Back in 1990, I had a vivid dream that I turned into an awful short story that I only half completed. It was written in Word Perfect for DOS, and I believe I still have a copy of it burried somewhere. Then, in the summer of 1991, I attempted to turn it into a screenplay by starting first with the story boards. I have since lost that, but I believe I wrote as far as 20 seconds into the film. Then, in 1992, after some deep research into The Aeneid, I was insipired to turn it into an epic.

I wrote The Ulangar under the pen name “Viktur Conan Slayson,” and it took me the better part of 6 years to write. It started off with pen and paper, filling a giant 3 ring binder for the first two and a half books. After that, I began the revisions and started writing it on a computer. Fortunately, I had the forethought to save it in RTF format, rather than some custom OS/2 format (which I was using at the time).

It was intended to be split into 10 “books” in poetic form, with an epilogue book 11 in a more standard novel form. After I started on book 5, I soon lost all my saved files during a move, including the end of book 4 and the progress on book 5 which I hadn’t printed to a hard-copy, which led me to abandon the project. Fortunately, back in 2011, I found a backup of these last parts, and I started publishing them to the web.

Update: I have started reprinting it here.