For the past six weeks, I’ve been posting about my books and those of friends. I’m almost out of books of my own until I finish some more. This week my posts will be themed around my young adult fantasy novel, The Sign of the Sword.
Intrepid Force and The Sign of the Sword are both products of my late teens, and it gives me a wonderful sense of nostalgia to go back to them. One difference between the two is that I later rewrote Intrepid Force from scratch, whereas The Sign of the Sword still contains a lot of original material from way back when. It has been touched up and polished but never completely rewritten. This is what it’s about:
Losing Stacy was only the beginning. Still reeling from the loss of their friend, Arthur, Lance, Chris, and Angie joined their teacher on a carriage ride through the forest, passed through a fog bank, and found themselves in another world entirely. Within an hour of their arrival, they were chased by silver-eyed, cybernetic giants, attacked by a werewolf, and rescued by a ragged stranger who claimed to be the heir of King Arthur’s throne. Their only chance of ever returning to their own world lay in joining Ambrose Pendragon on his quest to defeat the armies of Samhain the daemon-lord and restore the fabled kingdom of Camelot. Could they and this vagabond king succeed against seemingly impossible odds or were they doomed to die in the forests of an alien land?
When I first started writing this novel, I had a mood, a setting, and some interesting characters, but the story lacked an emotional core. Then my brother lost one of his classmates in an accident. The death of a teenager when you’re a teenager is heart-wrenching on so many levels. The person is gone, and you see her empty desk at school. Her school books are still in her friend’s car. And there’s a terrifying sense of your own mortality, like life is only a thin web over a bottomless abyss. Christians were supposed to believe Christ offered hope in the face of those realities. Did I really believe that in a way that could make any kind of emotional, existential difference, or was it just doctrine?
Those were some of the things I was working through at the time I was writing, and the emotional center of the story came out of that. The power of our favorite fantasy stories is that they give you a way to deal with realities that might otherwise be too raw to deal with in any other way. I wrote once about being able to see the hope of heaven more clearly through the mists of Avalon than through stylized images of clouds and harps. C.S. Lewis had shown it through the lens of Narnia, and Tolkien had given us a hint of it with his immortal elves. I was reading their books then and trying, in my own clumsy way, to follow in their footsteps.
This is a link to a music video from Legend, an old Ridley Scott classic. It came out about two years after I wrote the original draft of this novel. The lyrics of the song are about the power of legends to remind us of timeless truths.
(Note: If the resolution in the video bothers you, I’ll add a link to an HD version. It uses the same song, but I liked the scene selection better in the one I posted above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6IL2dAm3ldk)