Author’s Note: Skyer Dannon, Episode 7

On July 15, 2022, I published the 7th episode of Skyer Dannon - A Vampire Story.
Yay! And still #1 in #Halflings!
Sure, it’s probably completely irrelevant, but it makes me feel happy, okay?

This chapter is named “Sway” and it focuses on an aspect of vampire lore that’s always intrigued me.

Stemming from Stoker’s Dracula, most representations of vampire in literature grant them supernatural controls over animals, and specifically critters that humans have long had a sordid relationship with like wolves and bats. Controlling wolves and bats suggest a taming of evil where wild, unpredictable creatures fall under the vampire’s subjugation. This ability fed many medieval fears, myths, and legends, and Stoker went so far as to imply some kind of parental relationship to wolves.

Such representations are symbolic of the vampire’s will to achieve their ends. In the story, I see Skyer coming around more fully into his mental faculty and experimenting with the gifts of vampirism, learning how to control (or sway) such animals. I started with bats and wolves because they are a traditional archetype, but as I get further into the story, I really want to push that envelope.

Halflings / Hobbits have a connection to nature that goes further than fearing creatures. I think they’re closer to nature than that. So my plan is to have Skyer learn that he can sway most woodland creatures, more like a druid ability rather than a vampire ability. I also wanted to extend the idea of feeding more into the emotional realm and that life forces don’t necessarily need to be defined as bodily fluids.

In this story, I toyed with the idea of extending Skyer’s sway over the the halfling militia that he encounters in the streets. I decided against it because the prose sounded too “Jedi Mind Trick” where Skyer offered suggestions and the halflings just responded in-kind, and I didn’t like the flavor of that. Instead, I think I’ve decided that his sway doesn’t directly charm or overtly control another halfling, and that flies in the face of most vampire representations that have them hypnotize their prey. I really don’t want Skyer peering into someone’s eyes and controlling them. Instead, as Skyer’s vulnerabilities are more associated with nature, I liked the idea of limiting his sway to the natural realm. I think I like the idea that the will of a living, sentient being is too formidable to sway.

This chapter is designed to also set a stage on tone and I deliberately used words like “subjugation'“, “dominance”, “submission”, and “mercy”. Skyer is vampire, after all, and - if you’re reading the story - you’re seeing Skyer becoming progressively more possessive of the halflings in Amberglen. I don’t think you can introduce a vampire without them feeling their proverbial oats (as they’re far superior creatures to mortals) and subjugating those around them.

I’m foreshadowing, of course, and running a conflict around the character that’ll eventually need to be resolved. First, there’s a characteristically-vampire impulse to control, and second, an uncharacteristic impulse to help the people of Amberglen. Goodness, it’s not all about him! Even in death, he’s an instinct to help the community and its suffering.

So I’m having a lot of fun with this and I hope you are, too! Keep reading!

Thanks again for reading. If you like what I do, please sign-up for my mailing list for follow me on Twitter at @blackanvilbooks.

R

Author’s Note: Skyer Dannon, Episode 3

On June 20, 2022, I published The Ballad of Skyer Dannon - Episode 3 - Hunger to Wattpad.

Tip-top!
Ranked #2 this week under #Halflings on Wattpad!
Totally obscure, and possibly irrelevant, but we gotta start somewhere.

This episode is about Skyer’s transformation into being a vampire.

When we read vampire-fic today, I think we gloss over the inhumanity of the experience. It’s like, in most modern interpretations of being turned, there’s a bite, maybe a little bit of sleep, and boom! You’re a vampire. You wake up and you’ve all of the same cognitive faculties, your mind and sanity are still intact, your emotional state is still as it was except maybe you’re a little more angsty … I mean, throw in some glitter and you’re got a Young Adult (YA) story.

I think the transformation to something other - like a vampire - must be truly horrifying, like stripping away rational consciousness and changing into an animal, one that’s perpetually hungry with killer instincts, can’t be easy. The physiological changes would be, of course, madness, but the mental transformation would probably be something the mind would retreat from, like what we see with people who encounter extreme trauma.

That’s kind of where I’ve headed with Skyer. Throughout the period he spends in the Wilds and before he goes to Amberglen, he’s in this transformative, traumatic state where mind has switched off. Readers will find his consciousness slowly returning in pieces as we work through episodes 4 - 7, but I want to believe that Skyer won’t be fully-realized as a new “person” for maybe a decade after his transformation. Hey, he’s immortal: I can take all the time I want, right?

Another thing. In my vampire story, I wanted to set the stage that Skyer consumed life in the form of living blood, that is, blood that is coursing through the veins of a living creature. So in current lit, authors tend to want to deal with what happens to a vampire if they consume something other than blood? What They Do in The Shadows makes a big deal out of this, for example, when the Baron consumes pizza and his body is thrown into the sky due to projectile vomiting and so on. I wanted to skip all of that. Vampires are undead. They don’t have a working digestive track, as their organs are shut down, so there isn’t any vomit. How does the blood get absorbed into Skyer’s body, as there’s no working stomach? Who knows?! What happens to the matter that isn’t absorbed? Who cares? I just didn’t want to deal with it. So in this story, we see Skyer eat crawdads, fish, and wood. I didn’t write about him puking it all up because it’s just so droll and, really, unnecessary. I think the reader accepts that Skyer’s a vampire and feeds on blood, that’s it, and that’s all I need to explain.

But I don’t know - what do you think? Do you think I should be explaining how that works? Let me know in the poll below.

And if you follow my Aevalorn Tales stories on Amazon Vella, look! I got a crowney-thing today, a top-faved story, so that’s kind of cool. Hopefully more people will see it…

Thanks again for reading. If you like what I do, please sign-up for my mailing list for follow me on Twitter at @blackanvilbooks.

R

Author’s Note: Skyer Dannon, Episode 2

On June 20, 2022, I published The Ballad of Skyer Dannon - Episode 2 - “Kibbler’s Bridge” to Wattpad.

Hey! I’m #3 in the #halflings tag today! What fun!

In this episode, I needed to pull away from the Pickles’n’Pork and go straight for the jugular. And not just proverbially-speaking. I needed to introduce Skyer, get the reader to develop a small sense of who he is, build some rapport with the reader, then brutally murder him, in under 2,500 words.

It was hard killing this character. I didn’t want to, not really, but I had to. I needed him to die.

And that’s pretty awful to think about.

When I read this episode aloud to my partner, she was taken aback by it. “It was sad,” she said, and that’s not usually how my stories about halflings go. I usually write about more fluffy and fun halflings like Gammond Brandyford.

This one, though, needs to be intentionally dark, and I have to write more from voice of horror and tragedy and less from a voice of lightheartedness and comedy.

Not only did I need to kill Skyer. I needed to do it in a way that was both true to vampire lore, but also in a fictional hamlet setting of hobbits. Can you imagine Count Dracula suddenly appearing in the Shire? Yeah, neither can I, but that was my problem. I needed to avoid cliche and write a terrible death scene that would take place near or around halfling burrows. And all of that seemed pretty antithetical to me.

Taking Skyer out of town - away from the burrows - and across Kibbler’s Bridge seemed like an easier way to deal with the problem. I also figured the pond scene was unusual enough to keep the reader’s interest, and to set the stage for a more unusual vampire story. The Bridge becomes an interesting touchstone for me later in the story, especially when revisiting the lore about vampires needing to tote around soil from their vampiric birthplaces.

As a halfling vampire, the Skyer Dannon character tries to take the vampire concept and twist it into something else. If you get a sec, please complete this story's survey below. I'd really like to know your thoughts!

Thanks again for reading. If you like what I do, please sign-up for my mailing list for follow me on Twitter at @blackanvilbooks.

R

Author’s Note: Skyer Dannon, Episode 1

On June 20, 2022, I published The Ballad of Skyer Dannon - Episode 1 - “A Good Evening Spoiled” to Wattpad.

So this was my first attempt at self-publishing on Wattpad.

I’d never tried it before. I’m more used to publishing on Amazon and Kindle.

I gotta say that I really enjoyed the author experience more so than Amazon Vella.

The ability to generate tags, the stats and metrics available to authors … the process what a heck of a lot easier than Vella. Wattpad also seems more comprehensive, and there are more tools to engage with the audience. So hey, that’s kind of cool.

This episode came in around 2,000 words and that’s what I’m shooting for in this project. Something easy to read, consumed in about 15-20 minutes, updated once a week, targeting the 25+ fantasy reader, maybe someone who’s got a background in role-playing games like D&D and Pathfinder.

I kinda feel like I have to tell this story as viewed through the lens of other halflings so I created Joliver Barleywood for that purpose. I think I can do a better job talking about Skyer that way. I can interject as a Joliver to provide context, and, gloss over particulars and move the story along. That’s why I went with “The Ballad Of” in the title of the story because it’s a story as related by Joliver.

In order to do that, I figured that I’d have to spend the first episode building out the Pickles’n’Pork setting and introduce Joliver as a narrator.

Okay so why this story?

One, I wanted to shamelessly tap into the whole vampire zeitgeist. Vampires, werewolves - these things seem all the rage with the readers on Amazon and Wattpad so I wanted to create something relevant.

Two, as I write about halflings, I wanted to talk about the unique perspective of this character as it relates to them. Skyer is a very antithetical representation of a halfling. Halflings are pleasant, polite, rotund, full of joy, optimism, interconnectedness, and life; charming 18th century naturalists. Vampires though are really about scarcity, need, hunger, loneliness, sorrow and regret. For me, writing this story is really about trying to create that contrast in the context of halflings, and not about creating a typical vampire story about supernatural power, immortality, and supremacy.

Three, it cross-promotes Aevalorn Tales on Amazon Vella where I can push readers from one platform to another, maybe even get them to sign-up for my mailing list.

Finally, I titled the work “A Good Evening Spoiled” as a play off of the idiom “a good walk spoiled” in reference to golf. I also wanted to convey that Skyer’s story a reluctantly-told story. It’s like, the reader wants vampires and werewolves, at least based on the content that’s viewed on these platforms and, okay, I can do that, but this vampire story isn’t going to be about a murderous teen demigod, or, kinky BDSM soft-porn in the disguise of paranormal fiction. This is going to be a tragedy because losing a halfling to vampirism is something of an awful, tragic rebuke against nature.

Anyhow, thanks for reading! If you’ve got any ideas or suggestions or comments, please write them up in the Wattpad story. I’d love to receive feedback and interact with readers.

Thanks!

R

Why I Write Stories About Halflings

Like most everyone, I was first exposed to Hobbits reading Tolkien’s work.

The Lord of the Rings movies produced by Wingnut Films didn’t come out until I was in my thirties, so my earliest impressions were from actually reading the books, and, the Rankin Bass‘  productions of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.

When I started playing role-playing games in my teens, D&D helped to inform more about halflings, particularly images drawn by Jeff Dee.

At the root of it, what I love about halflings is their appreciation of hearth and home. Tolkien’s adaptation of the word to develop an 18th century culture of charming portly naturalists - who value connection, family, friends, and food ahead of monetary gain - gives us (as readers and authors) an opportunity to reconnect with those values.

At the same time, I like writing about Halflings that do the unexpected. I like writing about characters who went beyond the stereotype and expand on Tolkien’s concepts.

Jeff Dee’s images of svelte, muscular halfling adventurers took those original Tolkien concepts portrayed (lovingly and accurately) by Rankin Bass into something different. It took the original pallet and expanded on it, and I really loved that idea.

As a gamer, I often played halflings because they had that interesting dichotomy of wholesomeness and home blended with luck, curiosity, a bent for exploring, and an intense desire to go back home; Weis and Hickman’s Kender in their Dragonlance saga only pushed that envelope farther. I loved playing those kinds of characters and expanding on what Tolkien originally gave us.

In writing about halflings, I enjoy the fact that they’re a literary shortcut that builds off of all of these other ideas about them. It’s shorthand: a way of describing something the reader already knows, and it allows me to cut back on writing lengthy descriptions of characters, scenes, or motivations. Shortcuts are really necessary in writing serialized fiction because you don’t have the time to elaborate on details.

Finally, I like writing about halflings because they’re often depicted as sidekicks to protagonists. They’re more likely to facilitate an outcome, or be comedy relief, than a central hero. I think that’s what really motivates me to write about them because, like Bilbo and Frodo, halflings do represent the hero. They portray the idealistic who doesn’t want to fight but must to protect heart and home, or, the undaunted, child-like exploration of the world.

Either way, halflings offer a quick way to jump into these ideas in Aevalorn Tales.

R

How Things Started

Hi - thanks for stopping by, and thanks for reading my work.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in 1980. I was ten. I had already started reading sci fi and fantasy; at the time, I don’t think there was a young adult fantasy genre, rather just serious fantasy (Tolkien, Brooks, Eddings, McCaffrey, Moorcock) and what I’d call light fantasy (Weis and Hickman, Salvatore, Pratchett, and numerous “Choose Your Own Adventure” books). I adored both.

But as a kid, I really found myself pulled towards the latter because those stories had a hook into role-playing. I guess I could relate to it. I enjoyed picking out gameplay elements of D&D from I was reading - no doubt due to TSR’s brilliant marketing - and I so I kept buying new books. Back then, spare cash and I were often parted due to my D&D habit.

The White Stands, the Free City of Trelalee, Fenwater Abbey, Gaelwyn, and Aevalorn were concepts created for a D&D 5E campaign I developed in 2013. Having finally reached a place in my life where I could devote time to write, I decided to explore these ideas again under a serialized fiction platform, Amazon’s Kindle Vella.

So maybe a part of this is to reconnect with my childhood. It’s something like that for me, yes, but it’s also a “do or die” thing. If I don’t start writing now, I’ll likely die before I get an opportunity. Now is better than later.

It also turns out that I’ve created a ton of stories for role-playing games over the last 40 years. I’ve so many worlds, characters, and ideas sitting idle in old notebooks and electronic files that it’d be a shame not to leverage them. Sure, world-building and story-writing for role playing are apt skillsets for novelists and writers, but I’ve also a technical background that lends to modern self-publishing. Further, I’ve enough idle time to write. Therefore, I guess it’s just a confluence of happy coincidences.

Today, when I write about Trelalee and Gaelwyn, I feel that same connection that I’d felt as a kid between playing RPG’s and reading fantasy novels based on those settings. It’s still a real kick for me. I can’t say that I spend a lot of time rule-mongering and checking my writing against game mechanics, but I will admit that the 5th Edition rulebooks are nearby when I draft my outlines. I’ll also say that those older, more dusty books written by serious fantasy authors are nearby, too; they’ve always been a part of me.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.