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The Last Void Song and the Evolution of Interactive Entertainment

By Steven Alexander Mailer

By Veris MarockPublished 3 years ago 10 min read
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The Last Void Song and the Evolution of Interactive Entertainment
Photo by the blowup on Unsplash

Where to begin with this project?! I suppose with the name? The Last Void-Song is a series of novels set in a not so distant future about a young man who is thrust into a universe of horror and magic and sci fi beyond his wildest dreams, the books are about the responsibilities of leadership, of fatherhood. It’s about the corrupting influence of power and the horrors of isolation, the ruin of hate and sorrow upon the soul but more than anything else, The Last Void-Song is about humanity. It’s about who we might be in our darkest moments, when we have nothing else but each other and the need to survive, to keep on going despite unimaginable hardship. In a way, The Last Void-Song has been my confession. It’s my measure of how far I’ve come from a time where I did not think I would get very far at all. The shining worlds and fathomless depths of the Void-Song universe allowed me to escape the troubles and torments of my life and my dwindling mental health and just be somewhere else for a time. Which, maybe explains why it’s about 13 multiverses wide at this stage. (I always go big)

This project is more than just a series of novels to me, it’s my masterpiece. It’s my way of saying “this is what I can do. How dare you tell me I was capable of anything less.” It’s, at present, six books long though I have plans for another three prequel novels as well but that’s just the main story. The primary story-line that introduces the universe to you, this is the Star Wars original trilogy of the Void Song universe. I don’t want to stop writing Void-Song and then move on to some other grand venture, Void-Song is designed to be self-sustaining in regards to my limited attention span. This means, the Omniverse of the franchise is so breathtakingly large that I fully intend to open it up to other creative minds when I’ve finished crafting it. I want this series to attract artists, writers, poets, song writers, toy makers, I want this series to thrive and become a place where people like me can come to hide from the world. To make new friends and to make their own adventures. To imagine without limit, and build without being told that they’re not good enough so that when they leave they leave that much more confident in their ability to create. Creativity is the single most important thing to me. If I could no longer create, life would be empty and pointless, to remain would be tantamount to torture for me. I NEED to create and it can’t be limited to any one genre. Void-Song is high fantasy wrapped in a Sci Fi shell with an undulating aura of cosmic horror that demands your unwavering attention. It’s got graveyard worlds, scarred beyond recognition and devoid of life with alien signals still calling for help. It has living galaxies, poltergeist moons, demons from the dawn of time and warriors as old as the stars, bathed in the blood of ten thousand worlds. It’s a place of magic and blood and starships and horrors from mindless nightmares that even the gods have forgotten. It has everything, this series is in a sense the embodiment of my inability to focus on any one thing for too long. Which is in of itself the greatest challenge of writing this series. I have the attention span of a hyperactive puppy that’s just discovered its tail in a multi-coloured ball-pit.

I am a third of the way through the first novel in the first trilogy, which I suppose counts for something but it’s difficult to move ahead while battling your own demons at the same time all day, every day. My work is essential to my continuing sanity, even if that means the work itself delves deeper and deeper unto depths where sanity has no real definition. I am haunted by things that cannot be, that persist regardless within my mind and I funnel that existential horror into my work at any opportunity. It’s a place where my demons can be productive I guess and that’s perhaps the reason it’s been such a staple of my life for the past 10 years.

The story begins with the subjugation of humanity. Our protagonist, a young man named Adam, is thrust into a world of magic and aliens and the story follows his quest to avenge his father and liberate his people from the cruel and unyielding Blade Empire who have expanded across the stars and begun culling inhabited worlds, abducting all members of the various races who are capable of using magic and inducting them into cruel and horrifying experiments. As our heroes travel throughout the galaxy searching for a way to thwart the Blade, they discover evidence of an ancient cataclysm that once consumed all life in the galaxy and from the darkest reaches of space a chilling signal echoes among the stars. Something is returning. Something has awoken.

As it stands right now, I have planned out all six novels, I’ve written so much lore it could effectively be a book unto itself and I even have a vault full of 30+ pages of monsters, ghosts, ancient Gods and demon planets and living dimensions of flesh and torment, to say nothing for the myriad of side projects that all exist within universe and further expand on pre-established concepts, places and people. This project has been the focus of my life for over a decade and though my sixteen year old self was a sight less seasoned as a writer than I am now at 26 years old I still retain the early building blocks that I put in place and the earliest ideas, though I’ve developed them and refined them to be more applicable to my future goals.

One of the most important aspects of my writing career thus far has been my further education. In 2018 I began a higher national certificate in Professional Writing Skills at the City of Glasgow College. It was...grueling. The downside to a writing course is that you have to write things that you generally wouldn’t. I walked away having spent most of the course on a script for a Fawlty Towers-esque sitcom about the House of Commons and even having been forced to script, edit and voice-act my own trio of radio scripts. Though I admit, I had the option of asking other people to act it out but I was so extremely unhappy with what I’d written (despite its generous grade) that I cringed at the thought of letting another soul read it, never mind act it out. So I sat in a recording booth for 20 minutes concocting voices for about eight different characters and acting out my own work. I did eventually get to the meat of the course, the Graded Unit. I was given full creative freedom and I walked out with an A. I was exceedingly proud and I continued my study of English literature and writing to degree level which I’m about to enter my third year of at The University of Strathclyde. Though the course itself is not always strictly relevant to my goals it has allowed me to network with other fantastic, talented writers and creators whose advice and support has been invaluable throughout my most recent writing career. Which brings me to what I think is essential advice. NETWORK! Talk to other writers, talk to artists and graphic novelists and painters and game developers. The creative industries are a web of talented and wonderful people. Help is out there if you’re willing to look for it and sometimes you’ll meet someone who can show you things about yourself that you never really noticed before, refining your art in ways you never imagined. Though be prepared to be bombarded with requests to beta read things. Which, honestly, I think is a bonus.

Fears? Certainly I’ve got them. The series might never take off. With my luck I’ll go to publish the damn thing and it’ll release the same day as George R.R Martin releases the fabled Winds of Winter and like the final season of Game of Thrones I’ll never financially recover. Forced to toil in obscurity while people ask me if I can believe Jon Snow was secretly Jesus the whole time. (I could.) Which brings me to the big dollar sign question. How do you monetise this?!

Well in a perfect world, I’d publish the first book and earn a contract and while I’m working on the next one I’d have a website full of short stories and interconnected writings and things like that to tide readers over till the release of book 2 and that cycle would rinse and repeat and the website would expand as the series got larger. Growing and widening organically to a certain point where I would open it up to fans to submit their own stories within the established canon. This is where the Omniverse comes into play. The Last Void-Song is split into 13 distinct multiverses, so if a fan submits something that doesn’t STRICTLY fit with something I’m already putting together it can become a part of one of the other facets of the series’ reality. It means fans can actively contribute to the canon and feel like they’re part of the story without it all becoming a big convoluted mess. (Though some messiness at the start is perhaps inevitable and to be honest, welcome? I like a bit of chaos.) The website itself would have paid memberships but I want to keep those tiers low so it’s accessible to everyone.

I envision The Last Void-Song becoming a new frontier in audience engagement, reinventing the novel for a generation raised on interactive entertainment. From I-pads to Minecraft the paradigm is shifting, fans and viewers have more of a say in creative ventures than ever before. Take the Sonic Movie for instance? That film made bank and it was all because the studio took fan feedback on board and completely augmented their original uncanny valley design to create a finished product that was FEROCIOUSLY gobbled up by an enthused fanbase, compare that to Disney’s Star Wars trilogy that not only ignored fan involvement but openly attacked and mocked them at every turn for disagreeing with their half-hearted, directionless vision of the franchise, nearly killing it till Dave Filoni and Jon Favreau took the franchise back to its roots with The Mandalorian. Fan engagement is going to be ESSENTIAL to the success of your creative projects in the years going forward. The age of social media has entirely and irrevocably changed how we approach these things and honestly I do think that it’s a good change. It’s going to reshape the landscape but change is inevitable and if you’re not willing to move with that change then you’re just going to be left behind.

I have ideas for competitions, contests, allowing fans to submit characters and monsters and worlds to me for a chance to feature in the series. It’s so wide and deep that I reasonably never could run out of room for new and terrible things to drop into the story. I’d be open to everything from new starship designs to even entire alien factions to play around with and make a facet of the continuing narrative. Like I said, the six novels of the main story are just the beginning. There’s absolutely no limit to the growth of this series. It could be monumental, I plan to design it to be able to grow organically even if I’m no longer around to add to it.

The Last Void-Song is something I very well could be working on till I die but to be honest with you, I’m not terribly disappointed with that outcome. I’ve hand crafted a place where dreams can come alive or nightmares can go to hide and I want to share it with the world. We all wonder what will remain of us after we die, I plan to leave something behind that will outlive me. My own little taste of immortality.

future
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About the Creator

Veris Marock

I've been a writer since I was a child. I had my first story published in 2019 in a short horror story collection and I've been working to expand my horizons since then. My primary interests are horror and fantasy.

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