Slumberland

I mentioned in that previous post that I found a bunch of old stuff in a box. I found it while I was looking for my clips (examples of the writing I did for various publications a while back). I did not find the clips. But I did find some writing.

In eleventh grade I decided to write a novel. At the time, I was reading a lot of fantasy novels, so that’s what I decided to write: your basic quest story in which one character has an object of power and doesn’t know how to use it, but must take it somewhere to prevent Evil from taking over the Land, and this character has arrived in this land “beyond the fields we know” from our own world via mysterious means, yada yada yada. (The means were especially mysterious, because I hadn’t figured them out yet. I started writing the book with Chapter Two and figured I’d fill in the beginning later.)

I carried a composition book around, and wrote when I was supposed to be paying attention in class. Math class was particularly productive, when I wasn’t drawing caricatures of my math teacher. (Luckily, none of those survive.)

During the year, one of my friends read the book, as much as I had written, and said “You’ve read the Stephen R. Donaldson books, haven’t you?” Why, yes, yes I had. And it was indeed that obvious.

What does every fantasy novel of that type have? An obsessively detailed map of the “Land” in which it takes place, of course.

This was mine, and I worked very hard on it. Quick! Can you pick out which names were slightly changed versions of names in other, more famous and rather better stories?

I never finished the book. I have no idea how I was going to end it.

This is a page from the book. Keron was terribly Mary-Sue, but I guess that’s to be expected. I suppose it could have been worse, considering.