BIRTH OF A SERIES
Pan of discovery:
Out of high school, I did what a lot of kids from 1970’s Detroit did…work in a factory, a factory that has to do with the making of automobiles. It was a tiny mom-and-pop style factory that made small internal parts for cars. I was given the job of operating a mind-numbing production machine called a broacher. It made two flat sides on the end of a metal shaft, a shaft that would eventually end up in car braking systems. It was tedious to distraction, but the pay was good. I sat before a large machine placing each metal shaft into a chuck holder so that two large blades could come down and score the sides of one end. Next, I removed the broached shaft, slammed in another one, and then repeated the whole process. Over and over again. Hundreds of times a day. It wasn’t long before I could do this repetitive action with my eyes closed. So, as I sat there hour-after-hour, my hands covered in the constant flow of yellow coolant (which ravaged my hands, but protected the car parts from being scorched in the cutting process), I used to daydream. Daydream a lot. Sometimes about a girl. Sometimes about cars. But mostly about…a mystical place I called Palzin-Darus. Sitting on a shelf just in front of where I sat was a pan of the raw metal shafts. I would grab raw parts with first my right hand then my left hand, slap them, one-by-one into the broaching machine and have my finished parts to drop into another pan. One day, I noticed that by alternating left hand, right hand, that I had created a center mount of parts in the pan. Now, to most normal people, this fact would go unnoticed. Would be nothing more than a mound of raw parts to be smoothed out before continuing. But to my overly active imagination, it was a wonderful mountain range (what is now the Lower Apertine Mountains) in a fantastic and ancient world. And so, off my muse went creating all types of stories based upon my mountain range of parts. These daydreams served as the foundation of my Vision Dream Series. A weird beginning…but true.
Later, after joining the navy and being assigned to a military base in the northern part of Washington State, I took a bus trip down to see the city of Seattle, called the emerald city by many of its inhabitants. After seeing such sights as the Pike Place Market and the towering Space Needle (and escaping the over-enthusiastic clutches of the Church of Scientology’s devotees), I finally hopped onto a bus back to my military base. On that bus (as young male sailors tend to do), I met a girl and immediately struck up a conversation. A week later, I went to see her in a small college town close to the Canadian border. During our visit together, I started to tell her about my wish to someday write a book about my daydreams back at the factory. She grabbed a blank notebook and ballpoint pen and tossed them to me. And so began my work on this wonderful place I called Palzin-Darus at the time. I started by constructing a crude, hand-drawn map, and then began to write a story about an early ancestor to Princess Angelterra.
Fantasy, epic, dragons, wizards, sorcerer, sorceress, princess, knight, flight, vessel, evil, medieval, dark ages, lord, robert clifton Storey jr, Part One: Flight of the Vessel, Part Two: Daughters of Thine Lesser Evil, Suzerain of the Beast, Robert Storey, Kindle, Kobo, iTunes, createspace, #rcsjr, rcsjr</span