I started the week with fond remembrances of cliff-diving without the water. And I started that post with a link back to other stories from my childhood, exploring the far forested acres of my parents’ farm.

I blamed the recent nostalgia on my childhood buddy Josh, for mentioning some of those stories on Facebook, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve been thinking about them recently anyway. I’ve had to, because I’m currently writing a little me.

(Anyone who’s utterly terrified of even the slightest spoilers should probably get out of here right now, because I’m going to talk a little bit about the books in the Dragonprince Trilogy. I won’t be giving away anything that would actually hurt your enjoyment of the story any, but some people can be a little dogmatic about avoiding all hints whatsoever.)

Anyway, Courtney gave her Works-in-Progress update yesterday, so let me give you a little peek into mine:

20-Year-Old Daven in The Dragonswarm

Ever since publishing Taming Fire in June, I’ve been plugging away at the sequel, The Dragonswarm. The Dragonswarm picks up right where Taming Fire left off–or close enough, anyway. Six weeks after the end of the first book, we dive right back into Daven’s point-of-view and pick up his adventure.

No surprise there, because The Dragonswarm was originally written as the second half of (a very different) Taming Fire. Now the new volume finishes his story even as it starts the dragonswarm that’s destined to wipe humanity from the earth.

The original book coasted from Teelevon to Fort Palmagnes on nothing but the raw momentum of Daven’s early experiences, but now that it’s a separate volume it needs some extra material to get it up to speed.

So I’ve been working hard to finish the sequel to Taming Fire, but mostly that has been a matter of writing the first three chapters. Somewhere in chapter four I’ll stitch the old and new together, and then it’s just touch-up all the way to the glorious end.

Most of the work of that new beginning is building the emotion–creating a strong sympathy in the reader for Daven and his plight. That’s most of the touch-up I’ll be doing on the rest of the books, too: managing where and how and which emotions I try to appeal to in readers as I tell Daven’s tale of true love lost.

15-Year-Old Taryn in The Dragonprince

The Dragonswarm wraps up the story of Daven’s rise to power, but it ends with humanity on the brink of destruction. I can’t leave my readers there! (And, for that matter, I can’t leave all that drama untold!)

So the third book in the trilogy wraps up the story of the dragonswarm. The Dragonprince takes place fifteen years after the events of The Dragonswarm, as the last of the dragons are going to sleep.

And now we move on to the next generation. Instead of Daven’s, The Dragonprince is told from the point of view of his son, Taryn, who has grown up in the fortress his father built.

We get to see Daven for the first time through someone else’s eyes. We also get to see Isabelle and the jerk of a king through this kid’s eyes, and we get to explore a shattered version of the decadent, corrupted world Daven had battled his way through.

Boys Being Boys

Those are both really exciting books. I’ve got them plotted, I’ve got them structured, and I love where both stories are headed. I’ve been having so much fun working on them.

But I get to face a special challenge, because I do have to work on them. My goal had been to finish Book Two over the summer, because I was already committed to developing Book Three as my Master’s Project over the course of the fall semester.

I didn’t get it done. I’m close, but I’m not done. And the fall semester started last week. So instead of finishing Daven’s story and then telling Taryn’s, I’m now actively telling both. I’m preparing 25 pages a week of The Dragonprince for my professor to review, and in the meantime I’m still scrambling to finish up The Dragonswarm whenever I can find a free moment.

The fascinating thing about it all is how easy it is to keep the two apart. The stories are vastly different, of course, but every now and then I worried how I would keep Daven (who started out as a 17-year-old in desperate circumstances) recognizably distinct from Taryn (who starts out as a 15-year-old in desperate circumstances).

But so far it’s working like magic. And strangely enough, that’s because both characters are based on me as young man.

Writing in the Mirror

For what it’s worth, all my characters are based on me. Yes, even the girls. Everyone I write is a character I can imagine being, and that means to some extent it’s me in an alternate reality.

It might be me as a sports guy, or me as a buff warrior, or me as a handsome and popular public figure. It’s fiction, after all.

But Daven and Taryn are both modeled more closely off a me who lived on that quiet little hobby farm in northeast Oklahoma. They’re based on very different aspects of him, though.

Daven’s the roamer, the explorer, the outdoor guy who loved spending his time climbing and swimming and building and digging. And Taryn’s the other me. The reader, the dreamer, the spoiled kid from a happy family pretending to live in poverty.

It’s fascinating how different those two people are. It’s enlightening to spend some time remembering them, evaluating them, and seeing what kind of men they could have grown up to be–their relationships, their goals, their motivations and fears. Their destinies.

They’re a lot of fun to write, and I’m having a great time getting to know them. That’s one of the special joys of the writer’s life. And there’s another one, too: When I put the pen down, when I stop imagining these fantasy versions of me, I get a whole new perspective on the real one.

I’ve been a bunch of people in my time. But here and now, I’m awfully happy to be the version of me I am. And I’m grateful to all of you for helping me become him.

Once upon a time, I was a boy with nothing to do but explore the worlds I found in my imagination, and decorate them with little bits of mundane reality. I lived for free time and fairy tales.

That doesn’t really narrow the context at all, does it? Very well. Let’s say once upon a time I was about ten years old, and my family lived on a hobby farm outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, and I got much more use out of our forested fourteen acres as a playground than my parents ever got out of it as farmland.

I’ve talked about it here before. Way back in the earliest days of the blog, I talked about my Blackberry Fort. I was reminded of it last week when I posted my poll asking what topic should I focus on in the non-fiction book I’m writing this fall.

I asked the same question over on Facebook (as you can see in the illustration above), and my childhood friend Josh suggested I do an autobiography. Specifically, he suggested:

Tell the true tale of how you once created a zip line down into the valley as a way to escape from your hideout made out of a sticker bush!!! 🙂

And if you’ll look back at the other post I linked, you’ll see I already told the story about making a hideout out of a sticker bush (and a couple other hideouts to boot). The zip line was kind of a funny story, too.

See…I got something like an allowance when we lived on the farm. We were allowed to earn some spending money by working. Cleaning our rooms and household chores didn’t count, but working on the farm did.

So when we spent our Saturdays gathering rocks from the fresh-tilled garden and throwing them down the hill, we made a few bucks. If I went willingly to gather the eggs from the henhouse, I might end up with walking-around money.

And then I had to figure out what to do with it. My favorite destination was always the feed store. The Co-Op in town, with its wall full of handy tools and its weekly discount flyer. I can’t count the number of hours I spent staring at the handheld welding torch, calculating how many chores I’d have to do to bring that thing home one Saturday….

I never actually bought it. I did buy a pulley. I knew all about pulleys from one or another illustrated physics books I’d collected somewhere along the lines, and I thought having one around could prove quite handy. Turned out…I was wrong.

I just didn’t have that many things that needed lifting. So I ended up paying out several weeks’ worth of allowance to buy a big block of shiny steel I couldn’t really use.

As the Blackberry Fort story goes to show, I never let anything go to waste. I was constantly thinking, figuring, trying to find a way to turn my boring life into something amazing.

I suspect I was probably watching an episode of G. I. Joe when I finally got my brilliant idea, but somewhere along the way I’d caught a glimpse of a zip line in action–some reckless adventurer hanging suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, flying along at incredible speeds as he descended safely from a great height. And my thinking went: Well, I’ve got this pulley. And there’s plenty of rope….

So one Sunday afternoon when Josh was over hanging out, I borrowed some laundry rope from the shed out back, grabbed my pulley from its customary place in my desk drawer, and headed to the far end of our property where some shale cliffs towered high (eight feet or so) over the majestic river (muddy creek) that carved a path across our pasture.

We found a tree up top of the cliff and tied off the rope. I had along the ’50s-era Boyscout Handbook my granddad had once given me, and I double-checked all my knots for the sake of our safety. Then we threw the rest of the rope over the edge before taking the long path down and around to the base of the cliffs.

Then we stretched the rope as far as it would go, and tied it off low around the trunk of a tree growing by the stream bed. We stood back and stared in admiration. In all, it was probably a fifty-foot length of rope, but it looked like an awfully glorious run to us.

So we scampered back around and up to the top of the cliffs. We realized we’d made a mistake so we untied the rope, slipped the pulley onto it, and tied it off again. I double-checked my knots one more time. This was our safety we were talking about.

Josh found a stick that would fit through the loop in the top of the pulley, so we threaded that through for a bar to hang from. I held the pulley tight while Josh tugged on the branch with both hands, to make sure it would hold our weight. We didn’t want it snapping while we were in mid-flight!

But everything seemed ready. I don’t remember which one of us was brave enough to go first, so I’ll just say it was me. I stepped up to the edge, reminding myself not to look down (never look down), but I could feel the yawning abyss stretching out beneath me.

I tightened my grip on the makeshift handle. I peered down the length of the line to make sure there were no obstructions, but it seemed safe. I caught my breath, steeled my nerves, and I jumped forward off the cliff.

Funny thing about clothesline: It’s very stretchy. We might as well have used bungie cord. I jumped forward off the cliff, my weight dragged down on the pulley, and the line bent straight down to the ground. I landed hard about two paces away from the cliff face.

Legs and hands all scraped and bruised, I looked up the cliff face to see Josh peering down. His eyes were wide with excitement. As I hauled myself painfully to my feet, he called down to me, “That was so cool! My turn.”

I went to fetch the pulley, where it had settled some forty feet off at the bottom of our line. “Okay,” I called back up to him. “But then it’s my turn again!”