Many, many years ago, when I was around twelve or thirteen years old, I started writing a story -- a fantasy story, full of action, adventure, brave heroes, dastardly villains, wizards, dragons, dwarves, magic, and even true love. It was going to be an epic on par with The Lord of the Rings...or at least Final Fantasy II. I put together a detailed outline, created a map of my fantasy world, came up with dozens of characters (I even drew pictures of some of them), wrote all kinds of background information on the world's history, and, finally, sat down to write it all out. I managed to fill forty-eight pages of wide-ruled notebook paper before losing interest and moving on to something else. Recently, while digging around in my closet, I stumbled across this forty-eight-page epic, along with my original outline for it and all the maps and background material. The story was embarrassingly terrible and derivative, full of scenes I'd swiped from fantasy novels and characters I'd basically stolen from the 16-bit video games I'd been playing at the time, but I was impressed with my younger self's insane confidence and enthusiasm for the material -- I really did think I was creating something awesome. In the intervening years I've become a slightly better writer (at least I'd like to think so), and I began to think it might be fun to polish up and finish the story, using my original outline as a reference, and using the background information I rediscovered to flesh out the world a bit. My goal is to clean up the story and give it a more professional feel while staying as true as possible to my juvenile and overly-ambitious original vision. Each chapter will include a bit of commentary on the changes I've made.   So here it is: the revised and updated version of The Chronicles of Simon the Light-Wielder, a fairly generic fantasy about a Chosen One who goes on a quest to defeat a Dark Lord, has a bunch of adventures, makes a lot of new friends, etc. Enjoy!