Everything You Could Want To Know

This is going to be a long post. I will explain, to the best of my ability, why I'm here and what I intend to do with my art.

The story of my writing goes back about twelve years. I met one of my closest friends that year and at some point, we repeated a conversation I'd had with my older brother.

"If you had the power to control anything, what would it be?" had been my older brother's question. As my friend and I gave our answers and we discussed the topic, as middle schoolers, he said to me that I should write a story based on the conversation.

I was an avid reader by then, and had been since I was able to read at all, but I couldn't think of anything I'd ever read with the tone we'd spoken of. We all wanted control over things like lightning, or fire, but we took the fantasy closer to science. If one controlled lightning, weren't they influencing molecular charges? This kind of talk is what spurred me to write my first ever original creation.

It was awful. "Characters began to talk." "But then someone else spoke." "Wait, which person is talking now?" "There's only three of us here!"

And the like. You get the idea. The formatting was awful, there were huge narrative slogs and terrible pacing. You know, like you'd expect from baby's first fanfiction, except it was an original idea.

Fast forward a few years and I still had the document I'd written. It's gone now, and because I overwrote the original post on DeviantArt, no one can see it anymore, but I did in fact post it to DeviantArt about nine years ago. Once I posted that chapter, I decided to make the next chapter or so some kind of "tribute" to another artist on the site who actually had a following. Again, I was a delusional middle school student (or freshmen in high school, I can't remember), and I was a nerd.

The story quickly evolved, but my ability to write it did not. More and more things got jumbled into the story until it was a complete mess of influences with no real direction. I started on a second idea, and posted for that for a while too, but I never got any real feedback beyond one or two people who genuinely seemed to care about seeing me improve.

Well, in the background of all this work, life had continued, and I met new people. One of them, again a very close friend now, suggested I write fanfiction as a way to get more feedback. "People are starved for skilled writing," he said, "Just make something up you think would be cool and post it."

Well, I tried that, and it didn't really work so well at first. What I thought was cool was Rengoku, a game by Neverland and Hudson, that almost no one knows exists. Needless to say, that story consisted of me shouting into the void some more and never went any further. Then I tried Sword Art Online. After all, a lot of people were following it, and I disagreed with the direction the story had taken. That one did a little better, but still ended as a flop.

Off on the side, I wrote something for Halo, mostly to practice writing characters based on real people I knew. That was never finished, and didn't get much attention.

And then... We get to Dark Souls. "Twin Humanities" is my single longest work to date. The original was very nearly 100,000 words (96,466 if I remember right), and the rewrite is still going. The original draft of the story was riddled with horrible errors. Narrative asides, no trust in the reader, wooden and hamfisted dialogue, missed opportunities, forced romance, and so on.

Most people loved it anyway. Some people didn't. I won't say who, but a group of bloggers picked it up and ripped it apart chapter by chapter. Their hateful criticism was indeed constructive, but it took me a long time to see the message they wanted to get across to me through the vitriol.

It was the best criticism I've ever received, and it caused an evolution unlike anything in my writing before. With their message clear, I decided I would write for Destiny next.

Kell of Light was a triumph, even more beloved by the fanbase than Twin Humanities had been. Sadly, because of what happened to the Destiny series of games, my story for it declined in quality as well as I began to write more out of a sense of obligation than anything.

Around that time, I also decided I would rewrite Twin Humanities. I'd wanted to write a sequel for it for a long time, but the style and state of the original made that feel impossible. I rewrote it from start to finish and beyond, into the sequel I'd always wanted, and I'm still going.

My beginning years were spent hollering my stories into oblivion on DeviantArt, with hardly any views and no comments to speak of. I had no fanbase, no followers who weren't friends, and made almost no improvements.

My more recent years have been completely the opposite. I've instead turned to telling my what-if stories to other fans. My views number in the hundreds each day, even if the comments are still more sparse than I'd like. My followers now are strangers who want to see the next chapter, and my friends have mostly left my work alone. I've improved until you can hardly tell I'm the same author anymore...

Which brings us here. To this page. I'm beginning the next chapter in my writing career. I want to publish books. And I mean physical copies not just puking a manuscript onto Amazon's digital store and calling it a day.

To do that, I need your help. I'll make it happen with or without the help, don't get me wrong. Do or die, come hell or high water, I'll publish these books someday. But with your help "someday" can come a lot sooner. Decades sooner, probably.

The next page is being written, and I intend to make it the best one yet. And the page after that will be even better.