What It Took to Write My Third Novel

My third novel, Light of the Outsider, is now in the world in e-book and paperback formats, with the audio book in production and on its way.

It’s the first novel in my Shaper’s World storyworld. The Shaper’s World is, speaking simplistically, a fantasy setting like Narnia or Middle Earth… but… no. It’s not like those at all. There are no elves, no hobbits, no talking lions (no tigers or bears or fawns, even), no dwarves or dragons. No portal to our world.

It didn’t start out that way.

The development of the Shaper’s World, and the origin of Light of the Outsider, stretches back more than three decades.

In the interest of revealing just how many twists and convolutions and changes the creative process can endure over time, what follows is a rough-as-memory history; a tale of a tale that would not let me go.

Thank You, Gary Gygax

In the summer of 1984, I was seventeen years old. Home life was a metaphorical floor of planks laid over quicksand. My girlfriend was in a non-metaphorical mental hospital. Although it was all I knew, my normal was… not.

Thank goodness I had comic books, science fiction, rock and roll… and, since 1980 or so, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and other role-playing games published by TSR, Game Designers Workshop, Chaosium, and others.

My world wasn’t so hot, but I could make a different one.