Welcome
Much of modern day fantasy is watered down, contrived, and self indulgent. The beautiful worlds created by incredible talents like Martin, Sanderson, & Jordan become wastelands of adverbs and lost direction. Instead of leaving a Tolkein-esque legacy of brilliance, creativity, and imagination, networks scramble to finish someone else’s story.
That sucks.
And it was the motivation to begin a foray into writing I’ll never return from. I was through the 4th book in Martin’s A Song of Ice & Fire series, or as non-readers (how there is such a thing, I’ll never quite understand) call it: Game of Thrones. Side note: I do think the show was better than the books, a very unpopular opinion within this community, but I am who I am and I’m not sorry. This book was a complete SLOG to get through, and later I found out that Martin wasn’t even going to finish his series, instead letting HBO do it for him.
That sucks.
And I said to myself, ‘I could write a fucking book.’ And over the course of the next 6 years, in between a deployment to Afghanistan, earning my Masters Degree, getting divorced, starting a strength & conditioning company in Arizona, and figuring out what life after the Army was, I did exactly that.
For me, fantasy is a way to explore the foundational concepts that make us human. Evil doers can truly push the boundaries of morality, heroes can embody everything we want to be in our own lives but can’t, and every concept in between is as muddled, confusing, frustrating, and gray as our own realities often seem, yet unbound by science and unlimited by our understanding.
No matter how black a day becomes, I have the characters in Halja to show me how to be brave; how to persevere. No matter how lovely my life seems in a given moment, I have the characters of Halja to remind me that darkness doesn’t take rest days, even when the sun is shining. And no matter how fruitless, boring, meaningless, or artificial fate decides to be, I have the characters of Halja to take my mind on countless adventures; to teach me lessons about the world and to prompt me to dream.
That doesn’t suck.
The narratives I write on this website will not be polished, they will often be opinionated, sometimes they will be fun, sometimes they will be boring, and sometimes they won’t make any sense. But they will always be me and you will always be welcome to dream with me here.
Together, we will remain far outside the confines of the day-to-day and we will steer clear of what everyone else tells us that we need to do. We’ll take the long way around, and most certainly, we will suffer. But taking the long way around will give us more time to figure out where we’re going. And when we get there, it will all have been worth it.
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“When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” -Hunter S. Thompson
Current book I’m reading: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch