Cartoons.

When I was six years old, I lived for them. I cared for nothing but watching cartoons all day long.

My parents moved around a lot, sometimes between countries. Not every place aired too many cartoons, but I had my VHS tapes, which I wore out.

Then I learned how to read.

And I still wanted to do nothing but watch cartoons.

Luckily, my parents are readers. Our house was full of old science fiction novels. Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and other authors covered the bookshelves. My parents decided it was time for me to start reading books too.

One day, they placed a book in my hands, and told me: "Read it."

I refused.

"That's not cartoons," I said.

They insisted, so I read. The book was about a group of children who solved mysteries. It wasn't too bad, I begrudgingly admitted.

"I might as well read the sequel," I told myself.

I read all the sequels. Several dozens of them. And I read most everything else that author wrote. Then I got a library card, and books began to compete with cartoons.

I read whatever I could find. Mysteries, action novels, sports novels, novels about high school angst and love. My teenage cousins would read the latter; they were shocked, I think, that little Daniel was borrowing their books.

For some reason, I never read fantasy.

When I was eleven, a few nerds from school approached me. I know it's
not nice to call them nerds. But that's what they were. Big glasses, bullies on their trail, the works. They asked me to play Dungeons and Dragons with them.

I was surprised. These kids weren't friends of mine. I had rarely spoken to them. I think they recognized my potential geekiness, and realized that to fully realize it, I just had to play D&D.

So I joined them for a game. As we played, I heard everyone talk about Lord of the Rings, and Dragonlance, and Forgotten Realms, and all sorts of books I'd never heard of. Next time I visited the library, I went to the fantasy section and browsed.

Larry Elmore. I blame him, the bastard. He created that beautiful cover art for Dragons of Winter Night. When I picked up the book, I couldn't look away.

Dragons of Winter Night has had several covers since its first printing in the 80s. The original cover is still the best one. I don't know why they keep replacing it. On the forefront, you see three figures. One is a knight. The artist put great detail into every piece of the knight's armor. The vambraces, greaves, pauldrons, breastplate, helmet, the chainmail -- all are drawn with a meticulousness that amazed me. Beside this knight, stands a beautiful warrior woman, her armor just as impressive. She holds a lance and shield. To the left, stands a diminutive creature with pointy ears. In the background, a blue dragon slinks over a snowy mountain.

I had never seen cover art like this. Every scratch on the shield, every dragon scale, every sword pommel or belt buckle or fold of clothing -- the details suggested an entire world. It was about magic, fierce creatures, brave warriors, and adventure.

I took the book home and read it. I didn't even realize, until the end, that it was a sequel. So I went back to the library, and grabbed the first book, Dragons of Autumn Twilight. I read that one, and then the third book, and the fourth and fifth and sixth.

I began reading other novels from the same publisher -- Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft, but mostly Dragonlance. These were all novels written for the Dungeons and Dragons game. I enjoyed the game, and I enjoyed the novels just as much, maybe more.

Around the same time, I discovered Roger Zelazny. I read his Amber books, and reread them twice since. There are no elves or dwarves or dragons here. It's innovative fantasy, surreal and gripping. More people need to read Roger Zelazny.

Skip a few years forward to 1994. I'm fourteen, and I'm writing my first story. I only meant it to be two or three pages long, but it ends up being fifty pages. It's a novella about a group of humans hiding in a jungle. The rest of the world is destroyed; robots had risen up and decimated humanity. It was heavily inspired by The Terminator, and has been lost to the ages. I wasn't sure if the story was good, but I knew that I loved writing. I knew that I wanted to write a novel.

So I began to write one.

It begins in a medieval castle. The main character, Lyle, is a teenage squire. Shadowy, reptilian creatures murdered his parents years ago. Today Lyle is training to become a knight. Despite his dark past, he's an easy-going fellow, and something of a smart alec. With his friends, he pulls pranks on the master-of-arms, a pompous bulldog of a man with a bushy mustache. He cracks jokes. He's your typical teenager with no care in the world.

A legless slave lives in the castle. During the days, he hunkers under the tables with the dogs, feeding on scraps. He's a mysterious old man who always seems to be watching Lyle.

One day, those reptilian creatures return. They attack the castle and begin killing everyone. As the carnage goes on, the legless slave hands Lyle an amulet. When Lyle places it around his neck, great power fills him. He goes into a blind rage. He kills many of the invading creatures -- the Dark Ones. Finally he passes out.

When he wakes up, the castle is destroyed. Only the legless slave and himself still live. The slave is wounded. He tells Lyle, "I'm your father. The Dark Ones didn't kill me all those years ago. They only took my legs. I stayed in the castle, now nothing but a lowly slave, to watch over you. This amulet will give you some power. Four other amulets exist. You must find them. Only when the five amulets are together, will you be powerful enough to defeat the Dark Ones."

With that, the old man dies. Heartbroken, Lyle goes on a quest to find the four other amulets. On the way, he has many adventures. He travels through an enchanted kingdom of elves, where he falls in love with a beautiful elven maiden. She joins him, as does her brother, a frail wizard who's suspiciously similar to Dragonlance's Raistlin. They keep travelling in search of the amulets, and are eventually joined by other heroes -- an archer from the far north, a fierce warrior woman, and a slave girl with psychic powers. The companions fight Dark Ones as they seek the amulets of power.

I wrote a good 400 or 500 pages. Then I stopped.

I'm not sure why I stopped. Maybe because the book just wasn't very good, and I somehow realized that. Maybe because, after hundreds of pages, the story was only beginning. The heroes hadn't even found all the amulets, hadn't even made much progress!

In short, I ran out of steam.

So I put this book aside, and I read The Lord of the Rings. I was fifteen.

I don't know why I waited so long to read The Lord of the Rings. I had read The Hobbit a few years earlier, but it never grabbed me; I was probably too busy with Dragonlance at the time. In any case, I finally read Rings, and loved it. To this day, I think Frodo and Sam's journey through Mordor is some of the best fantasy writing out there.

I began to read George R. R. Martin around the same time. A Game of Thrones hadn't been released yet, but GRRM was around and kicking and writing good things. It's 1998, and I'm eighteen, before I read A Game of Thrones. It changes everything I knew about fantasy. I had read doorstoppers before -- Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, and others -- but A Game of Thrones seemed different. It's dark, gritty, and realistic. I hadn't known fantasy characters could speak four-letter words. I hadn't known main characters could die.

I was nineteen when I finally finished writing a real novel. It's called Firefly Island, and a real publisher called Five Star actually bought it and published it. Firefly Island isn't as polished as my later books. Some scenes are a bit clunky, I think, especially the romantic ones; you can tell a teenager wrote them. But the book is miles better than my story about the robots and the Dark Ones. Five Star Publishing agreed.

Five Star is a small publisher. They only printed and sold 700 hardcovers. But their check didn't bounce, and suddenly I was a published author. So I kept writing more stories, and sold a few to magazines. And I wrote three more novels. They weren't that good – not as good as Firefly Island, I think – and nobody published them.

They're still buried in the shadowy depths of my hard drive.

Finally, in 2010... Kindle. Lovely, beautiful Kindle arrived in Canada, my country. Blessed, revolutionary Kindle. So I dug up old Firefly Island, and uploaded it to the Kindle store. And it began to sell. It sold 2,000 copies.

I wrote more novels. I wrote all those stories kicking around in my brain, the kind I loved growing up, the stories inspired by Dragonlance, Amber, Lord of the Rings, and A Game of Thrones. Into the Kindle store, I released my novels Flaming Dove, The Gods of Dream, and Eye of the Wizard. And I decided it's time to write a series -- an actual fantasy series like all the cool kids were writing -- so I wrote Blood of Requiem and its sequel Tears of Requiem. There will be a third book too someday, if people like these ones.

So there you have it. I blame my parents for forcing me to read that first book. And I blame Larry Elmore for all those swords, dragons, and suits of armor. And I blame Amazon for popularizing e-books and giving so many authors a new voice.

I'm an adult now, a real one, thirty-something years old if you'd believe it. I know how to pay the gas bill, and do my taxes, and act all civilized among other adults. But when I sit down to write, there's a small part of me that's still a wide-eyed kid, one of those D&D geeks from school, who's going: "Whoa, dragons, cool!"

-- Daniel Arenson