Myth Conceptions

Next week, over at the Shanghai Low blog THE PENNY DREADFUL, we begin serializing HER MAJESTY'S WILL. It's an experiment on my part, as I close in on the end of the Roman novel and work on a silly pirate thing, to see if I can write a serial novel a la Dickens or Doyle. I'm not being paid by the word, however, so never fear.

HER MAJESTY'S WILL is an Elizabethan spy/adventure novel starring William Shakespeare and Kit Marlowe, and deals with the Babington Plot. I'll talk more about the story itself later. But I want to take a moment to acknowledge a major influence in the conception of this tale. 

Twenty-five years ago (or thereabouts) I was a kid wandering into the local comic book store, The Eye Of Agamotto. I remember it as the same summer The Dark Knight Returns hit the stands. The owner, Norm, sold me a copy that I still treasure. Perusing the stands, I found an oversize black-and-white comic with the shadow of a giant demon and a blond kid on the cover.

I picked it up, and the one after it, took them both home, and fell in love. It was the most freneticly-drawn, hysterically dialogued thing I had ever read, and the title was MYTH ADVENTURES.

The next day, I went back to the Eye and asked Norm, "When's the next Myth book coming out?"

Norm looked up, smiled, and pointed to a man standing just behind me. "Ask him. He wrote it."

And that's how I met Robert Asprin.

I'm sure I was huge pain in the ass to the man. I got him to come talk to my grade school class, I called him, I went to his house at Halloween dressed as Aahz, with my friends dressed as his other characters. Always I was rewarded. That Halloween we each got posters for his new novel, HIT OR MYTH, and saw other concept art by Phil Foglio. And always there were stories, and puns, and possible future plots and titles, including one still unused, M.X. Mythile.

In the course of this, I read all his books, the ones the comic had been based on. It took me awhile to see all the Ann Arbor references (Hell being the yearly Art Fair, the Big Game that determined the fate of a world being the Michigan/Ohio State game, etc.), but I was smitten. The books were borderline dirty (so I was getting away with something), and culturally literate, and very very honest. The main character, while often naive to the point of stupidity, also had a heart the size of a mountain. It was like Bob split his personality between his two main leads – the gruff, cynical, worldly, caustic demon Aahz, and the sweet, generous, instinctively moral Skeeve.

Bob often told the story about how he wrote the first one as a lark, something to take his mind off other more serious work. He turned fantasy conventions on their head, making the human an apprentice to a demon. And he was highly influenced by the Hope & Crosby Road Movies, after watching a marathon of them one week.

In creating my own buddy adventure, I went back and read the first MYTH book, ANOTHER FINE MYTH – though by now I could probably recite it from memory. The structure and pacing were exactly what I wanted for Will and Kit. We'll see how it goes.

I wish I could share all this with Bob, but Robert Lynn Asprin passed away on May 22, 2008, lying in bed reading a new Terry Pratchett novel. The last two decades had been personally hard for him, and we lost touch when he left Ann Arbor for New Orleans. But he remains one of the biggest influences on me and my writing. I don't write anything like him, nor could I. But his early MYTH books are one of my touchstones, and I'm delighted to be able to take inspiration from his structure and timing, the way he took it from Hope and Crosby.

Bob, this one's for you.