Entry tags:

fantasy, legacy formats, parody, writing

Cursed be the name of catdoc(1), or, stupid crap you find from old floppies
As some people (I'm taking that "some" is at this point an exaggeration) who take close interest in what I do are aware of, I'm trying to write some good, honest fantasy stuff right now (though I'm letting my brain cool off a bit before I tackle the daunting task of correcting tons of errors in the latest story).

But as I'm often not willing to tell, it's not the first time I've written fantasy.

Let's make some gruesome confessions: the first fantasy story I wrote was in 1995-1996. Yeah, I built a fantasy world for RPG use. No, I had no players to share this amazingly (in retrospect) Kafkaesque and over-stupid-punny world with.

Yeah, I wrote a story. I found two Windows Write files from a CD that has tons of copies of floppies.

-r--r--r-- 1 502 20 53760 1995-12-13 21:49 .../aamunkaj.wri
-r--r--r-- 1 502 20 92800 1996-06-14 21:26 .../aamunkaj.wri

Now, the latter version was interesting because it was probably the last surviving copy. It's not the last version though. I know I copied the file to the hard drive of my father's laptop, and I edited stuff there for some time before the HD died. This particular file was undeleted from a floppy I transferred the file from. Good that I didn't write anything on top of that. I know it's not the last version, because I remember adding some lines to the story in Zykrese, a language I had invented for the fantasy setting.

Okay, I used catdoc to read the thing.

It's not really gigantically awful. Okay, I wasn't really that good of a writer ten years ago, really pretty damn awful in fact, but with some heavy editing, heavy heavy heavy heavy heavy editing, this stuff might be actually pretty decent, if I say so myself.

Lots of really silly ideas though. Really really silly ideas. Not to even mention all of these stupid, silly not-very-subtle tweaks of the names. I mean, the continent where the stuff happens is "Murheenkrynn" (from Finnish murheenkryyni, "troublemaker") for crying out loud.

The longer copy is 11626 words and shorter is significantly enough 6665 words (and is missing completely the weirrrd, obviously Dragonheart-inspired ending.)

And then it hit me. Wait a second, I wrote some of the scripts in Linux to deal with the conlanging crap? Dictionary searches or something? Was this on the yet-another-HD-that-blew on the 486 or my always-nicely-backupped Pentium? The frigging Pentium!

I knew it was a command I was not supposed to issue.

$ locate *amunk*

Please don't return anything.

.../aamunkajon-lohik.txt

...sssshitttttt...

Okay, that's the final surviving copy of the text. Originally formatted in, surprise surprise, Emacs, probably GNU Emacs 19.something for MS-DOS, and probably touched up in Linux.

-rw-r--r-- 1 wwwwolf users 106825 1997-12-10 22:26 aamunkajon-lohik.txt

In 14191 glorious words. And it doesn't even include the awful, awful foreword in the Write versions.

Enough with the history! "Excerpts," I hear you not cry (but I do it anyway), "excerpts!" Bear in mind that this stuff was originally written then in Finnish; the translation was done right now.

The awful original foreword began like this:

"You could almost say that this adventure story with all of its cliches, spoofs and jokes (mostly stupid ones at that) was grown while telling. I originally started to write a slight parody of "Dragons of the Autumn Twilight", but regrettably that didn't simply take off even on the second try - I decided to think with my own brains and write a story all by myself."

...which was a frigging great idea. Know why? "Dragons of the Autumn Twilight", vertiable Hickman & Weis novel, has been sitting on my shelf in my room in my parents' home since, oh, 1995. I never got crazy about Dragonlance. Of the D&D novels, I had earlier only read "Darkwalker on Moonshae" (in English!) and after that, the next D&D novel I read was entire frigging R.A. Salvatore FR that-drow-guy-slices-every-baddie-dead series, and that was only in the last few years! So, um, I thoughtfully noted, even then, that making parody of a book you haven't read is a profoundly crappy idea. (Doesn't stop some people from trying though, if it's still amusing. Interesting to note that SA people had the exact same methodology. =) So why is this an awful way to start a foreword? Spoofing Bored of the Rings that spoofed Lord of the Rings. Errrrrrrrrrrrgh. Mirrors and mirrors.

"Originally, I intended to write a short story. The story grew and grew and then I noticed Write's page counter must suck, because there was no WAY I was on page 17. But that was approximately where I was."

First of all, a deja frigging vu what comes to the big story I'm editing right now. That story is a frigging massive size for a short story, and I have to say that I frequently thought OO.o's page counter lies. =)

By the way, I have my reservations about the above statement of "intending" the story to be a short story. Why? I never planned how the story went. Basically, I started writing on how the folks travelled a long way and found some swordies and killed a dragon. Woot. Well, basically, in retrospect, I guess I got what was coming for me.

I should write more about the actual story when I dare. All sorts of memory-lane-hopping here, but rest assured I will report on this.

For now, I will briefly document a small scene that's probably the reason I dug this text up right now. One scene involves a spell that misfires due to a heavy storm, and the spell opens a portal to Devi-Null, the Dimension of Lost Creatures (arrrrrgh!), and a shortish demon appears, greets the folks, says it's a dinner time, and gets promptly swept to the ocean by a raging wave. Next to my bed is a collection of fantasy short stories, one of which was the direct inspiration (okay, a source of very minor plagiarism =)... Craig Shaw Gardner's "A Malady of Magics".

Hmm.
*stomps to the bookcase*
There we are, my copy of "The Hobbit". Got my own copy in 1994. Among the big books that really inspired me to sink into the genre.
Funny that I've been a big admirer of fantasy literature for that long time and I still don't really, really know all of the interesting stuff. I read too little.