We interrupt your regularly scheduled story to bring you: The Making of Twilight Rising

It all began when I was around eleven or twelve. I was always (still am :-) different than other people my age. I was quite a bit smaller and a whole lot quieter. I quickly became the outcast, which was fine by me. Even at that young age, I could see through the older kids’ popularity contests and phoniness, and I wanted no part of it. So naturally, a lot of my time was spent dreaming up ways to correct the horrible injustices of the world, usually involving somebody and explosions of energy. And so, the basis for Twilight Rising was born.

As the years went by, my ideas became more coherent and less of a childish dream. While I hadn’t given them names, my characters acted out scenes in my head constantly, whether I was awake, busy doing something, or dreaming. I often thought about putting it all down on paper, but never went through with it.

Then came college. Thrust into a new world, I scrambled to find a foothold. I sank into my computer games once more, and my grades plummeted. By this time, I didn’t even consider typing the story out, much less publishing it on the internet for all to see.
To this day, I still do not know the exact reason I started typing Twilight Rising online. Could be I finally had access to a world I’d never seen before. Could be I just didn’t consider it. Could be that seeing other people publish their work sparked something in me. Could also be that I tired of gaming as an outlet for stress, and decided to find something new to do. Most likely it was a combination of all those and more. Whatever the case, I decided to begin typing it.

First problem: title. That’s right, even after six years I still had *no* idea what I was going to call this thing. I must’ve spent an hour staring at the flashing cursor before coming up with anything close to decent. To my shame, however, the title was largely the product of my roommate NW’s genius. I thank him again for helping me with the title, but I respectfully refuse his request to put The Random Russian in Twilight Rising. Perhaps in a different story, NW. Perhaps in a different one…

Anyways, so now I had the title. Second problem: character names. I didn’t even have a clue what most of my characters would be called. So I went through a bunch of census listings of last names to get those, and for the first names…I already had Sara in my head, but that was it. If I’d used “Nick” as the main character, it’d be a bit *too* obvious, now wouldn’t it? :-) I settled on Darren as a solid name. Originally, Darren’s last name was supposed to be Henderson…*wince* That would have been bad…I changed it to Kinsley before I started writing so it’d flow better. Williams and Rodriguez are common last names, so that wasn’t hard. As for all those Shirnish names…completely original ideas of yours truly. Shirn, B’thda, Pilosh…those too. Mine! All mine! Precioussss…

*cough* Third problem: plot. I had the character traits, appearance, and personality…but what would they *do?* Well…now I’ll reveal to you my secret of typing all this good stuff. Ready? I’m making it up as I go along. :-) Half the stuff that happens in Twilight Rising is spur-of-the-moment, random stuff that I’m able to tie into the plot, and the other half I get ideas for while daydreaming in class. Personally…I’m amazed that it turned out this well. (And even more amazed that I got decent grades.) I certainly didn’t think I’d get this far, and I actually didn’t intend for a lot of stuff to happen in the story…but it did.

Well, there you have it. Ferment six years of chaos in a teenager’s head, pound it out on the keyboard at 2 in the morning while listening to various pieces of music for maximum potency, serve in sporadic updates, and you get Twilight Rising. I continually enjoy typing it; probably more than you all enjoy reading it. And I don’t mind one bit. ^___^
- posted by Nick @ 7/09/2004 09:13:00 PM