This is daunting.

I’ve only just read a few excerpts from some of you here on the ’shares, and I’m already impressed. There are some talented motherfuckers out there. What business do I have, dipping my toe? We shall see.

If I had a writer’s bio, it would read something like this:

"John Price lives in Toronto with his wife and two kids, and is a scumbag marketer by trade. He writes entertainment reviews for Exclaim! Media (exclaim.ca), and has never won anything, ever. He HAS written a book, though."

That has to count for something, right? I mean, even if it’s a pile of chitlins, I wrote a book. Not bad, for someone who has trouble focusing when adjacent to shiny things. So there’s that.

Mine is called Back On Paith, and it’s a labour of love. The simple inspiration has been my friends. Ever see Freaks & Geeks? Of course you have. You haven’t? Go watch all of them, right now. I’ll wait.

Alright. So my friends and I, back in high school, were kind of like those ’freaks’. We smoked a great deal of weed and thought proms were for losers. We rarely showed up, and when we did, it was mostly to chase some skirts.

But, we were also like the ’geeks’. We consumed comic books and fantasy literature voraciously, and as you might expect, played Dungeons & Dragons. Proudly so - and this was in the 80’s, before nerdism was cool. Somehow, we still managed to kiss some girls.

In any case, we lived in both of these worlds, and they sometimes collided. Pretty soon, we were playing D&D on hallucinogens. Hilarity ensued. We developed some pretty amazing characters, and that, ultimately, became the inspiration for the personalities in this story. My friends shine through each and every one of them.

Oh, and another thing hard drugs are good for? Overthought. If you want to analyze the shit out of something and pick apart its flaws and features, take some acid. I sure did. It led me to a deeper delve into the fantasy / sci-fi stories I loved, and I got to asking some questions. For example, in these mystical, essentially alien worlds that are fantasy settings; why is it so familiar? Why is everyone speaking English? Why is the climate, and the day-cycle exactly as we know it on Earth? Why are there even humans there in the first place?

I started to really think about that. Then I started to think about the characters we all created. I thought about some doughnuts. Then, when the doughnuts were all gone, I started to think about a story I wanted to tell. It would, in my mind, provide answers to these questions.

This is the ’X’ meets ’Y’ portion of the descriptor. Inevitably we are all, as writers, influenced by the books (and movies) we love. For me, it can be summed up like this...

The Hitchhikers’s Guide To The Galaxy; The Illuminatus Trilogy; The Discworld series; Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas; The Stainless Steel Rat; anything by Tarantino, and more recently, Ready Player One.

Pretty obvious, right? Yes. But I felt there was still room for some new angles. Maybe there’s room for fantasy stories that ain’t your daddy’s. Something smart and raunchy; a sort of ’gonzo’ fantasy.

But then, maybe not. As Michael Scott once wrote in erasable marker: "You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.".

And that’s good enough for me.

jP