The First Story: Spears of Death

While studying Computer Science at college, I took a part-time job with Standard Chartered Bank. It was six days a week: four hours a day after classes, plus two night shifts on weekends from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. My day off fell midweek. I was ecstatic. For a collage boy, the pay was fantastic. I managed to buy myself video games, a TV, slowly build a DVD collection, and put some money aside. I bought books on 3D modeling, and I started teaching myself 3D Studio Max. I felt the pay was so good that I thought: I bet I could buy a house now.

I drove out to a housing project that had just launched. It was 2002 and one of the leading developers today were selling off-plan units. I think it was their first project at the time. I went there and saw the prices, then got back in my car at once. I drove to a video game store and bought two new PlayStation games instead.

Houses are damn expensive!

Life, however, was good. I had a golden work-fun-social-educational routine going. No cracks in it whatsoever. During an outing with a friend, he introduced me to the idea of writing a story, and I decided to go for it. I wasn’t much of a reader by any stretch, though. But hey, I loved adventures and played my fair share of adventure games. So if I wanted to write a story, why couldn’t I just do it?

There really wasn’t much to do after 2 a.m. on those night shifts. I assisted the team in the control center; we managed back-office operations that consolidated all of the bank’s daily transactions—from credit cards to loans to God-knows-what. Everything happened digitally. My colleagues were mostly from Sri Lanka and India. They called me Ali, and when they spoke among themselves, they called me “the Local.” Neither was actually my name. We worked in what I can easily consider the coldest place in the bank. We wore jackets because the servers needed constant air conditioning. Every now and then, one of the guys would nap on the floor between the AS/400 server racks. I used that quiet time to write.

I decided on fantasy, since it was my favorite genre. I called the story Spears of Death. The hero had the frightening power to turn every raindrop he saw into needle-thin spears as they fell. He used that ability to free his village from beastly creatures and warmongering neighbors, but then ended up living in isolation. Even though his power was the only thing keeping his village alive, his people only welcomed him when war came their way. Otherwise, he had to stay away, especially when it rained, since they lived in a dense forested region with a wet climate. That's how the story began, and the rest of it was about his attempt to rid himself of his powers.

I kept tinkering away at the plot, thinking through the sequences: what the characters looked like, their weapons, the furniture, the wars, the flawed justice system, the engravings on the doors—all the small bits as well as the big ones. Little by little, my solid work-fun-social-educational routine began to fracture. Every time I played a game, something bothered me. Anytime I tried to start something on 3D Studio Max, I couldn't finish it. When I watched a movie, I wasn’t watching it for pleasure anymore.

Three years later, I had a heap of notes on my story that I didn’t know how to use, and I hadn’t written a single serious chapter. I spent most days just talking to myself about the story, or sharing it passionately with friends. But nothing concrete ever came of it. On top of that, I had no fitting ending. I became exhausted by the story itself and my characters, and lost interest in gaming, 3D modeling, collecting DVDs, and especially watching movies with political or war plots. To this day, I avoid them, just as much as I avoid social media and the news altogether. I get the news from friends and family, never from the screen. And when I rewatch movies I like, I fast-forward through war sequences, including Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I adore. (Except for the Battle of Helm’s Deep. Now that’s an exception.)

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  Spears of Death plot

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  Spears of Death Dragon

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  Spears of Death Weapon

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  Spears of Death Character Concept

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  Spears of Death Spear

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  Spears of Death Dagger

One morning, having had enough with this growing hole in my routine, I brought cardboard boxes to my room and filled them with my DVDs and video game discs. I packed up my PC, removed the TV from my room, and gave away my PlayStation. I placed my writing desk in front of my bed, and that was it. There was literally nothing else in my space but that. I dropped Spears of Death, mentally retired my cursed character to a hut on the loneliest mountain in that fictional world, and decided never to write another story about war or politics. They simply stopped interesting me.

It became clear—very clear—that I wanted to strictly write about adventure. So, The Longed Tales series was born, with The Chained King and the Castle of Mystery as its first book.