What we're gonna do right here is go back, way back, back into time.
Why? Besides taking the opportunity to both paraphrase Sam Cooke and steal a much stolen sample from Jimmy Castor (and really, why should I need a reason for that?), this post is meant to give a brief look at my history as a writer/storyteller and the things that influenced it.
Fair warning, it's not for the faint of heart or classically trained. Or really anyone who feels writers should be fed on a steady diet of critically acclaimed entertainment. You have been warned. All others, look under the cut.
Stories have been a part of my life since I can remember. My mother used to tell me stories about a heroic bear named Bilbo (cribbed, obviously from The Hobbit, but his adventures were more sci-fi than anything). She encouraged me to suggest things about the next story and introduce my own characters and by the time I was five, I was telling stories to her.
Thanks to my utter ignorance of Middle Earth and the existence of a delicious brand of glazed donuts with a bear mascot called Beebo, Bilbo became Beebo under my first attempts at storytelling. It was during Beebo's time that I came into contact with the first of many cartoons I would become obsessed with. That cartoon was Dino-Riders.
I'll spare the reader the details about the series, but it combined the two best things in the world to a six year old: space ships and dinosaurs. It was the childhood equivalent of turning a corner and finding a room full of beautiful, naked women, each holding a pitcher of beer, a pizza or a plate of hot-wings just for you. It entered my consciousness and stayed they for damn near the next decade. The amazing part was that I only watched the first episode and bought the toys. It wasn't until college that I found out it was a series.
It wasn't long before Beebo was meeting the dino-riders and fighting the evil Rulons while gaining powers from a magical amulet. God bless my mother, even with me was a prepubescent geek reenacting the fruits of my imagination in the living room, she reminded me that I shouldn't take other people's characters as my own.
Like a born and bred future comic book writer, I quickly changed the names and imagined costumes of the characters and left everything the same. I still like to think six year old me would still call bullshit on SMASH!, though.
Beebo eventually parted with the other characters, but for years, my family still refereed to them as Beebo stories in much the same way that the venerable newspaper strip is still called Barney Google and Snuffy Smith even though Barney's been gone for a while.
Then I met my new fandom.
While I watched and enjoyed the early superhero cartoon offerings on FoxKids (Batman: TAS and X-men), they had yet to capture their imagination. A year after their debut, however, something new did: Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers.
Again, it was the perfect storm. Like Dino-Riders, there were aliens and dinosaurs. But this time, the alien grew really giant and the dinosaurs were also giant robots that combined into an even more giant robot. Also, karate. I was entranced by every part of the show: the mentor figure, the signature weapons, the secret identities, the transformation sequences. God help me, I even loved the(incredibly thin on the ground at times) teenage drama.
Overnight, the Beebo stories sprouted sentai, giant robo and kaiju themes. They also picked up stunningly stupid team names based on my favorite animals at the moment including, I shit you not, The Kit Foxes, and The Diving Dolphins. If I was naming things that way today, I suppose my serial would have the inexplicable name of The Waddling Penguins. God, kids are weird.
Then 1994 happened. Fox put out Spider-man, the 90's animated series. Unlike X-men before it, Spider-man was actually aired in production order with its season long story arcs intact. While Batman: TAS now stands out as the objectively better show, Spider-man offered me the most complex storytelling I'd ever been exposed to on television. Conveniently, Marvel has comics out at the time that acted as companions to both the Spider-man and X-men series. My introduction into comics had begun.
But comics still didn't capture my imagination. They were an interesting read, but I wasn't really inspired. What was inspiring me was fantasy. I had just entered middle school and there was a program called Accelerated Readers where you could read books to earn points toward prizes provided you could answer reading comprehension questions about them on a computer.
I already loved reading, being the kid that begged for and then spent around thirty dollars at every book fair, so I went right for the high point values: The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings. Combined, they alone were worth a hundred points and an automatic free ice cream for a week pass in the cafeteria. Hell. Yes.
I tore through them in less than a two months. And I learned something important: dragons are cooler than dinosaurs. A dinosaur was cool in a 'big, cool looking lizard' way, but dragons were everything dinosaurs were, plus they could fly, breath fire and talk. I don't know why, but talking was important. In search of everything there was to know about dragons, I scoured the library of mythology and fantasy books and learned about monsters that made Power Rangers fare look like muppets (which they essentially were).
The stories in my head changed again. The team now called on the power of dragons in the service of Athena from their base at Ayer's Rock (I had a thing for Australia).
Then, the next year, the best thing in the world happened to me. An event that will rival only meeting my wife and the birth of my children when those come to pass. I sprained my ankle.
Yes, that was a good thing. It was mind destroyingly painful, of course, but the school I went to was the opposite of handi-accessible. I couldn't carry my backpack with me and my crutches were deemed 'possibly disruptive', so I was put into a wheelchair and sequestered in the library instead, where my friends would pass through to hand me my assignments.
The reason this was great is that I learned that without my teachers trying to teach, I could learn from the book and get my work done in about twenty minutes rather than the forty-five minutes of class time. By the time lunch rolled around, I would be done for the day with plenty of free time and privacy.
So what did I do with my week and a half in the library? I started writing. It started as an assignment for English; 'write an original story', and became The Angel Awakens. I didn't want to 'waste' my favorite story on school so Angel was an original story about vaguely mythological beings sealed in jewelery. One escapes and possessed the girlfriend of the protagonist and he was forced to use the others to go after her.
It was a clumsy effort, but it was a start. In the lull of classes, I would work on committing another story to paper, this one called True Human Race where the precursors of mankind, the creatures we thought were Neanderthals, returned to earth from space and were upset to find it crawling with Cro-magnon offshoots. It was written over two years on looseleaf. It was stolen as a 'joke' twice and now exists on a tightly sealed manila envelope as a monument to said-bookisms and poor descriptive skills.
It's important to note that both Angel and THR were inspired by the 90's X-men cartoon (The Phoenix Saga and Brood story arcs respectively), but on an almost unconscious level.
Meanwhile, a blatant and dare I say insane cash grab was hypnotizing me with its siren song. I speak of course of Big, Bad, BeetleBorgs and Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog. Make no mistake, these shows were Power Rangers with extra weird (And that's the series that gave us the Pudgy Pig monster, so you know this is crazy) and fantasy elements respectively, but they each bought their own special touches that utterly captivated me.
The BeetleBorgs were kids that got their powers from comic books. Not only that, but they upgraded their powers by asking the creator of those comics to do it for them. Talk about meta. Mystic Knights (which I've actually done a nod to in The Descendants) added the twist of the heroes having elemental powers.
From these two came the character Chaos. And I don't mean Ian Smythe. Chaos was me. Or at least a cooler me that lived in a world where transformation trinkets that gave you power were available.
Wielder of the Chaos Band, a mystical artifact that was basically a Power Morpher you wore on your wrist, Chaos could summon the Chaotic Armor and the Chaos Claw (A weapon named for the Green Hunter Claw from BeetleBorgs, but which was more like a giant, singular version of Wolverine's claws) as well as having power over fire and probability. He was also super cool and everyone thought he was awesome. Because I was thirteen. Shades of Stephanie Meyer though, I almost got a story with this character published.
By the time I entered high school, I was writing in every square inch of my spare time. I have no less than ten composition books completely full of stories, mostly the Chaos stories, but also a story set in a world called The Realm called Honor Among Thieves, which I would later pillage to create my World of Ere campaign setting.
In high school, I made a discovery that made 'dragons are awesome' pale in comparison. That discovery: girls like creative guys.
Now, I've like girls since the age where liking girls got you called a sissy and required a cootie shot. I've always had more female friends than male and my driving force for wanting to go to school in second grade was getting a girlfriend.
So when I discovered something that got girls to notice me instead of the other way around, it was like discovering a superpower. I became famous for being 'the guy writing the book' and by my sophomore year, girls were stopping me in the hall to ask about how it was going. So I did what any self respecting guy would do in my situation: I started putting girls in my stories.
I also put some of my close friends in the stories too, but mainly, you could tell how much I liked a girl by how much screen time she got and how cool her character's powers were.
Speaking of cool powers, therein lay my downfall. Up until high school, my stories weren't just a showcase for cool powers and visuals; they had stories. There were villains with motives like the betrayed and abandoned roboticist, Robin Atan (who has appeared in The Descendants) and the purpose seeking, yet genocidal machine, Viral.
That was until Digimon: Digital Monsters came on the scene. Don't get me wrong, I still think it was an excellent show. I also know for a fact that it stunted my writing chops for two damn years. Why? What could a TV show about adorable critters and their human friends possibly do to me?
One word: Digivolution.
A casual reader might notice that some of my strongest early influences weren't great literature, but imported, Japanese entertainment or rip-offs thereof. And if there's one thing Japanese entertainment loves, it's mid-season upgrades. The power rangers got new giant robots and new costumes a few times, sure. The BeetleBorgs eventually upgraded to Metallix, and the Mystic Knights got better armor and wepaons.
Well here's the thing: Digimon did this every third episode. I am not kidding. A cute little creature would turn into a big creature and kick ass before turning back. A few episodes later, that wouldn't be enough, so they become even bigger and cooler and kick more ass. And if that's not enough, they warp-digivolve or DNA-digivolve, or armor-digivolve. In later seasons, they even merged with humans to get cooler.
And I looked upon it. And it was good.
Actually, no it wasn't. Chaos and Darkness, following a publisher's rejection where I decided to retool, became little more than flimsier and flimsier excuses to justify new 'mega-forms' as I called them. I think now that this may have been a form of creator breakdown. I stopped writing stories and started writing just blocks of transformation sequences. I went as Warlord Chaos for Halloween.
Then summer came and it's as if everything disappeared; my friends, my girlfriend, my comfort zone. And my will to write. I tried to write in my first few months of college, but there was always Something Happening, and I filled all of three pages.
Somewhere in here, I also lost comic books. The local stores stopped carrying anything but Archie Digests (which I admit I still buy. Shut up, they're charming) and I could only pick new ones up on trips out of town. The limited runs I had started with were over and I dropped into normal Marvel continuity.
That is to say that I went from comics based on the animated after school versions of Batman, Spider-man and the X-men to the height of the Dark Age of Superheroes. I had the distinct misfortune of having my introduction to the mainstream continuities of these venerable titles be Knightfall, the Clone Saga, and Onslaught respectively.
By the time the rather cool Operation: Zero Tolerance storyline came out, I was about done with the bleak, tedious, and soul sucking experience that was comics in the mid 1990's. A relative, however gave me some old New Mutants and Avengers comics, so I knew how comics used to be and I was in love with those. Still, knowing that time was over meant I stopped reading and figured comics would play no more role in my life ever again. Yeah.
College happened next and without writing and the will to write, I was pretty aimless for a few months. I had made it to college and now had no idea what I wanted to be. Luckily, something came along even more nerdy than cartoons and comics that rekindled my creative fires: Dungeons and Dragons.
Creating and fleshing out my characters was like a religious experience for my inner writer and once I took over the DM chair, world building became a new joy all it's own, something I considered very little in my early endeavors. I started reading the Wheel of Time and the original Dragonlance Saga, not to mention rereading Lord of the Rings. A new story started to take form: a fantasy set in the World of Ere with the hero in the person of Vaalingrade Ashland (oh he of my internet handle).
I had abandoned the story I'd been forming and telling for almost twenty years for something new and strange. How did that lead to The Descendants? Well I'll leave that for the next entry on this blog; a history of the stories and events that lead up to The Descendants.
Until then, I will continue creating.
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