Ahab's Revenge

And so my Travel Guide to Places that Don’t Exist is completed.

Well, completed is probably not the right term. One of the positives surrounding a fake travel-guide like this is that you can always add a new place or attraction, slotting it in wherever you like.

Will I do that? Possibly. Not for a while though, because I have something…a bit larger in mind for my next project. How large? Well, let’s just say I’ve never posted a project as I was working on it. Thankfully, I’ve always had a backlog of stories that I’ve “finished,” so I’ve always been able to relax and put the time into writing without worrying about any self-imposed posting schedule.

That’s going to change a bit. This next project is…let’s be kind and just call it unfinished. A lot of work is going to go into it, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to keep a three-times-a-week posting schedule on this project alone…so I’m going to start only posting it once a week, on Saturdays. Tuesdays and Thursdays will be focused on posting/archiving old work, and any one-shot short stories I come up with.

So what is this big project? Well…

When I started writing in seriousness, it was because of The Watch in the Sand. The idea struck hard and held on tight; I had to write it down. At times it was a short story, at times a novel, and once even a narrative poem like Robert Browning’s The Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Right on the heels of The Watch in the Sand came Edmund Moulde. The first book never changed too drastically; it was always about Edmund learning to live at Moulde Hall and deal with his new life. At one point I had planned on having the first book be all about Edmund exploring Moulde Hall and finding the Cavalcadium, with a second book being all about his relatives arriving and scheming up a storm. I think editing down to one book was the right choice…most of the time.

My third idea, an idea that has stuck with me from then til now, was the Ever Lord series.

The setting was a mix of a few different inspirations: the Fading Suns universe along with Dune provided a mixture of sci-fi technology and medieval society. The just-then released Game of Thrones provided the framework of political machinations and a thematic statement; “A story about good people doing good things and it all goes wrong.”¹ Added onto this was the idea suggested by the Fading Suns name; what if the universe was dying?

It’s going to happen eventually; the stars will all die out and the universe will end. What sort of story would happen if that were only a few hundred years away? With a dying universe and a fading empire…how would people behave?

This third idea became my white whale for over a decade.

I wanted to write seven books. I was tired of the fantasty-series cliché of books that kept adding characters until you had 500 page volumes that spent two chapters apiece on what each character was doing across the world. It felt clumsy and a not a little lazy. Instead, I wanted to write a book for each of the main characters from their point of view. The first book would set the stage, and then the next five would start at the same chronological point before branching off as the main characters went their separate ways. There would be a few scenes that would occur in more than one book, but you’d see the scenes from a different point of view: perhaps in book 2 you’d get one character’s anger at a situation, while in book 4 you’d see how another character was manipulating the first one.

These five books would all then end at roughly the same point, so that book seven could close out the story with a more traditional climax. I was excited about the project — still am, really — but after writing a book or two’s worth of words, I realized I had bit off more than I could chew.

First I scaled it back to six books, then just five. I re-wrote backstories, character-arcs, added and removed significant portions of plot, even shifted settings multiple times. The idea of the universe dying took a back seat, and several characters got added, removed, and restructured. Then my semi-regular depression took over, and I re-started the project only to quickly stop again multiple times over the years.

Am I finally ready to re-start and finish this project? Who knows? I’m certainty feeling scared of it; Like Pavlov’s dog, I’ve been taught over the years that working on this series brings failure, along with feelings of doubt, inadequacy, and depression. I don’t want to go back to that place, but I do feel stronger, now, and I have a new format to play with, thanks to my aforementioned posting schedule.

I’m moving the story to take place in the Myriad Worlds, in a place sequestered from the rest of the Velvet. I’m not writing to create a “book,” exactly, but instead a series of stories — vignettes, if you will — in the setting. There will still be an overarching plot, the main characters will still be seen regularly, but I have a website that needs regular posts; I might as well embrace the format.

This will be a long project, and results may be sporadic. I’m going to try positing regularly, but it might not work out that way. We’ll have to see how it shakes out.

With that said, time to hunt me a white whale…