So, whenever I end up showcasing any of my work, be it to family or friends or strangers, I tend to get two questions:
1. Where do you get your ideas from?
2. Do you just make it up as you go along?
I would say that to anyone who writes anything, be they a journalist, author of fiction, playwright, script writer, poet, whatever, ideas come and go, and it seems, in most cases a natural occurance. This is obviously not true for everyone - I know that when I'm writing for a deadline of any variety I'm usually flat out of ideas and inspiration, and that tends to encourage the dreaded writer's block to raise itself up from wherever it's been lurking up until then.
Where did I get my ideas from for Valerian Night?
To be honest, it started out as a random notion, a dialogue piece I wrote for class. In the dialogue:
He had her cornered again. The bruise on her neck still had not healed; unsurprising since it seemed to be the favourite feeding ground. Two hands kept her pinned against the wall. Alyxa just rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. Waiting. There was always the waiting. That was the trouble with demons and dieties: they did not understand time.
"Where have you been?" he asked her, blood slipping over his lips as he pulled away.
"Out."
"Out where?" he wanted to know.
"With the coven, I told you before I left," Alyxa told him, holding her hand to her neck, pinching skin together to stop the bleeding.
"Was that today?"
He was standing at the other end of the room now, looking at the fish in the bowl that never ceased to fascinate him. He was careful with his pronunciation of 'today', the word was as alien to him as he was to the world.
"Yes. That was today, Morpheus," she replied, wearily; he had taken too much again.
Dark emerald eyes peered at her curiously, studying her.
"Are you tired?"
"Yes."
"Did going out tire you, beloved?"
"Yes," she mumbled untruthfully, the world was slipping; he had taken too much.
He was there then, holding her, crooning, whispering words to her that he had whispered in her dreams.
"Sleep then. I will watch you. Sleep."
How does one disobey even the most captive of gods?
And from there I decided to try and explore that relationship some more. Most of my writing tends to be heavily focussed on character interaction and relationship, it's most often my starting point. In the case of Valerian Night, the relationship between Morpheus and Alyxa was the founding stone upon which the rest of the story was constructed.
Those of you who have read the backstory and are keeping up with it have - hopefully - picked up on the symbiotic, but rather taxing - I'd use the word draining, but let's not get too cliche here - on Alyxa. In many ways that bond has become the cornerstone for the relationship between our world and that of Reveille. Without giving away too much - and taking out all the fun for you, the reader, who I'm hoping is bringing your own theories and own ideas to your reading of this work - the Dead Gods in Reveille are very much like celebrities, who, having had their time in the lime-light now long for screen time all over again, and want to come back into the 'real world', where everything is headier, richer, and well...more real.
The philosophers among you will enjoy this - and everyone else will shake their heads and frown at me, most likely: when I was creating Reveille, in my head, it settled itself as Plato's Cave (Plato, Republic, (Vintage, 1991), pp. 253-26) , the place where the reflections are stored, where the shadows of reality are left to collect dust and provide meaning to those who look at the shadows. The Dead Gods then, can be seen as being people seated around the fire creating the shadows. The difference between this metaphor and that of the Allegory of the Cave, is that the Dead Gods sitting around that fire have already ventured out of the cave and have seen the real light, but, in order to survive, have fallen back to the cave. They are now stuck with what to them is dull and plain, literally like having the real thing taken away from them.
In the second part of Valerian Night the focus of the story, which up till now has been aimed primarily at the Dreaming aspect - following Morpheus, Amy, and Alyxa - and introduces Jessica Mirkhill, who is a character from another webfic that I'm going to actually be putting up in 2011 called Riven Cascades.
In the second part of Valerian Night the focus of the story, which up till now has been aimed primarily at the Dreaming aspect - following Morpheus, Amy, and Alyxa - and introduces Jessica Mirkhill, who is a character from another webfic that I'm going to actually be putting up in 2011 called Riven Cascades.
