The Origins of the Five Countries

Kim and I knew each other from the previous year by reputation: she was the one who wrote the poetry that was passed around the cafeteria, and I was the one who wrote the short stories that were passed around the cafeteria. The day she brought me the notebook, she said, "You write stories."
"Yes," I said.
"You finish your stories," she prompted again.
"Yes," I said again.
Then she handed me the notebook and said, "Finish my book."

We spent several months and too many class periods working on the project, fleshing out the background and creating a plot. I created a new set of characters, changed the spellings of all Kim's countries, and did most of the writing. Kim reserved editorial rights, wrote some material, and revised my work. This lead to spirited arguments over the use of the word "the" versus the use of the word "a", and somehow we failed to get thrown out of class. Collaboration is an interesting thing. After getting about 100 pages into the project (which we never did have a title for) and getting all our characters lost in the desert ("Siva: desert, perseverence"), we ran out of steam, and the book went to bed in my closet.

After getting distracted by other projects, writing two novels that are also sleeping at the bottom of the closet, and going off to college to study English lit, history, and humanities, the project revived itself. Once again Kim was the impetus: we had both read T.S. Eliot in our separate English classes and we were running off on Hollow Man themes. As she always did with her new writings (and still does), Kim emailed me her poem TightRope Walkers. This sparked an idea in my head, which was crowded with seventeenth-century poetry and economics in ancient India and the development of religion in early societies. I had a book to write and I needed a world to put it in. I dug out our old project from the bottom of the closet and overhauled the entire world. I wrote histories for the countries and worked out the social, economic, and religious backgrounds. I wrote six hundred years of backplot and created new sketches for the characters I put into it. The Five Countries were born.

In 1996 I finished the draft of my novel Kith and Kin. Unfortunately, the plot I worked up to put in my newly revised world did not live up to the six hundred years of backplot. (Kim's reaction on reading it was "Well, I think I get it...") So back to the closet it went.

I had the vague idea that I could fix the project by expanding it into a series, and in 1999 I finally found a plot for the first installment. This came out of my watching news documentaries on con artists and children with reactive attachment disorder, as well as too many action/spy movies, once again proving that the creative impulse consists of mixing together totally inappropriate things. Elzith Kar was created, and she went to live in the Five Countries.

Ultimately I hope to write more volumes to fill out the histories of the Five Countries. And I've promised Kim that one day I will write Adina's story again, and even if it's wildly different than it was originally, she'll set fire to her room and escape through the smoke like she did in 1986.