The first story that I ever decided to write, was when I was somewhere between the ages of 10-14 probably. I had in my possession a laptop that was very thick and very old and very useless for everything other than writing. Nothing fancy of course, it did not have Microsoft Word but it did have Wordpad. For those of you who remember it, Wordpad was a simple plaintext word processor that did little but hold text, and at the time there was no markup, no word wrapping to the next line. You could keep typing a line forever and it would never wrap down to a new one, but continue to expand the digital x-axis of the page to infinity, so you had to use the return key whenever you felt like skipping a line, making copying or printing a huge nightmare, if you were trying to write a story that is.
In other words, what I had in this old laptop, which had some suspicious stains on its casing that looked like it might have been jam at one point, was a very high-tech typewriter with a screen instead of paper. I would have much rather had a typewriter. It would have worked better, and prevented much of the dismay that follows.
Anyway the first story I started writing (and this was not The World is Among Us, not yet, for that was the first story I finished) was a fantasy, sort of like Fae, or at least a kind of Fae prototype that was really nothing like Fae at all. It was inspired by a dream I had once during that age that was between 8-13 probably maybe, in which I, a character who was not myself but my dream-self, huddled behind the rocks of a dessert land to conceal myself from a raging sandstorm. I was part of some sort of caravan, a nomadic group of people who were there with me behind these great rocks. One of these people was actually a friend of mine in elementary school who was part of this dream cast in my head that I did not control. The caravan, I think, became inspiration for the Resistance, and the friend, I know for sure, eventually became the idea for Jeph, the first faery that Faolan meets in Daemonology.
I know that we spoke, this friend and I, about things that I remembered when I wrote the story and that were very important, but that I cannot recall now. Still, I began writing this story about a green forest kingdom and about a boy who lived there, and a girl, and various others as well. And that is all I could tell you about the story for that is all I can remember. I wrote quite a lot of it actually, several short chapters in a messy collection of digital text in Wordpad on this ancient machine, but one day the laptop simply stopped working, and the story was lost. It didn’t happen all at once, there was a long time in which I had not used the machine at all and it was only after I discovered that it was no longer functional that the thought occurred to me that there had once been a story inside of it, and I was a little disappointed, but I think at some point must have gotten over it. There are still images in my head, one from the dream, and one from the story, and maybe one day they’ll become something new.
At any rate, time went on and I began writing music and asked my grandmother one day if she would help me purchase a new laptop, since I had only enough stowed away to pay for about 75% of it, and I also wanted to buy Finale, to write music. This was in 2007 I think. The laptop that I bought was a new Toshiba Satellite, which was not the most impressive thing, but I like it, and it worked, and I used it all the way up through my first year and a half at university. The laptop, I still have to this day, and use it occasionally when I feel the need to run a game that I cannot play on my iMac or my new MacBook Pro, or to fiddle around with different operating systems without worry about destroying the machine from within. And it was on this laptop that, after writing much music that was not very good, I began writing stories again. This was when I wrote The World is Among Us, and eventually, Fae, which would eventually become Fae: The Book of Faolan, and eventually Daemonology. I changed the name once I began to realize that there would be more books in this world, and that there would be other players whose stories would need to be told to create the lore that still resides in my mind, but those books will have their own introductions, when they’re written.
For Faolan’s book, I began to write it after my best friend passed away, and I wanted to return to fantasy for a number of reasons. One, my friend and I loved fantasy. We had endless chronicles that we created, playing together, of fantastic adventures and thrilling characters, and I wanted to write some of these things down, and although none of our chronicles ever truly became a part of Fae, the spirit of them inspired me, and I still have them for a rainy day. The second reason was because I wanted to reclaim the story that had been lost in the old machine, for posterity perhaps, if nothing else. And I might have reclaimed the story, or taken more detail from it, if it were not for the third reason I returned to fantasy. The third reason was the inspiration I had from a video game. I like video games very much, especially RPGs, and especially ones with good stories inside of them. I use a small bit of inheritance from my dear departed great-grandparents to purchase for myself a Playstation 3, partly because it was the only thing I could think to buy, and partly to honor my departed friend who passed away just two days after my great-grandmother, and with whom I spent many hours playing games with. There was a title called Folklore, and it was stunning. I took to the darkness of it, the bitterness, and of course, the faeries which pervaded the beginning of the game’s story, but would eventually become just a fraction of the brilliant tale. I also like the idea of folklore, and the stories that people, folk, came up with to describe the strangeness of life, and that lore were really just stories themselves.
I started looking at the folklore of western Europe. I took to the idea of little children being kidnapped by mischievous faeries, and wondered what happened to these children who were taken away, and where they went, and what became of them if they ever came back. I also discovered among many things a curious race of creatures within my research that were called Finfolk, who were shape-shifting creatures of the sea. Finman and Finwife, for males and females respectively, which Faolan explains to Gréagóir and Oisin in one of the opening scenes from the book. That was where it all started, and I took the rock of an island, and the darkness, and the bitter wistfulness of a storyteller, and Faolan’s words began to come out of me, and he told his story of how Finfolk had come and kidnapped him, and I began creating a reason for the kidnapping, and a set of events that would follow for those who survived such an event, and the rest unfolded from there. Every event, and tie, and character appeared and unraveled before me, and I experienced the story as I wrote it—and it all took me completely by surprise.