Why?: Chewy Noh and the Legends of Spring
The Dedication
To Clint
This is a personal dedication (what one’s aren’t?) dealing with my childhood best friend who Chewy’s best friend is named after. Though Clint in the story shares more than just his namesake–the fear of water and leg braces, not to mention super blonde, practically white hair–in this story, another character personifies my childhood friend: Tom
In the book, it is loosely hinted at what fifteen years into the future has caused to happen to Tom. Losing everything he cares about, he doesn’t know what to do–and in a chapter written but ultimately cut from the book, we see what Tom decides to do about it. In this way, it echoes my friend’s choices and the sad circumstances I learned regarding him. Sometimes, we all need a little time traveling powers.
After Note
There hasn’t been an after note with my other books, but as the dedication was given to my old friend, I still felt the whole sub-content of the book had to be addressed. There was a reason for me bringing Chewy fifteen years into the future, and it wasn’t just to make a crazy story. I’ve reprinted the after note below to clarify.
In this book, Chewy Noh goes fifteen years into the future, landing roughly around the year 2030.
I am no futurologist. I don’t try to even guess what new gadgets or new problems the world might have in the next decade or two. It is far too hard, and too many before me have gotten things so utterly wrong it’s embarrassing. But that date is, nonetheless, important.
By that time, most every unreleased POW in North Korea will have died. They will have fought for their country, been captured, and then spent the next eighty to ninety years in another country, living like a slave. They will have spent those years as outsiders, mistreated and under appreciated. When they die, no one will know, and even worse, care. They will have been forgotten, and for me, that is the part of their story that no matter how much I know it I can never for a second believe or understand.
Tim Learn 