Part 3

Another week, another blog post where I have to figure out what to write on the spot. So far it has proven to be a process that has generated both satisfaction and dissonance in equal measure. Well, let’s get on with it and see how this week’s post ends up making me feel.

Okay, so last week I wrote about the genesis of my writing journey, and while I said that I would talk more about how that one interaction affected me this week, I have decided to change my mind. I don’t think doing so will change this article in any meaningful way because I’m still going to write about how things developed from the end of last week’s post. That said I imagine that I will cover quite a bit more ground this time around since I currently do not foresee a need to provide paragraphs of context, but then again, I don’t know how I’m going to go about writing these blog posts until I’m typing the sentence out in real time.

Last week ended with my interaction with the creative writing teacher after winter break. Let’s spend this week talking about what happened after that. Well, the day of the interaction, I was pretty spurned, but what I remember the most was showing what I had of my world at that point to the friends I had in the TTRPG club that I either shared class or lunch with.

They were much more enthusiastic and positive about my efforts.

After talking with some of them quite extensively, I decided to convert the framework of the world I made using TTRPG rules into a playable game of my own. However, what the teacher said about plagiarism stuck with me, and is still something I carry with me even today, and I quit the TTRPG club. Looking back on it, the teacher was probably relieved that I stopped showing up and based on my own personal views on what kind of person I was back then, if they did feel that way, I can’t really blame them.

Anyway, I stopped going to their club, and I remember feeling fortunate that I never read any of their work, because that made any future plagiarism comments baseless. Now, I’m aware that there is no stopping the ignorance or malice of others from tossing such slander my way. But I know that I was the one who decided to write every word that you’ll see on every page of my work, and I know that I’m the one who made the decisions on where I want my series to go, and despite however things may or may not turn out, that is the only thing that actually matters.

However, a consequence of my desire to avoid being shut down like that again in the future was the unintended choices I made to stop reading and to kill my budding interest in TTRPGs. Granted, these weren’t conscious choices that I made, but the fact is that after that day I stopped reading all together for over a decade, and I still haven’t sat down to play another session of a TTRPG that wasn’t based on my world since.

Sometimes I feel like I missed out on a lot of my own life by making choices like that. At the very least, the things that are and are not in my life are a result of the choices I have and haven’t made. But, at the same time, I don’t really feel like I’ve missed out on anything. The idea that if I made the choices that would have prevented some of my greatest regrets and my life to this point ended up in a place where I’m either not me as I am now, I haven’t written as much as I have, or I don’t have certain things like my dogs, terrifies me.

For example, there are times where I feel like I am years behind where I could be if I had never stopped reading and focused on committing myself to becoming a traditional author. While I obviously don’t know this for sure, I feel like I would already be published, and already have the following that I am currently building as I write this. But, if that had happened, then there is no denying that my works would be fundamentally different. I obviously don’t know if that would be for the better or worse, but what writing has done for me as a person is something that I don’t think I would trade correcting my past mistakes for. But on the other hand, part of me feels like a selfish scumbag for prioritizing my healing and growth over preventing some of the worst experiences of my life.

I don’t know. Who’s to say that life would have turned out ‘better’ if the incidents that caused my regrets didn’t happen? Who’s to say that I’d even still be alive if my life didn’t end up on this path? I don’t know. There are way too many variables and different ways things could have gone to risk ending up as someone other than who I am now.

Anyway, sorry for the tangent. That’s just the kind of thing that I think about when my mind isn’t occupied with work, personal relationships or my writing. But, enough of that for now, I think. Let’s get back to my writing journey.

So, I stopped reading and looking into TTRPGs because I wanted to craft my own world off my own ideas and that’s what I did. There was a time during either my final semester in high school, or that summer, where I tried to write the story of the protagonist in my creative writing final, but I ultimately abandoned the project. It’s been years since I opened that original Word document, but I’m pretty sure I wrote like, at least one-hundred Word pages before I gave up on the idea. There was just something that didn’t feel right, like I felt like I was just making stuff up as I went (the irony of saying that when I’m writing fiction is not lost on me), and that nothing was really going anywhere.

I did not know my characters, which was fine, but I also did not understand my world. I think that was the crux behind why I stopped writing and why I shifted gears into creating the TTRPG. Like I remember actively asking myself about my own backstory. Who were these characters? What happened in their lives? What happened in the timeline that led to the current day events in the story? What was the world’s history? Who were the important historical, and mythological figures that shaped the world into what it was?

I didn’t have answers for any of these questions, and the more I wrote a narrative centered around one character, the more they piled up until the pressure of all of those unanswered questions made me not want to write anymore. So, I stopped.

Then, there was the social aspect of everything. In the years after high school the groups I somehow ended up being a part of were still together and I spent most of my time wasting days, weeks and months doing whatever we felt like at the time, which was almost never anything that served any practical purpose. But, I didn’t care. I just wanted time to pass until time wasn’t my problem anymore.

With that being what it was, I graduated high school, jumped around colleges, got a few jobs, and just existed as an empty, pointless shell of a person for the next ten or so years. I did try to start writing again a few times during that period, but my interest always ended up falling back on the TTRPG rules I made.

I think this was for three reasons: I knew more about games (video, board, card etc) than I did about novels, working on rules allowed me the flexibility to focus on any part of my world, and a fair amount of the friends I had at that time were interested in playing. So, when I wasn’t busy wasting away in my own depressed indifference, I was tinkering with my world.

This was the time when I created the overwhelming majority of the content you will see on the lore page of this website. I spent a month or two here messing around with ideas for a given race until I found something I liked, then spent a month or two thinking about the historical events of a region until I got excited enough to write some documents about it.

Oh, right, so I forgot to mention the fourth reason why I veered away from writing a traditional story in favor of working on the TTRPG. See, something I realized rather early on in running my own game was that I could use whatever I came up with for their sessions as a baseline for things in my world. For example, if player A had an adventure where X, Y and Z happened, then I could just make those things canon events and fill out the many, many, many blanks I still had with my project.

Obviously, I don’t know if any of you who played will ever read this, or my mainline novels, but if you do then I want you to know that some of the things we explored together made it into the final product. So, thanks for helping me figure out my own history.

So yeah, that pretty much sums up my writing journey in the first ten years after I graduated high school. I know it might feel like I skimmed over a large period of time, but to be honest, unless you were there playing the sessions with us, then there honestly isn’t much to talk about regarding my writing journey during that time.

It wasn’t until May of 2019 that I started writing the draft that ended up being the novel that will be going on sale eventually, but there is so, so, so, so much to talk about regarding the impossibility of that project that I’m feeling pretty justified in waiting until next week’s blog post to talk about it.

So, until then, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you later.