If you choose to journey further into the universe that I have created, then let me first give you the history of how and where this expanding field of consciousness is leading me, and potentially you.

My youthful endeavours into the literary world were an escape for me from a world that I found less magical than the one in my head. During the early 1990s I faced some insurmountable questions about my existence and got to the fork in the road where many of us in our youth find ourselves. My head and heart combined and led me out of my five-sense reality and soon my life was full of enchantment and hilarious synchronicity.

In 1994 I lived in an apartment in Dunedin, in the South Island of New Zealand, where I had an ‘experience’ that changed my life in ways I may elucidate in an autobiography at a later date. As a consequence, to appeal to the force at work within me, I wrote twelve dark tales (under the pseudonym of Buford Somerset – I liked the idea of giving over my voice, particularly in regards to these twisted yarns) in the space of days. Those short stories gathered dust for eleven years, and in the meantime I wrote half a dozen more in Vancouver and the first draft of a novel that I finished in 2003 in Wellington, New Zealand.

In 2005 I got to another fork in the path and looked towards the open road in a physical sense (heading abroad again, I travelled for six years before coming back to New Zealand in 2002) and decided that I needed to follow my heart at whatever cost to my head. I dusted off the short stories I had written in 1994 and rewrote them. I quit my job and spent my life savings so that I could fulfil my urge to write. In the process of which, I felt the impulse to bring some light where there had previously been none, and wrote ten inspirational short stories (penned under another pseudonym, Pablo Wairua). It struck me, as I was writing, that I could combine the knowledge I had gathered along my path of self-discovery into a fictional account of how these two imaginary writers came to pen these anecdotes.

During the six months of writing, I began to research heavily from the books that had filled in the blank spaces in my own experiences, giving me a holistic vision of reality and that had also allowed me to form a clear picture of the history of Buford Somerset (an English aristocrat) and Pablo Wairua (a Tuhoe Tohunga).

I had to return to work after six months, but continued to write and research in my spare time. After five years my editor sent the final copy of Entwined (which I wrote using the pseudonym Harmon Sueno, the son of a Rapa Nui native and a Chilean colonist) back to me, and now it finds its way here for you, too.

My intention is to write two novels in this series and four collections of short stories. Entwined, the first novel, relates the full history of Lord Buford Somerset and a little of Pablo Wairua’s. It also depicts the interaction between the two that leads them to become authors.

The second novel, detailing Pablo Wairua’s history and a monumental finale for our authors and their universe, and the final collection of short stories will be released sometime in the future.

Go well.

Pharaeus Lysander

(my second novel, unrelated to the subject matter of Entwined, (Sanctim) will be released mid 2011)