The Thief Of The Dark Crystal

I've loved Jim Henson's masterpiece, "The Dark Crystal", ever since I was a little kid.

It spawned such a truly original, surreal universe, I've been waiting for a sequel ever since.

Much to my delight, in December 2013,  I found out about a new contest going on... "The Dark Crystal Author Quest"...

The only problem was, the contest ended by the end of the year... That meant I only had a month to come up with something!

Much like Jen from the original Dark Crystal film, I set off ("Alone Then") to find a good story to tell.

With so many ideas fighting to make the page, while following the contest guidelines, I decided to craft my story around a mysterious Gelfling thief named "Moon".

I wanted my take on The Dark Crystal to be more rugged than the original.

Where Jen reminded me a lot of Luke Skywalker, I wanted Moon to be more of a Han Solo character... An outlaw... with an eye patch... A drifter with a Podling sidekick called "Notes".

That sounded cool to me.

Add on 2 Gelfling warrior princesses ("Willa" and "Wisha"), an adorable but vicious Fizzgig ("Fuzzbub"), and a curious Landstrider, I had a pretty good cast assembled for a journey across Thra.

I did my research of course- www.darkcrystal.com is an amazing website- but I opted out in making my story solely about "The Gelfling Gathering"... I also had a hard time envisioning "Rian" as a main character.

There were just too many questions that I, as a viewer and fan of the original film, had, pertaining to:

-How did Aughra obtain The Crystal Shard?

-Why did Aughra keep The Crystal Shard mixed in with all those other shards?

-Why didn't The Skeksis hide or destroy The Crystal Shard (on initial breakage), so as to prevent it from being healed?

-How did The Skeksis (pre Garthim-era) steal the Gelfling and Podling's essence without being found out? Surely, there was some sort of system in place to keep a stray Gelfling from wandering into skekTek's lab...

All these questions (and many more) needed to be addressed... and in a way that was fun to read too.

While writing my story, "The Thief Of The Dark Crystal", I drew out storyboards to imagine what things might look like if it was ever translated into a movie. I hope you enjoy my illustrations.

Anyway, March 1st, 2014 (yesterday), I found out I didn't make the cut... I wish the remaining 5 finalists the best of luck in their endeavors.

It's awesome that The Jim Henson Company and Grosset & Dunlap let the fans have a stab at creating a new Dark Crystal story. If there was any such thing as a real "Gelfling Gathering", I feel like I was part of it during this period of writing and waiting.

Thanks for reading!

Here is my "Author Quest" submission: "The Thief Of The Dark Crystal"