David E. Barber

Every writer has a few stories about how they got started. This is mine.

I have always been a storyteller. Sometimes I told storis with words. Other times I used pictures. When I graduated high school I was on the fence about what to do with my life. Did I want to be a writer? Did I want to be an artist? Both paths seemed difficult, if not impossible.

I eventually enrolled in a Commercial Art program at a nearby community college. I graduated, moved from the Midwest to Colorado, found a job, and the rest, as they say, is history. Well, not quite.

After a number of years working in advertising, I had managed to build a reasonably comfortable life for myself. But something was missing.

One morning, after a restless night of sleep, I sat down at my kitchen table and began writing in a notebook. For the next two years I wrote a little every day. A couple of pages to start with, then more. At first I was just talking to myself, sorting some things out, but then I began telling stories again, and I was reminded how much I loved it, and how much I had missed it.

I started attending continuing education classes and writing workshops. One summer I spent a week at the Taos School of Writing under novelist Norman Zollinger, with guest authors Stephen R. Donaldson, David Morrell, and Suzy McKee Charnas contributing insights.

I joined the Horror Writer’s Association and started submitting stories to magazines with names like Cemetery Danceand Weird Tales. When I sold my first short story I felt like I’d won the lottery. I was learning and building confidence, and I began thinking about writing a book.

I have always loved science fiction and horror, but fantasy was my first love. If I was going to write a full length novel it would have to be a fantasy story, and fantasy stories usually come in series of books. I needed to think bigger.

For many years I had been playing RPG games with a group of close friends and taking notes on my laptop as we played. We had already finished one long-running fantasy campaign and had moved onto another; a space adventure this time. I began looking at my notes from the game and thinking of ways I might turn those extraordinary adventures into books.

Eventually those game notes, with much revision and invention, became The Draakonor Chronicles. My first book was a novella, a prequel to the much longer and more complex story I wanted to tell. The Fabled Beast of Elddon was published in 2016 and premiered at the Denver Comic Con where I was working a table with my friend and co-author, Douglas Shuler.

A Way with Magic, the first full-length novel in The Draakonor Chronicles, followed soon after. For the past ten years I have continued to expand the world of Ninavar, the world in which The Draakonor Chronicles take place, and I’ve added two more books to the series. But there’s a lot more stories to tell.

Looking back, I realize I never really chose between writing and art. I chose to do both and to keep telling stories in any way I could. My story, the one that began at my kitchen table with a notebook and a ball point pen, is still being written, one epic adventure at a time.