The Ivory Star

Foreword

The Ivory Star was my first published novel, appearing in 1997 from Commonwealth Publications.

It is an artifact that traces a number of points through my early life.

I started writing this novel in high school after an incredibly vivid dream. I finished it in college, and spent the next several years revising ad infinitum, whilst sending out dozens of query letters to agents and publishers.

Like the rest of my early efforts-various odd, fun, derivative stories and novellas-The Ivory Star was written on my family's Commodore 64, using word processing software called Bank Street Writer (a phrase that has not been dredged from some 25 years of intervening memories, until the moment of writing this sentence), saved on 5.5-inch floppy disks, and printed with a dot matrix printer. The Commodore's RAM limited my chapters to about 3,000 words, and I can remember many hours spent trying to massage chapters into that space.

When I began writing this story, I was a naïve farm kid from the middle of nowhere. When I finished the first draft about four years later, I was a naïve kid with a university education.

When I began writing this story, I was a kid who'd never had a girlfriend. When I finished it, I was in the relationship that became my first marriage.

It was written before the Web existed, and died when the Web was in its infancy.

It wears its influences on its sleeve, and yet that is not necessarily a bad thing, because its influences are wonderful. Its pedigree is strong. Critical readers can draw their own conclusions about those influences.

I am now a writer with thirty years more experience than when I started this crazy adventure. I have advanced considerably in my skills. I have written eight novels since then. The skills of the naïve newbie grate sometimes on this mature writer's ear, and yet I still love this story for its passion, for its earnestness, for its raw headlong charge into the kind of pulpy, romantic adventure that I loved back then (and still do).

I hate what happened to this book. I won't recount the entire story here, but point you toward my blog Ronin Writer, where you can find the whole sordid tale down on the left hand side on a page titled "Cautionary Tales for Writers." Suffice to say that it suffered abuse first at the hands of a literary agency that culminated in all three of its principals in federal prison for fraud, and second at the hands of a criminally unscrupulous publisher.

This book was my baby, and I was forced to watch helplessly as it was savaged by dingoes.

After this experience it was two years before I could bring myself to write again, but the subsequent work would become The Ronin Trilogy, a work of which I am immensely proud. Moreover, I learned some hard lessons about the publishing industry, about my own artistic integrity, and how immeasurably valuable it is for the creative soul to be accepted into a community of other writers. 

Because of its history, and because I'm much better now at what I do, many conflicting emotions are tied up with The Ivory Star. I have struggled for a long time with ideas about what I could/should do with it. Should I leave it and its unpublished sequel in their forgotten graves, or should I present them to another generation of readers? With the sea changes of recent years in the publishing industry, the possibility exists to resurrect this scarred, tainted artifact from my artistic past. Will audiences discard it for its flaws? Or embrace it for its storytelling, for its unabashed spirit of adventure, for its sense of hope? Perhaps both? Perhaps readers familiar with my later works might find it a curiosity.

There are those who would say I should let it stay buried. Perhaps it should be what they call a "trunk novel," a piece wherein the writer began to learn his craft, but a piece that never again leaves the steamer trunk until the dead author's heirs start sifting through the dusty, yellowed bytes of Old Stuff. Those folks would say I should just aim for the future and keep writing new stuff, let potential fans discover the mature writer. They're not wrong. I do this with no small sense of fear.

But somewhere in me I still believe in this tale. For many years, this was my baby. I must pay homage to the years I spent writing and polishing it. Somewhere I still have to believe in that naïve kid and his dream of being a novelist. Even with six published novels under my belt and two more on the way, cultivating and maintaining that faith never gets easier. But I want to experiment with new ways to connect with readers in this digital age. I'm willing to let readers decide its worth.

It is by virtue of the latter sentiments that I present The Ivory Star in a new revised edition. I have done almost nothing with the original text, except to add a couple of flourishes, play with some names, and carpet-bomb the most annoying writerly tics.

-Travis Heermann

November, 2015