I suppose it’s no great spoiler to reveal that in my Gustav Gloom series, it is Gustav who with his friend Fernie What must travel across worlds and endure great hardships to confront that ficton’s villain, Lord Obsidian.

C’mon. You can’t have read even one novel before without getting that much from book one. (Though given the age of the book’s youngest readers, reading even one novel before this one is not a given.)

But I do take pains to have several characters in the know tell him versions of the following.

There are no chosen ones. There are no great, cryptic prophecies. There are no grand heroes chosen by fate, centuries ahead of their birth, to confront the evils of their time. There are just people, trapped in history not of their making, who have to deal with such terrors when they would have been just as happy, happier, living quiet lives that never intersected such awfulness. Prophecies of chosen ones are there so that the people suffering under tyrants will sit around their whole lives under the most brutal oppression, figuring that fighting evil is the kind of thing that only one particular person is born to do, and that there’s no point in initiating that project themselves, because they’re not that one particular person and will lose, whereas that one particular person is generally promised his eventual glory by a birthmark and therefore has nothing to worry about.

Gustav Gloom is a hero, I think. So’s the book’s viewpoint character, Fernie What. But not because somebody promised their arrival centuries ago. Just because they see what has to be done and get down with it with a minimum of kvetching and whining.

This was something I always promised myself I would arrange, if I ever wrote a story in this particular genre.

I kept that promise.

Tags: Gustav Gloom, writing | Category Blog Business, Books, Fantasy, Gustav Gloom, Writing