Otherworld talk 1

Over at my Patreon, you may have noticed a recent release, entitled Out of the Past. It’s a short novel (or long novella, whichever you prefer) I originally wrote back in 2013, then updated over the past year or so, and it is the first in what I hope is a long line of stories which take place in the fictional setting I call the Otherworld. By the time this post goes up—assuming nothing bad happens in the weeks since I wrote it—I’ll have written a total of 14 works in this setting: the 8 original novels of Chronicles of the Otherworld and a collection of six side stories, A Bridge Between Worlds. Back here at Prose Poetry Code, I’d like to delve a bit deeper into the inner workings of this particular creation.

Origin story

Begin at the beginning, they say, and the Otherworld began a few years ago, sprouting from a two-headed seed. First, I was a bit upset at the cancellation of Stargate Universe (just as it was getting good), which left no real “exploration” sci-fi on television—there’s still not much there, by the way. Second, I like inventing languages, and I had recently begun looking into the cultures that would speak those languages.

Otherworld brings together both of those ideas. The story itself is pretty unspectacular: a bunch of college kids get sent to a medieval-style world, where they have to find a way to survive until they can come home. I originally built the world as a playground for my conlangs, as well as a chance to write a story involving exploration, first contact, culture shock, and other such notions. The whole thing is about being taken out of your comfort zone, and the Otherworld saga has, over the course of four years and half a million words, evolved greatly from that point. I sincerely hope it’s for the better.

False start

As I said, the first part, Out of the Past, was written in November 2013, although it didn’t have a title back then. I even went on to write two and a half more parts (I call them episodes, as the format is meant to mimic a TV series) after that, but I’ll freely admit that they were awful. Halfway through Episode IV, I gave up. I was bored with the setting, and I wanted to move on. So the Otherworld went back onto the shelf, and I thought little more about it for a year and a half.

In 2014, I wrote Before I Wake, as you may know. After that, I started looking through my notes and ideas for something new. At first, I settled on the beginning of what has become the Linear Cycle, plus the “Miracles” short story I’ve put up here at the site. Then, I digressed into the unfinished work currently titled Lair of the Wizards.

That one was the key, I think. Its setting was almost a mirror image of the Otherworld: a bunch of kids in a medieval world find a cache of advanced technology that they see as magic. A kind of novel-length restatement of Clarke’s Third Law, if you will. But writing that got me thinking of the other way around, of the advanced people going to the primitive world. Well, I already had one of those in the works, so why not?

Back in the saddle

So the end of 2015 saw me heading back into the Otherworld, but things were different now. All along, I’d had the idea that the fictional world was connected to Earth. It had to be, for how else would the characters get there? And if it was connected, then it was always connected, which served as a neat explanation for how the inhabitants could get there. More importantly for story purposes, it was the perfect excuse for how they could be human.

The people of the Otherworld are human. That was an ironclad rule I had when I first devised the setting. They weren’t aliens, even if some of them were a bit…altered. (The idea of different races of genetically modified humans actually came about very early on, partially from the D&D campaign my brother and I have made.) But the humans had to get there somehow, and thus I had to begin filling in the backstory.

Again, I did a lot of this back in 2013. It was then that I worked out the sketch of a timeline for the setting’s prehistory. The timing is just barely within the realm of believability, and it’s even within the margin of error of our current archaeological knowledge. But I had to go back and change a lot of specifics to match my assumptions.

The core assumption, of course, is that the Otherworld is derived from the New World. At no point until the present day of the stories (2019, chosen for no reason other than because I didn’t want to risk a tropical storm name being retired) was it ever so much as visited by anyone of European descent. At some point in 2015, I lost myself in research as I looked for a way to make that work. What do they eat? What can they make? How does their technology compare with their Earthly counterparts? (The last was the hardest, as the diverging point is so far in the past that it’s before civilization even began. Fortunately, that almost gives me a blank slate.)

Reset button

After a bit of editing work on Out of the Past, mostly to make it match my new findings, I started on the second episode, The City and the Hill. According to my notes, I finished the first draft on November 26, 2015. The next three followed in quick succession, then I took two months off in May and June of 2016. (That was for the Linear Cycle and Lair of the Wizards, in case you’re wondering.) The final three parts of “Season 1” took up the summer months, ending on September 25.

Even when I was writing the final words of Episode 8, Long Road’s End, I didn’t think I was done. Oh, no. The Otherworld is more than just these eight stories, and it was like that all along. I’d intended from the start to write a second season, a new set of stories that would build upon the foundation that these laid down. The way I wrote, however, meant that I needed something to bridge the nine-month gap that the stories’ structure required.

Thus came A Bridge Between Worlds. This is a story spoiler, so be warned. Some of the characters do not end Episode 8 on their home planet. The bridge novellas were intended to tell their stories. Well, five of them do. The sixth (actually, the third in sequence) ties up a few loose ends from Season 1 while setting the stage for events in Season 2. And that is coming, if I have anything to say about it. I’d like to start writing it later this year, but we’ll have to see.

Moving on

In the coming months, I’ll talk a lot more about the Otherworld setting. It’s my favorite creation, and there have been times over the past four years where I’ve lost myself completely in it. I’ve thought about it in the shower (where some of my best plots and character moments are born). I’ve dreamed about it. I don’t want to give it up, and I know that the world still has more to give. Some authors have a whole shared universe for their works, but I’m content with a single planet, a single world.

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