Regular Life

I looked everywhere for it. I looked in the place I had kept it for at least 20 years, but found only a few scattered bits, a veritable “worst of” collection. As many times as we’ve moved, it was a wonder any of it had survived intact, but I hadn’t yet found anything worth saving.

Then, a few weeks later, I inadvertently did what I should have done in the first place.

“Did I ever tell you that I wrote a fantasy story? Swords. Magic. I even made up some creatures,” I said as I poured dabs of whole wheat pancake batter onto the hot griddle. Pancakes one day a week have become a tradition in our house. My mother had recently told me that she had used whole wheat mix for my brother and me, so on Saturday I was giving it a shot.

“I don’t think so,” Shannon answered from somewhere in the back of the house, probably checking on a noise she heard Ben make in his room. He had alternated between there and the living room all morning.

“The main character’s name was Thavian,” I said.

“Who?”

“Thavian. I had been writing a bunch of stories that just set my friends in the future. Chris had a hovercraft,” I said.

“Sure, of course. Why wouldn’t he?” Shannon replied, now back in the living room where I could see her.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh all you want.” I carefully slid the spatula under the first pancake to take a peek. “I’m not sure how to tell when whole wheat pancakes are done. The batter’s brown before I even start cooking them.” I said.

“So, one day Chris says, ‘Hey, man, why don’t you write some fantasy?’ So I asked what he meant and he said, ‘Dragons, knights, wizards, stuff like that.’”

I went on to summarize the story as well as my 15-year memory of it allowed. She made an admirable effort to seem interested, and perhaps she was — in an ‘I loved the first Lord of the Rings movie, but not so much the second one’ kind of way. She sounded utterly un-thrilled.

“I’m not saying it was great, but it would be cool to read it again and see if there’s anything at all worth saving,” I said.

I wrote “Blood of a Dragon” before I had read any fantasy books, in about 1983 or ‘84. I had seen Dragonslayer, Krull and Q (set in the present). I won’t say my story owes a lot to those movies, but all of my fantasy sensibilities at the time were rooted in film. I’ve found that, generally, the best fantasy either never makes it to the big screen, or takes a very long time to get there.

“I can’t find that story anywhere. In fact, I can’t find a lot of my stories in that blue portfolio where I always kept them,” I said, flipping the pancakes. Perfectly brown. Even with wheat, I could tell.

“Well, there’s a file in the filing cabinet called ‘Prose,’” Shannon said.

I kept myself fairly well organized before I got married. After that, my wife quickly made it apparent that she not only possessed superior skills in this field of expertise — she thrived on it. I left almost every organizational detail up to her. She has done a commendable job all these 13 years.

As sure as she said it, there was a file called “Prose,” and I soon had in my hands a huge stack of my stories that ran from 1982 to somewhere in the late 90’s. Many, if not most, are unfinished, but they all helped shape me as a writer.

Some were absolutely aborrhent, while others showed sparks of talent and creativity that helped me understand why I thought I might be a writer some day, at the same time making me wonder when I had lost that ability. As I pored over them the next two days — somewhat to Shannon’s chagrin (oh, great poem title) — I noticed that I went through a phase that relied very heavily on dialogue. I wrote some horror, some fantasy, some science fiction, some drama, and some romance (not Harlequin style). I’m not sure I wrote any of these particularly well, but they are there, in all their genre-ness. I even had a few college papers in there, one on which the professor wrote, “You slighted Burns a bit, but good on Shelley and Keats.” I could tell you very little about any of those guys now.

I just checked the Internet, and evidently Thavian is a popular name in fantasy and science fiction. In various places, his name is given to an elf character in a game called Neverwinter Nights, an ArcticMud person, an Everquest II character, and a language on Alternate Mars. I’m pretty sure there’s no way that those sources existed when I wrote my story, but if they did, I knew nothing of them. I guess it just sounded all cool and fantasy-like to my teen brain. Apparently I was not the only one.

Whatever his name’s true origin, I found my story, so Thavian lives! Reading over it again, maybe he should have died. Ugh.

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