Backspace #4 – A Lizard’s Tale
As I write the Cor Series I don’t have a pre-set story plan, instead I follow the characters and let their stories emerge as they interact with each other and their environment. At times a character does something so random that I take my hands off the keyboard, shake my head and ask, “Now why did you decide to do that?” That is the the most enjoyable part of writing, finding the motivation and story behind the choices your characters are making. Giving them room to do something unexpected and show us a new side of who they are.
When I write, there have also been times when a new character appears out of the blue and catches me by surprise. They simply walk out into the page and look at me as if to say, I think I have something to say here, why don’t you start typing. This has become even more common in books two and three in the series as the characters have grown both in number and in complexity. There are characters coming in the series that I am really looking forward to introducing to you as a listener or reader.
In the first book, The Hammer, the very first character that popped up and begged for more development was Tsarek. When I began to write the hammer, the large lizard was a curiosity, an interesting way to introduce the mysterious doorway in the Castle Rocks. When Corvan was ridiculed at school for saying he has seen a large lizard in his backyard he imagines that since he lives near a large deposit of dinosaur bones, maybe an egg from a dinosaur was exposed to the warm sun and in hatched.
This was my homage to a book written by Bertrand R. Brinley In 1961, the year I was born, Bertrand wrote a series of short stored titled The Mad Scientists Club. The first story in the book was “The Big Egg” in which the boys in the club discover a dinosaur egg that they might have successfully hatched.
There was a wonderful proliferation of science fiction novels in the 1950’s and 60’s but like the Mad Scientists Club, most of the books from that era have been forgotten. Some people call that time period in history the golden age of Golden Age of Science fiction but others say there is always a golden age of Science Fiction and that age is 14 years of age. I like that last definition. It seems to be about the right age for those who wholeheartedly dive into a science fiction or fantasy book. That was the age that I read voraciously and lived inside my world of books and stories. My favorite day at school was when we would get our Scholastic Book order forms figure out how far our allowance would stretch. I would pour over the pictures of the covers and the descriptions to make the best choice.
One book that I still have after all these years was Stranger from the Depths by Gerry Turner. The cover art featured a scaley underwater man from an ancient civilization who was awakened in our time by a Tsunami. The lizard-like man was an intriguing character and he became the inspiration for Tsarek.
Tsarek may have started only as a lizard but over time he became one of my favorite characters in The Hammer.
You have been listing to Backspace Podcast #3. The Story of Cor Series of books.
