To the reader:

This was a great experiment for me. As some of you may know, I am a wannabe writer, but when I write my science fiction it is heavy with dialog. I have been told that I write very good dialog, and knowing that, I wanted to try something different. With this short story, I have used exclusively narrative to tell the story as you may find in a traditional fairy tale. For me this was not easy. So many times I wanted to slip into dialog to help things along, so many times I had to force myself not to.

There was also another reason for this story. That was as an illustration to another members of our little community of what perseverance could bring and that to be rescued may not be a bad thing. That if one has faith in ones self, can look beyond the hardships, and keep an eye on the future, incredible things can be done by the power of your own will. If you want it bad enough, you can make anything happen.

Along the way I have showered the story with many allusions, iconography, parables, and symbology to help it along, some of it on point, some of it as side comments. Like much of my writing, there are deeper messages written within.

This is also the fastest I have ever written anything of this scale (and when I say scale I include the depth of meaning and not just the word count.) It is, as presented, largely unedited and I am sure that the technically minded amongst our readers will find that there are tense problems, word meaning errors, typos and assorted other maladies that to be honest with you I have a hard time correcting myself.

Do I plan on continuing the story of Galahad, Ionia, and King Morpheus? I doubt it. I think this story will stand alone and I will leave it at that. Would I rewrite this as a longer story, with more description and complete dialog? Maybe. There are a lot of things about this story I like and there are elements that I am not happy with and maybe a rewrite could help, but then again, maybe not.

So for now I am going to let it rest. I have a lot of other stories to tell in my more serious writing (Truth Inc., Levis’ New Genes, Sands of Time, Celestial Mechanics For Hire, etc.) that I may not have time to get back to it. On top of that there is my “Tower” series that I want to write, Forces of Reath (a least 4 or 5 volumes, and big ones at that) that took me twenty years to tell and I would bet that it will take me twenty years to write. I have a lot on my plate, we’ll see where it all leads me and if I can get back to it.