sagas

(above: Melissa and I long ago circa 1998 when we first started writing this story)

Not long ago my sister sent me six new chapters of the Fehran story and I was reading them more avidly than I read the last Harry Potter book (which is really saying something as Harry Potter allowed for neither eating nor sleeping). When she finishes this section, we will be almost finished.

Fehran will be a (probably really long) illustrated novel. Missy (actually as she is now a grownup she goes by Melissa calling her that feels weird for me) offers this description of the book:

“Fehran is a dark fairytale about how a broken heart can consume the whole world. It is set in two kingdoms. In one, a tyrant king searches for something to feed his ambitions. In the other, seven magical princes and their sister grow up and nourish the seeds of tensions that will destroy them. The story follows how the two kingdoms crumble the closer they are intertwined, as a great betrayal brings love, escape, revenge, and finally losses that cannot be repaired.”

The story began actually years ago. I was nineteen pretending to work in a temp job in Houston, but as they had actually nothing for me to do, I just stared at the computer screen and imagined a story in my head that played itself out before my eyes without effort, like a secret tv. Missy was sixteen, in high school and a big fan of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” It turned out she too was imagining and dreaming a story. By combining our two stories, we found an excellent form of entertainment.

This was nothing new; we had been inventing stories together our whole lives, the notes of which filled many manila folders and which we called Sagas. Most of the earlier Sagas were about hot tempered brave ladies in Victorian times who fought pirates or something. But this new one was different. We called it Fehran after the world in which it took place. We even started writing it down. After all, the Brontes had written down their Gondal story, the one the children had all imagined long before Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights. We wanted ours to last also. I had to draw pictures of all the characters because I like to know how people look. Soon we were writing a book.

We never finished. I went to New York to study art; Missy went to Rice in Houston to study anthropology, and Fehran went the way of the other childhood sagas. Ten years went by. I don’t really remember why I started writing Fehran again. I was unemployed, always a blessing for artistic endeavors. Soon Missy was writing it again as well. It has changed a lot from its original version, but the characters, like the two wayward princesses, the seven magic brothers, the waifs Eani and Henri, and the tyrant King, have all remained.