Being so busy with work right now doesn't mean my mind isn't on writing. It always is and has been for the last five years. So as I work during the day, my Muses escape during the less watchful hours at night and taunt me with possibilities. One of thee moments is actually quite conscious: when I go to bed and read. I love reading in bed and it's usually a toss-up whether the reading will put me to sleep after a few pages or will keep me awake into the wee hours igniting ideas and imagination.
Recently I have been actively reading up on faeries and heroic fantasy. If the first book of the Simon & Sally Spangenberg series is about fairy tales, the second is about just that: heroic fantasy and its sister genre faeries. I just finished reading the excellent anthology 'The Faery Reel' and have now started re-reading the very first trilogy that got me reading in all earnest: The Dragonlance Chronicles, by Margaret Weiss and Tracy Hickman. I'm not the only one who read this book feeling more kinship to it than Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Maybe it had something to do with the period of time in which I read it. Dragonlance was an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D) role-playing game (RPG) and at the time these games were still in high demand. AD&D had invaded Holland and even prompted its own Dutch cousin RPG 'Oog des Meesters'. I admit to being a complete nerd and loving RPG's. So it was only a matter of time before I would discover the novels that went along with the game.
It was the summer of 1990 and I was deep into collecting comics. My favorite comic store at the time - a stone throw away from college - carried a wide variety of American superheroes and independents alike. Mind you, this is the Netherlands and English books were (and sometimes still are) hard to find. You have to visit special bookstores that carry these prized readings.
Even though I am Dutch, I disliked reading translated books as I felt the Dutch language failed to carry the nuances the English language has. And so when I saw the original 5 year anniversary box set of the Dragonlance Chronicles I was sold. I had read The Hobbit (convincing my English teacher to put it on the reading list) and this looked like more of the good stuff. At home over the course of the summer holidays I sat in my lazy chair in my room and flipped pages like I've rarely done since. The sun beat down on me through the open window and the sounds of a quiet sub-urban Dutch town only helped the experience.
Unlike the many fans of Dragonlance (which went on to tell over a hundred different stories set in the same world) I only re-read the Dragonlance series once. There is just so much new stuff out there that keeps catching my interest. But then Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman decided to flesh out the original three stories with an Annotated Chronicles and (very creatively) a new trilogy describing the events that occurred between each of the original three books (which had time-gaps to allow the writers to skip forward in their epos). I was sold again. How cool is it to re-read the entire series with added comments and new story bits? I mean: imagine twenty five years from now a follow-up to Harry Potter chronicling adventures Harry had during the years between Hogwarts and becoming an adult?
What I especially like about this experience is that not only the writers, but I too am looking at the story from a fresh angle. It is not only like watching a DVD bonus disc of your favorite movie, it's now an examination of the process and design of a arch typical heroic fantasy, in ways more direct than Tolkien's famous trilogy. Three books, chronicling three different seasons, in three different styles/acts/colors - it's a similar plot template I use with Simon & Sally. Heroic fantasy and RPG's have always gone hand in hand and in my second book I'll enjoy playing with the heroic fantasy genre and its archtypes, magic, dragons, quests and all the other juicy stereotypes of its kind.
But for now, I snuggle in my bed with the 2500 page epic (6 books) of this wonderful and highly underrated classic called the Dragonlance Chronicles.
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