“But, one good thing about nightmares: We wake up from them, hopefully stronger than when we went to sleep.” - Lloyd Alexander Max Mondrosch
Lloyd Alexander is my favorite writer, and the reason I always wanted to write fantasy books. His worlds were so bright and so pure, that they were a joy to live inside. The only sadness came when I had to step away. In 2009 I made the decision to start writing books and began drafting what would later become The Crimson Spark. It was meant to be like Alexander’s work. But the more of myself I put into it, the more it warped, became darker. This was something that happened unconsciously at first. I didn’t know where it was coming from. But rather than fighting it, I leaned into it and let the book go where it needed to go. It became a dark fantasy story for young adults about the effects of trauma and sexual violence on the developing mind.
As you can imagine, that is a hard sell. People are shocked and confused when I tell them about it. I always get the same question too. “Why?” And I didn't really have an answer other than ‘that’s what it is.’
Obviously getting traditionally published went out the window. I settled into the independent scene and carved out a little niche. To my immense relief, feedback for Spark was very positive. But even more rewarding were the messages I got from people telling me that it had helped them with something. It was never the same thing, sometimes it was grief, sometimes confusion, sometimes something terrible that happened a long time ago. But the fact that it was helping made me feel great. Still that question hung in my head “Why?”
It’s been five years now since Spark was published and we’re three books deep in the story of Vagabond Legacy. Now that I’ve had time to work on it and it’s finally come into its own. I think I finally have an answer.
I began writing Spark on the tail end of a massive battle with depression and anxiety. I was sixteen at the time and had dropped out of High School. When it finally faded, when I began processing things and moving on, that’s when I started writing. Spark was born from a dark time in my life that I managed to escape from, but not everyone I knew was so lucky.
It’s an awful thing to go back and look at a millennial yearbook. You scroll through the names and it’s “he’s divorced, he’s got a drug problem, she’s a single mom, he’s trans, she was in a psych hospital, he killed himself.” You come away with the same question “Why?”. Why do so many of these people I grew up with struggle like this?
I don’t have a conclusive answer for this, I can only write from experience. Almost all the people I grew up with, they have something missing from them. A hole in their hearts that they try to fill with something, sex, drugs, nostalgia for a time when things made sense. A lot of millennials wish they never grew up, most didn’t. Whatever ingredient was there that made our grandparents functioning members of society, it’s gone. Now we drift about, unsure of who we are or what to do. A vagabond generation.
I don’t blame these people. It’s easy to fall into the stereotype of the ‘lazy millennial’ but it goes beyond that. These are people who were brought up to live in a different world, a world that stopped existing when they were young. Now we have a generation of adults who aren’t really trained to do anything. College didn’t help, it’s hard to get a job and even harder to make it a career.
Relationships are difficult too. Thanks to the internet, many of us saw things even the Marquis De Sade couldn’t dream up before we’d ever even held a girl’s hand. They watched their parents’ marriages fall apart in real time, whether from infidelity or simple boredom. It’s not surprising they don’t have functional relationships with people, because they’ve very rarely even seen one.
Drifting aimlessly and having dysfunctional relationships are hallmarks of a millennial’s adulthood. But there’s something else that is not brought up enough. Mental illness. With each new generation, mental health is getting worse and worse. All this drifting, all this dysfunction is contributing to people who are unwell. But mental illness doesn’t come from nowhere. The stresses of the modern world may certainly be a factor, but there’s a deeper element to it.
One of the prevailing themes of Vagabond Legacy is the idea that the developing mind is a fragile thing. It can be wounded or altered more easily than anyone realizes. According to the CDC, 1 in 4 girls and 1 in 13 boys are estimated to experience abuse in childhood. That’s in the United States. It’s estimated 1 out of every 5 children in Europe. Children are not being kept safe like they should. In Vagabond Legacy I wrote that the primary duty of any society is to keep its children safe. By this metric, our society, as of right now, has failed. Children that grow up in these conditions are not going to magically become healthy adults. For them, there’s now a healing process that has to take place, against the already difficult challenge of growing up and transitioning into later life. And they are simply not being given the tools to heal.
At first I’d hoped this was just confined to my generation. One of my first jobs out of college proved that I was wrong. I was a middle school special education teacher. And sometimes the students in the program were just that, someone who learns differently. Most of the time it was where the school deposited students they didn’t know what to do with. Children battling severe mental illness and behavioral issues. Very quickly I saw why. Students came to school hungry. Children came to school bruised. I saw children as young as twelve, children I recognized, wandering the streets after dark alone. I heard stories of girls beaten to death by their Mom’s boyfriend a day after social services said there was nothing they could do.
From gen X, to gen Y, to millennials, to zoomers, it isn’t stopping and I don’t think it will stop with the generations to come. There is a poison in the world that is infecting people younger and younger every day. And I decided that if I was going to write a book for young people, I couldn’t keep this out of it. I couldn’t lie.
This is why Vagabond Legacy is the way it is. It’s a story designed to fill a specific need in young people growing up in this chaos. There is a bright and heroic Alexanderesque story to be found, but to get through it, our heroes must overcome this hole in their hearts that I and so many others have lived with since we were children. It’s a story about characters coming of age in spite of the monstrous things done to them. Vagabond Legacy exists as an inspirational story and it exists to give a set of tools to the people who read it. Tools that will prevent them from becoming warped. And I am eternally grateful to everyone who has allowed me to share it.
Thanks for reading and here’s to five years on the road,
William
Great read! I only respectfully disagree with one point: "With each new generation, mental health is getting worse and worse." I would argue that the mental health SERVICES are what has gotten worse.