Preface: A Life of Its Own

The Borderlands Mythos is very much an evolved work, and evolve it has done. It starts as a kind of knock-off of Salem's Lot and The Stand, with a concept borrowed- to be honest stolen- from a passage in the novel Jurassic Park describing an airborne rabies virus as the agent of the dark events. The resemblance to Salem's Lot would come from a small town being overwhelmed by a plague of dehumanizing evil, the resemblance to The Stand coming from a worldwide plague that overwhelms humanity. The main character, who would himself undergo radical metamorphosis over time, was John Taylor, a knock-off himself of Mark Petrie from Salem's lot, a kid whose ability to turn the tables on an obnoxious bully in his opening scene made him an instant favorite of mine.

This was when I was thirteen, by the way, so forgive the fact that I stole like crazy from what I read. The germinal seed for Jake and Sarah, along with John's future wife, would be planted when I read Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising Sequence, with Jake a sort of country boy, Sarah a twin to a character named Rachel (unrelated to the Rachel of this story), and Laura Mackenzie, who began life as Lindsey MacLeod. Laura's original name was a combination of Lindsey Brigman, the female lead from James Cameron's The Abyss, and the last name of that immortal sword-swinging Scotsman Connor MacLeod from Highlander.

The Huntsmen were once superheroes. In some way, they remain such. It was in detailing their adventures that I started writing in earnest. They themselves started as knock-offs of the X-Men, though mutation would not be the sole means of gaining superhero status. With my typical obsessive focus, I practically created a catalog of them, complete with drawings of them. What I lacked in drawing skill, I made up for in heavy lines and tons of erasing. Among the sometimes members is my oldest character, Mikhale, who began life as a perfectly human superhero called Blue Shield, a knockoff on Batman, who I created after seeing the movie and being enthralled by it's grittiness and action. It says something about the sheer extent of the evolution of his character that this human adult superhero would one day become a non-human villain/anti-hero in my first completed work, not to mention brother to a considerably more grown up John Taylor.

The world of Serkal, and it's cousins the Borderlands, would come about as a result of exposure to various parallel world adventures, and to David Edding's The Belgariad, The Malloreon and other works of its type, with their lands of magic, gods, and medieval battles. That all would lead to further readings in the fantasy realms, which would shape the course of my other writings.

Now, to this point, I've been talking about knock-offs, but to be honest, my intention was never to ride somebody else's coat-tails. I was simply at the age where whatever caught my attention inspired me to try and do my own version. Even then, I didn't want to be a copycat; rather, I would take concepts and things I liked from those stories, and do my own version. At some point, though, I began to realize something very important: the styles and stories I was imitating were limiting my choices as a writer.

Serkal represented a breaking point, really. It was in writing my first versions of that story that I came to understand the limits of simply imitating others. The story, which took a new character named Gabriel Savien (later to be a Huntsman companion to John and the others) into the world of Serkal virtually wrote itself, but that seemed to be the problem. Looking back at what I had written, I found myself hard-pressed to find what was original about it. It seemed to me high time to rethink my approach. I decided to work out the nature of the lands and the peoples of Serkal.

Serkal would develop to such an extent that I started a sequence of stories about it, a saga in its own right. It would also lead me to do letter substitution codes in the pursuit of easy to prototype fictional languages, to get away from the tedious baby-talk that seems to be the result of just pulling words out of the air. Many names and places now take their names from the advanced results of this, including cities like Arnokedic, Elbujtheyo; worlds like Mua'alwarsh, Sechichalu, Nocthiro and Padzhir; peoples like the Ritulmidocha, the Aucethabi, and the Ba'acasu. I'm glad to have used the process, because it gave the names and the dialogue in these languages the right mix of organic shape and phonetic structure that sounds like language to us.

Serkal would eventually bring me back to Earth, as I took up the story of Jake and the others again, this time taking a different angle, with mages living as a secret society among other people, a sort of paranormal counterpart/reflection of Serkal on Earth. My growing interest in Religion, particularly Christianity, among other concerns, would lead me to my first truly complete work, The Right Hand of Chaos, which is almost a direct predecessor to this story. Most of the characters, practically all of the Magic using characters in fact, show up first in that story.

What started this work was an accident of sorts. When I was done writing the first few drafts of The Right Hand of Chaos, I ventured into the realm of political writing, and ending up spending much of my time writing about Bush and the war in Iraq rather than about my fantasy realms, a fact I'm not ashamed of, but nonetheless a sacrifice of the kind of writing I found most enjoyable.

Once before, I had written a fictional sci-fi story to post on the site called Fast Mover, where the life of a crew in a dropship depends entirely on whether their military contractor installed the right parts. I decided to do it again, only this time taking the politics into the world of the Borderlands Mythos.

Little did I know that the story would take on a life of its own. I never intended intitially to make an epic out of this story, but the spirit is in me, so to speak, and the idea of continuing this venture as its own work appeals to me greatly. Watchblog, the political site I'm a writer for, was never supposed to be a showcase for fiction, and I respect that. With that in mind, I start this new blog expressly for this work of fiction, to give it the space it needs on its own.

My plan, at this point, is to republish the original eight posts on this site, as they were first written, and then later post revised versions of the earlier arcs when I complete the work as a whole.

I hope this world takes on a life of its own in your imagination, as it has in mine. In the meantime, don't be afraid to ask questions and offer comments, as I am still a beginner in many ways, and have much to learn.