Are you wanting this to be posted now, Jay, or filed away under the new system?

For me dragons are sentient, decent, fire-breathing, flying, speaking, mortal, almost human creatures. For you they may be animals; deceptive, snake-like, creeping, mute, immortal, very strange creatures. Why?

The fact is that when you read about my dragons, you are in my world. In my world, I decide how things are, why they are, how they came to be, and everything else. When I read about your dragons, I am in your world. Over there you decide who is important, what makes an action right or wrong, how justice is served, whether it is served, and what kind of food is served at dinnertime. We all have our own worlds, whether we are fantasy writers or not.

For some their world exists on Facebook. For others it is the realm of gor Jensihi Tyra, the Sixth World. For some the great histories are the most recent tweet. For others it is the chronicle of the first age of Middle-earth.

Fantasy writers, though, do not tell their story in one-hundred-forty-character blocks of text. More often it takes a fantasy writer one hundred forty pages to tell about their world. When we write, whether we are Facebook-ers or the next Tolkien, we introduce our readers to our world.

What is it then that separates gor Jensihi Tyra from Facebook? Instinctively we know that one is an official art form and the other is a product of social networking and that the two are very different. The difference is in the reflection, in the depth and resolution of the image.

A whole reflection can be seen in a drop of water, but it is far more brilliantly displayed on the surface of a lake. When I welcome you to the Red World, I am not only telling you what happened last night in half of a sentence, but I am telling you everything about me. A social blurb like, “Soccer game last night! [smiley removed]” does not tell you what I felt about the competition as does a novel devoted to the story of Caeron as he crosses the wilderness to fight the dragon.

Fantasy writers have even greater opportunity than writers of historical fiction or contemporary novels. Those writers are stuck with physics and creatures as we know them. The sun has to be a far away star that our planet orbits. It cannot be one of the last flowers of Telperion that is carried across the sky by a spirit being. Darkness has to be the absence of light; it cannot be a thing of itself.

We writers of fantasy are likewise faced with a dilemma. How can we reveal everything about our inner-selves and our worldviews in only one hundred forty pages? The fact is that most authors cannot. This is because we are not making just one moral point through our novel.

We are not addressing just one social issue. When we write our fantasies we take the world to task and ask it, “What are you?” We explore the depths not only of one emotion or the effects of one decision on one life, but the effects of the first rebellion on the whole world. We explore everything, from original sin to coming judgment.

The literary realm of fantasy rises above social media and stands over traditional literature. Perhaps it is this reason that the ancients did not write novels about men, but wrote myths of gods. They knew that no legion of novels about ordinary men would ever satisfy the depths of human curiosity. It is against that challenge that the fantasy writer strives.

The man on the street of the modern novel is of just one kind. The wizard that must fight the dark lord or the hobbit that must carry the ring into Mount Doom involves us all. We all strive against dark lords, whether it is the bully at school or the dishwasher that is busted. LOL We all carry rings toward the volcano, whether it is the burden of temptation or the vendetta with the referee who didn't make the call when you were so obviously tripped within a few yards of the goal.

Fantasy writing is different from all others in that it does not study the world by analysis, but by synthesis. We do not investigate one man who feels out of place in his culture so that we can understand that kind of situation better. We do not investigate the relationship between two Jewish boys of different denominations and how they both relate to the world around them to understand that single culture better. Fantasy writers seek to tackle the whole world at once.

When fantasy writers work their craft, they do not send out a short message about how they are feeling today or the final exams coming at the end of the week. Neither do they just explore how they feel when encumbered by social expectations. They welcome others to view their whole selves, to investigate the essence of their hopes, dreams, and fears. The dark lord is both the gossip that destroyed our reputation as it is the god of this age, the real dark lord. The ring that we carry and that is our task to destroy is the hatred for the gossiper, and the willingness to partake of the true dark lord’s peace offerings.

In gor Jensihi Tyra, Nastar and Aerykun are the dark lords/the unfair soccer coach. Welcome to my world.