Building the Black King's Hall

The Black King's Hall is the product of my life-long love of science fiction and fantasy.  I have loved science fiction and fantasy since I was about six years old, when I saw an android reveal the circuitry beneath his skin on the original Star Trek.  I have walked many worlds since then.


In my late teens, I began to build the world of Anvar and the Black King’s Hall.  Back then it was a setting for my fantasy role-playing campaign.  That Black King's Hall and the story of its inhabitants were inspired by my favorite progressive rock, science fiction and fantasy novels and films, and my ambition to build the biggest, meanest dungeon players would have the misfortune to roll a die in.  But I am not all bad.  The main prize hidden in that ancient ruin would have given the one who found it limitless power. No one ever found that prize.  


It wasn’t for lack of trying.  Many characters got very rich sacking the warrens beneath the Black King’s Hall.  That was at a time in my life when rolling critical hits was giving way to graduating college and finding a full-time job.  Shortly after graduation I started working second shift and every other weekend.  I was married six months later.  Dungeon explorations became ever more infrequent.  But Anvar and the Black King’s Hall never left me. 


I always thought Anvar would make a great setting for the kind of stories I wanted to read, and every few months I wrote something down.  I eventually had a cast of characters and the outline of a story about a gladiator and a demon.  Although that story was based on characters from my campaign, it had little to do with the Black King’s Hall.  Again, life continued with its victories and failures, which I attended to at the expense of the worlds in my head.


Then one day, years later, something unexpected happened.  I was driving to work, listening to Queen’s second album, and as the songs progressed the history of Anvar assembled itself in my mind.  That history was populated by the same characters and spanned the same places I had been imagining for almost twenty years, but now they were all connected. What a great day that was.  


It was around 1996 when I first started writing about the Black King’s Hall.  Back then I lacked discipline and had yet to find my voice.  There were many distractions and false starts.  I would write for a little while and then go months without touching my keyboard.  Then, life intervened again.  I was laid off from work, and instead of having less time to write, I suddenly found myself with more.  In 2007 I put my butt in a chair and finished the first draft of the Black King’s Hall.  


You know the joke about taking a few months to write a book and a million years to revise it? It’s true.  Every time I went back to my manuscript or had my alpha-reader look at it, we had new ideas to improve the story.  It got to the point where I dreaded inspiration.  Each revision made the book better, but some took weeks to accomplish.  


At last, in early 2011, I declared the book finished.  I am very proud of it.  Now I want to know what the rest of the world thinks.  The Black King’s Hall is waiting.