How I Started my Fantasy Series

There can few pleasures greater than going someplace out of your regular routine with a notebook and pen, and just writing. At least that's the way I feel. If you like writing, probably you do too. Perhaps the best way to get ideas for your fantasy novel is to suspend thinking, instead simply sit somewhere perhaps where you've never been before, somewhere you can relax, and just get that pen moving across the page. Let the pen lead you!

Whatever thoughts or partial thoughts flow through your mind can be turned into some tale to be retold in some sweeping and fantastical drama. Whether that tale is in this world or another, is down to you. That's what I did. As the pen moved across the page, things came into existence, people became reality, their thoughts entered into history, and I realised I was beginning to create a new world. I was excited as to where this new world would take me! And I at least want to share a little bit of this voyage of the imagination with you.

When I first started writing my fantasy series, a disaster occurred after having written 35,000 words. You can probably guess. My laptop went kaput and I lost every word. This was before backing work up on the cloud was common practice. My writing had been sucked into a black hole! After recovering from this devastating blow, I started again.

Before my 35,000 words had been sent into a black hole, it may be a good idea to start at the beginning. Driving along a quiet country road in Salisbury Plain many moons ago, my attention was caught by something shimmering above a copse of trees. Turning my attention to it to the extent I could, given there were a few cars behind me, and given that there were no parking spots, I drove on, periodically turning my head to look to see if this thing were still there. It remained hovering above the trees all the while I could keep the little thicket of trees in view. If there had been somewhere to park, or even if there had been no cars behind me on that narrow country road, I may have pulled over for a closer look. But I didn’t think it possible, and perhaps by some compensatory measure on my part, I convinced myself I’d been mistaken, and that if it had been anything, it had perhaps been a beleaguered weather balloon descending to the earth.

A few days later I was sitting at home and handed a British newspaper by my mother.

'I thought you might find this interesting,' she said.

I was looking at a double-page spread of some truly amazing crop circles displaying breath-taking complexity right in the area where I had seen what I dismissed as some sort of beleaguered weather balloon! I became convinced this silvery orb was connected and became almost obsessively convinced that this all relates in some way to the great ancient mystery of Stonehenge which I had visited after the silvery orb incident. The ideas marinated in the back of my mind until one day I started writing.

After this somewhat other-worldly experience, I became fixated for a time with Stonehenge. This enigmatic circle of stone which has stood since time immemorial on the plains of Salisbury. My imagination went into overdrive imagining what if these seemingly inanimate megaliths were in fact some kind of hyper consciousness and were merely the material manifestations in our physical world of events in another world existing in a dimension above and beyond our own but interactive with it. And so I began writing.

Of course, silver orbs aside, what actually causes these grand swirling patterns in the fields of crops is a mystery even to today.

A mystery though their origin may be, the thought tenaciously remains, in some way or another, that these grand and perplexing patterns originate from further afield than our earthly sphere. Rather than visitors from a distant galaxy–the sheer journey involving millions of years being at least a slight deterrent–why could these perplexing and swirling patterns not come from a parallel world, one existing side by side our own?

"Eventually they [the Twelve] reached down into the earth, just using the power of their thoughts. They produced living things. Their thoughts reached down into the deep places, deeper and deeper like a swirling vortex, creating masterfully complex swirls and patterns from the smallest things beyond the sight of men, yes, even into the tiniest things out of which all things are made. It is said that in the old nearly forgotten times, these patterns, or their echoes would appear unbidden in gigantic patterns in the crops and fields of men upon the ground, and they would perplex all who looked upon them."

And if the actions of the Twelve moving about their celestial business has reverberations in this world, why can't other great events in our world affect the world wherein they dwell? That led to a further development in the outworking of events that cross the boundary of worlds. What of the melting of the polar ice caps?

Read more...

As I wrote, the idea developed that a world parallel with ours but mutually unreachable could exist side by side and that things which happen in the story have reverberations in our world and vice versa. So evolved the story that there were once two mighty and celestial beings of old who were long ago corrupted by power, who had led the world astray resulting in what the book refers to as the first Shadow Age, and that these beings were incarcerated by the Twelve in the great ice prisons of Norderakk and Kalnerakk, which we would associate with the icecaps of the North and South Pole. Entombed though they were in the prisons of vast ice, their power sufficed to influence the minds of men, but particularly those who dwelt in the other parallel world (ours), such that they would set things in motion that would result in the melting of their bonds of ice so that these two beings, Thakragg and Krakorr, may once more go forth into the world unfettered.

"It seems that the Shadow Lords even from deep within their ice prisons either eventually...had just enough power to subtly influence people to do things that in truth originated in their minds. Mankind didn't know what they were doing, of course. In that forgotten age, men thought they were doing things to benefit themselves, yet all the while they were working the will of Thakragg and his underling. It is said they made hideous weapons that scorched the earth and made great carriages that rode roughshod across the lands defying all that is natural in the world—carriages that could even fly through the skies that could journey halfway around the world in a single day, whereas today the same journey would take many long weeks. But in all of this, the peoples of that forgotten age were misled, and were fooled into seeing all this as advancement to themselves, whereas in reality it was the evil of the desolators at work in them. Man began to do these things in that long forgotten age before our time, and so it was that somehow great wheels were set in motion for the melting of the bonds of ice in which they were contained, and they've been melting from those days long ago even to the present."

Please note, what is referred to as ‘that long forgotten age’ refers to the parallel world in which we inhabit and that time—past, present or future—has nothing to do with it but that is how the characters perceive anything that emanates from across the boundary of the worlds into their own.

Please contribute to the development of this fantasy series by commenting and making suggestions. Thanks so much for taking the time to read this post!

In the next post, some of the characters in the story will be introduced as will just a little of the plot.