January 09, 2002
Original Link (now dead) - http://acdm.turbinegames.com/?cat=0&id=217
Insight into the Martine stories, Part 2
By - Ken Troop
A Dry Withered Leather Bound Journal
Ramangas! I love using them in my writing, even though I'm not particularly good at creating clever ones. When coming up with the names of my central character and his friend in the travelogues, I really wanted to anagram the names of two of my favorite epic fantasy authors, Robert Jordan (writer of the Wheel of Time series) and George R.R. Martin (writer of the series A Song of Ice and Fire), but I also wanted people to get the connection, and I had such a difficult time trying to create an anagram that wasn't very easy but also wasn't completely obscure that I decided to take a different tack.
Minor digression: for an example of an anagram that I still don't believe anyone has discovered yet, look at the name of the protagonist for the AC teaser I wrote for April 2001, A Reign of Stone. This was my way of paying homage (in an apparently very obscure fashion) to someone who had recently announced his departure from the AC public spotlight. I really need to work on coming up with better wordplay devices.
Back to the matter at hand: so my first thought was to just be clever with the authors' names. Robert Jordan is just a pen-name for James Oliver Rigney, and some permutation of that seemed promising. After some scribbling around, and adding the proper Aluvian touches, Olivier Rognath became the friend and confidant of my protagonist. I had a rougher time with the protagonist's name. My first attempt was something hideous, like "Georgeth Martine" Not quite that bad but close. After someone on the team said to me, "Not only is that a stupid name, but it sounds like you're trying to refer to someone in real life," I came up with Candeth Martine. I've been racking my brain trying to remember where I came up with Candeth, but as Martine writes in a later journal, "But I soon forgot to write it down. And now I can no more recall my...past than I could recall what life was like in my mother's womb. It is gone." And so it is.
There they were, Candeth Martine and his trusty sidekick, Olivier Rognath. What strikes me now is how innocently this whole story started. As I mentioned in the first commentary, I had intended all this to be a comedy. And everyone started out so innocent. I created the Explorer Society as a useful explanation of why Martine would be out exploring and getting into dangerous and interesting hijinks. My first character sketch of Sir Alayne was of this kindly and frail old mentor for Sir Candeth. The main drama for me was whether Olivier was going to become a full fledged Explorer of the Society (as one can see if they check out his text strings with the Mace of the Explorer quest).
And once again, as soon as I started writing it, everything changed. I tried to stay true to my original conception.
"For all you readers who may have not had the pleasure of reading my previous small travelogue, a pithy recap follows: [snip pithy recap] Trust me, it felt as frenetic as it sounds. At least my note remains back in the old Mosswart Dungeon. Unless a Banderling ate it."
But I let my concentration slip for a few seconds and I find myself writing this,
"It was only when we reached the Maze that some of these answers began to take shape. How to describe this miserable place? When I was a boy, long before I could have ever have dreamed of being whisked away to a strange time and place, bereft of most whom I loved and cared for...again, I apologize, such moments occasionally overcome me. I'll speak no more of it.
When I was a boy, I used to play with certain types of puzzles, long drawn out maps of lines, written on parchment, arranged in such a way that it was almost impossible to figure out how to traverse from beginning to end of the labyrinth. When I was a boy I think I had some skill in such matters. I wish I was that boy again."
Yikes. Apparently Martine had some issues. And no matter how hard I wrestled with the writing to get it back to its original shape, I found myself coming back to the same themes: Martine's overwhelming sense of alienation warring with a need to belong, his hopelessness versus a sense that surely the very fact of life itself is a reason to hope and wonder. Not that I neccessarily was consciously thinking of these themes at the time, but rather it was my reaction to the whole strange fictional conceit of Asheron's Call: people pulled out of their homes and families to go slaughter strange beings in an eternal orgy of death and blood and experience points, and to never be able to die.