One Over X News

Preface to Wolfcat Chronicles

Prior to the publication of One Over X: From The Inside To The Closer (August, 2001), I had believed that the best of times for a writer would certainly be having something officially appear in print. It was a dream that I had for a very long time and after a lot of hard work and frustration it was finally coming true. Even if subsequent experiences and disappointments left something to be desired, I still would not trade the elation that I felt at the accomplishment for anything. In the process, I learned a good deal about the publishing business. I also learned how perfectly awful my original manuscript was. A good deal of time, effort, emotion and perseverance had gone into the creative process. It took a great deal of patience to make it through the process that ended in having a printed book in hand.
Since then, I believe I have continued to grow as a writer. Although I would not presume to speak for all writers, I have met a few kindred spirits. Of course meeting other writers tends to happen when you are a writer. It is not a coincidence as we share interests and the associated misery (or magic) of seeing the irony in nearly everything. Artists in general and writers in particular are attracted to one another. It is a natural phenomenon that is generally accepted but little understood.

For me writing has always been a compulsion. I enjoy the process more than anything, even to include achieving the end result. I tend to write long stories not because I like to write long stories but because what I have to say cannot be expressed adequately in the constraint of a couple hundred pages. It is also true that I never seem to be able to end a story. To me, ending a story seems comparable to dropping a bomb to end a perfectly good world.

Whenever I re-read something that I have written for the first, second or third time I always find points that want for more detail or greater clarity of explanation. Whether writing fantasy, science fiction, a home improvements guide or an explanation of how to build your own personal computer, it is important for a reader to share the writer’s vision. It is very hard to write for anyone else and it is therefore an achievement for me to say that I am finished with something. It is saying that at a given moment I do not think that I could make a work any better. It is a very hard thing to do: to walk away from a project and pronounce it finished. The difficulty rests in the amount of self that has gone into a project.

I know ‘me’ all too well. Some of it is because I have been inside of me for a long while, now. I know that I would write even if there was no hope of it ever reaching the public. Over the years most of what I have written falls into that category. I have discarded hundreds of thousands of pages of text, over twenty thousand in one monumental event in 1981. Since I acquired a personal computer revision has been much easier and so it is very hard to ascertain how many pages of text I have discarded. Suffice it to say that mostly I write for me and some of that is generally applicable and I decide that I might make it viable for publication. At any rate, it all started because I enjoy tickling my imagination.

Eventually it becomes an addiction but it is a constructive high.

The spring of 2000 was a transition year for me on so many levels that is is very
hard to conceive of the present me without having gone through all those experiences. My personal life was a complete mess, a good deal of it was emotionally taxing, some of it was even tragic but overall a lot of it was just terribly sad. In April of that year, a few days before his birthday, I lost my father to the complications of his bout with Parkinson’s disease. My mother was already institutionalized with Alzheimer’s and she couldn’t even attend the funeral. She didn’t know that my father had passed away and it was generally decided that she lacked the mental capacity to even acknowledge it.

Call me a maverick but I made a special trip to her nursing home just to sit with her and talk about things. I spent the better part of an afternoon with her, describing everything about the ceremony in some detail to her. Had she had her faculties she would have been there to witness everything first hand, including the touching, perfect eulogy that my eldest sister Joyce offered. For some reason I felt that my mom needed to know that father was laid to rest in the appropriate way and it was honorable, respecting the kind of example that he had set in life. My father was a very good man.

Even though the nurses assured me that my mother could not understand I preferred to believe that she understood. I must have seemed pathetic in my denial as I spoke to her at length, telling her everything, then mom smiled at me. Yes it was a slight gesture but at least I could sieze it as evidence for my own satisfaction. I really felt that she understood.

My mother has since passed away as well. She died in her sleep. It was just as she would have wanted it, in March of 2003; ironically it was a few days before her birthday and around Easter. She was born around Easter and died around Easter. Whether that was coincidence or design, if you have read any of my previous works I think you know where I stand.

Even though my first book had been in final revisions since late 1999 it would not be ready for printing until August 2001. My personal finances were a shambles. My marriage of then 15 years had turned out to be a fiasco and the family that I had emerged as a result was at risk of becoming even more dysfunctional than the one that I had endured in my youth.

Somewhere in all the confusion of the spring and summer of 2000, I met several people online in a chat-room; some of them were old role-playing-game types. They were pretending to be the members of a glorious Wolf Pack and devoted followers of someone they called ‘the Wolfcat Goddess, Ela’na’.

The odd part of all this is that before May 2000 I had never even chatted with anyone on the Internet. Before taking the suggestion of a friend from Connecticut and checking out a site that he believed I would really get into, I had even held that those people who hurried home from work to chat online were easily amused and overall they were abusing the gift of the Internet, soaking up precious bandwidth and all that.

Why I started chatting at all I do not recall. I knew that emotionally I was a wreck, hurting after the loss of my dad and I needed some diversion beyond the catharsis of my writing. Maybe that was what led me to discover the Wolf Pack.
A few sessions into my experience as a fledgling member of the Wolf Pack, Ela’na asked some of us to write a few wolf stories and submit them to her so that she could read them online. Her idea was to have us develop our characters and also give her some stories that we could work with while we played out online roles. I knew that what she had in mind was something a page or two in length. I decided that such a meager effort would have never done the Wolfcat Ela’na or the Wolf Pack any real justice. I started recording the attempts of others at making stories and some of the speech patterns, saving them to files on my computer. Later on, at my request Ela’na even sent me everything that she had saved as character profiles. Meanwhile on my own and over the course of the ensuing thirteen weeks, I produced a rough draft of what has since evolved into The One Pack, the second collection in The Wolfcat Chronicles.

Toward the end of writing that first draft the web site that the Pack used to connect with one another fell upon hard times and went down forever. A number of the wolves remained determined to stay connected, through one or another of the instant messenger services. Ela’na did not have access to any of us, though. In her stead, the Wolfcat Jade attempted to lead the Pack and it worked for a while but that eventually ended as well. With Ela’na not present it was never the same. The magic for the members of the Wolf Pack was gone, the Wolfcat Goddess was missing and no one could ever replace our beloved Ela’na!

For my part I continued to edit, revise, amend and extend what I had written. All along I felt that I had lost all contact with Ela’na forever. Real life also influenced my writing. There were extensive fires between the Space Coast and Orlando in the summer of 2000, a distance that I drove nearly every day. I also delivered the Florida Today newspaper to around 300 homes and apartments. Between the jaunts out of the vehicle to deliver papers to the doorsteps, I listened to talk radio stations and learned about any number of fringe beliefs, including the theories of the origins of the human race on Earth. When I returned home, I had nothing more pressing to do so I wrote, composing new material or revising old material and then, after I was done I usually wrote something more.

My first book was still with editors and I had little say at that point as to what was being done to it. I would eventually receive a number of suggestions from the various editors. I would deal with the suggestions one at a time. Largely I was doing nothing except working on the ‘Wolf Stuff’ as I tentatively called the project.
In December of 2000, I happened to find a mutual online friend that personally knew Ela’na; we chatted briefly. She was elated that she had seen me and said that Ela’na would be happy to hear news of me. I mentioned to her that I had a story about the wolves that was almost ready to send to Ela’na. She gave me an email address where to send it.

A few weeks later, after finalizing the draft of the story, I sent it to email the address. It was another month before I heard anything and when I did it was a brief reply email from Ela’na. “You really are a writer,” she said. She also alluded to opening the document without checking its size and starting to print it out before she realized it was over 400 pages in 8 1/2” X 11”, 12pt format.

To paraphrase J.R.R.Tolkein, ‘the story had grown in the telling’. Unlike the master of the fantasy trilogy, I did not intend any part of this story to be told to my children. Nevertheless my children have read a good deal of this material and generally they have liked what little they have read but from the outset the story was intended only for Ela’na and, if she liked it, it might be shared with the other members of the Pack.

What has now emerged from all of my revisions and reworkings, around and through the thoughts and processes attendant to the original ‘Wolf Stuff’ is a considerable volume that is in 10 segments - books for lack of a better name. It is also very different from the other material that I was writing and/or revising concurrently to the time that it was composed. Even as I was working on One Over X, I generally found myself looking forward to working on the ‘Wolf Stuff’. I can say unabashedly that this was a labor of love. Even if this is not the complete story of the creation process it is enough to satisfy the moment. Spectre of Dammerwald is the most recent addition. I discovered that I need to write something to prelude the other material.

This series of books is especially for you, Ela’na.

E

posted by Unknown @ 10:07 PM