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The Explorers of Chilce
What are the origins of Chilce? The name was invented by my good friend and fellow penman Gordon Scott, who co-wrote most of the cooperative fiction in this library with me. It was initially created as a name that he used repeatedly for his side in our many games of Warlords. Gordon would frequently rename his kingdom from the game's default to Chilce. Eventually, I created a scenario for the Warlords II Deluxe (W2D) game called Chilce, and as I always tended to do in my hand-crafted scenarios, I made up and packed in tons of off-the-cuff references to the legends and folklore of this mythical country. You can take a look at the topographical map of Chilce generated by the game if you like.
If Grishny's Tower had a physical location (yeah yeah yeah, I know it's on a server somewhere in California) it would be in Chilce, near the town just south of the mountain range on the northeast edge of the map. When naming the ruins during the creation of the aforementioned Chilce W2D scenario, I took the name "Grishnakh" from J.R.R. Tolkien's The Two Towers, shortened it to "Grishny," and turned him into a orcish wizard living in a tower just south of the Nos'loch Mountains.
There's more about that elsewhere. Suffice it to say that this web site draws its name from that one flash of inspiration years ago. Cut to 2004, when an on-line friend told me about National Novel Writing Month. I've always enjoyed the creative process of writing, even though I've never pretended to be very good at it. The great thing about NaNoWriMo is that you don't have to be good at it. The whole point is to "get into the groove" and just spend one month enjoying the creative process of writing. I decided to try it out.
Just one problem: what was I going to write about? I didn't have any long-dormant ideas for a novel festering in my brain. I thought about trying to write something for my favorite genre, science fiction, but I didn't really think I could do it justice. I read some tips on the NaNoWriMo web site about planning out your novel before hand and having at least a vague outline to go by to help structure your story, and then it hit me! I already had the "bones" of a story, some main characters, and even a setting in the form of Chilce. Having made up my mind, I gathered together this material and when November 1st came, I attached it with a vengeance.
The result was Helec. Unfortunately, despite "winning" at NaNoWriMo by making it to 50,000 words by the end of November, I did not finish the novel, and without the impetus of the contest to drive me, my pace slackened off very quickly and then stopped. The novel lay dormant for months at a time, and I was only able to complete a paragraph or two at a time, feeling devoid of inspiration. Then it hit me: I was trying to figure out how to continue the story, when what I really needed to do was wrap it up. The exploration of Chilce wasn't carried out by just one man. This is a story with many characters, and it needed to be told from many different perspectives.
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