So I was born and then, shortly afterwards, named after the millionaire father-in-law of a dentist who had been kidnapped by the IRA (Irish Republican Army). Now, there’s a lot to unpack there but rather than try to give you the historical and cultural background necessary to understand why the IRA kidnapped a dentist I’m just going to stick to the stuff about me.
My mother will maintain that I am not named after Dr. Austin Darragh, the millionaire father-in-law of the kidnapped dentist, but instead she just heard the name on the radio and it “sounded nice”. My father, who’d had strong opinions when it came to the naming of my other siblings, didn’t have any problem with this name and the nuns came who visited my mother in hospital approved of it.
Just for clarity, nuns visiting new mothers in hospital isn’t one of those Irish things you don’t realise is weird until you’ve said it out loud but rather my mother worked with nuns and I guess they had a free afternoon. The nuns also gave me my middle name (This might be a weird Irish thing…?) which I won’t list here because it’s security question and in the future I may want to claim the M in “Darragh M Kelly” stands for magnanimous, meteoric, or perhaps Magnavox.
So, I was born and named. After his, not much happened. I lived in Ireland, I went to school in Ireland, went to college in Ireland, and worked in Ireland. While doing all of this I also spent too much time on the internet. At first it was writing Fan Fiction and then I was contacted by one of my fans (my funny fan fiction about Legacy of Kain was very highly rated) who invited me to hang out on his forum. These events were some of the earliest dominoes in a chain that would eventually lead to a 1000+ person wedding in India where I married someone I had met on an online role playing site.
Again, for clarity, the 1000+ person event wasn’t technically the wedding (That either happened the next day or 3 months earlier, depending on your interpretation) but 1000 people is a lot of people and I feel it suggests my mass appeal from the early days of my fan fiction career had only grown in potency. Also, though it would be gauche to dwell on it, I would like to stress that I am now married to someone who’s first exposure to me was when I joined their site to play an isolationist mad King who lived up a mountain.
If you are unfamiliar with the world of online role-playing (my condolences) I should tell you that when that when it comes to cooperative writing you probably shouldn’t make a character who’s defining feature is they don’t really want to interact with other people. Still, I managed to wine and dine a god’s brother on a frigid mountainside, link arms with a cunning courtesan as I ordered someone to hit a dog with a chair, and even roundly disapprove of my daughter’s failure to put the well-being of the Empire before herself.
Now I know what you’re thinking; why’d you hit that dog? Well, it wasn’t a real dog, a man had shapeshifted into a wolf to attack me. Still, even if it had been those posts were so powerfully and beautifully written that it wouldn’t have mattered in the long run. Of course, my wife writing was also very good but she owned the forum and was well liked by everyone so I feel when you do the calculus of who tricked who into marrying them I come out on top. Anyways, you’ll probably be able to read her account of all this stuff when she’s promoting her novel, which is very good, but until that time let’s keep the focus on me.
So why were my posts so good? Well, the thing about role playing at the height of the Game of Thrones fever is while a lot of people have read those books they generally haven’t read everything by Terry Pratchett. So, while everyone else is determined to be competent and ruthless, you are driven entirely by the principle of “Yeah, I think this should get a laugh”. Discworld is an incredibly important series for me as not only is it great (Small Gods is the best) but it also made me realise that fantasy could be funny. You know, funny in a way that didn’t require someone to crack a wry grin to let you know. Funny in a way the way that you still keep “It was like asking a brick wall what it thought of dentistry. As a question, it made no sense.” on the pedestal upon which it deserves to rest.
But most important thing I learned from Discworld is stories didn’t have to be just funny. They could change the way you thought about poverty, they could show you how easy it is for a lie to outpace the truth, they could help you recognise that we all, no matter where we come from, we all share a common humanity. And it could do all that while suggesting that Australia is some kind of universal constant that will just crop up naturally. That is my inspiration and I hope it’s something I can emulate in my own books.
But not specifically the Australia thing as I the setting I write my books in the one my wife created for the forum we met on and I’ve already pushed my luck far enough by getting a Ireland analog in there.
So yeah, I think that’s the essence of me. Writing has been good to me and I want to keep doing it. Partially to give it the chance to be even better to me but mostly because I enjoy it. Also because I have a pathological need to be funny that is undoubtedly some kind of coping mechanism and writing is the best outlet I’ve found for it. So far.
Regards,
Darragh “Monstrous Regiment was also pretty good” Kelly