Casey Fahy is the author of the novel, The Seven Isles of Ameulas. An excerpt of his second novel, Escaping America, is featured in this issue.

Mr. Fahy is a recalcitrant writer of "escapist" fiction.

The following is taken from a transcript of the question and answer session that followed a recent reading the author gave at the Barnes and Noble bookstore in Mission Valley in San Diego.

Q: When did you know you wanted to be a writer?

A: I was twelve years old when I decided to become a novelist, and I wrote down in a small booklet that I could carry around in my pocket the title of the novel that I wanted to write. And that title was called, The Seven Isles of Ameulas. I started to write every day…

After I'd written three chapters, about 75 pages, my mother, as mothers will do, threw my jeans into the wash, and I ended up retrieving a clod of paper mache out of my pocket, and had to start over. I knew that was the turning point. And if I could do that, I'd be well on the path of becoming an author. So, rewriting is what it is all about.

I finished the first draft when I was sixteen, and I put it aside after Random House very kindly rejected it with many encouraging words. I also decided it just hadn't lived up to what I wanted it to be. So I returned to the novel when I was in my twenties. At that point I added an entirely new level, a layer called 'romance'. (Something I didn't know about when I was twelve.) But of course, Trinadol had to have a love interest. There had to be a true love in the book. There are now three love stories in the book, so it's rather rich in that regard. But I again set it aside, because it still wasn't quite what I wanted it to be. I wanted it to also be a great adventure tale, and I had a lot a research to do on seafaring to make a credible voyage at the end of the book. So I set it aside and returned to the book in my thirties. That's when I finished the book.

Q: Was this the only book or project you worked on in all that time?

A: I've written other novels and many other things in the meantime, of course. This has not been my only pursuit. And, that's one of the unique things that makes the novel have more richness, a lot more layers, than most escapist fantasy would.

One of the missions of the book was to include more than the general escapist fantasy would include. From the beginning of time when people first started writing fantasies, back to Greek mythology and Aesop's fables, throughout fiction, from Shakespeare to George Orwell, writers have been going into the realm of fantasy to say something about our world, in reality.

And I think a lot of fantasy today has gotten away from that. I think that, in some ways, it's kind of an escapism 'fix'. You see endless series about unicorns and elves and whatnot and it's a mix and match dungeons and dragons kind of serialized intravenous drip of escapism.

Q: What is the book about that applies to our ‘real world’?

A: The book is about a young king who inherits a kingdom at the age of seventeen. He is given a curse, or a prophecy, by his dying father from his death bed. That prophecy is that, the thing he loves most in life will be his downfall. As he's about to assume the responsibilities of the crown at a very young age, he finds himself afraid of anything that might come close to his heart.

It's a parable for what all of us have faced. Every time we love, we risk. At his age that is something he has to understand how to approach. When he finds out that he may himself be the source of this doom, he decides that he must isolate himself from his kingdom and embarks on a mission to build a giant network of monsters and smaller islands around his island kingdom, so that his subjects can never reach him… so that anything he loves cannot be harmed, by him. He is afraid that he might bring devastation to everything he comes in contact with.

So it is a parable, of what I think leads to most people's sense of isolation at some point in their life. They feel inadequate to deal with their loved ones. They feel inadequate to reach out and be involved in the world. So they isolate themselves in one form or another. Sometimes it's addiction, sometimes it's alienation, isolation. But all these causes, I think the core motivation at the base of that is that people lose a certain confidence in themselves and are afraid of the risk involved in loving.

And that's something that Trinadol ultimately must learn as he isolates himself from all of the world. Instead he journeys into a dream world-where he finds his true love-but ultimately someday has to come back, and confront the real world.

Now this is a something that everybody goes through at some point or another in their lives. But what's interesting is that it's also a parable of an artist's journey. An artist must go into a dream world. He must isolate himself for many, many years. And somehow, when he comes out, he must have something valuable to impart to the real world.

It's the parable of an artist, and it's a parable of everyone's journey through their own lives. Coming to terms with the fact that if you believe you will harm the things you love and you isolate yourself from all the world, in order not to bring harm to that world, you end up, ironically, relinquishing the world to evil. Because evil does not have such a moralistic conscience as to try to take itself out of existence. It will jump on you, and it will also prey on that kind of conscience in a person, so ultimately, at the end of the day, you have to risk, you have to go out into the real world just to defend the things that you value, the things that you love. And this is really the lesson of Trinadol the King as he learns how to reclaim his kingdom and reclaim his love.

Q: What type of research did you do for this book?

A: I actually did just about everything. I mapped out the phases of the moon in the world that was there. I built a globe of the world. I built a model of the sailing ship that's used to battle through the Archipelago in order to learn all about the seafaring. I studied many books about seafaring and all it's terminology-researched with several experts in that field in order to add the authenticity to all that. That's absolutely necessary to suspend disbelief for some of the more fantastical adventures that the seafarers go through as they're trying to get to Trinadol.

Q: What authors have influenced your work?

A: Well, I would certainly say Tolkien. I would say this book is, in a way, sort of a combination of Hamlet and The Odyssey. It's a reluctant King trying to figure out his own soul before inheriting the world. On the other hand, it's also a giant sea voyage through great, perilous monsters at sea.

I'm very much influenced by 19th Century romantic authors. Victor Hugo is one of my favorites. This is a kind of school of literature that is not often published today, and this is my favorite. So in a way I'm an anachronism, maybe in a way I'm born at the wrong time, but I think in a way I'm born at the right time. Because I think some honest and real romanticism, in the heroic sense, is probably just what we need in a sea of irony that we've been literally weathering for the last decade or so.

Q: What kind of commitment did you have to make, as an author, to completing your first novel?

A: Well, I certainly think as an author there is a trade-off that an author needs to make. An author needs to commit himself for many, many years to no social life whatsoever.

That means coming home every single night and writing until you drop and then getting up the next day, going to work, coming home and writing. That is a strange trade-off. Because you literally give up a lot of the real world in order to dwell in a fantasy world.

That is certainly a battle that Trinadol fights himself. He is literally going into to a fantasy world. He needs to emerge at the end like I did after writing those first five words on a little pocket book in my jeans.

Ultimately it had to come out in a real thing, in this world, that would be of some value here to everyone in the world. So, yeah, there's a parallel there…it’s a very personal parallel.... in a way, I was addicted to writing.

I got out of this world into a world that I invented. I had to live there and live in other worlds, in order to make them real.

There are many parallels to that. I think artists of all kinds have a parallel to that. They have to leave the world in order to somehow come back to the world with something. And I think that's true for everyone in some way.

I was certainly aware of that as a theme - addiction would be a theme. But it's not just addiction. I think there's a whole cluster of problems caused by people escaping from the world.

And that's why the book is in the genre that it is. This is escapist fiction. It is fantasy, and it had to be a fantasy because in order to take the reader through that process of going into a fantasy world and coming back to this world with something-after they turn the page-that they can carry forward into their own lives. It needed to be a fantasy.
I actually think that a good parallel is people who love escapist fiction. They don't want to face this world.

Some fantasy is good. Star Trek, you bring back good messages and morals about life and then you can apply them to your life. But there are others. Literally, I consider some fantasy novelists sort of pushers in a way. Because they keep people addicted to escaping without any 'real world' purpose that they can bring back to this world.

So there's many forms of escape, many reasons why somebody would want to escape. And what they have to learn is about themselves in order to come back and defend their values in the real world.

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