloak was the blade of a sword, the hand and hilt concealed from view because I'm even less adept at accurately representing hands than I am at everything else.
This character was side by side with several others, including "Duck Bond," "Indiana Duck" and a character that bore a remarkable resemblance to Sherlock Holmes, but whose name, for some reason or other, I decided to make "Duck Ducaine." I still have this original drawing buried somewhere in my filing cabinet, but at the moment I'm a bit too lazy to go and get it out.
Anyway, fast forward a year or two to the time when the ground breaking video game "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" was all the rage. I decided I wanted to be a video game maker, and so began to jot down ideas for a storyline that my game could follow, which, although not in any way similar to the aforementioned game, bore resemblances in terms of the style of play and the swords-and-sorcery setting. Simply put, I wanted to make a fantasy adventure video game that emphasized story, as the industry had just begun trending.
After many futile attempts to make an outline, I decided I'd just try to pen the story as a synopsis, and that's where all the madness first began. I've never been good at summarizing things. It's nearly impossible for me to write a short story, for example, because once I become acquainted with the characters, I realize I'd rather they go on some sort or other of a grand adventure, and the 10 page vignette turns into a 30 page novella, which could really run on for another hundred or two in order for me to say everything I'd like to say about them. My synopses fall into this same trap, and while trying to summarize the story, I realized that I was not writing a description of the events fueling the exploration of a video game world... I was writing a novel.
What amazed me even further was that, a few (dozen, hundred?) pages into the thing, I no longer cared about the video game and was focusing entirely on the story. The protagonist? Obviously my trademark character, Duck, and specifically the one in the cloak with the sword. His name? Well, I really liked "Duck Ducaine," and as it was an original creation and not a cheap knockoff, it stuck. So began the actual first draft of the story, which ended 3 chapters later when I ran out of time, motivation and ideas.
I picked up the book sometime later, making it into the low hundreds this time, until my inspiration and free time again fled from me like roaches from a Tennessee gas station restroom patron. The book and the desire to write it flagged while I was busy enduring heartbreak at the hands of the woman of my dreams--who would later become my wife and the mother of my beautiful daughter--and while I busied myself graduating high school and taking on a year-long law office assistant job immediately following.
During this depressed, self-searching time in my life, I decided to volunteer at a community center down in Puerto Rico, which I had long known about after a few church-led visits during my high school and young adult career. I spent many months in relative isolation; relative because I had taken 3 years of German in school, which helped me exactly not at all in trying to communicate with my new neighbors and friends. This isolation led to further depression, which lead, as is uncannily the case with many others, to writing. I tried my hand at poetry, short stories, even graphic novels before turning my thoughts once again to the looming epic that had been dwelling on in the back of my mind for the past 6 years.
In about as many months, I had penned a sprawling, journalistic document spanning a hundred or more pages, all dedicated to figuring out what I wanted my story, probably my life's greatest work, to be about. In this document, which I half-mockingly entitled "Clarification," I go back and forth with myself about the characters, places, motivations and events that drive the story that unfolds in my mind every time I tune out the pastor or stare out the car window. What I ended up with was an almost unreadable, autobiographical synopsis of a story spanning thousands of years in a fictitious realm, interspersed with rants about society and other things that disaffected, college age people don't know why they don't like, as well as terrified entries written by a scared 19-year-old who doesn't know if the bullets whizzing past his rooftop apartment are meant for him or others, not that it would matter if one of them happened to find its way to his heart.
After Puerto Rico, I went to work at a Boys-and-Girls Club, which was a part-time gig that left me 5 hours in the morning to write to my heart's content. And write I did. In fact, this was probably the most productive writing time in my life, for my friends were away at school and I shared a house with two people who were hardly ever around, except for the bi-monthly binge parties that somehow always manged to find their way to our home. Anyway, I spent 6 months writing and had a finished, 12 chapter manuscript to show for it at the end.
While friends, family and former English teachers were reading or pretending to read it, the woman who had given me so much grief during the latter years of high school happened to resurface in my life, and within a year's time, we had resolved the past grievances between us and were, miraculously, happily wed. The book was shelved while my new wife and I established ourselves, but a fire such as I had begun in my soul 9 years ago is not easily put out. By the time we had moved from Indiana to Pennsylvania, I had begun rewriting my book.
The second draft took, according to my best calculations, a year and a half. This was a version I liked but wasn't quite proud of, though my wife insisted it was good enough to publish and provided me a deadline for getting it sent off to literary agents and publishers. I did as she said I must, and got, as I expected, a host of form rejection letters, which I hung proudly on my office door to keep myself motivated. Other projects took precedence, and I spent another year not writing. As I was working two jobs and my wife was student teaching, and our life was becoming about as stressful as it ever had been, we received the unexpected blessing of an impending child. Thus began a 10 month preparatory period, in which work was sporadic and stress was much.
Despite the mind-alteringly chaotic year that was 2010, in which we bought a car, a house, had a baby (while simultaneously fighting an on-going battle with health insurance, which we eventually lost) and experienced the deaths of two of my wife's grandparents, I was able to crank out draft number 3, the final draft, in about 6 months. I sat down shortly after the holiday season and the dawn of 2011 to do my line edits, and by the second week of February, I had a publishable manuscript. And publish it I did, but you already know that.
Thus I concluded the 14-year saga of this first book, "The Wizard of Roaming Hall," which is but the first of four parts to the overarching tale called "The Three Kinsmen." I have not yet begun my second book, but such a task is on the docket for the immediate future. In the meantime, I will be working diligently to market this first offering to the literary masses, and hope that you take the time to at least look at the book, maybe even digitally thumb through it a bit, and then see for yourself the culmination of more than half of my life's worth of blood, sweat, tears, frustration, anxiety, depression and, eventually, triumph. Though I can't credit the quote off-the-cuff, the cover of my uncle-in-law's Nook states "A writer only begins a book... the reader finishes it." Go forth, then, dear reader. I leave the rest to you.
