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.