July 8th, 2008. That's when The Alternative was born. It was after one in the morning. I was stretched out on my bed at my parents house, flipping through channels, occasionally muting to look up full episodes of Tiny Toon Adventures on YouTube.
I was troubled. I was over half-way through my college career, and I couldn't get my mind off of how irritated I was with everything that was going on around me. The writing program was driving me mad, pushing the constraints of "literature" on me, and I was getting nowhere with the film program. I wasn't in school for me. I didn't know why I was there.
That night, I recalled the many attempts I'd made to write sci-fi, crafting worlds, manipulating our own, just doing something to tell a story that wasn't entirely grounded in reality. It'd been several years since I'd last bothered with attempting something in that vein. I'd written about seventy pages of nonsense for a story when I was in high school, over 100 handwritten notebook pages of things that we won't discuss here before that, and dabbled in and out and around these visuals and ideas ever since they'd failed.
It wouldn't hurt to try again, just to do something!
This was when I started to write a story called The Alternative. I wrote about ten pages at first, just rambling through a raging action sequence without direction just because I wanted to. I still have that bit, and the few pages I wrote afterwards. They're terrible. Every line. It was fun! That night, I continued with notes. I'd never written notes for a piece of fiction before. I'd always just gone from a single idea, crafting whatever it was that I was doing along the way. Not a great method, but it had done the trick before.
Those notes are still on my current hard drive, on my back up thumb drive, the netbook in my closet, and the desktop wired into my video game rig around my TV. That document contains some very basic notes about the galaxy I was writing in, some of the worlds, future antagonists, my trio of lead characters, their pasts, and even that lovely spacecraft that I wanted to carry my cast around the galaxy in. Those details are all still incomplete, mind you, and I really need to get to work on a series bible, especially in light of the thing that everyone reading this probably already knows, and will have to deal with reading about again in the later paragraphs of this blog.
Next came a couple of attempts at short fiction, as character origin stories to precede the novel. This turned into a lazy piece of flash fiction, and an ambitious (for me) short story, which I workshopped in my literature-only advanced fiction class in college. Yes, I'm not all that kind to such things as I had forced on me at UNCW. Let's leave that alone, though. Clyde Edgerton, the professor of said class, told me that the story wasn't big enough for everything I was trying to include, that it would make a great novel.
I'm not sure that he had this in mind.
Not long after, I had expanded the concept into a series. This developed into an attempt to write comics, and then back to prose. I found the vision of three origin tales, one for each character, then bringing the cast together over the course of a pair of novels that would send them into combat against a strong intergalactic threat. There were political themes I wanted to tackle, and I wove them into the notes. Let me tell you, if this set of notes were a basket, none of them would be finished, and the whole bloody thing would be rather hard to carry, much less be a proper place to drop your fruit. Wow, I can't tell if that sentence makes sense. I need sleep. ComicCon today, ya see? I'll have to tell you about that later.
After the comic writing plans fell through, due to various things, I knew that I wasn't going to sell a high concept comic book series with pitiful scripting skills as I posses. I returned to prose in late 2011, finally starting down the path to writing the first novel of The Alternative. I had a few new ideas on how to approach the story, and used the completed first story arc from the comic scripts to assist in my efforts. I thought I'd be okay to get rolling in a positive direction, targeting something between sixty and seventy thousand words.
And then I hit my early snags at about eleven thousand words into the story. It was mid-October, and I had other ideas in mind. To distract myself, I decided to give NaNoWriMo a second shot. My first attempt crashed and burned at just over ten thousand words with a pitiful novel attempt in the pipe. I finished the first draft of Crusader on December 3, 2011, reaching the goal for NaNo in time, and wrapping up the short book afterwards. Then I moved to Louisiana, and struggled to find a way to edit the piece. I still haven't finished editing that short piece, but I haven't really given up on it. It's not a great story, and I'm not that confident that I will ever be able to publish it. However, a New York literary agency has had it in their possession to read, so I do know how to pitch it. Well...someday, maybe.
Back to Alt.
I made several attempts to write more short fiction this year, and I only completed one piece of flash fiction. The other unfinished shorts are still in my active queue. I'm really not good at writing short fiction. The Alternative manuscript kept popping up in the word processor, and I wasn't getting a lot done. I set deadlines, and failed to meet them. I was fairly realistic as well, which is why it's pretty sad that I couldn't ever get on track. I can't say that some exterior force played a hand. Sure, I hate my job, and it drained me of my will to function many times, but that should have been even more of a motivator to get this thing written. However, it never really came to pass.
November 1st, over eight thousand words.
To some, this isn't impressive. For me, it was the most I'd ever composed in a single day. I had a lot of dry stretches throughout the month, but I kept pushing forward, grabbing up two days where I wrote over ten thousand words of new content. The novel was completed on November 25th, a day I spent between two different coffee shops, mind and stomach warped by fine espresso. I had a finished manuscript, bearing 90k words. Yes, it was less than my goal, but over the month, I'd figured that I didn't have enough content for the other 15k. I may prove that to be wrong over the editing cycle.
Four years, and six months have passed since I started my journey with The Alternative. I've yet to give up on the crazy thing, despite the challenges that will come with writing a story as big as I think I've conceived. It's no George R.R. Martin creation, and I will say that I'm happy about that. I've started down the path now, and I can't wait to keep going. It's been bizarre and enlightening. Some people seem to be genuinely interested in the mess that I'm making with my laptop these days, and I hope that never ceases.
The strange journey continues with the editing phase of my novel, some time recently coined Anarchy Veiled, a title that I have no idea if it sticks or not. I've yet to successfully edit anything this large, and I don't even know how to. I'm scared, to say the least, that I will find myself hating this book as much as I hate Crusader right now.
But on the other hand, it's a better book than that psychotically bitter piece of Japanese RPG inspired fantasy fiction. It's not perfect, it's not even a great book, but I really enjoy what I've tried to do with the tale, the character, the world that I've been devising. And apparently changed my mind about at least twice over the course of the 450-ish pages that I've written so far. If you are reading this and you have a copy of the manuscript, I hope that you're enjoying it, or that this has made you more interested in what a madman has been obsessed with for over four years. Some of you have been having to hear about it far too much to have only seen this product after all of this time. A couple of you are technically rereading this story, albeit in a much better form.
I'll leave you with this; it's been a blast so far, and I've not had as much fun writing anything in my entire "career" as a writer as I did writing this book. It was constantly challenging, thoroughly exciting, and I wouldn't trade this experience for anything.
Now, I'll get to editing this some time, and we'll see how long it takes for me to tell you the story of the road to getting the second part of this story written!
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