Inside My Head – #1

I figured a little insight into how this whole writing thing came about would be a good first blog on my newly updated site.

The main inspiration for the James’s Ragtag Adventures series came from some stuff I had written somewhere around 2003-ish. I was out of work for a number of years due to a car accident and one of the things I did to kill time was write in a wrestling efed.

Now for those of you who don’t know what an efed is, it’s basically Dungeons and Dragons except with wrestlers. You create a wrestler, and each week you would write a small story called a role play about what your wrestler was doing to get ready for his match, and your opponent would do the same. Then, at the end of the week, the owner would write out what happened in those matches, with the winner being the person who he thought had the better role plays that week.

Now, some people did the traditional, show their wrestler in the ring, talk some smack to their opponent, and that was it. But some of the “better” feds had people who focused a lot more on character development, getting deep into their characters life, their problems, goals, etc.

I met a ton of great writers in these feds, and writing against them each week definitely boosted my own writing skills. Eventually, I joined a tag team with someone who had a similar style and humor as I did, and instead of the more serious, character development type stuff, we decided to go way outside the box.

Basically, we would take one aspect of our opponents character, whether it be his size, skills, something he said in his role play, etc., and use that as a catalyst for having our wrestlers embark on a crazy adventure.

One of us would start the role play, and the other would continue the story in their own role play. So by the end of the week, we each wrote 2 or 3 role plays that formed one big story. The wrestling efed we were in was also pretty out there as far as efeds went. It was a very supernatural type of fed with crazy death matches and wrestlers who had magic powers, and all kinds of crazy things, and our tag team really ran with that kinda stuff.

We had a sword that let us travel through time, so that opened up a lot of creativity for us. So if our opponents, let’s say, knew karate, we would decide to travel to feudal japan and go fight ninjas, and end up overthrowing a dynasty or something. Or maybe we’d travel into the post apocalyptic future and fight the wasteland, mad max versions of our opponents. It was just a bunch of way out there stuff that we were coming up with.

Eventually, a few other people started going along with these random adventures, and soon there was a good six or seven of us all interacting with each other, writing off the wall adventures. That basic premise of coming up with a ridiculous plan which ended up getting our wrestlers into a boat load of trouble was the whole basis of the James’s Adventures series.

After the efed thing started to die down, I was writing more and more fantasy stuff aimed towards possibly putting out my own novels, rather than for the efed. I started writing not quite epic fantasy, but sort of high fantasy type things. I have a ton of layouts and chapters and bits and piece of novels sitting on my computer, in various states of completion. The problem soon became, that despite my feelings that these are all great stories that I think should be written, I just wasn’t motivated to write them. Every so often I would revisit them and write a few bits here and there, but it wasn’t imperative that I get on the computer and finish those stories.

Now, I’ve kept in touch with a lot of the people I met during the efed days, and every so often we’d get to talking and reminiscing about all the crazy things we wrote. One day, I was looking over all of the half completed stories I had floating around and it dawned on me, why not just write something like those random adventures from back in the efed days.

So I broke down what we did into pretty much two sentences.

1: Make up a stupid plan to accomplish something the characters needed to accomplish.

2: Have said plan go completely off the rails and in turn cause a ton of trouble for the characters.

Now, while the role plays from that efed were more adult oriented and amusing to those of us within that community, I didn’t think it would work as well in a full fledged, 300 page novel aimed at adults. So doing some more thinking on it, I realized that our wrestlers were basically just big kids, coming up with stupid ideas to amuse themselves. So I decided that toning down the more adult oriented content, and making the main characters kids, would work a lot better for what I had in mind.

So with that in mind, I hopped on the computer and wrote out a basic goblin fight scene which would set these characters on their journey. That original scene, which I wrote just to get a feel for if my idea would actually work, ended up becoming the first three chapters of Return of the Goblin Queen. From there I just kept writing. I had no real direction after that initial scene with the goblins, and a lot of the story just came off the top of my head as I was writing.

Eventually, about a week later, I had a completed story from start to finish that I was extremely pleased with. It took an additional couple days of editing, fine tuning, and some small re-writes to get it up to where I wanted it to be, but in the end I’m happy with how it turned out and I hope everyone else enjoys it as much as I do.

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