I am the entertainer, I bring to you my songs
I’ve always said that if you want to write to make money, you’re not a real writer. If you want to write to become famous, you’re not a real writer. And if you want to write to impress people, you’re not a real writer.
If you write because you have to, because it’s the only way to get the burning ideas out of your brain, because it’s the only way to stop the dogs barking in your head, you’re a real writer.
I’m a real writer. Have been for as long as I can remember. I was an avid reader as a child, and somewhere along the line it struck me that if I couldn’t find a story I wanted, I could make it up myself. I became a storyteller, guiding my friends through adventures in many different fantasy and science fiction worlds. I wrote, hacking away at ideas for story after story, but I rarely finished anything and even more rarely showed them to anyone. But telling my stories did stop the dogs from barking, so it wasn’t wasted effort.
I am not the only traveler who has not repaid his debt
It was being a storyteller that brought us together for the first time.
Well, not exactly. I first met her in passing at a party. We didn’t really speak, but I remembered her. At the time her hair was jet-black and cut short with a luminous white streak, and she reveled in the attention it drew. I paid attention from a distance.
Very late, an argument ensued about the nomenclature of time, and whether or not it was still “night” or if we were approaching “dawn.” Someone made the claim that in Middle Eastern countries, tradition held that if you could tell the difference between a black camel hair and a white camel hair, it was dawn. So she promptly pulled out one black strand and one white strand, volunteering for the experiment. When no one could tell the difference in the inky blackness, she picked out the right one—only afterwards explaining that she could tell by the texture.
I saw her again at another party some time later, and her hair had returned to its normal shade. She was avoiding the attentions of a would-be suitor who apparently was too persistent for her liking, and to ward him off she settled in with the group of misfits hovering around me as we talked about gaming and movies and assorted other nerdy topics.
Her ears perked up when someone commented about the gaming shop I worked at, and some of the games I’d run. “You’re a GM?” she asked.
I nodded. I explained that I’d been running games and telling stories since I was in grade school. I rattled off some of the systems I was familiar with.
“Ever hear of Dream Park?”
“The Niven and Barnes books, right?”
She grinned at me. My first time impressing her by catching a reference; there would be many others over the years. “Yeah, it’s based on the series.”
“Oh, yeah, I’m familiar with it. We got it in the shop a little while back. I haven’t checked it out yet, though, so I can’t speak to how good it is.” I thought it was an interesting pretext; a roleplaying game in which you played people involved in a live-action roleplaying game in a science-fiction adventure park. Playing a character who’s playing a character. Very meta. (When I saw Tropic Thunder years later, that infamous line from Robert Downey Jr. about being a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude made me laugh hysterically on a whole other level, and it took me a moment to recall why.)
“I bought it, but I haven’t been able to play it yet.” She eyed me closely. “Do you think you could run a session?”
Nail, meet hammer. “Absolutely. When?”
“Now.”
I blinked, then grinned back at her. “Of course.”
She hit me with that smile for the first time—the one that lit up her entire face—and said, “Consider yourself drafted.” She turned to the rest of the group. “You guys want in?”
The group around me all enthusiastically agreed that the party was dead and we’d much rather follow her elsewhere. Within the hour we were eating Chinese food in her living room and rolling characters.
I’ve been seeing things in you, oh, I think I believe in
I remember almost nothing of the session itself, outside of everyone having a good time. Eventually, the group began winding down and everyone was dozing in the early hours of the morning, but she and I were real night owls. We eventually convened in her office nook, where she sat playing an old puzzle game called The Fool’s Errand and we had the first of many long conversations, beginning to discover our common ground.
Eventually we reconvened with the rest of the group, groggily watching Saturday morning television. A new show—Power Rangers—was on, and at one point I snarkily made a comment about how all the American actors in the re-shot scenes were varying heights, but when they transformed and the show switched to the original Japanese footage, everyone was five-foot-two.
“And what’s wrong with being five-foot-two?” she asked icily. I began stammering a mea culpa—of course she was 5’2”—and then caught her grinning broadly at me out of the corner of my eye.
(Suddenly the lyrics for Randy Newman’s “Short People” popped into my head, but I decided not to press my luck.)
Eventually, everyone began making their excuses and heading towards the door, anxious to get some actual sleep. As she picked up her keys to give one of the other players a ride home, she grabbed my arm and thanked me for running the show. “Same again next week?” she asked.
“Of course.”
Though nothing will keep us together, we could steal time just for one day
Over the years, I told many more stories in her presence. She always loved them, and encouraged my creative endeavors. When she learned I was writing outside of just being a gamemaster, she encouraged that as well; I always wanted her to be my First Reader, but I never got anything polished to the point where I thought it would pass muster. I wanted to impress her, and my best never seemed quite good enough. (I’d always plot myself into a corner, get stuck, and the story would languish until I finally gave up on the thing.) And now, of course, it’s too late.
After she passed, I had a dream about us. We were out under the sky, watching the constellations above us. She made her comment about Orion, and I was telling her stories about the mythological figures the Greeks had drawn above us so many centuries before. When I woke up, though, I realized it wasn’t her, and it wasn’t me—I had the first inkling of a story. I’d actually written a similar scene years earlier for a book that never came together. I’d been writing it when I met my second wife, and the destruction of that relationship eventually killed any interest in completing the tale. That scene had always bugged me, though, feeling like it didn’t fit. I realize now it was because I was writing it for different characters entirely.
The story certainly has echoes from my life—it’s about a young man who meets an amazing young woman and she becomes the most important star in his sky. But while I did crib heavily from my past and from Sid (and I imagine I might be called to task for that on another plane of existence one day), the story became something entirely different, about love and loss and finding one’s way. I just needed an amazing woman for my protagonist to fall in love with, and I really only had one great example to pattern her after. Hopefully she won’t mind.
(I’m sure the folks who knew us both will raise their eyebrows at me. Guys, sometimes a cigar is just a p—I mean, a cigar.)
The story laid itself out in my mind in fits and starts, at first appearing with huge gaps, and then sort of backfilling with details as it unfolded. An annoying day at work or a particularly restless night would see an entirely new scene drop fully-formed into the tale, and I’d make notes and form things up. And as it grew, I began to think it might be possible to actually write the thing.
Finally, one day I drove home through ferocious afternoon storms, and I felt a power upon me. I’d been hacking at the first scene of the book and having difficulty, never being able to get it just right. So, instead, I opened a new page and jumped straight to the most important scene, one in the heart of the story, and it just flowed. I wrote page after page, and while it definitely needed some polish, it was my first time writing at length in years. I felt like Thor in Endgame, recalling the hammer and finding out he was still worthy.
And when I closed Word, I was dumped back to my desktop. Ages ago, I’d selected a theme which rotated pictures of dark skies, flipping through about 20 gorgeous images of stars at night. And the one that I found myself staring at bore the unmistakable figure of Orion in a place of prominence.
And I could almost hear Sid somewhere calling me a thundering dumbass for forgetting who I was for so long.
So that’s what the book is. It’s me writing a love letter to a lost friend, and a way to express how much she meant—and still means—to me through a work inspired by her presence in my life. And in the meantime, I’ll use this site to throw words out into the universe, if for no other reason than to keep my tools sharp and my powder dry.
And to shut up those goddamn dogs.
Love you, lady of chaos. Whether or not I actually finish this, I found myself again.
And there’s just one thing you’ve got to know, you’ve got ten more thousand miles to go