The Villager's Tale: Author's Notes
The original version of The Villager's Tale was written around January 11th, 1994.
It was part of our daily writing exercises, called The Daily Dash; our school was on an
eight-day rotating schedule, and on every Day 8 we were to hand in a good copy of any Daily
Dash that we wanted. As a result, the original version of The Villager's Tale had
silly punning references to The Daily Dash and our teacher, Mrs. G. These were replaced by
silly punning references to Geocities and its 11 MB file limit for the HTML version.
Most of the punctuation (except for "...", which was spaced oddly and annoyingly) has
been kept intact. Apparently, I really, really liked commas and semicolons.
Nevertheless, Mrs. G gave me kind comments on this assignment. I think. She either said
that if I ever tired of brain-surgery, I should try my hand at writing, or she said
that she couldn't say enough good things so she wouldn't, or she suggested that I
expand this into a novel. I believe it was my first two-part Daily Dash (since the full,
double-spaced version of this was 9 pages or so, I didn't think it fair to burden her with
that).
That said, this story might as well have been titled "Attack of the Raistlinoids". The Jerym
character was very much inspired by my limited knowledge of the famous silver-haired sickly
mage from Krynn (I think I read
Tales of Love and War in elementary school, giving me a rather romanticized and idealized
vision of Raistlin); the were-dragon idea was probably also inspired by Love and War.
After this story, I attempted to write a Dragonlance Fanfic that combined this story with the
world of Krynn; in the end, though, I think this story deserves its own world and its own rules.
I have an unfinished "prequel" story that would explain some of the more cryptic elements of
the tale. Without spoiling that story, however, some additional information about our leads:
Tamsin is what I call a moon-dragon. She is a nocturnal creature who has, for mysterious
mystical purposes, twin unicorn horns. (Ever since elementary school, I have had a habit of
imbuing mystical creatures and dinosaurs with unicorn horns. There's just something neat
about an ivory horn spiralling out of the forehead!) She has a long neck and slender head
because I happen to find plesiosaur-y shapes aesthetically pleasing. The gossamer wings were
probably because I like the word "gossamer", plus I'd gotten the idea somehow that dragons
were meant to fly. I no longer know if "gossamer" wings are right for the moon-dragon;
shimmering bat-wings might have worked better.
Since the full moon and magic are closely tied in this world, the magic within Tamsin waxes with
the moon. Unfortunately, this makes it harder for her to maintain her human shape; hence, her
constant weariness when bathed in moonlight.
Jerym, aside from being a cheap knockoff of Raistlin, is from a fairly noble background.
Despite his social graces, he is not completely at ease among people; hence, his tendency
to sit alone and his inability to dance. (I think there was some self-insertion at work
here.)
As I was HTMLing this, a lot of glaring mistakes leapt out at me. Although this is another
of my favourite stories, it has a lot of punctuation errors... some annoying hokey attempts
at dialect... terrible examples of foreshadowing... and some repetitive phrases. I think
the latter may be due to the fact that it was a two-part assignment, and I wasn't sure where
the page-break would occur. Nevertheless, this story could probably use a lot of
polishing.
(And what's with The Villager's vocabulary, anyways? He knows an awful lot of big words.)
Many of the names in this story were from a Name Your Baby Astrology book that I found in my parents' record collection. They were selected for their pseudo-archaic fantasy feel.
- Alain
- Actually, I think I just like multiple vowels in a row. In grade 3, I had a crush on an older student named Shaun. Later, I liked Alistair Sims mostly for his name. I guess Alain caught my eye because it was like "Alan", only cooler.
- Susa
- As far as I know, I made up this name. It's like "Susan", only it's missing the "n". Which makes it all archaic and fantastic and kewl.
- Jerym
- Isn't this a gorgeous name? Isn't it terrific? Jerym. Jair-rim. Jair-eem. Like Jerry
and Jeremy and so many other names combined into just two syllables.
Too bad it doesn't exist.
Although there was an entry for "Jerym" in the index of the Name Your Baby book, it appears to have been a typo. The "real" name is "Jermyn" which means "from Germany". - Tamsin
- Another possibly typo name. It's either Tamsin or Tasmin. I like Tamsin better, possibly because I like the syllable "tam". Tambourine, Tam-o-shanter, Tam-agotchi. Isn't that a nice sound?
Although this is an old (and in many places, unforgiveably hokey) story, I'm fond of it.
And I hope to someday get started on finish the prequel.
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