The Black Dog

Dear Wal,

I realized just now that I've never told this story. It's a story about the first story I ever tried to write. The one that taught me everything I know about writing and revealed to me how insane my imagination (and, well, the rest of my mind) is. It started when I was eight years old, and I had this crazy dream about being chased by a clown. I was never afraid of clowns, so I don't have a clue where that came from, but he was wielding this sharpie marker thing that was supposed to smell good (but really it was the nastiest thing on the planet) that I used to have in real life. I hated that stupid marker. Anyway, he was using it as a torture device and terrorizing the whole town with it. I think the town was Spectre from the movie Big Fish. I think I had seen it for the first time recently.

How I imagined him before I could draw

Spectre's savior in my dream was an uncanny one. A big black dog. Think of the hound of the Baskervilles and Sirius Black, and you've got the effect it had on my childhood mind. I became instantly fascinated with this character, and the dream continued over several days. Kind of like watching episodes of a TV show. I don't remember what happened exactly, but in the end the black dog saved the day and everyone was happy, woop-de-do. Seems like a fairly simple story, right? WRONG.
I was too young and ignorant to realize this, but Black had seeded himself in my mind and he was growing like a cancer. I like to think of it like Mal from Inception, because that's exactly what happened. I got this idea, and it nearly drove me insane. I started trying to write down the story from my dream, but it was no good because by the time I figured out that was what I needed to do I had already forgotten most of the dream. The original story was lost to me, so I made it up. Or rather, tried to. I didn't realize what the ramifications of this decision really meant.
It started out to be fairly simple: Black was protecting the town from some kind of evil dude (I took out the clown because I thought that was stupid) and he went on all kinds of adventures to do so. At this stage, I was actually enjoying myself. It was fun. I had never done anything like this before. After that, however, things just went downhill. My first draft (which I can't find anywhere, sadly-although I'm not sure if I want a glimpse into my eight year old self) failed utterly. And so did the one after that. And the one after that. I didn't get it. I couldn't understand why I couldn't finish this story.

Sucky version of Ratanger's wolf form

Then Araucania arrived. Araucania is another as-yet-unfinished story of mine, about a fantasy world being taken over by winter. You see, the magic was based on the seasons, and the different kinds of magic had gotten out of balance for some reason. Black became the Chosen One who was going to bring balance to the Force once again. At first, he was still just a dog, but then I decided since he was surrounded by human characters he needed to be human to. But I didn't want to let go of him being a dog, so I made him a shapeshifter. Thus was born the Mirgans: a race of super strong shapeshifting warriors.
Black became Ratanger, a blind man who had taught himself to fight despite his disability, and who had vast magical power that had as yet been untapped. This story did have a villain: his name was the Ice Lord, and he was...well, the lord of ice. He was just sort of there for Ratanger to battle, there wasn't much dimension to him. Ratanger, however, became extremely complex. There were layers upon layers to this character, many of which I hadn't even tapped into yet. As my instructor Lynn would say, Ratanger was like an onion. Every time I peeled off and resolved a layer, it revealed more layers and more problems.
Araucania went through many, many more versions. I lost count somewhere around twenty, I think. I couldn't finish that story either. In the midst of all this, I started to genuinely believe I was going insane. I went  to my mom one day and told about all of it, and how crazy it was, and how I thought I was crazy (she later told me that when I came to her she thought I was going to tell her I was doing drugs or something-this was how bad the state I was in was). She explained to me that this was just what characters did. They drove you crazy. It was all perfectly normal. This revelation was a relief, but it still left the problem of my unfinished story unsolved.
After a few more turns on the "let's rewrite, again!" wheel, I decided it was time to bring Ratanger back to planet Earth and make him Black again. This seemed to help. I didn't have him rattling around in my head about the injustice of being transplanted to another world where he didn't belong anymore, but I still couldn't finish the damn story. Finally, I took a step back and seriously looked at what the heck was going on. I was eleven or twelve at this point, and I was tired of Black. Really, really tired of Black. I decided that the first thing that was wrong was that there was no villain. Not really, anyway. However much I wanted to, I couldn't use the Ice Lord as my villain because he belonged to another world. Thus was born Greyback. Greyback was a wolf, who hated Black and caused havoc for no apparent reason, but that was alright. Greyback didn't need a motive. He was an agent of chaos. Black and Greyback became my Holmes and Moriarty, my Batman and Joker. It was perfect. But I still couldn't finish the damn story.

Black & Moonlight
I don't know either, so don't ask

So I trashed Greyback and made a whole new villain: a human (for some reason, I thought turning my characters into humans would fix everything) who was this crazy serial killer person, and Black was trying to stop him from killing people. He was essentially the same character as Greyback, except in human form. I even carried over the name as his nickname. I had conflict, I had a villain. You might think this would give me the ability to finish the story. Nope.
So then I added romance into the equation, in the form of a golden retriever named Moonlight. That didn't help either. I think she only lasted one or two rewrites. And new problems were arising. Greyback was growing as a character, and competing for my attention over Black. Plus, Black was expanding as well. He had become a roleplay character in the various wolf-themed roleplays I participated in on the wild currents of the internet. Black had consumed every aspect of my life. There was no where I could go, nothing I could do, to escape from him.

Blackest of Nights-the RP version
(I didn't draw this, BTW, it was a gift)
Black went through many RP versions as well, not something
I want to reiterate here

Somewhere in all this, Greyback gained an actual name: John Burdock. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, here we have a very basic version of Tom Burdock, whom I consider my quintessential villain. He started to demand his own stories, too, and I was happy to oblige because it was a relief from Black. Plus, the whole group of characters I had made up to accompany Ratanger in Araucania started complaining about the way their story had fallen to pieces after I cruelly ripped Ratanger out and turned him back into Black. Then came Nanowrimo, my first year ever. I tried to write Black, of course, and failed utterly. That was it.
I gave up.
I quit.
I was too tired and too bewildered to handle any of this anymore.
I took a break, a well deserved break. I was nearly fourteen, I had spent six years on this story and nothing good had come of it. I had nearly lost my mind, spent about three of those six years despairing over something that wasn't even real and had nothing to show for it. The following summer was the year I applied to the VEC, and got in to my delight. I had spent enough time without Black driving me crazy to take another look at his story. Plus, I was in English 1 with a very good teacher (you rock, Miss Wright-yes, that's her name) and I had a better sense of what a story needed to be in order to be successful. For a while, I thought maybe I was going to have to try NaNo again with Black because the story wasn't getting anywhere. And then my mom said:

The final version

"Just write it!"
You go Mom.
So I did write it. And it ended up being a lot shorter than I had originally intended. Only about a page and a half. All of my original concepts were in it: Black was trying to save someone from Greyback, and it even had an entertaining twist at the end. And that was it. The end. Black never bothered me again after that. His story had finally been written, however short it was, and he was satisfied. For a long time I wondered whether or not I had done him justice, but eventually I decided that was enough. I had found a way to shut him up, and make us both happy.
But Black was the thing that launched me onto the wild roller coaster ride of this thing that I like to call my writing "career."

/endrant

P.S. Wow. That was long.