A Rambling Foreword

This all started five or six years ago or longer as I think about it... 

I will eventually bore everyone with the journey, probably later in this post or the next one. Not sure. What I will do is introduce all this mess. I describe it as a failing upwards tale. Be warned, this is going to be a bit of a ramble, but there is a point! This is the foreword to what is to come, and I wanted to document it in order to remember my thoughts at this moment in time.  

It has always been my dream to write creatively in some capacity. I lost that dream when I became an adult. After I was freed from high school and moved onto college into the wider world, I wanted to “make it” in the traditional sense. For those who know me personally, know that is not who I am. I won’t go over that whole journey at this time as it does not relate fully to writing/art and what Daegon Studios is. What that time did teach me is what is important and defined my character. I would not change that time for the world because it led me to where I am now, as well as my fiancée.  

Let's talk about her. We are sitting on the deck right now enjoying a coffee together listening to metal. There is a pleasant breeze and the sun is on the house’s other side. A very pleasant morning. She is talking to me right now distracting me as usual and singing Lord of the Lost – La Bomba quietly to herself and petting our whiny dog’s belly. She is the reason I am doing this. Even though she is extremely distracting and always wants to talk my ear off (which I love), it is a challenge to write when that is going on. One thing she has also done is pushed me to finally share my writing. Her support is why I write this and am finally putting myself onto the world wide web. I had the idea before I met her, but the perfectionist in me did not allow me to release anything for the six years since I started this. What I will release is not perfect and that is okay. It’s about getting it out for now and perfecting it later (hopefully with the feedback from readers!). 

Insecurity has never played a part in my hesitance to put my writing out into the world. I write for me. It fills a gap in my, for lack of a better term, soul. It fuels me as much as food and drink. In my adult life’s first half, I always felt there was something missing and it took me years to find that it. I was an awkward kid who constantly carried a notebook filled with half drawn monsters and half written stories about those monsters. I shared them constantly but like all creatives they were never good enough. There was always a reluctance. I would be at once proud and dosed with dopamine after I progressed my style in both, show it off, then the next day I would want to completely redo it and scrap the project because it did not meet my vision. So, a new notebook with fresh blank paper would be in my hand the following day (thank you mom for having enough stationary to support my craziness). It was not perfect, so had to be restarted! Therefore, all my friends on the school bus and the few teachers that expressed interest would get a new half started story and new half drawn monsters every week. 

Now Ares (our dog) is being a distraction... he is needy. I stopped petting him... so I am getting yelled at. Sorry for getting up to refill my coffee dog.  

Back to the earlier thoughts. What I lost was the ability to share. Not sure when or how that happened, (probably high school started the diminishing stories) but child Brett would share his imperfect works before locking them away, where adult Brett stopped the creative process completely (yes I am referring to myself in the third person, deal with it). I know it was a gradual thing, but something most people go through. Must start making money and gaining skills so you can buy food... I did fulfill a dream in that time and got to work for Games Workshop at Kingsway Mall for three wonderful years (that is a whole separate story, but probably the happiest I have ever been working for the “man” instead of myself). 

Back to that six-year mark. One day I was feeling mentally exhausted and became sick because of it. Was just a mild upset stomach, but I stayed home because of it. I wrote nine pages that day, a complete short story. This story was unrelated to anything else I had written before. I had started dabbling with my first novel at this point (which is still an absolute mess and I will talk about shortly) and was getting lost in that entire process. I decided to aim smaller (unusual for me) and write a self-contained story. My cousin AJ (an extremely talented person, write more you dick and finish something!) challenged me to write a horror screenplay to, maybe, be filmed one day in a short anthology movie (never happened... yet) and instead I drafted this short story. I named it “A Diary of a Serial Killer” and even though I have not gone back to it (I really should, it's probably a story that could get published if I expanded it, but I like dragons and knights to much) it put an important thought into my head, “This is what I want to do for the rest of my life”. “A Diary of a Serial Killer” set me on this course.  

A few months later, due to the economic downturn and a need to explore this path, I moved south to live with my cousin Chet and restart my life. And so, for the next 6 months I wrote that first novel, “The Lady’s Champion”, having no clue what I was doing. It was the story that has been bouncing in my skull since those school bus days. I did not have the ability to tell that story as a child and did not have the ability to tell it in those six months (it really is a mess), but I completed a first manuscript and loved it. Writing “The Lady’s Champion” taught me a lot. One day I will sit down and edit it for the year it needs (its triple the length of anything I have written since and requires ten times the energy to get it to where I need it to be). After writing it, I realized that no one would be willing to read three hundred thousand words without buy in.  

A blog was the answer! I would make a blog with short stories and use my art to promote those short stories! Readers! Many readers! These short stories would feed into “The Lady’s Champion” and then someone other than AJ would be willing to commit the time to reading it! The stories would have to be perfect though...  

For the last four years I have been writing and drawing endlessly to make it perfect and releasing nothing. I had to take some time away to progress my new career and in that time I met my Fiancée (told you she is distracting and I had to chase her because when you meet a one of a kind person like her you can’t help but fall in love). 

 Short stories, something simple like “A Diary of a Serial Killer” but fantasy or sci fi because dragons and mechs are cool! Now we come full circle, to the fail upwards comment earlier. I ended up writing another novel... A prequel to “The Lady’s Champion”. It appears I am unable to write something simple... My mom showed me this wonderous thing called a hundred-day challenge. A fantastic way to create a habit. I wrote every day for one hundred days and a six-part mini prequel series became a twenty-chapter novel, “Demon Rising”. As I said failed upwards. But unlike “The Lady’s Champion”, I edited “Demon Rising” after I wrote the initial manuscript and learned more. I even shared it with all those people on the school bus I used to torture 15 years ago. But... “Demon Rising” needed a prequel... “Plague Wars”. For the last 70 days, I have been writing and editing “Plague Wars”. Convenient that we have had a pandemic for a plague story I referenced in “Demon Rising” a year and a half ago... the “good” news is my Plague is far more destructive... I am all about that poor taste I guess and have always had “great” timing.  

So that’s the story. The foreword. If you made it this far, I thank you with all my heart. I promise the actual story will be less of a rambling mess. I will be releasing the first chapter, right here, in September 2020. Need to write for thirty more days to get to another one hundred and have the first ten chapters of “Plague Wars” completed to a semi-perfected level. We’ll call it a readable level. Between now and then, I will be doing more blog posts and teases. As we get closer to September, the official release date for the first part will be announced. Again, thank you for reading this first post, I look forward to sharing more and starting this journey in earnest! 

I will leave you with a piece of art to entertain those who made it this far (thanks again):

~ Brett