Copyright © 2005 by Blake Charlton. All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, reposting, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without express written permission of the author.
It's like this: it was autumn 2000. I was twenty, a junior at Yale, sitting in a classroom, and so completely bored that I would have rather pulled my intestines out through my nose than continue listening to the professor's flaccid ideas about King Lear.
Outside, the New Haven maritime effect was gradually freezing what had been late autumn rain into sleet, then into hail, then snow, and then some unholy alliance of the four that would eventual turn the entire city into a dark, pollution-flavored slurpee.
It's strange, but I do miss that town.
Anyway, I was in a seminar and bored, which at that point in my academic life was something of a novelty. You see, up to this point my Yale career had been one of complete, abject terror. Up to this point, I had known that I did not belong at Yale with the same clammy certainty that a semi-sleeping five-year-old knows he's wet the bed before waking.
Once, during organic chemistry midterm, I clocked my heart rate at 190 beats per minute. For those of you who are not physiologically minded, 190 bpm is about what your heart should do if you're a) sprinting the 400m in the Olympics, b) trying to escape from a building that's on fire, or c) being chased by a blood-crazed grizzly bear that's on fire. It's not what you're heart should do when you're trying to evaluate synthetic pathways for salicylic acid.
In those days I used fear the way an IBCM uses rocket fuel; I thought it was propelling me faster and faster, and farther and farter away from my retardation. Truth was, it was propelling me only toward a mushroom-cloud burnout of fire and psychological fallout.
But fortunately, I stopped. Fortunately I let go of the fear and forsook academic achievement before detonation. Fortunately I got bored in English seminar.
Let's think about that class for a moment.
I found it tedious because for the first time I knew I wasn't going to fail it. In fact, I was pretty certain I was going to get an A.
It's odd. For the past two years, I had foresworn sleep, sanity, and social-interaction precisely to achieve academic success and confidence. But as soon as I had that confidence, I became contemptuous of it. It was one of those sudden, violent shifts of emotional weather that are common to those that dwell in a psychological climate I call 'the cripple's mentality'.
That day, in that dull classroom, I suddenly hated academia, hated that I had made myself the slave to grades. I hadn't escaped or transcended my disability at all. I was only feeding it grades, offering them sacrificially in hopes they would appease the demons.
I remember that the need to escape was nearly overpowering. I wanted nothing more than to stand up in the middle of that seminar, tear my notes into confetti, and charge out of New Haven in a blast of sound and furry.
But common decency kept me in my seat. I fumed for a while and stared out the window at the falling slush. I doodled on my notes and scowled at the phonetic dialect of English I write in when a computer is not available. I daydreamed.
It was then that I began playing with the idea with which I'm still obsessed. I began to wonder if magic were not, in fact, real. I began to wonder if written language were not a kind of spell that existed in an almost metaphysical sense but was still able to affect the physical world. I began to construct parallels to other, stranger written languages I had encountered in my scientific studies. And of course, like any boyish daydreamer, I injected myself and my problems into these ideas. About midway through the class, I had formed the central ideas of SPELLWRIGHT.
And so I turned the page in my notebook and began to write a description of a young man who had to make a nighttime escape from a stronghold of overly strict academic language.
People call fantasy 'escapist'. They mean to insult the genera, to imply that SFF readers are unable to cope with realty and so must escape their deficiencies by plunging into books with scaly beasts and bikini-armor-clad babes on the cover.
But fantasy does not take you away from your problems. It cannot. Wherever you go, there you are. Good fantasy--like all good fiction--can only change the world in which the problems manifest themselves. Good fantasy crafts brighter worlds, more lavish worlds, stranger, darker, more wonderful worlds where perspectives and rules are changed but problems are not. "The Green World" is what Northrop Frye called it when saw it in Shakespeare.
Having taught myself to read on SFF, I dimly knew all of this even back in 2000 when I sat in that dull King Lear seminar. And so what happened later that day was not a complete surprise. I was trudging up science hill in the gathering dark when I suddenly knew that SPELLWRIGHT was going to require all my devotion, all my love. Suddenly I knew that it would become my gate to the Green World.
Six years full of writer's doubts, brown bag lunches, artistic frustrations, and odd day-jobs have passed since then, and SPELLWRIGHT has finally found a publication home. When I first set out down this road, I had visions of a bestseller, of financial comfort (or at least stability), of a few minutes in the limelight. But now, a little bit older, a little bit wiser, all that I truly hope for SPELLWRIGHT is that it will one day open your gate to the Green World as it has opened mine.