Dear Reader,

      Stories, like poetry, come to us for different reasons. Maybe it pops in our heads, maybe we heard or read something and we come up with our own ideas. Regardless, the mind of the literary artist is a wonderful, and sometimes magical thing.

      I write stories for the thrill. Sometimes we get that IDEA! and we're the seaboat captain in a hurricane, and the idea is the rough sea and we're only piloting it with every scrap of our soul, putting the words in their places to transfix the reader into the extraordinary. Books are the closest thing to a teleporter we've got, so we're doing our best to wisk you away to Never Never Land!

      Screenplays were my first loves, and like our first loves, we never forget the first time we get to see them for their full entirety, naked to the world and soul to bare. When you finish a great chapter, or the main character saves the day, or the bad guy gets it in the end, the feeling is momumental. To me, that is writing. It doesn't matter how little or how much you write, the feeling is there, whether big or small.

      For me, this is the first real novel I have done. After a few screenplays, and a ton of poetry, this IDEA! came to me in the late week of October, 2004. This is when I got my first laptop, a EArmyU laptop that most hand calculators can outsmart. I started the story idea, and I puttered on it for a while, doing a line here, or a paragraph there, for quite a while, until the end of Febuary. At Febuary 2005, I went to Fort Polk, LA, for JRTC training, and worked 16 hour days. Whenever there was a lull, or I was actually off, I worked on the outline of this story, by way of paper and pencil.

      Getting back to New York in early April, I had with me multiple pages of a rough draft outline of where I wanted my story to go. I started typing on it again, a few lines here, a few paragraphs there, until about June. I got stuck in a rut. Not a writer's block, a roadblock; I didn't like where it was going! For months, the story sat in perpeptual stagnacy, the thirty or so pages I had so painstakingly typed sitting there, using up 40 or so kilobytes of space. I could have deleted it, like many of my failed stories, but I didn't. I even kept the outline, which wasn't worth anything, since the story didn't even follow it.!

      August 2005 rolled around and I found myself on a plane trip to Baghdad. For many months, the story sat on my laptop desktop, a Word Document gathering digital dust. I hadn't opened it in months, much less touched it. I would get the hope of starting up again, open it, read the last few pages, and close it in disgust, unable to write a word. I was frustrated.

      It was either fate or God laughing that inspired me, but all it took was one person going home.

      In the third week of January, 2006, a soldier I work with went on leave. In his place, I worked his job; the worst job in existance. I answered phones, cleaned after everyone, and sat at a desk with the entertainment value of watching paint dry or grass grow. I wasn't thrilled.

      After two days of this career monstrocity, I brought in my laptop, in hopes of either listening to music or secretly playing Solitaire for 15 hours a day (the job's hours). Instead, I opened this story, a story I hadn't worked on in months. I opened it, and I typed a word, just for the hell of it. I followed it with another, and another.

      What the fuck?

      With that, I deleted the last paragraph, and started writing on it again. From 7 in the morning until about noon, all anyone could hear were the clattering of my fingers on a keyboard going about 60 wpm. The spacebar sounded like a machinegun going off and people swore my fingers were a blur. I was like a junkie getting a hit with as much blow as I wanted; I had the storm, I was sailing the seven seas in the Titanic and the iceburgs took the day off. In a 12 hour period, I had added 12 new pages, and edited 20 more.

      This went on for about 2 weeks.

      Now it is mid-May, and I am around 200 pages strong. People have read subscripts of my story, wanted it in digits, and I even printed out 170 pages of it and mailed it 10,000 miles for someone to read the thing, spelling errors and all. The story had a mind of its' own, and I was just the guy at the end of the leash.

      Join Crois and her companions on their adventure that will take them over many leagues, and through many difficulties. I've walked with them every step of the way, and I'm still keeping up with them!

      I introduce to you, Maidens Of The Silver: Bloodlines



      yer pal



      Jersey Daniel Gibson

05/27/2006

Author's Note: Chapter 01

Posted on 05/26/2006
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