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Let’s set aside for the moment the fact that I’m a traveler from another
universe, and that all of the characters that I’ve written about are real
people, living somewhere out there in the bulk. Let’s suggest that I’m just
a normal creative storyteller whose stories come out of his mindbrain, just
as they would for anyone else. Let’s talk about how this process began and
developed over the course of more than two decades, and let’s pretend that I
never left my world of origin. I was thirteen years old when I officially
became a writer. My local radio personality would say that I shouldn’t be
allowed to call myself that because I’ve not published any books. But that’s
not the definition of a writer. That’s the definition of an author,
numbnuts. I was struggling in eighth grade science class, specifically the
chemistry portion, which was particularly disheartening, because I wanted to
grow up to be a biochemist. Seeing that letter F on my report card
told me that I would never realize my dream. It was unrealistic, and I would
have wasted a lot of time, energy, and money on the fruitless pursuit.
Fortunately, I had this other idea of telling stories, so I started really
leaning into that. About two years later, I started work on my canon. I
didn’t understand that I was doing that, but the story I came up with in the
summer of 2002 has survived today, so I ended up retroactively marking this
period in my life as the beginning of my franchise. It was about a boy who
was on a boating trip with his fellow scouts. He gets separated from them
after the tragic deaths of all of the parents on board, as well as the crew,
and ends up on an island full of mythical beings, like elves, dwarves, and
mermen. It was quite derivative in the beginning. I’ve rewritten the
majority of this book at least four times, and revised it any number of
times in between. It’s taken as long as it has to finish because I have
never stopped growing as a writer, and perfecting my skills, technique, and
personal voice.
As I was saying, I wasn’t familiar with the concept of a canon in the early
years of my work, but I did have this compulsion to tell stories that exist
within some kind of established continuity. They might be thousands of years
apart, or even in different dimensions, but the potential for crossover had
to be there, whether it ever actually happened at all or not. I came up with
the premise for dozens of stories over the course of the next several years,
nearly none of which remain today. The ones that have survived have
transformed so much that they would be unrecognizable to anyone who happened
to hack into my computer to read the originals. I never published a word, of
course. In 2004 or 2005, I came up with a book and its television follow-up
that I don’t even want to talk about, because they were rooted in my anger
and violent tendencies. I wouldn’t even mention it, but I feel that I have
to, because that was my first TV show, even though I wish it wasn’t. My
second show, which I conceived of in 2007, was about a group of people with
special powers, and from there, the universe expanded. By then, I had
already decided that the dimensions from my original concept would be
temporal, instead of spatial. That is, they just happened at different
points in the long history of a single world. I came up with several other
shows that fit within the timeline on the one planet, and then I came up
with several more which took place on nearby star systems, and in other
galaxies. It was 2012 when I came up with The Verge Saga, which took place
billions of years ago in another galaxy. The number of TV shows that I had
created effectively doubled overnight to around 60.
For a couple of years in my adult life, I had a recurring dream. Well, maybe
that’s not the right word to use. Continuous would be a better
choice, because I wasn’t just reliving the same thing every night. The story
kept going. I could wake up, go about my day, and then go back to sleep to
revisit the characters right where we last left off. I don’t know about you,
but I’m only in about half of my dreams. A lot of the time, I’m observing
other people’s lives, and this particular one felt very much like something
that could be adapted to fiction for public consumption. I even had the
perfect title for it, but the problem with it was that it inherently took
place on Earth, where that established continuity I’ve been talking about
bars such world-changing events from occurring. Basically, if I wanted it to
take place on Earth, it had to be a different Earth. This was when my
canon exploded. I suddenly had access to a dozen new universes, which could
have their own independent histories that I didn’t have to worry about
conflicting with each other. My list of TV shows approached 80, and I was
unstoppable. That’s when Salmonverse was created, but that’s not when I
thought of my first story for it.
On December 27, 2012, my first dog, Sophie Love was put to rest at a 24-hour
animal hospital after a short but brutal and cruel battle with liver
disease. Shortly thereafter, I had a dream (not again; this one came first).
I woke up to find my dog alive downstairs, where she should have been all
along, and then I realized that I had traveled through time to before her
death. Of course, my dream turned into a nightmare when I jumped back in
time again to not only before my dog was born, but also before we lived in
that house. Someone else was living there, so I had to escape without
disrupting their lives too much. Samuel Bellamy took over this role when I
converted this dream to fiction, making him the first ever resident of
Salmonverse, but like I said, I didn’t come up with that until 2015.
Everything I wrote until I built my website just sat there in my files,
never to be seen by anyone but me. That’s why these things have weird
temporal values, because I regularly come up with a story, or only a
premise, or even just one character, without having any place for it yet. I
guess normal writers conceive an idea, and then just with it until it’s
done. I often develop all aspects of a new story all at once before I so
much as write the first word of the actual text. This process might inspire
sequels, prequels, multimedia follow-ups, and crossovers that I will
also work on without necessarily having written anything substantial. I
dunno, maybe I’m doing it wrong, which is why I’m over here with a personal
website that no one reads, and George R.R. Martin is a millionaire. He too
has taken forever to write his latest book, but people are actually waiting
for it. Hopefully I’ll finish the new edition soon, but I’m pretty busy.
Unlike how it is for Martin, this isn’t my only job, and as aforesaid, I
don’t make a dime off of it.
Tomorrow, I’ll get more into the details of my website; how it got started,
and how I prepare for upcoming stories. There’s a lot. It takes a lot to
keep this thing running. Like, you don’t even know. Slipping back into
character, I’m surely in jail now, awaiting trial, or whatever step comes
next. I scheduled this to come out just so I don’t leave you with nothing,
but I’ll eventually run out of these too.
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