Greetings and salutations. I suppose this makes me the Graham half of the pen name and Ettin that is Graham Clevenger. I am Stephen Graham, a punny world-builder who turns caffeine into ink and sarcasm into conversation. Yes, even here in my serious introduction I can’t help but be goofy. Or am I Mickey?

     Anyway, let me tell you a bit about where I came from, and what I bring to our writing. I was four years old, living on an Army base in Germany when the kids next door were sent, from their grandparents, a big box of new toys that had just hit toy shelves. They invited us over to play with these new toys, some weird thing called Star Wars. I never looked back. I grew up a child of the 80’s, bouncing around between Transformers, G.I Joe, and of course, Star Wars. It was another two years, when I was six, that I saw my first movie in a theater, The Empire Strikes Back. I became obsessed with every piece of model building and world building lore I could find about this new series, even back then.

       My love of science fiction started there. My mother was a highly creative person, and started me early in my love of reading. Most of my memories of playing with my brother were the elaborate dioramas and stories we created from all of our toys. I drifted directly to the Decepticons, COBRA, and the Galactic Empire. My brother was a fan of the Autobots, the Joes, and those traitorous Rebel Alliance, so collecting was easy for us. So the Decepti-Cobra Empire fought hard against the G.I. Auto-Alliance, and every character had a name and elaborate backstory. We debated rigorously over who should win in each match-up, and why.

      Then a few months before I turned nine we moved to Texas. Being such a long drive, we headed to the bookstore to load me and my brother up with distractions to keep us quiet. I found some really cool cover art that intrigued me, and to my parent’s surprise I picked out The Sword of Shannara. Not even nine, I fought my way through that book, barely looking up the entire trip. A few days after we moved in, my mother had to go to the mall to track down the second book in the series. From there I was hooked on fantasy. My movies turned from ET, Flight of the Navigator, and The Last Starfighter, to The Neverending Story, Willow, and Krull. Star Wars and Star Trek: TNG kept me in kind of an equilibrium, and now both genres fight for space in my head.

      My desire to tell stories soon turned to trying to write, and in my freshman year of high school I tried writing novel adaptations of two of my favorite movies, Neverending Story and DARYL. I didn’t try Star Wars only because I had already read Alan Dean Foster’s adaptation, and knew those had already been written. I gave up on those though, in favor of trying a hand at my own “original” work, a complete knockoff of Shannara. I wrote about 50 pages, probably close to 20,000 words, before life got in the way of all that. I still have a hard copy of that in a binder by my desk.

      It was around here that I discovered pen-and-paper roleplaying. Dungeons & Dragons, HERO System, and Vampire: The Masquerade. At last! Storytelling without the repetitiveness of writing and editing! I was hooked. I was all about creating these new characters, writing elaborate backstories for them, and creating adventurous stories with my fellow gamers. Even better was when I was able to run the game, getting deep into the world building of my youth. What is the government here? Who runs that shadowy guild over there? Why is there a mountain in the middle of this plain? I dug deep, and spend probably thousands of hours delving into the how’s and why’s of game worlds I could introduce players to.

      I still roleplay, but my mind kept drifting back to the thought of writing. After all, when I was gaming, I only had control of one half of the conversation, and since they were all improvised on the fly, there was no time to ponder over the perfect lines. A few times I teased around with co-gamers about the possibility of turning some of our game sessions into a book, but it never got past talking and daydreaming, really. I guess it was around ’98 or ’99 that I ran a one-on-one game with a newer friend of mine, Clevenger. He played the main hero, while I fleshed out the world around him. Since that point, we both tossed back and forth about the idea of writing something down as we continued on with our tabletop roleplaying games.

      My life completely fell apart in 2017, and in a bid to regain some control I went back to writing. I had done some short stories here and there, posting online and showing a few friends. But now I was serious about trying again at a book. Digging into some writing prompt postings gave me some initiative, and I settled on a story in my head about a romance, playing into the trope of the street thief and the prince falling for each other. Yes, it was going to be a gay novel. I’m gay, I’ve fought my family, my environment, and my friend circle for the right to be gay, and damn it, I was going to write a gay romance. But I lacked two things: the motivation to stay at my writing, and a proper backdrop to set my romance into. 

      Enter (re-enter?) Clevenger. He was helping me rebuild my life, and we got around to talking about writing. We were already in the middle of doing a giant world building exercise, creating a fantasy world to run a roleplaying game in, toying with the idea of writing it into a source book that could be put up for sale, where others could use our magic system, world history, and original races to play their own games in, and tell their own stories. As we developed the magic system, Clevenger told me about this story idea he had, about a guy who finds out his parents were the warlords on both sides of a war, and how he would deal with that knowledge. I started telling him about the novel I was thinking of. My story lacked an overarching plot, while his lacked significant character storytelling. So what if we combined them?

      An idea was formed, and from there we began finding ways to connect our characters, weaving our two stories into one grand tale. We had ten years of tabletop roleplaying stories to draw on for locations, villains, and background characters. And wouldn’t you know it? We were sitting right in front of a set of giant whiteboards with an entire world and magic system, just waiting to be used. From there were were able to grow into what is now the Stories of Sainan. I had experience writing and world building, Clevenger was a master of organization and technically minded to build metaphysics and pick apart plot holes. So together we started outlining, with me writing scenes and him keeping the outlines organized. Then Clevenger made the mistake of taking one of his scene descriptions and expanding upon it. Before he knew it, he had written his first scene! Score!

      Now we are easily writing 50/50. Our styles and mindset work really well together. We keep each other on point, and act as editor and critique partner for each other’s scenes. We have weekly discord calls to brainstorm character ideas and story beats. We write everything out and keep it in a shared Google Drive folder. I honestly could not keep on this without Clevenger being right there, keeping me on track and helping me with every plot twist and character change. We started with a small idea that we hoped might stretch into a single book of maybe 70K words, with no intention of publishing aside from doing a pair of print-on-demand copies for our own shelves. Now that three act book turned into a three book series, which has ballooned into a four book outline, already half written. Since we are writing all four before editing the first book, all four will gain the benefits of what we are learning as we write. Already we have so many ideas for rewriting book one scenes!      We have fallen in love with this world, and with these characters. We invite you to come in, and fall in love as well.

Don’t forget to love one another,

Graham