Two weeks ago, in the previous installment of this blog series, I shared the inspiration for “The Wind’s Kiss,” the opening piece in my new short-story collection Swords, Magic, and Heart. This time around I’m sharing the background from which the concluding tale of the collection, “The Sassy and the Naegg,” sprang forth. But I’m going to do it by taking you in a circle.
Every young writer is influenced by the type of reading material they consume in their early days. It’s natural. I would even say it is beneficial. We learn from the examples. In my case, by reading lots and lots of Edgar Rice Burroughs, I absorbed at least two writing lessons: 1) (on the positive side) take joy in the breadth of your imagination, but 2) (on the negative side) don’t string together your plots by coincidence after coincidence and nothing but coincidence because after a while you’ll just piss off even the most avid of your readers. From Tolkien, I learned what sort of standard I wanted to aim at in terms of worldbuilding, but also not to throw in too many bumbling orcs. From Robert E. Howard, inject action and “edge” and a keen sense of place, but don’t get so fucking grim you end up killing yourself.
Copying other writers, though? That’s another thing altogether. Plagiarizing them? No, no, no. Even in my youngest days, I refused to let my own creations stray into what I defined as theft. That code of conduct was true even with the very first manifestation of what one might call a literary endeavor — that is to say, a work of fiction that wasn’t created as a school assignment but was done for the joy of creation and as an attempt to possibly entertain an audience. That happened to be in the form of a comic book that my best friend and classmate Jon Kawamoto and I tried to pull together in sixth grade. While it borrowed from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby in the sense that its main characters were a team of superheroes and carried on in a Fantastic Four, Avengers, X-Men sort of way, the story was original. Not that it was good. Rather it was just as bad as you might expect from a couple of nerdy Fresno County youngsters. But at least it offered newly minted characters engaged in story whose plot was as freshly-conceived as we could make it.
I guess another way to put it is, I didn’t go through a fan-fiction phase.
I need to be careful here, because it is not my intention to stomp on fan fiction as a creative modality. I have a tolerant attitude toward fan fiction when it is done in an ethical way, with respect toward the creator(s) of the source material and is presented via a platform that doesn’t take income away from said creator(s). What I am intending to say is that I, personally, did not spend my apprentice-writer days appending any window-dressing onto someone else’s fictional world. Later, after I had a career going, I did take advantage of a small number of opportunities to contribute to existing franchises, my X-Men novel being the prime example, but that’s different. That was by invitation, and it was for pay.
That said, I feel differently about the tradition in the literary world sometimes known as pastiche. It can be quite fun, and I would even say entirely legitimate, to come up with a piece of fiction that is, at its heart, a commentary on someone else’s piece of fiction.
It took a while, though, before I felt enough of a compulsion that I actually composed anything that could be called a pastiche. Certainly I did not get around to it until it got done to me.
Boy, was that a surprise. During my early years of writing it never entered my mind that someone might write something that was a “bounce off” of any of the stuff I was writing. I had a pipe dream that maybe, in the mature stage of my career, I might manage to craft something that would cause that effect on another author. Turns out I didn’t have to wait. It happened to me as a result of the appearance of my very first piece of professionally-published fiction.
In the spring of 1987, I went to Norwescon. The con was in its heyday and the New York publishers were cognizant of its influence. A number of editors made it out to Seattle from New York, including a contingent from Ace Books — my publisher at the time. One of their recently-hired editors, Ginjer Buchanan, hosted a brief get-together of half a dozen of Ace’s new crop of “virgin” authors. The gathering happens to be where I first met Sara Stamey and Kathi Kimbriel, who these days are among my Book View Café colleagues. It was also where I met Carl Miller.
Carl — it pains me to tell you he passed away just this past December — was one of those people who looked exactly like what he was, which was a man who lived alone in a cabin deep in the woods. Long, scraggly hair. Long, scraggly beard. Think John Rhys-Davies as Gimli the Dwarf in the Lord of the Rings movies, only thinner and I hasten to point out, not a dwarf.
At that point, Carl was not yet a published author. His debut novel would not appear until 1988, but Ace had already bought it. Carl was, you might say, the most virginal of the virgin authors at the gathering, the first novels of the rest of us having either already appeared, or nearly so. As I was introduced, Carl almost cackled aloud.
Because, you see, the novel he had sold to Ace was one he had written because he had read my story “Dragon Touched” in the 1980 anthology Dragons of Light, and as a reader had so much wanted “more” or at least, something more like it, that he filled that need by writing his book, which was called Dragonbound.
Carl was unaware until that encounter in Seattle at Norwescon that I had in fact produced “more.” But those were the days before internet search engines. He couldn’t simply check on-line to see what else by me might be lurking about the literary landscape. And admittedly, I had — ahem, cough, cough — taken my time getting anything else out there to follow up on “Dragon Touched.” By the time my novel The Sorcery Within appeared in the summer of 1985, Carl had ceased waiting and had already written most or all of a draft of Dragonbound.
It was really cool for me to be able to read Dragonbound and see just how the influence had played out. From my perspective, it was just right. Nothing one would call plagiarism. Carl had been struck by the element in “Dragon Touched” wherein a lead character is telepathically linked with a dragon. That notion was out there already, most notably in Anne McCaffrey’s Pern novels — works that by the way I did not read until after I’d come up with that premise on my own — but it was when Carl read it in “Dragon Touched” that he took note of it. From that seed had grown what was to become an entire trilogy, and a fine trilogy it is, containing a landscape based in large part upon the Eel River watershed of northern coastal California within which Carl’s cabin stood. I doubt that anyone reading both my trilogy and Carl’s would think his had budded off from mine. It is its own thing, and successful at being what it is. I recommend you read it, and only wish Carl was still around to send the kudos to.
“The Sassy and the Naegg” is similarly inspired by an author’s first published work. Back in 1991, a local writer named Risa Aratyr sent me some sample chapters of her Irish-myth-inspired epic fantasy. I was stunned by the quality of both the writing (as in her technical grasp of prose), the inventive storyline, the verismilitude of the setting, and the consistency of the characters, who though they were all evoking archetypes, were nuanced and individual, their motivations not simply laundry lists of the roles legend required them to play.
Risa had completed a polished draft by the time she joined my writing group, the Melville Nine. The rest of us did our best to be helpful during the critique session(s) but really, we were kinda out of our depth. There had perhaps been aspects of earlier drafts where advice might have been useful, but Risa had taken care of those missteps on her own, using family members as her beta readers. The best help the workshop members could provide was in the form of networking. I for example managed to get Marion Zimmer Bradley to read the manuscript and compose a letter of recommendation. Ultimately the work found a home. It was published in 1995 by HarperPrism under the title Hunter of the Light.
Fast-forward to the winter of 2015-16. It had been my habit to compose a story once a year for the Sword and Sorceress series. I had done so eight years in a row but a full plate kept me from turning my attention to composing something for volume thirty of the series. I did do the cover design — a regular gig — but did not come up with a story. To make up for that, I started early on the work I would submit to volume thirty-one. That would turn out to be “The Sassy and the Naegg.”
Sitting there, staring at a blank computer screen, the first inkling of the story-to-be was Risa’s voice, affecting an Irish lilt and Gaelic syntax, as I had heard her do when reading aloud a passage from a work she was using as a key reference while laboring upon the sequel to Hunter of the Light. It wasn’t the content of the scene that lured me in, but the buoyant exchange of two people conversing in that certain way, as the characters of The Hunter and his shapechanging sidekick do in Risa’s book. I wanted that. I wanted the humor. I wanted to highlight the way Irish Gaelic, in its pure archaic form, avoids outright declarative yes or no answers, and therefore opens up conversation to evasions of the truth. (Not lies necessarily, but talespinning for personal advantage.) And there you go. “The Sassy and the Naegg” does include a small number of contextual details that reflect the source, such as the presence of a shapechanger, the momentary appearance of a stag, and a sinister set of beings that delight in bad-faith promises. Mostly, it’s the voice. That’s something that would only have come to be included in any part of my oeuvre because I had an example to guide me right.
