Norwell Native Publishes Fantasy Novel

A group of soldiers is being tracked and hunted by a large party of “orcs.”
They’re outnumbered and they’re running out of time.

They decide they’ll find a place where they’ll make a stand against their enemy.

A mountain pass is chosen, and when the bad guys arrive on the scene, a massive battle ensues.

Fighting together, the group’s teamwork allows it to emerge victorious despite the staggering odds.

This description comes not from “The Lord of the Rings” or more recently “The 300,” but rather from a fantasy novel published recently by Erik O’Brien, a graduate of Norwell High.

This past fall, O’Brien, who now lives in Halifax, self-published his first novel, “Kur’s Rage; Part One of the Duaredheim Staff Saga.”

As of this week, O’Brien had sold about 40 copies and given out a number more to friends, family and coworkers.

“Pretty much, I want people to read my story and enjoy it, to feel the passion I had when I wrote it,” O’Brien said. “(Writing is) the one thing in my life that when I’m doing it, it feels like I was meant to do.”

The theme of “Kur’s Rage…” involves war veterans who become friends when they meet up during peacetime, and band together to take on various adventures.
“Anyone who can read well will enjoy it,” O’Brien said. “I designed it to entertain.”

The theme of the story is influenced from O’Brien’s interest in science fiction and fantasy writing, games — he was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons growing up — and also from the experiences he had serving in the military.

After graduating from Norwell High in 1984 and then from UMass-Amherst, O’Brien joined the Army and served as a supply sergeant in the Army Rangers from 1990 to 1994.

“Most of the time I loved it,” he said of his military experience. “Sometimes I hated it.”

O’Brien said some of the characters in his book are modeled on people he met in the Army, and some of the battle scenes in the book are also similarly inspired.

Some of the men O’Brien trained with in the military died in Mogadishu, Somalia, in the fall of 1993, during the action described in Mark Bowden’s book “Black Hawk Down.”

O’Brien said he started writing his book while in the Army, and over the years he kept at it as a hobby, eventually building up a lengthy manuscript.
“The more that I wrote, I felt I had a winner,” he said.

In all, O’Brien said it took him about 10 years to write the book, and an additional five years of rigorous editing. He estimates that in all, he has read the book about 1,000 times.

“I thought I’d brought it to as high a level as I could,” he said. “I wanted to make sure it was as good as it could be.”

O’Brien, who works full-time as a lathe operator at Villa Machine in Dedham, contacted numerous publishers about the book, but eventually decided to self-publish, working with Colorado-based Outskirts Press to do so.

In addition to the text, the book features a handful of maps that depict the lands where the characters live and where their adventures are set, all of which O’Brien illustrated.

With his first book published, O’Brien is working on the sequel, and he has already mapped out ideas for a few more books. In a given week, he said he writes at least one hour each day, and sometimes for three hours on the weekend.

He writes his scenes and stories in a notebook first, and next types those into his laptop computer.

Most of the writing comes to him spontaneously, he added, and he doesn’t seem to suffer from writer’s block.
“It’s like all my books are already (written),” he said. “I’m just tapping into it.”

What can be a challenge at times is finding the right word to say exactly what he wants.

“I try to use the simplest word that I need, to get the most meaning,” he said.

In many genres of fiction writing, O’Brien said characters are presented in a 100 percent, good versus evil kind of way. O’Brien said his characters have more gray areas: there are heroes who have some negative traits and bad guys who’re not all bad.

The names of the novel’s characters — including Kur, one of the heroes, and others like Kalor, Cloghan, Nenagh, Targon and Master Uldrick — got their origin either from O’Brien’s imagination or from the pages of a names dictionary.

Over the years, O’Brien said his parents and friends have been very supportive of his writing, and since his book has been published, a number of friends and colleagues have been reading and enjoying it.

“I’d like to make money on it, but I’d like people to read it more than anything,” he said.

At some point, O’Brien said he would love to write for a living, and he said he will not stop working or writing until he gets there.

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