You cannot cleave a ghost in twain with a cast-iron fireplace poker. Throwing snowballs at vampires will not keep your blood from being drained. And bugbears don’t really have an aversion to little girls in pink dresses (except for little Tessie Trueheart of the Green Dale; that little booger has a temper as large as her love for the color pink).
To go adventuring in Mickey the Dungeonmaster’s dungeons, you need the right equipment. Of course, whole books full of weapons and armor and adventuring doodads have been published. Some of the stuff we use in the family games comes from the game books, as exemplified by the items pictured above. The Blue Wood Armor of the Forest Guardian is a collection of items put together from the books published for D&D by Wizards of the Coast Publishing.
My daughter’s favorite weapon is a sentient throwing knife that always flies back to its current master after being thrown. It also never misses, adjusting its own flight to always strike the target for the greatest possible damage. It has a mind and intelligence of its own. It became sentient and alive in the middle of an epic combat with a magical giant golem who hit it with a spell that went disastrously wrong for the caster. This item was created on the spur of the moment in the midst of a published adventure, based on a disasterously low roll of the dice for the monster side of the combat.
Some items in the game are actually treasures from the published adventure scenarios I like to use. Instead of simply selling off items when they are discovered in the cold, dead hands of defeated evil druids whose dreams of conquest and tyrannical rule you have thwarted, you can take them for your own personal use. I have a tendency to embellish what is described in the pages of the adventure with both really good powers and effects, and really insidious concealed curses. The Legendary Black Blades are both demon-laced and deadly. And both, though fatal to your enemies, will eventually darken your own heart and possibly shorten your adventuring life the hard way.
Not all equipment is made of swords and armor. The Evil Heads of Dr. Zorgo are a collection of living zombie heads that can impart wisdom and information (allowing characters to add skills) and can also direct you to places of adventure and great treasure. Of course, they are evil. There is always that little factor to consider. But come on, how can you not be tempted by treasures talked about by the Ghost Elf’s head when you tried to ask her for the time of day in her native land?
So the point of this post is that I am really proud of my drawings of D&D equipment and wanted to show them off. This post is merely an excuse for doing that. I have one more to show you, though I must confess, while I drew this one, it was designed by number one son to be used for his character, though as soon as he got it made, he sold it for lots of gold to use on the next project.
Werewolf Writing
But I can tell you a few things about my novel.
First of all, the werewolf of the title is not really a werewolf. He is instead a boy afflicted with a genetic hair-growth disorder called hypertrichosis. It is genetic in nature and runs in families. It may skip generations. But it is a hard thing to deal with in terms of self image for the sufferer. Once the wearers of werewolf hair were treated as circus freaks, to be marveled at, pitied, and sometimes reviled.
But this is a horror novel of sorts, not really about the hypertrichosis sufferer, but more about another member of the family who has become abusive in increasingly horrible ways. And the murders in the book are committed using canines as weapons.
The wolfishness is not located in the animals, but in the heart of a man.
There is a lot of Saturday night black and white horror movie watching in the 70’s that went into this book. It also comes to fruition by way of my own experience being sexually assaulted at the age of ten. The fear and self-loathing that this story has to tell about are metaphorically very real things. I was not myself a monsterous-looking creature in my youth, but I felt the same feelings of isolation and rejection that one of the main characters, the boy with werewolf hair feels in this book. Part of why it took me twenty years to write this tale is my own personal struggle to overcome my own fear and self-loathing.
But even though this book comes to its conclusion with silver bullets and death by wolf fang, it is basically a comedy. Comedy, in the Shakespearean sense, always ends with the hero getting the girl and the monsters defeated. And it has a few laughs that not even the death-by-teeth parts can overturn.
So, I am glad I am finally finished with this book. Not edited and published, but finished as an exercise in wringing things out of the terrible nightmares and monstrous memories buried in my cluttered old brain.
Leave a comment
Filed under artwork, autobiography, commentary, horror movie, horror writing, humor, novel, NOVEL WRITING, Paffooney
Tagged as novel writing, The Baby Werewolf