Recently, I was searching through my library for a particular book that was missing.  In the process of failing to find the missing book, I ran across a book series that I still had that was a key piece of development in terms of fantasy writing.  I hadn't thought of it in decades.  And there I was standing there staring at all of the books in the series, the spin-off series, and the graphic novels astonished.  Astonished at how long ago it was that I'd poured so much cash into them, and also that I still had them.  It brought to mind memories of my teenage years so thickly and so vibrantly rich that I almost for a moment thought I was standing in Book World in Chillicothe reading them in the aisle before purchasing them.

The series was a shared world concept of short stories entitled Theives World.  It was the first of its kind, and it was wildly successful.  It was the first time I had read stories in the fantasy genre that brooding and dark, that were from a gritty and seedy place filled with powerful anti-heroes doing they best they could to muddle through the circumstances life threw at them.  It was intricate and involved and filled with intrigue and backstory.  The histories of the place, the characters, the pantheon of beliefs were deeply detailed, and full of description.

Its fair to say that it had a huge impact on me.  Its also fair to say that it was among a handful of experiences I had in which I could absolutely envision the sights, the sounds, the smells of the city and its denizens.  When reading these treasured gems of stories, I longed to be in the city.  I ached to walk the length and breadth of the bazaar, to see the Maze for myself.  I wanted to sit in Illra's reading room listening to her psychic readings while hearing Dubro's hammer rings from the smithy out back. 

I wanted to see the Hawkmasks loyal to Jubal myself and to find a way to sit in his audience chamber listening to him conduct underworld court and pronouce judgements.  I desired to sit with Hakeim over a mug of ale in infamous bar called, The Vulgar Unicorn, and listen to him to me story after story after story about the place, its people, its history and paying whatever price he required for the stories would seem a trivial pittance to be regaled in such a manner.  To see Lythande and perchance find a way to touch the blue pentagram tatooed on his/hers forehead, would have been the chance of a lifetime.  To see the Stepsons and their leader Tempus, the avatar of Vashanka, once more was he sum total of desire for contentment.

This series was influential to me in so many ways.  It affected what I would later desire to read, and how as I took up the mantle of a writer, what I would write.  It is a reasonable inferrence that my desire to write high fantasy about noble knights riding off to fight world threatening powers and principalities was killed when I read those pages.  After I read those works, I desired only to read and to write a form of fiction that had a genuineness to it, an authenticity that marked it as being part of this genre.  Its fair to say that I could never write like Tolkein or Lewis after having been exposed to it.

And so it was that while I was standing there staring at that stack of books, that I had the desire to check in on the series, and see if anymore had been written since I had bought what had been billed as the series finale.  I had actually spoken to Robert Lynn Aspirin at one point in the middle 1990s when I worked for CallTech when it was supporting Compuserve.  In the course of getting his account fixed, he told me that the publisher was done with the series and wanted no more to do with it.  He told me the economics of publishing the series was just not viable anymore.  So a decade and a half later I was wondering what had become of it.

I found out through my research that Lynn Abbey had made some efforts to revive the series in the early part of this millenium with a series of three books, and had compiled the entire original series into an Omnibus.  And so I was hopeful that I could go check out the works and check in on it again.  And as I read what had been done to the world I had so loved I was heartbroken.  Virtually all of the characters I loved were either dead or had moved on from the world, or were so radically altered that I would not recognize them today.  Hakeim moved on out of the city, Illra dead, Dubro dead, One Thumb dead, Jubal dead, Enas Yorl dead, Hanse Shadowspawn had a stroke and was no longer the theif he had once been. Prince Kaddikithas was dead and so was Molin Torchholder.  Lythande was gone as were Tempus and the Stepsons.

Left in its place was a cast of new characters that I had little of no interest in reading.  And as the reality of the current state of this shared world sunk into me, I knew a substansial part of me had died.  I knew that what had energized me to read and write no longer existed.  I am not sure why this bothered me, because the reality of such a gritty, grim, and violent world would be that most of those characters 25 or so years hence would be dead or dying, but it did.  It felt like someone had done something vile to something I cared about quite deeply.

I suppose this is because one of my fantasies was to write for this shared world.  I wanted to write stories for Enas, Lythande, Hanse, and the others.  I wanted to share my take on them and the situations they encountered in my imagination.  I have to accept that it was just not meant to be.  And any effort to do so would have been a distillation of someone else's ideas.  It would have been at best a derrivative of the original, a copy.  That realization left me sad beyond measure.

And so it is now that I know that I must turn the page and move on from this place.  I must accept that it is best for me to revel in what was, while putting my creative energy into new and wholly seperate concepts of my own.  It becomes important to focus on the worlds of my own imagination and not weep over the death of the creative worlds of others.  It doesn't make it easy knowing that.  It doesn't make the task of moving on any simplier.  The gulf between knowing and doing are completely seperate places.  But it is the task that lies in front of my now.  So mote it be.