The garden is under construction

Everything is kind of crazy right now. In the world, in my life and the life of my wife (and cat)… 2023 has proven to be a year of great change, not even halfway through.

I haven’t been doing much writing, but I have been doing a little every day. Sometimes only a line, or a series of nonsense words, but I’ve done it every day. I wrote a poem that I actually liked! Which was cool.

Maybe I’ll post that poem next. I’m not sure. We’ll see if it feels write when the words get recorded.

I got out of food service. I’m working a job at Equitable Advisors, on a financial planning team. I’m a rookie, but there’s an office with people in it, so I can learn a new industry immersively. You know I love fantasy; for me, immersion is everything.

So by day, I’m trading out my right hand barista callous for a Clark Kent routine. By night…well, mostly I’ve been studying, but Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom came out last month, so by night I’m either studying or playing that. (Still haven’t found the Shadow Temple, but I’m holding out hope…)

The Zelda series is like, my biggest inspiration. I am not kidding. When I was 7, my mom got us an N64 and two games: Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask. Which means she got me the games, because…well, probably because I was greedy, but Jess and Sam were still pretty young. I dunno; I was 7 and I totally felt like it was mine. (sorry Jess and Sam…)

Mom also got me the game guides. Which was great, because at 7, I was NOT good at these games. I used the guides to get everything. Everything. Total immersion. I went into every room, broke every pot… I had so much patience. How? I don’t have that kind of patience now; I just unlock the shrines as warp points and keep going forward. I think I’ve still got like, 6 hearts, and that is NOT gonna be enough for some of these creatures…

Anyways. Tangents galore. King of tangents. Ramble and roll.

I played through these games using the play guides, and what ended up happening is I read the game like a book. Ocarina in particular was great for this, because it’s so linear. The way Majora’s Mask plays is real weird in comparison. One of those weird things is how time, time itself, is a tool that you can use to change the difficulty of the game.

When you finally get the ocarina (which, at 7, was really the hardest part of the game), you play a song to go back in time. This really is hard without the guide, because it sends you on a winding, classic style RPG quest… With a time limit. A hard time limit: 3 in-game days.

But then, it gets complicated, because the quest that you’re on is: “meet everybody.” And nobody tells you that! You just have to figure it out. Thank goodness I had the guide in hand. (And liked to read; not a given.)

Well after you get the ocarina, you have to play a song. I don’t remember if they even teach you the song…or like, where you find it. Even already having played Ocarina of Time (which maybe they assumed?) I don’t think I would have come up with that on my own, and definitely not at 7.

Well, after you get the ocarina, and play the right song — “The Song of Time,” which somehow you know — there are some hidden melodies that are almost like cheat codes, that let you control how difficult the game is, and they are both based on “The Song of Time.” And for me, this is where the brilliance of the game begins.

If you play “The Song of Time” backward, then time slows down. And if you double each note, then you can skip forward to the next big chunk of time — later that night, or the next morning. Slowing down time makes every temple MUCH easier, and being able to skip ahead saves a ton of time if you know what you need to do in a quest.

Pretty cool stuff. And that’s just the beginning of the brilliance of The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask! I don’t think it’s a perfect game, especially if you don’t already love the series, but it is a constant inspiration to me.

I think that’s why I got here. I’m playing the new Zelda — Tears of the Kingdom — and it’s been inspiring me. I love to write, but when the well is dry I love to immerse myself in something epic.

Being on a team of financial advisors is interesting. Maybe that sounds like a joke to you, but it’s been nice. We’re helping people retire, and retire more quickly, and pay less taxes when they get there. I’m learning a lot from some really smart people. Most people my age don’t feel like they’ll even be able to retire, let alone more quickly, so to be a part of something that puts that back on the table is…awesome. The job can be hard, but what I do is awesome.

It’s also making me want to revive my old DnD character, Craig from Finance… Maybe that’s what I’ll blog about next. I dunno. I’m thinking about bringing him back, and putting him in the first GOBLIN MAFIA book.

Those are the books I’m working on, by the way. (Should I have maybe started with that?) I’m going to write the first book in 3 separate trilogies, then once those are all lined up, I’ll write book 2 for whichever one…well, whichever one I want! Whichever one I like to write more, whichever one excites me.

Honestly, all 3 excite me. Here they are, my first 3 Book 1s:

The first book in the Nala the Orc trilogy,

The first book in the Goblin Mafia trilogy,

And The god of yesterdays and tomorrows.

Nala the Orc is a character I’ve been thinking about for awhile. She’s a barbarian sorceress, which just means she’s the Hulk. When she gets angry, her magic happens. She doesn’t do what the Hulk does, but like the hulk, the story is going to be about anger: what it does, why it happens, how it hurts people, and how it can be used for good. My own anger has a story, and that story is the seed for Nala.

I also want to write a Goblin Mafia trilogy. This is gonna be some blatant borrowing. I want to take the story structure of The Godfather and apply it to a mob of Goblins, in the big bad evil capital (think Gotham, under the shadow of a sacrificial pyramid where your King lives). The humans in this world don’t have magic, but they can use magical items. The Goblin Mafia makes drugs that let humans do petty magic, but have the effect of real life drugs like meth or heroin, and intense addictive properties. I’m also looking at one of the rival “families” being a family of Purple Giants that live in another sort of “borough” of the big bad evil capital that lives under the shadow of a sacrificial pyramid…

So, that’s gonna be fun. That’s the second Book 1 I’m going to write.

The third trilogy I want to start is going to be harder. I’ll probably write it last. A little girl named Rowan, who is 7 years old, gets possessed by The god of yesterdays and tomorrows. The god of Time.

Whenever Rowan touches someone else’s skin, she lives their entire life, from beginning to end. For her, it’s in real time, but it passes in a moment.

Now, I don’t believe in fate. I don’t really believe in anything like that. But I wanted to deeply explore this idea, of knowing the future, and what it would look like, and how it would change a person to live through so many lifetimes. She’s 7, so it’ll be awhile before she pulls a Rogue from X-Men, and thinks, “…What about gloves?” (note to self: Rowan doesn’t live somewhere cold)

So when she lives through your life, your past and your future… She’s lives through all of your futures. Every one. Beginning to end, in real time, Rowan the 7 year old girl relives every possible life you could have lived.

My thought is: it would never end. She would never come out of that. That’s a narrative problem, because basically I think it would send her into a coma. And also, I think it creates a kind of infinity paradox. Unless she can operate in her own life somehow, at the same time as she’s having a vision of the person’s life. And then maybe it just goes on forever, until her consciousness ends.

Maybe in this world consciousness and magic are the same thing, and magic ends in a person when their consciousness ends. When they die, basically, equating consciousness to life, and lack of consciousness to death. I’m not so sure about keeping that as a thing, but it could be a possibility in the story…

Dang, the tangents today! Wow. This is maybe the weirdest freewrite ever.

Another possibility for The Time God story: perhaps Rowan lives every possible future, endlessly, trapped in a timeless loop that’s nested in a single second of realtime… And she’s trapped there, until she chooses a future for them.

Now that could be interesting. She suddenly bears the responsibility of choosing this person’s path, for them. It’s the only way to get out of the vision.

It’s the only way out.

And Rowan becomes the Chooser of Futures. That becomes the real value, the real outcome, of this “power” she has: she decides the future. That would make her kind of like the Norse Seithr witch: a weaver of futures, guiding the threads…

That would be a great title for either Book 2 or Book 3 of Rowan’s story: A weaver of futures, guiding the threads.

I like that format of titles for that trilogy. It’s almost like a poem that calls the first line you read its title, like Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Those are my 3 first books:

NALA THE ORC 1,

THE GOBLIN GODFATHER,

and The god of yesterdays & tomorrows.

My plan is to build one big world that I can write a bunch of smaller stories in, so I only have to build all the magic one time. It’ll take longer, but in the long run it will be better, for when I want to write books faster: the seeds of many distinct, concrete magic systems, so that depending on the story I can focus on different magic. Whatever the story needs.

So, one big world, lots of types of magic. Think Harry Potter, but instead of vaguely defined categories like “Transmutation” and “Charms” and “Defense” and etc.etc. spells that never get either defined or utilized, I try to show that there are many different systems, and use the story under my pen to go deep into one of those systems.

I’m stoked about the magic! Here are some of the ideas swimming in my head.

I’ve likened spells to plants; “each place has its own magic.” Maybe even “each house has its own magic,” like certain styles of Chinese Martial Arts. It used to be that a style was proprietary to a family, or a Sifu’s close friends, and even if you were practicing snake or crane, it would be your family’s style of that discipline. Obviously this is just the broad stroke from reality, but I think it’s such a cool idea: family styles.

So, with Nala the Orc that magic system is basically what you’d call a barbarian in DnD. Nala’s father is a barbarian farmer, using his anger in his work to be stronger, to work longer, to protect his community… Nala’s mother is a barbarian sorceress, Remi the Red Witch. She teaches Nala magic, from a very young age, and how to use her emotions to shape the world and disrupt reality.

The magic system in the Goblin Mafia will be mostly related to the artificing power of this particular city gang, but I want to explore a lot more varieties in this one. Mafia movies are usually set very deeply in a particular culture, and I want to make sure I’m creating a lot of different cultures in this city. I want multiple types of goblins, doing different kinds of magic depending on like, neighborhood, and background…

In the Goblin Mafia book, I want to explore religion and magic. In movies about organized crime, there is this tendency to include some kind of religious irony. These are people who do not live right. They aren’t kind. They’re greedy. And this is cross cultural: even though the religions are different, Infernal Affairs and The Departed are a great example of what the same theme looks like over different religions. (That’s of course because The Departed is a pretty faithful adaptation of Infernal Affairs, which is a film that should get more attention in the US).

Obviously, the magic system in Rowan’s story is Time Magic. The most unwieldy. The one everyone tells me not to touch.

This inspiration for Rowan traveling through time, traveling through someone’s life, actually comes from Dune. It was…

Oh my. This has gotten rather long, hasn’t it? I’ll cut it off here.

I appreciate you.

Anthony