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Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

Last week, we got back into discussing where the origin of our writing idea began. This week, we move into bringing up the actual ideas we each brought to the table. We have touched on some of this while discussing different topics. Now we want to dig a bit deeper and discuss where our writing ideas originated for each of us, where their cores lie, and what changes or sacrifices we were or were not willing to make to what began in our heads. Clevenger and I had been discussing for a while the idea of collaborating on a writing project, and he asked if I had any ideas for a story. I had tons of vague ideas floating around in my head, but no real direction. While Clevenger already had a story he wanted to tell, I had to sit and narrow down some more concrete ideas of where I wanted to go. After a few weeks of mulling it over, I was able to outline the convergence of three core concepts: a romance, a writing prompt, and later, a roleplaying game.

The first core was that I wanted to write a romance, a gay romance. I knew it was going to be in a fantasy setting, playing with many of the identifying features such as magic, monsters, sentient races, and the more extreme class structure a medieval fantasy world tends to engage. I wanted to play with the Cinderella / Prince and the Pauper crossing of societal levels with my two lovers, one being a street thief, the other being a noble. My initial pitch to myself was basically the main character from 2000s Dungeons and Dragons movie, falling in love with Crona from Soul Eater. I know, it sounds weird as all hell, but I had ideas for making it a fun pairing, with the poor but outgoing street kid and the shy, introverted wizard noble. I didn’t have much more than acknowledging that they would be my main characters and some vague ideas of their personalities, but I had no real character development for them, or a plot for them to move through, other than their meeting and subsequent love story. That came later, from a collaborative discussion with Clevenger.

The romance angle was a good start, but I have written that before in short stories. What pushed this in the direction of a novel rather than a short story was a writing prompt I came across. I’m a sucker for social media posts and websites of random writing prompts. They get my brain juices going, making me think of unique ways to fulfill the idea, or to subvert the trope presented. I also really enjoy reading the creative ways that others tend to expand on the ideas. At one point I was keeping a note card file of different writing prompts that I would pull out a review occasionally, ideas that might get me thinking in the direction of a good story plot line. I came across one that was presenting a scenario of two bad guys fighting. This writing prompt was, “The Shadow realm invades an Undead kingdom”. I thought that sounded like a really unique idea, so I pushed forward with it. I didn’t want my two heroes to come from either of the evil societies, so I started with the premise that there would be a “normal” kingdom caught in the middle of this fight. And there you have it; we now have a plot for our romance to be set against. Or at least, the bare bones of a plot. Clevenger’s story idea added much more depth, and a reason for the story.

What came later, after we were already well into the merging and outlining of our grand story, was the overlay of a setting. As mentioned last week, this was not the first project that Clevenger and I had worked on together. Back around 2017, he and I had been working on a fantasy world, history, and magic system, with the idea that we were going to try to turn it into a publishable roleplaying sourcebook. We never got that far, primarily because we didn’t have the time or drive to do all the legwork needed to turn it into a publishable product. However, enough of the work had been done that I was able to use it to begin running a game for Clevenger and another best friend of ours. While that game didn’t take off, it gave me enough love and respect for the environment that I encouraged Clevenger that it would be a good backdrop for our “neutral” kingdom. It had several unique features that I enjoyed, and good political and guild setup behind the scenes, and a few great secrets that I was able to bring Clevenger in on. He agreed that it was a good and interesting backdrop. We reviewed and augmented the magic system, and viola, we had an environment, with rules for how the world would work. Yay, us!

So there you have it. These are the core ideas that I brought into the project. I had other things floating around that I could have written about. But these are the ones that I wanted to bring to a combined writing project. Next week we will discuss the ups and downs of where we were willing to compromise in our vision, and what we felt was core to our ideas. But until then…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham