I found out today that I'm going to have weekends off and will likely be scheduled an average of 20 hours a week from now on. Instead of moping about how little money I'm going to have, I feel I should treat this as an opportunity to pursue some creative endeavors. I have been planning since starting this exercise to periodically write some creative blurbs or fictional scenes involving some of my old characters. So far this hasn't happened. A couple of months ago I typed out a pretty long document discussing some of the characters I've created over the years. Despite a lot of them having some pretty terrible names (Tommy, Timmy, etc), I felt like there was something salvageable there. I still care about those characters in a way.
Of course, the main character that always springs to mind is Dalkaen. I've used the name as my own on message boards, League of Legends, Twitter, and just about everywhere else on the internet for years and years. The only other names I've used are Alec Figaro (a reference to Final Fantasy VI, a game I'd very much like to discuss here someday) and Terakiel, which is still just a reference to Dalkaen anyway. I wrote and rewrote many stories about this character, but he never solidified into something that was really human. He was a mishmash of ideas and my own thoughts and attitudes about the world around me. He was emotionally dead, as I often felt myself to be. This, of course, turned out not to be true.
As a teenager I was absolutely fascinated and engrossed by high fantasy--both literature and video games. As mentioned previously on this blog I was never a D&D player, but I still loved dwarves and trolls and goblins. I read a lot of novels from the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, most of which I've forgotten by now. R. A. Salvatore, however, wrote incredibly visceral battle scenes that teenage me responded to. I was fascinated by violence in a way that I guess I find a little disturbing now. When I wrote my own fantasy stories then, I would try to emulate that brutality. Every story would start in the middle of a fight and every important plot point involved violence in some way. I really skimped on interpersonal relationships between my characters. It was like I was trying to write episodes of Dragon Ball Z.
Don't get me wrong. War and fighting are pretty darn important in fantasy stories and if I wrote something like that they definitely would not be absent. But that would not be my primary focus. I don't think I want to write "high" fantasy anyway. Sure, my story isn't going to take place in the real world and non-humans will play an integral role, but I'd much rather stray from a lot of the established tropes. I understand how difficult it is to write something original these days but that's not really what I'm looking for either. I just want to write characters that I--and subsequently the reader--care about.
So who is Dalkaen? Well, it depends on which version of the story you read, I guess. He's a sorcerer or mage of some kind, but he's not some practiced spellcaster who reads incantations from books. No, his power is much more primal, much rawer than that. Its something that comes directly from his blood and it is terrifying. It threatens to engulf him if he is not careful. It's sort of like the Hulk, I guess. If you don't keep your composure you are a danger to those around you. As it turns out, Dalkaen was a danger to his family, more specifically his father. In many versions of the story, Dalkaen is responsible for his father's death as a young man, possibly just shy of his teenage years.
How does one recover from that? I'm not sure I'm emotionally mature enough to make a good judgment there. It would do me some good to do my research on how children respond to extreme trauma. The Showtime series Dexter would have you believe that witnessing a violent death at such a young age provokes dark urges that must be kept in check. I wonder just how big a part that kind of guilt can play in the formation of a man.
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