The World Within my Well

“What makes you so special?”

That’s what the voice in my head keeps asking me, not to mention talent agencies around the world. I don’t know if I know the answer, if there is just one. What makes me so special? If I were to go on America’s Got Talent would I have something to offer? Maybe my charm? My compassion? It could be nothing at all. I could be the only ordinary person in the entire world. Which, of course, would make me 100% special. Uniquely boring; technically it would work, but it’s not my work. I can write. Big stinking whoop; so can everyone else on this website. Ah, there it is. Am I looking for an answer in comparison to someone else? Am I guessing what’s acceptable and unacceptable based on other people? That’s like putting newspaper in a campfire. It’s alright to get me going, but if I try to run off of it I’ll burn out.

So what, if anything, makes me special? It’s a simple, age old question (just so long as that age is 21 and four months), and for the life of me I can’t stick to an answer. I guess… there is one thing that’s always been with me. I love stories. I used to devour books and I shotgunned six seasons of Parks and Rec in one month. It’s in my blood. My Dad raised us on movies and my Mom had us reading Lord of the Rings by the time I was thirteen. They couldn’t help themselves but to teach me the value of a good story, to appreciate it. When we were kids my siblings didn’t play sports, we played make-believe. With Legos, action figures, or just ourselves. We invented worlds around our games, complicated, thoroughly planned out worlds with monsters and history and heroes. That was how we had fun.

That’s where I came from. I read both the entire Harry Potter series and the entire Percy Jackson series twice by the time I was fourteen. I read The Scarlet Letter a second time in college just for fun, and chose to write my final paper on it for lit class. What do you do with all of that? With a passion for stories and a head full of worlds of make-believe that your siblings have moved on from, aged out of? That’s the question I would finally answer in the four year task of writing my very own novel. What started as a kind of pet project in 2016 has become an all consuming passion. I wanted to write about zeppelins; honest to God I just wanted a story with zeppelins in it. Until the most recent/final draft of the book there wasn’t a single zeppelin in all 270 pages.

The story, the characters, the themes, even the world I was writing about have all evolved time and time again like an indecisive caterpillar before I got to where I am. What started as a five book series has morphed into a century spanning saga with dozens of stories and series, with rules and generations of made up people. I’ve been able to work in old ideas and characters from my siblings with a surprising amount of ease, to the point it’s like parts of my childhood— our childhood— live in this story.

There are other worlds too, and other topics I like to write about. After all, that’s why I’m here. Nothing is as thorough, or special, or exciting as this world. The world with no name. Just like the book, also nameless. It seems as much as I enjoy the naming process coming up with a good, solid name when I really need to is something I can’t do. Which isn’t good if I want to market this story, and I do want to market this story. I’ve been racking my brain (and avoiding working on it) ever since I started the project, and the hardest parts are now the most important: what do I call it, and how do I explain it to people? I tell my friends and family I wrote a 270 page novel and they ask what it’s about. The nerve of some people. Naming it aside, the potential of this once personal project is limitless. Characters on characters with backstory, front story, even side story.

A membership platform would be something along the lines of a “further immersion,” something where I could send subscribers a kind of monthly loot crate or email packet themed around my world. There could be artwork, maps, poems, even recipes set within the world. There would also be lore highlights for creatures, characters, artifacts, cultures, and locations, allowing readers to better understand and learn about the world. The last thing I would include would be beta reads, sampled early editions of upcoming work, to guage interest and solicit dialogue. I believe this would be a worthwhile and valuable service for fans of my work, as well as helping me to grow my following.

This challenge was just that for me, a challenge. I’m more inclined to think in abstracts, and let my mind run away with me, so to actually have to apply myself to a specific problem and solve it took a lot of work. I don’t know if what I’ve come up with is the best, but it is only my first. There’s a lot of other things I’ve got in the works.