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Soho have done a great job of getting this together – particularly in the ‘Create a D&D character’ section.
I think if I’d seen that when I was playing first edition D&D in 1977 I would just have fainted with joy.
It’s funny that, since writing the book, my passion for fantasy has reignited. I’ve started collecting old games – recently paid through snout for copy of Empire of the Petal Throne. I was going to buy the Book of Demons and then it fell out of some stuff I was taking to the dump. Hadn’t seen it in 20 years. Still gives me the chills. I’ve also begun writing a fantasy novel.
It’s all a bit secret at the moment but I can say it’s consumed me in a way that I don’t normally get with my fiction. I always enjoy writing and I put body and soul into it (more soul than body, thankfully) but, when I’ve finished a book, I’m able to view it objectively and can assess cuts suggested by editors and agents with very little emotion. I can wield the blue pencil with the best of them.
The fantasy novel has been different. It’s 200,000 words long (two and a half times longer than an average novel) and every word I cut from it has been like pulling a tooth, and not one of those spindly incisors either, a real deep and rooty molar.
I have managed to reduce it to about 140,000 by slicing out one whole story line. It’s better, it’s pacier, it’s more readable and I still wake screaming at midnight wondering if I’ve done the right thing. Anyway, it may never see the light of day but, in the end that doesn’t matter so much because I think I’m achieving what I set out to do – write a fantasy novel of the sort I’d like to read.
My inspiration as a kid was stuff like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service, The Wicker Man (original, with Christopher Lee, not the Nick Cage version, which was about as enjoyable as watching a dear old friend being beaten to death with a tyre iron), Children of the Stones (obscure Brit TV, scariest theme tune ever – in the 1970s it was seen as perfectly fine to terrify children into catatonia at 5 in the afternoon. Today, there would be law suits), HP Lovecraft and lots of books about witches. I was trying to get some of that strangeness into what I wrote, the idea of horrors lurking underneath a veneer of normality. Unfortunately, I enjoyed it so much I just kept writing. Hence the pruning job I’m doing now.
Anyway, a big thanks to all at Soho on The Elfish Gene. I’m really excited about the launch in the States. It’s gone down really well in the UK but I think there’s a wider appreciation in the US of just how central D&D was to geek culture and, ultimately, the culture of the world. We may be rubbish at sport, too spotty to date and dress like we’re newly exhumed but who ya gonna call when your computer don’t love ya no more? Who put that iPhone on your table and the Wii in your apartment? D&D influenced virtually everything (I can expand on this later)
The game had a massive effect on the people who played it. Since the publication of the book I’ve realised that D&D marked me even more strongly than I thought. I tend to concentrate on the alienating nature of the game, as I played it, in the book but anything done obsessively tends to be a bit like that, I don’t think D&D is unique. I focus on the difficult stuff for the good reason that a lot of that was very meaningful to me but also funny. On the positive side, I think the game probably turned me into a writer.
I’ve been looking at studies recently that say the human brain pares down its skills during adolesence, losing those skills it doesn’t use and enhancing those it does. D&D kept me creating things throughout my youth, coming up with story lines, thinking about the motivation of people. And orcs.
I actually have quite a lot to say on the motivation of orcs but maybe that’s best left for another time. But the important thing is that, though the game robbed me of my ability to communicate with girls and kept me in an environment of mutual bullying for most of my youth, at least there were major compensations. It did encourage creativity, albeit within the narrow band of fantasy. It’s quite possible to be in an environment of mutual bullying and learn nothing more useful than how to make a quacking noise by putting your hand into your arm pit or what to do when someone tries to flush your head.
Anyway, I’d love to get any feedback US readers have to offer on The Elfish Gene and hear if the stories in it chime with your own.
And remember, as you go through life, beware of picking wild flowers, for who’s to say one might not be a polymorphed red dragon.
M