I’m sorting – when I can – the vast amount of digital, handwritten, sketched, and printed-out information that accrued over my years of worldbuilding the Lonhra Sequence. It isn’t pretty. If I’m to have any hope of self-publishing these stories, I need to do serious housecleaning with all the interlocking and/or contradictory versions I’ve written.
One of the more bittersweet tasks is cataloging all the routes the stories could have taken, but didn’t. Those notes go into separate long-term media storage, but I’ll never do anything serious with them.
My writing style went through a sudden and catastrophic direction change twenty years ago. Partly because of a multi-author collaboration that just didn’t work for any party, and partly because of my changing worldviews, I scrapped nearly every bit of worldbuilding that I had before. I started fresh. It needed to be done, and my writing improved because of it. But at the time it felt like I was ripping out my heart.
Still, looking back over outlines for hilarious, overly-angsty, and just plain nuts possibilities, I wonder how those things might have turned out if we’d actually written them instead of just talking about them. I’ve lost touch, but I hope my former collaborators went on to tell the magnificent stories that were all their own.
I have no idea what it could have been, but the dedication for this one alone still makes me smile:
‘Dedicated to the real crew of the T.I.S. Snakepit, who have amply demonstrated that the forces of darkness will hire just about anyone these days, and, fondly, to the valiant members of the A.W.C.M.B.B.S. whose motto really is: Buttons pushed, Levers pulled,Tails tugged, Damsels bothered, and Demons rescued. Now hiring, experience preferred.’
Carry on, guys, wherever you are.