Storyteller's Forum

Behind the Mists of The Triads of Tir na n’Og

Okay, I confess: I didn't come up with all this on my own.  Huge, vast, inflated amounts of credit go to my husband, Dameon Willich.

 The Triads of Tir na n’Og series and the stories from Tales from Opa are based on the world and concepts invented by Dameon.  Back in the 80’s, he, along with a few old friends, created the first version of this universe for a series of LARPs (Live-Action Role Playing, for you non-gamers) for The Fantasy Alternative, wherein a large number of hard-core and hyperactive role-players, survivalists, martial artists, ex-navy seals, and other elements of society best kept safely occupied, ran around in the woods in full armor and elaborate costumes shooting arrows at one another, laying traps, casting spells, and bashing one another with shanai.  It was all good, clean fun, and almost no one got hurt.  Well, not often, anyway. 

 TFA was the longest-running continuous LARP in the US for many years, a record I believe it still holds.  Out of the hundreds of games held by the TFA, the ones Dameon wrote are widely remembered as the most fun and exciting.   I am still amazed by the number of people, many of them adults now with children of their own, who come up to us and tell us of games they vividly remember playing when they were kids growing up in TFA.

 At the time, Dameon was working as an artist for DC comics, working with Mike Grell on a number of different titles.  He wrote up a proposal for a comic that was to be called “The Ironlords,” based on the history he invented for his game world.  DC passed on the idea, but Dameon held onto it.  He developed a tabletop RPG based in the same world, honing and refining some of the concepts.  When I met him in 1994, he had been running Triad games in Tir na n’Og around the gaming table for several years. 

 Once we married, he enlisted my help writing scripts for the Seattle Knight shows based in the same universe.  I found it complex and fascinating, filled with endless story potential.  But it seemed incomplete.  I started asking questions.  “If everyone leaves home at 16, who keeps society going?” “Are Triads ever just Broken by the Fey without anyone dying?” “Where is Anagni in relation to Killaloe?” “How does the whole ‘time’ thing work?” “What do the color Factions actually stand for?”  Dameon re-thought some of his initial concepts and together we refined the society, the culture, the world.  Some of those show scripts would make great stories for the Tales from Opa series.  Who knows?  They may show up there.

 One day, while digging around for information to use in a script, I came upon his story treatment for “The Ironlords.”  I was hooked.  I asked him if someday I could write a story based in his world, and he said yes.

 It wasn’t for another couple of years, after The Strawberry Roan had been snagged by an agent willing to peddle it, that I picked up the idea again.  I wanted to do a story that would introduce readers to a lot of the world’s background.  “What if,” I thought, “a young priest from, say, the 1300’s, was to find himself in Tir na n’Og, dealing with this incredible kaleidoscope of strangeness that would violate his entire sense of reality?”  Eventually, the young priest became a young religious scholar named Jean LeFleur, an admirer of Jean Froissart.  I turned him loose in Tir na n’Og to see what he’d do.  I think I learned as much along the way as he did.  Eventually, the story became “Heart of a Cavalier,” the first story in Tales from Opa.

 The second story, "Sign of the Golden Archer," I wrote mostly for laughs, but the third one, "Westmere", was actually based on a real-live (sort of) incident.  Dameon wrote a live game for friends of his, and we spent the weekend at their property -- largely forest and swamp out in the middle of nowhere -- with better than a dozen good friends, playing it out.  It turned out to be one of the most memorable and riveting games I've ever participated in, one the participants still talk about whenever we get together. 

 Unfortunately, due to a torrential rainstorm that started Saturday night and never let up, thereby turning most of the landscape into a swamp, we were unable to finish the game, so Dameon gathered us all into "the bar," and told the rest of the tale. 

 We'll never know exactly how it would have ended -- after all, the players decide how the story goes once it gets started--but I came away from that game with the basic germ of the story of Westmere.  The only problem I had in writing it was sticking with one person's point of view.  There's so much Ton-Kel never witnessed or knew of.  Still so much of the story untold.  Ah, well.  I did what I could.

 The Triads of Tir na n’Og was the second book I wrote about this world, after Tales from Opa.  It started as a treatment for a movie script; a long-standing ambition of Dameon’s.  We based it on the original story from “The Ironlords,” but, thinking we had a great idea for an ongoing series, we decided to keep that original main story thread as a background, and weave different, multiple story lines through it.  I still think it was a great idea.  However, the proposal was turned down (I forget by which production company now) and the treatment moldered in the computer for a year or so before I looked at it and thought, “Hmmm.  There’s a book in there.”

 In those days I was still heavily involved in the actual performance end of the Seattle Knight shows, being one of only four women jousters, and very much in demand.  Being on the road 6 months out of the year for the shows played havoc with my writing schedule.  Never prolific, I stopped even trying to write during show season–which generally ran from May to October.  Thus, it took me at least 2 years and a bit to write a book each time.  Once I finished Tales from Opa, I decided to give myself a leg up on the next project by tackling the script treatment, figuring that with an outline already in place, it would speed things along.  I was so wrong.  Ah, well, live and learn.

 Eventually, I completely departed from the original movie outline–sometimes an idea that sounds good on paper doesn’t work out when you turn the characters loose on it.  I’m more interested in the characters and what they endure and learn than in the sword-swinging and blood-letting, so those elements take first place.  I pulled in some characters I'd created for other stories who were just too good not to use, and cautiously borrowed a few of the characters created by various actors in the Seattle Knights and TFA.  With permission, of course. 

 So far, only one person has ever made me promise not to kill them.  Most people have given me more-or-less free rein.  The usual caveat: "just so I die well, with piles of bodies around me." 

 The Triads of Tir na n’Og you can read today is almost complete divorced from the movie treatment that spawned the idea.  It was originally the first book of the series of the same name, and I sold it as such.  The publisher that bought it didn’t follow through, however, and eventually I got the rights back and started sending it elsewhere.

 Then another editor from a major publisher asked me to write a prequel, so I did.  It took me sixth months, a record at that time.  The result was Ironwolfe, the action in which takes place around ten years, give or take, before the events in Triads. 

 The editor didn’t buy it after all, but Ironwolfe became Book One of The Triads of Tir na n’Og, and The Triads of Tir na n’Og turned into Book Two.  The Red Triad is number three, and The Green Triad is the fourth book.  When I get around to writing it, The Blue Triad will be the fifth book.  It and the last book, The Ironlords, are complete in outline. 

 At the moment, I’m hard at work on another project, but plan on finishing at least The Blue Triad late in 2011 or early 2012.  I write much faster these days, now that I’m out of the saddle and have hung my sword on the wall.

The Strawberry Roan

Among the many questions I've been asked about The Strawberry Roan is: why is the book so danged BIG?

It's very simple, actually.  I screwed up and gave the cover artist (aka Dameon) the wrong page count.  So, he made the cover to fit a book with about 100 and some more pages than I had.  I suddenly had to come up with more book!  I increased the font and margin sizes.  That didn't quite cut it, so I decided to add "Knight Erring" into the back.  Still not enough.  Crap.  I put in a huge Afterward.  More still needed!  Finally, I rolled up my sleeves and rolled out a 3 1/2 page bio.  At last!  Success!

But yes, the book is huge.  So what?  You're getting your money's worth, right?

Knight Erring: I love a story within a story.  When my friend, Mike Black (a fabulous writer of gritty, hard-boiled detective fiction) was offered a stint as fill-in editor at HardLuckStories.com, he asked me to come up with something that would really make "his" issue shine.  Flattery goes a long way with me.  The caveat was, I only had 7000 words to do it in, and I almost never write anything that short.   Egad!  I'd been toying with a mystery series idea for some time, featuring a female protagonist (naturally) who was also a jouster in a traveling show troupe (and people wonder where I get my ideas).  I had a whole cast of colorful characters lined up, a wild bunch of plot twists drawn from some of my own life experience, but Jane, my heroine, was going to be a hard-edged, sarcastic, overly-intelligent, the mistress of pithy commentary she keeps mostly to herself, and slightly--well, actually, exceedingly--obsessive, with just a soupÇon of bitterness about some of the hard knocks she's had to endure.  But funny.

Well, I wrote 5 or 6 drafts, cut it down from 12,000 words to 10,000, and just could NOT make it work.  I was tearing my hair out.  What was wrong?  Why wouldn't the story come together?

I was still an active member of the Fairwood Writers in those days, and finally dragged my ailing tale in to throw at the feet of the group in a flagrant plea for help.  And they told me: your viewpoint character has just got to be Rory.

Rory?  He wasn't even one of the main characters.  And he wasn't smart; I'd deliberately created him to be a classic bimbo, only with dangly bits instead of breasts.  But, okay, he did have kind of a doofy appeal.  So, I tried it.  And, hey, it worked!  And the story, even in its truncated 7000 word form, went on to garner all kinds of notice and even won an award.  Although I only found out about that by accident.  Sometime later.