Book notes - Billy Barnaby's Twisted Christmas

In honor of my novel Billy Barnaby's Twisted Christmas being released as an audiobook, here are some book notes.

• Billy Barnaby was inspired by the movie Monsters Inc. Not the story itself, but the motivation for writing it. I loved Monsters Inc, and it made me want to write a kids’ story that would delight children everywhere. I don’t feel that I succeeded.
• I saw Monsters Inc over the Christmas holiday season of 2002, so I decided that my hypothetical delightful children’s story would be a Christmas story.
• After brainstorming in January, I wrote the first version of the novel between February and mid-March of 2003.
• Sometime later that year I adapted it into a screenplay.
• I like to think of the story as a cross between A Christmas Story, Willy Wonka and Die Hard.
• In 2005, I pitched the screenplay to a producer in Los Angeles, who told me the story needed a more specific threat, to make the danger seem more real. It wasn’t enough, she said, for the villains to threaten something vague, like the entire world. The threat needed to be to a person. Apparently it wasn’t enough that Mrs. Claus was being threatened. So in 2006, I decided to take her advice, and I rewrote the screenplay, cutting a lot of what I thought were boring scenes, and added a storyline where the U.S. President is assassinated. I also ended the story with an opening for a sequel, which the original didn’t have.
• Of course, a second movie producer, about the same time I was talking with the first, told me the story was too dark and violent for children. So what did I do? I instead took the first producer’s advice, and made the story even more dark and violent, because I don’t think it’s any more dark and violent than a lot of children’s movies I’ve seen (including Disney stuff).
• The second version of the screenplay was a top 10 Finalist in the 2008 AAA Screenplay Contest sponsored by Creative Screenwriting magazine.
• It was also in the Top 10% of the 2010 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition, which is sort of the Rolls Royce, or the Holy Grail, of screenwriting competitions, run by the people who do the Oscars.
• From 2007 to 2009, I took a break from writing and spent the time illustrating the screenplay into a graphic novel, which is available in print on Amazon. 
• Recently, in 2012, I finally got around to working the revised screenplay version back into the original novel.
• Eventually I plan to write a sequel, which I’m tentatively calling Butch Blackman’s Twisted Christmas.

Book Notes: The Last Legend

• My fantasy novel TheLast Legend was inspired more by The Hobbit than by The Lord of the Rings. I read The Hobbit at least half a dozen times from 1979 to 1982. Those readings culminated in the writing of a short story, “The Enchanted Sword,” in early 1982, when I was 13.
• In seventh grade I was in a class for gifted students called Project Potential. One week the teacher had each of us do a creative project in our spare time at home, just anything we felt like doing that was somehow creative. I told her I’d write a short story. I had just finished writing “The Enchanted Sword,” so at the end of the week, I handed that in as my creative project, pretending that I had written it in my spare time during that “creative” week. So I guess I sort of cheated on that assignment, since I never really completed it. But the teacher loved the story, and her assistant typed it up for me, since I had hand-written the story. (We didn’t have word processors back in those days, and I didn’t know how to type).
• In 1984, I wrote a series of one-page vignettes that were basically descriptions of various historical events in the history of the world of “The Enchanted Sword.”
• In 1988, I wrote “The Power Scepter,” a short story set in the world of “The Enchanted Sword.”
• In early 1995, I decided to continue the story that was begun in “The Enchanted Sword.” Years earlier, I had realized that I had left the story open-ended. The whole point of the story was that Beamer had been given the Enchanted Sword for a reason, but I never said what that reason was. He just put the sword up on his mantel and forgot about it. I guess that was acceptable to my 13-year old mind, but the unfinished nature of the story had begun nagging at me in the early 90’s. So in 1995, I added a few details to the story and made it chapter two of book one of the novel The Last Legend. “The Power Scepter” became the prologue.
• I originally named the main race in The Last Legend the Munchkins, but a few years later, I realized there were Munchkins in The Wizard of Oz, so I renamed them the Little People. Soon after, I realized that name was too reminiscent of Darby O’Gill and the Little People, so I again renamed them to “falliwagns.” The name is pronounced fowl-ee-wans. The g is silent. I have absolutely no memory of why I named them that.
• The falliwagns are, of course, the hobbits of my novel. Beamer is Bilbo. The Brown Lands are the Shire. Baldurn is Gandalf.
• Chapter two of The Last Legend, “The Enchanted Sword,” is almost exactly as I wrote it when I was 13. It hasn’t been edited. I did add the part about Beamer bottling the “miracle water” from the stream in his cellar and floating it down the river. I also changed the last hundred words a bit to make it easier to continue the story.
• The Last Legend originally ended with chapter 10 (Second Coming) of book one. I thought the story was done with, so I patted myself on the back for having written my first novel.
• I actually dropped out of college because of The Last Legend. I was writing notes and portions of the book in classes, when I should have been listening to the lectures. One day during a biochemistry lecture, I looked down at all the story notes I was scribbling on my notepad, rather than notes related to the class, and I had an epiphany: I didn’t belong in school. I belonged in front of my computer, writing books. A few weeks later, I dropped out and finished writing book one of The Last Legend.
• A year later and a half later, at the end of 1999, I realized that The Last Legend still wasn’t finished. So I wrote chapter 11 of book one (Salvation of Malhar), then banged out book two in December and January of 1996. I wrote book three over February and March 1996, which finally brought the novel to a close.
• I’ve never been satisfied with the way the story turned out. I had always intended to continue the history of the world of The Last Legend, with other stories and novels planned. But the ending of The Last Legend ruined all those plans for me, destroying all my plans of continuing in that world. The Last Legend ends with the complete destruction of the world, and then its recreation by the main character, who becomes God of the resurrected world. I don’t know why, but even though the resurrected world is supposed to be completely identical to the old one, it never seemed like the same world to me, so I lost interest in it. I kind of fouled my own nest with the end of that book. I don’t think it’s a bad ending for the story; I just look at it as a bad ending personally because it spoiled my interest in continuing the world. After the ending of The Last Legend, the book’s world seemed too impermanent and unstable, and I just didn’t like the idea of building a fantasy history that could be so easily swept aside and rebuilt, if that makes any sense.

Book Notes: Demonspawn

I'm going to start writing notes on each of my books. This first post is on my novel Demonspawn, which I think is one of my better novels.

• I wrote Demonspawn waaaay back in 1998. It took me about nine months total to write, working at a lazy pace, taking a few days and sometimes even weeks or months off at a time.
• At the time I was writing it, I was really into “The Book of Words” series by J.V. Jones. In Demonspawn, I think I actually was trying to sort of match Jones’s writing style. It’s been a long time since I wrote the book, but as I recall, Jones’s series heavily inspired my own book.
• The character of Nisiter was inspired by Jones’s own character Baralis.
• The two guards in Demonspawn, Carl and Dale, were inspired by Bodger and Grift, two similar characters in Jones’s series. I originally meant them to be just two generic background characters, but they sort of took on a life of their own whenever they showed up in the book. I liked their comic interplay so much that they became my two favorite characters in the book.
• By the time I finished writing Demonspawn, I had intentions to write a sequel featuring the characters of Carl and Kala, the Shazaran slave girl. In Demonspawn, they’re last seen heading south together, and the sequel would have followed their adventures in the south. But I never got around to writing the sequel.
• I was having a hard time coming up with a name for the character of Nisiter. I finally settled on “Nisiter,” as a play on the word “sinister.” I wanted the character to come across mainly as a sinister man, so I finally just twisted the word around and came up with Nisiter. 
• My favorite scene in the book is when Captain Thasus is castrated, and his men take him to the hideous old witch woman Druza, who cauterizes his wound, equips him with a makeshift catheter, and demands that his men sleep with her as payment. This was an unforeseen development that just came to me as I was writing, but which became a major turning point in the story arc of Thasus.