MINOT – Until the ice storm, Craig McCabe had given up on publishing his first novel.

Publishers rejected the story of wizards, swords and dragons. Self-publishers wanted too much money. One asked him for $22,000.

So McCabe stuffed away the manuscript.

But when the ice storm froze Maine in January 1998, knocking out power for half the state, he pulled out the pages.

By the light of the fireplace, the Minot man read his wife and daughters the story he’d begun merely because he’d run out of something to read.

“They liked it,” said McCabe, still smiling at the memory. “They were confused at first, but once they got into it, they’d ask, ‘What happens next, Dad?'”

Five years later, after a long search for an affordable self-publisher, the book is finally in the marketplace. Three online companies and a local seller have the 216-page book in stock.

The display on the front cover is a McCabe woodcarving of a dragon and a wizard. Made before he began writing the book, the carving belies a long interest in magical worlds.

As a boy, McCabe played dungeon and dragon games with his friends, fighting evil monsters and spells with nothing more than their imaginations.

McCabe put the games aside as an adult. He kept reading fantasy novels, though. A favorite became Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series of books.

“I don’t know what it was that got me,” McCabe said. “I really don’t. But if it had magic and swords and dragons, I’d like it.”

The books kept him going in the early 1990s, when he worked through a sometimes dull real-world job.

McCabe worked for the Bureau of Motor Vehicles. He gave written exams and road tests. Between the nervous teenagers taking their tests, there were sometimes long waits.

One day, he ran out of something to read. So, he began writing.

“I was having so much fun, I kept going,” he said. Sometimes he’d jot down only a sentence or two in a loose-leaf binder before going back to work.

“I just wrote down what I heard in my head,” he said. “It was like someone was telling me a story.”

About a year after he began, he ended the book. It was 229 handwritten pages, 124,959 words.

He spent months typing it into his home computer. He then printed it out and began sending it to publishers.

They told him it wasn’t the right time or their kind of novel. So, he went to a self-publisher. When one quoted him a price of $22,000, he gave up.

Then the ice storm re-awakened his desire to publish. He finally found a company called 1st Books. For about $1,000, he managed to get his book published.

The first copies arrived by mail a month ago.

“Imagine this, if you can,” the story begins. “A land that time has twisted and warped; A land of spiked mountains and deep valleys; trees gnarled and bent; A medieval land of sorcery and myth, legend and prophecy; A land that seems to be stuck in the autumn of the year, waiting for winter to come.”

The story focuses on a man named Rathsmus and his journey in the magical world. That journey is not over.

McCabe, who now works as a liquor licenser for the state, has begun writing a second book.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

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