Looking Back on 20 Years of Writing, Part 8: Music of the Metrognomes (2003)

What else can I say? I love these little guys!

It may be best to save the big story about Metrognomes for my upcoming blog about the first novel in the series. Suffice it to say, the two short stories and the novel series were all coming together simultaneously, way back at the dawn of the 21st century.

I want to say it was 2001, when Molly Brimer and I started working on this world in earnest. I was spitting out story ideas, and she was feverishly sketching character designs from my notes and rantings. I wanted to do three fully illustrated short stories to dip my toes into this magical world and to lead into the events of the first novel. They were intended as direct prologues to the larger story that would be told in the books.

I wound up writing two of the three short stories that I had pitched. The third one didn't really come together for me, even though it likely would have been the shortest, and I could have written it in a day. I will likely return to it though. It's never actually left my thoughts.

But, to the subject of this blog: "Music of the Metrognomes" was my first step into this universe; a dramatic departure from the horror fiction I had written up to this point.

I had this idea for a big novel that would tell a story covering about a decade of its characters' lives. I'll come back to this in a later blog, but the short of it is, I chopped that story into treatments for five distinct books, because I thought it would be more easily digestible for readers that way. Then, I decided it was too cartoony, and I thought I'd never actually go there.

That changed, when I met Molly Brimer, while we were both working at a Barnes and Noble subsidiary called Book Stop, in Dallas. She revealed herself to be an amazing illustrator, did some work for me, and reawakened these gnomes in my imagination. Perhaps the story wouldn't have worked for me as a mere prose narrative, but, with illustrations, we might just have something!

She signed on with enthusiasm matching my own, and we started meeting frequently, outside of work, to go over the characters and plot lines for the series.

I was in a really good place creatively when I wrote this first short story. My website was getting a decent number of hits, my first novel was selling steadily, I was well into working on The Chronicles of Nightfire, Texas and The Great Debate, and I had so many ideas of where I wanted to go next. I'm so glad I settled on the gnomes!

The overarching theme of the Metrognomes series was about the power of diversity; about gnomes from different cultural backgrounds coming together and adding to each other's strengths. That's really all I wanted to set up in this first short story, aside from the world itself; a world I was very nervous about writing.

I had primarily written horror and other dark fiction up to this point, and I had no idea what the tone of this new world was going to be. That was my first inspiration for writing these little prologues. I wanted to meet the characters before we got into the big story. I wanted to understand their world, before I tried to go there for the length of a full novel.

I had planned to tell the story of how Ak'ten, a magical Old World gnome, and Pete, an atheistic Techgnome, first met as children. However, when I looked into the world to start jotting down a basic plot, I discovered that I was far more interested in the second time they met as children. It gave them each an opportunity to worry their guardians before heading out, by confessing they had each met a gnome whom they were forbidden to associate with, and that they had not seen what the problem was.

The adults in the protagonists' lives were there to establish the philosophical contrasts of the two gnome cultures. Ak'ten was an Old World gnome, training under his mentor Malík to be a shaman someday. His people believed in magic, and fairies, and gods. They viewed Pete's culture to be dangerous blasphemers. The Techgnomes, represented by Pete and his mother Resna, believed in science, technology, and secularism. They had seen too many wars started by religion and had long since abandoned magical, dogmatic thinking. They viewed the Old World gnomes as dangerous pagans. Each of these societies had forbidden their people from interacting with the other, but when Ak'ten and Pete crossed paths, all they could see in each other was a different sort of gnome, who wasn't actually threatening in the least.

The story of their second meeting gave me a chance to foreshadow the friendship that would bloom upon their third, which would be the basis for the novel Metrognomes: The Shaman's Apprentice. 

Nervous as I was to try my hand at fantasy, I was delighted by the characters when I met them on the page. I started to find the tone of the overall series in the young gnomes' innocent curiosity about each other. Once I'd finished this first tale, I knew I could write the novel from the perspective of Ak'ten and Pete without trouble, though they'd be teenagers by the time I touched base with them again.

While Molly did concept sketches for several interior illustrations, it became so time consuming to do them in full color, as we had planned, that we eventually abandoned them in favor of getting the story published sooner, with the intention of doing an illustrated second edition later. Molly did finish a couple of the full color paintings, before we let the idea go, and one of them was chosen to serve as the cover art for the e-book. I would still love to work with Molly on finishing these other illustrations someday. Time will tell, if we ever have the chance to go back and do just that.

"Music of the Metrognomes" was published as a free PDF e-book on my website on July 30, 2003. It was the first story I ever published in that format. A number of e-book and print editions would follow over the years, the most recent being the 2013 Kindle e-book and a paperback available exclusively through my website, via Lulu.com.

This story has always been very dear to me. I met some of my favorite characters in its pages. In fact, to this day, Ak'ten and Pete remain two of my very best friends.

Next: "Dr. Coffee's Pill" (2004)