01377: A History of My Novel Concepts

I haven't been writing about my writing as of late, so let's address that to some extent. And while I don't have any immediate updates about my LGBT zombie love story project, there are a number of things nagging me that I need to release back into the wild. It's a writer / blogger thing.

Over the course of my nearly three decades of existence, I've worked on quite a number of stories. Some saw fruition as complete works. Others remained merely concepts, trapped within half-finished drafts and things of that nature. And some of the imagery.

Now back in grade school a classmate of mine had approached me with a proposal - for us to collaborate to develop a concept for a Magic: the Gathering expansion complete with a full set of cards and the story behind them. It was meant for some magazine contest - I forget not if it was for InQuest or The Duelist or something. He wasn't particularly comfortable working with Black and Red in terms of Magic's five color schemes and needed someone willing to deal with these more violent and sometimes "evil" cards. The basic premise was that the story was set on some island colony (much like the Philippines) and a rebellion was brewing. At the same time, more supernatural events were in motion leading up to a possible invasion of this plane by the forces of Hel (one L).

That evolved into my first novel concept a story we called The Gossamer Saga. This remains to be my "one big novel", if you get my drift, and has changed so many times over the years. I carried the story with me even though we never managed to submit anything to the Magic: the Gathering contest. I know he has his own version of the story and I have mine and I had even mapped out a possible crossover in Book 3 of the series with the story of another classmate. Oh school days. The cards for this series included a lot of cultists, fanatics and demonic forces. I really pushed the evil side of things.

The next major story I tried to wrestle with was The Excalibur Fleet Saga, because I seem to be hooked on coming up with multi-novel stories. This was a science fiction piece that drew heavy inspirations from the Star Control series of games, the SDF-3 storyline of Robotech, and of course a good mix of both Star Trek and Star Wars. The main focus would be an armed expeditionary force sent to locate a first set of explorers / colonists that had stopped communicating with Earth. Once outside the system, they discover they are unable to jump back home and that there is a greater interstellar conflict going. Benevolent aliens had tried to keep the humans out of the war but now that they had a fleet in play, their involvement was inevitable. So the fleet would now have to figure out whether or not they wanted to get involved, how they would protect Earth and of course to still hope to find the missing colonists.

The story naturally came to be because of the games that I enjoyed playing and the many, many, many Star Wars novels that had I read by then. I wanted to seriously dabble into science fiction and to play around with fleet combat scenarios and things of that nature.

The third major story that I had hoped to develop into a novel was a supernatural LGBT romance inspired largely by Neil Gaiman's American Gods. This only came to be because I wanted to write something gay-related for a change (by this point I was still in the closet but already committed to my first boyfriend) and this is the story that came out. It wasn't overly ambitious and the amount of research needed to ensure the gods were accurate was a bit staggering.  It never truly got off the ground, although I had gotten as far as plotting out certain key events and even written sample narratives for particular moments like when our protagonist makes a deal with Hermes or when he finds himself at the Gates of Janus that now bar the way between the real world and the supernatural one. Something like that.

I've returned to these story concepts time and time again over the years, even though they all originated in my early high school years. As the years passed, I started to learn more about writing, read more books and decided what stories still seemed viable and which ones were less than ideal. For example, The Excalibur Fleet Saga eventually became incorporated into The Gossamer Saga, turning the story in a fusion of science fiction and fantasy. I still try to write for this novel in this particular tone and isolated chapters exist as posts in the archive of my old LiveJournal blog.

But I'll focus on the zombie story first. That seems a bit more realistic. It'll take me a long time to fully realize The Gossamer Saga, assuming I ever get around to actually finishing it.

Oh the writer's life indeed.
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