Introduction

I must admit I’ve always had trouble talking about myself. This sort of thing comes from having been neglected, abused, and mistreated for decades, by the people who should have my best interest in mind. Even now, as I sit here and write this, listening to one of my favorite bands, a small part of me still hears my mother telling me she hates the music I love. Back then it was the only way I knew how to let my parents in, and I tried, always getting the same response, “I hate that” (I hate what you love).

Over the past 17 years many things changed for me, and now, even though it still is fraught with meekness, I now am able to talk about me, not defined just by my taste in music or movies, but the person behind those tastes.

Hi, I’m Ulff. If you allow it, I can take you on a journey into lands familiar yet strange and disturbing, and also endearing. It’s tough to explain my work without explaining how I got here, how my stories got here. I’m in my stories; my stories are a part of me. No, I haven’t done anything as disturbing as Drangar; though I have injured at least one person, a long time ago but still. When I say I’m in my stories, it’s literal and figuratively. I don’t know if every author puts one or more aspects of themselves into their characters, I hope so, but I don’t know. For me, every viewpoint character has a bit of me in them, male, female, animal. I need to understand the characters on an emotional level, and without that understanding, I can’t make them relatable, to me.

That doesn’t mean I see myself in every character, and it certainly isn’t a prerequisite for you to identify with the people you meet in my books. It does, however, mean that I can relate to a key aspect.

I began writing, as a hobby, sometime in the early 1990s. It’s not quite a blur, I remember writing down the stories on paper, because back then computers weren’t as ever-present as they are now. Only later, on a borrowed machine, did I type it all out. Drangar was born back then, as was Turuuk, and Darlontor; Kildanor too. Dalgor, at least the name, came into existence earlier; I found his name in some RPG campaign notes. The basic concepts were there, although in a much altered state. If you can grab a hold of the (German) fanzines the stories were published in, you will find the stories did serve as quasi outlines for Shattered Dreams.

People liked what I wrote, but it didn’t feel right. The writing group I was in helped me not only with my writing, but also with my focus, the way I approached editing my own work, and how to not get all weepy when someone criticized my writing. But I wasn’t happy with my stories; I felt I could never write exactly what I wanted to say. Writers must read, and I read voraciously. So why could I not say what I meant to say, write what I wanted to write?

The answer was simple, really. Since I had spent 1989/90 in the USA as an exchange student, I had pretty much stopped reading books in German. Translations sucked, and it took years, back then, to see an English novel published in German. I didn’t want to wait that long, besides, not all books were translated, and translations sucked. So pretty much everything I read was in English.

In “On Writing” Stephen King talks about a writer’s toolbox. Mine was quite well stocked, only I had two toolboxes, one for German (whose contents had diminished over the years) and one for English. Back then I didn’t know about toolboxes and stuff, I just figured that I should try writing in English and see how it went. I wrote a short story, it started out as a weird-ass science fiction bit and then switched into a metaphysical joke, really. Three pages. The people in the group were in stitches. It gave me the confidence to carry on writing in English.

Only one thing that I needed to do.

When I conceived Drangar, he was part of my being admitted to the German fantasy club called FOLLOW. My buddies had always talked about the crazy ass partying going on at their conventions, and I wanted to be part of it. Maybe it was me desperately wanting to belong, maybe it was because I needed to get away from my life, maybe it was a bit of both? Probably a bit of both.

I was a lonely kid. With narcissists as parents, life already was tough enough, my sister can attest to that. But when the gods piss on you, they rarely stop in mid-stream. In my case, they truly didn’t. I was a lonely child, and an unruly child. Highly gifted, bored out of my mind in school, and utterly unable to voice any of my frustrations. And with two self-absorbed parents, I was pretty much screwed from the get-go. I withdrew from everything. My one outlet was RPGs, and music. But since I never learned how to deal with people, and my emotions, things were rarely smooth.

My parents once noticed I was lonely, but instead of trying to figure out why, they decided the best course of action was to put me into a rowing boat, because that’s where they had made friends, in a rowing club. They actively tried to prevent me from making friends via RPGs… I already mentioned how they made me feel about the music I love. I started to drink early on, had my first alcohol poisoning at 19, the next at 21. In FOLLOW drinking was a pastime, which suited me just fine. Con-weekends were spent in a drunken stupor, for the most part. I wrote a bit, but it was primarily me working hard to obliterate myself. A friend once said that I was trying to kill myself, via alcohol. He wasn’t wrong.

One evening, whilst hanging out with some of my acquaintances, I ingested a very bad combination of uppers and downers, whilst still on some medication, and the nose-spray acted as the final ingredient to have me spend an hour or more shaking on the ground. It felt as if I was dying, but I didn’t want to die, not really. I still didn’t know what my problems really were; my self-awareness was so shot to hell that I didn’t know I was suffering. Thanks mother, thanks father.

That evening made the decision for me, I already hated being apprenticed in a bank, but I knew I could not go on there. I didn’t know what I wanted, but I certainly knew what I didn’t want. I finished my apprenticeship, became a university student, and eventually left FOLLOW.

I started writing in my spare time, not that university was that fulfilling. When you don’t know who you are, or what you want, things, including relationships, become problematic if not downright impossible. I cut my final ties with FOLLOW in 1998 or so, after I had written the aforementioned short story. Maybe it was my subconscious, I don’t know. Many of my decisions were based on the conditioning my parents bestowed on me, which means I was ruled by fear, even if I didn’t know it. I left FOLLOW because I needed to move away from the drunken weeks and weekends, the self-destruction had to stop. I was 27/28 and as I said before, friends had noticed how self-destructive I was.

Creatively I also felt stifled, FOLLOW’s fantasy world is a shared world, and every story beat that might affect someone else’s story or such needed to be coordinated. I hated that. So when I left, I could finally write Drangar’s story the way I wanted, without constraints. At least that was the plan…

In 98/99 I wrote two novels, I even submitted them to Wizards of the Coast at one point, when they were looking to expand their fiction line to beyond D&D books. In 2000 I spent the summer in the US, a week in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, hanging at Margaret Weis’s house, I had met Margaret a few years earlier, and she had invited me to the pre-GenCon partying that was tradition at her place. I met many of my heroes. At GenCon I asked Janet Pack, one of the authors I met at Margaret’s, to look at the short story. Her face grew very long, and before she could say anything else, I told her that the story had been written years ago. With that I handed her the nightmare sequence that actually is in Shattered Dreams. Her words, after reading this, still mean the world to me. “Had you not given me this bit, I would have told you to stop writing, but now I tell you to not stop writing.”

I was really happy with that. But it didn’t solve my underlying issues.

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University wasn’t for me. Courtesy of my parents neglecting me, I never learned to learn, and university kind of requires you to do just that. I tried to immigrate to the US and marry there, came back three months later, with a broken heart and pretty much nothing. I moved back in with my parents, and needed to get back on my feet. So I quit college, found a job, got a new place (I still live in that apartment). And forgot about writing, for a while.

Eventually, I had a nervous breakdown, because I was working 8 to 4, and then spent hours playing Everquest. Instead of getting drunk because of frustration, I lost myself in the online game world. Exchanging one addiction with another. Not really that smart either. Something had to give, and something did give. My nervous breakdown was pretty much the preamble of what was to come. I drifted deeper and deeper into depression, quit Everquest, lost myself in trying to be the best D&D game master, exchanging obsession with obsession.

I read somewhere that children of broken homes, abuse survivors are more susceptible to addictive/obsessive behavior, and that definitely fits the bill.

Unemployed, drifting further and further into depression, spending my savings on D&D material I would never use. Fun stuff. Eventually, someone told me I must see a doctor because she thought I was depressed. Turns out, she was right.

Depression is a funny thing, not haha funny, but more a really messed up animal that you need to experience to understand and I hope you never will. I got medication, which made life bearable again, got a job, got two more jobs, pretty much exchanging one obsession with another, again. The burnout was preprogrammed. Now that I look back at it, there was no other way. It didn’t help that my boss’s wife insulted my intelligence, pretty much the same way my parents had done from the beginning. Nervous breakdown number 2.

I needed help, and I got help, in form of a therapist who spent 3 months just cracking the surface. 3 months, 2 to 3 sessions per week, until I opened up. When you don’t know what you feel, because your feelings were never relevant to the people who should have cared… atrophy doesn’t even cover it, because for something to atrophy it had to be used at some point. From age 4 on, I knew that I couldn’t trust my father, even though I desperately wanted his affection, at age 5 my mother called me a braggart. When I was 7, she, who was a teacher at the same elementary school I attended, told me how happy my classmates were when I was ill because this way I couldn’t disturb the lessons. How was I supposed to know what I felt?

Once the surface was cracked, we started work. Eventually, we determined that in order for me to live a fulfilled life, I had to write.

When I had read A Game of Thrones, I knew this was the way I wanted to write, but I was too ignorant of my own needs to do just that.

You see, the stuff I had written almost a decade before therapy began was written in the style of what I had been reading: D&D novels, for the most part. But I had grown dissatisfied with the limitations, I wanted more, and when we determined I needed to write, I wrote, using the earlier books as outlines, if you will. Writing became my outlet, my way to cope with so many things. Of course, I made my new discoveries and insights about myself part of the characters. Like me, the characters are all broken, some more (Drangar), some less. But in the end they all are trying their best to live.

Like me.

Drangar has been my alter ego since the early 1990s, in many ways he is me, and I am he. Only he is, thankfully, caught in that literary limbo of his late 20s, while I am listening to music that wasn’t cool when I was 20. Not that I care, I love what I love, and I write what I want, what I need to write.

Yes, they’re fantasy stories, but they all deal with so much more.

Welcome to the world of Hiraegh, welcome to my world.