During my adolescence I was always writing some thing or another. Most of it never took off beyond a few pages. In 8th grade I had what I thought was a great idea about frogs who are made super-intelligent as part of a scientific experiment. The frogs become evil geniuses and build laser-shooting robots, which they use to try and take over the world with. I thought it was a great idea, but like all ideas it was a lot more fun to think about than it was to write. I barely got a few pages down, when I got bored and shelved it.
About 6 months later I was feeling like trying something else, and tried to think of an idea. I was into James Bond movies at the time, so the idea of doing something related to spies appealed to me. But I was also a big fantasy/mythological fan, so I wanted something set in the fantastical sword and sandal days. I figured I could combine the two. After all, they had spies in the ancient world as well, didn’t they?
Gradually the idea came to me of writing about a war. Being a teen-age boy, all of my literary projects tended to be somewhat violent, but I had never attempted an epic about a whole war before. I figured I could write about every aspect of the war: the kings making war and peace, the generals making battle plans, the ordinary men in the battle field, and of course the spies and counter-spies on both sides.
I set about making an outline for the plot. The morality was very clearly drawn. The good side was pure good. The bad side was pure evil. Looking back on it now this moral division is somewhat embarrassing, but when you’re 14 this is how you see the world. The comics and movies intended for 14 year olds seldom paint complex moral pictures. The same with young adult novels. Even American history is often presented as a story of good versus evil.
So in my story, one country was pure evil. The aggressor was the country of Marram, which was bent on aggressive conquest for its own sake. The king of Marram, Azom, could have easily been a stock villain from Saturday morning cartoons. I tried to make everything about him ooze pure evil. I even changed all the “s” sounds to “z” in Azom’s speech because I thought that sounded more sinister. (By the way, that seemingly simple decision turned out to be a nightmare with the spell-checker).
By contrast the country of Dishon was only fighting for self-defense. The people were not only fighting for their land, but for their very lives, and the lives of their families, since Marram put to the sword all that it conquered. I figured there could be no nobler cause. Also the tiny country of Dishon fighting against the huge emperor of Marram was a classic David versus Goliath story line, and everyone’s natural sympathy was with the underdog.
The third country involved in the war was Calet. Because Dishon knows that it does not stand a chance against Marram by itself, they bribe the king of Calet to join in the war against Marram.
In retrospect, this is one of the least believable parts of the story. It is absolutely ridiculous to think that a king would put his whole kingdom at risk all in return for more gold in the royal treasury. At the time though, it seemed believable enough to me. After all, there were many kings in mythology, like Midas, who would do anything for more gold. And in the Bible, Israel enlists Egypt’s aid against Assyria in part by giving gold to Egypt.
In fact, I chose the name “Calet”, because it sounds like “Egypt”. I was reading a book about ancient Egypt at the time, and I was fascinated by the description of Egypt during the Roman Empire. The book said that Egypt, although it had once been the most powerful nation on earth, was now being attacked on all sides by new nations, and was like a wounded boar being brought down by dogs on all sides.
I was interested in the idea of a crumbling empire giving way to a new emerging power. How did the people of an old glorious empire feel when they were forced to acknowledge the strength of a new country? Could they adjust to their new status as number 2?
Although the idea for Calet came from ancient Egypt, in many ways it resembles the old Roman Empire more. The idea is that Calet was so powerful it once conquered nearly the entire world. All of the nations in the story, Calet, Dishon, Marram, and even the Watchers and the Icelers (we’ll get to them later) speak a form of Caletian dialect, much as most of Europe speaks a variant of Latin.
Dishon 1-4
I was reading Livy’s history of the war with Hannibal about this period. I knew nothing about military strategy myself, but I had gotten it through my head that in the ancient world military success depended as much upon good strategy as it did on numbers and strength.
I therefore reasoned by extrapolation that if the military genius was great enough, no odds were impossible. No matter how great Marram’s army, Dishon could win if it only applied the right strategy.
I created the character of Perez, a character with a military genius so great, he never looses a battle. Since I knew absolutely nothing about military strategy myself, I couldn’t describe what Perez was doing, but instead simply made the statement that Perez’s plan was perfect.
Most of the story hinges on the genius of Perez. The outline of the story as I had originally planned it (not as it turns out) was this: Dishon finds out that Marram is planning to attack. King Recab of Dishon and his advisors have a meeting, and decide to bribe Calet to join them in the struggle. In Calet resides the great military genius Perez. Perez plans a perfect strategy, but he is foiled when one of his generals betrays him at the last moment. The king of Calet is killed, and the country breaks into civil war between a pro-Marram faction and a neutral faction.
Perez, disillusioned with the state of affairs in Calet, goes instead to Dishon where his military genius gives victory after victory to the tiny kingdom. Eventually however he is assassinated by spies. At about the same time the pro-Marram faction wins Calet’s civil war. Both Marram and Calet march on Dishon at once. Just when it looks like all is lost for the tiny country, every single man woman and child in Dishon march to defend the city. There is a spectacular battle, but by sheer determination and love of freedom the people of Dishon overcome incredible odds to defeat both nations. King Recab himself fights hand to hand with King Azom and is victorious. And the tiny kingdom is saved.
I didn’t finish it of course. I got 4 chapters into it (right after the defeat of Calet by Marram), and then ended up giving up on it.
The Comic Book Stage
It was about this time that I started reading a lot of comic books. What fascinated me about comics was the way each issue was a self-contained story, and yet several different story arcs would continue over many years. Also I thought it was cool the way characters from different series would interact with each other. Batman would sometimes appear in Superman comics, and vice versa. Instead of a bunch of different comics, it was as if the whole DC company was telling one long story.
I couldn’t draw, but I thought it would be fun to imitate the comic book style in my own writing. I would have several different series going at once. Each would have several different story arcs continuing over several issues. And the story lines from different series would periodically intersect with each other.
Although most comic books are set in a modern-urban environment, I had no problems with taking the comic-book way of story telling and adopting it to the classical fantasy setting. So I thought maybe this would be a good excuse to give another whack at finishing the Dishon story, which I had left sitting for several months.
The problem with my Dishon story wasn’t the setting but the story line. The Dishon story was an epic war story. I now wanted to write about a lot of mini interconnecting stories. And yet at the same time, it seemed a pity to start all over again from scratch when I already had 4 chapters written on Dishon.
I decided to keep working on the Dishon story. I would finish the original story line, and then any further adventures with the country of Dishon would follow the comic book format. At the same time, I would begin work on several other series.
I had a few ideas knocking around my head for other series I could do. None of them were terribly well thought out, but I thought about doing something with a group of animals that were endowed with super powers. Or one about a knight that wandered around from town to town helping people out. Or a series about a wolf pack that sometimes interacted with human beings. All of these would be separate story lines, and yet periodically cross over with each other.
All of these potential story lines fit in very nicely with the fantasy world already established in the Dishon series. Some of them might have taken inspiration from modern comics, but all of them took place in the ancient mythological “sword and sandal” world. But what if, hidden somewhere up in the mountains, there was a village of people who had super-futuristic technology? And what if they just stayed hidden away in this futuristic village, watching what happened in the primitive outside world, but never interfering?
Because this was the most ridiculous of all my ideas, this was the series I wanted to start on first. I had some sort of fascination with the bizarre. I thought it was kind of cool that all of the rest of the series would have the same theme, and then there would be this one really out there story line.
I never got started on any of the other story lines. It’s hard enough to write one story, let alone two at the same time. I just never felt like I had the time to start in on a 3rd story line. Eventually I got tired of even writing 2 at the same time, and made some clumsy attempts to combine them into the same story (but I’m getting ahead of myself).
At the beginning I was not concerned about where all the futuristic technology came from. Thousands of years ago a group of travelers simply stumbled into this abandoned futuristic city while crossing the mountains, and they have been living there every since.
Comparisons With Star Trek
The technology in the Watcher city very closely resembles “Star Trek”, of which I was an avid fan at the time. The computers in the city can replicate anything the Watcher’s desire, just like the replicators in “Star Trek”. And through the computers, they can watch anything happening in their city, or in the outside world, just like the computers in Star Trek. In fact if you’re an avid Star Trek fan, it should be very easy to picture the Watcher city. If you’re not, it may be a little confusing. Since I could picture the city perfectly in my head, I didn’t waste a lot of time describing it on the paper.
Actually the whole idea of “The Watchers” comes from a Star Trek episode with a very similar premise. I thought it had been my own idea, but then much later saw the episode re-run on TV, and remembered I had seen it before many years ago, and that elements of it most have stuck in my memory when I got the idea for “The Watchers.” (Specifically TNG: Who Watches the Watchers)
[I think what happened is that I saw Who Watches the Watchers back in 1989 when it was first shown on TV, and then didn't see it again for several years afterwards. This being in the days before the Internet and Wikipedia, a lot of these old Star Trek episodes were floating around in my subconscious, but I couldn't remember them clearly consciously. I think I first came up with the idea of The Watchers when I was in 10th grade, so it was about 4 or 5 years after I had seen Who Watches the Watchers. I had some vague memories of a TNG episode with a similar premise, but didn't realize how much I had ripped it off until years later. All that being said, I also wasn't overly concerned about ripping stuff off at this stage in my life. This was, after all, a story that I was writing in my bedroom for my own amusement. I thought there was story potential in the idea of a technologically advanced civilization that was watching everything that was happening in this medieval fantasy world, and so I borrowed the idea.]
Because I was a little embarrassed about how much of “The Watchers” was ripped off from Star Trek, I made a couple clumsy attempts to give things my own twists. For example I couldn’t have everyone running around with “phasers” because that would have been way too obvious. And yet I thought “laser guns” sounded too cartoonish. At first the characters use “a burner” which sends heat waves that severely burn the victim. After a few chapters, I got sick of writing about the burner, and just swallowed my pride and substituted a laser gun.
I’m not sure how a laser gun really works, which is one of the reasons I was reluctant to use it. In my story, a laser gun hit anywhere on the body is an instant kill. A burner, on the other hand, will only severely burn the victim, and there is the possibility of survival
The computers work much the way as the computers in Star Trek. When the characters want something, they speak into the air, and the computers obey. I thought the comparison would be too obvious if my characters addressed the computer simply by calling it “computer”, as in Star Trek. So, I divided the computer into two different entities. When the characters want the computer to teach them about something, they must ask for “The Teacher.” If they want the computers to do something, they must ask for “The Executor”.
And lastly: obviously having “transporter beams” would have been too obvious of a Star Trek rip off, so I invented the Super-Elevators which can whisk my characters anywhere in the city within seconds. That only works for inside the city though. When they leave the city, they must fly in their shuttles.
Plot Structure
After I had decided on the comic book structure, I went and re-printed the first four chapters of Dishon as if they were each issues of a comic book. I made up a cover page and a cheesy title for each one. I decided to name the whole mythical world “Fabulae” after the Latin word for stories, and so both the “Dishon” story and “The Watchers” story were part of the Fabulae series.
Aside from the fact that I was now calling my chapters “issues”, the Dishon story didn’t change all that much. I was still working on my war epic.
Even for “The Watcher” series, I never really attained what I had originally envisioned. I decided that 4 pages would equal an issue. That was really all I could write in a week anyway. But 4 pages was way too short to write a story in. So the idea of a string of self-contained, and yet inter-related stories, never exactly worked out.
However I tried to imitate comic books in another way.
Many of the comic book series I was reading at the time were jugging multiple subplots at once (usually involving minor characters.) These subplots would boil for months or years in the background before emerging to effect the main story (or sometimes quietly disappearing.)
I wanted this in my own story. I wanted to have several different subplots going on at once in a story that gradually got more and more complex.
It was an ambitious attempt at least. The thing I didn't realize at the time was just how much work and careful plotting was required to keep all these subplots from stepping on each other. And this is the problem I soon developed. The problem was I never really planned out where any of my subplots were going.
When I first started “Dishon”, I wrote out the whole plot first. This was how my 8th grade English teacher had taught us we were supposed to write a novel. But that made it extremely boring for me to write. What’s the fun of creating a story if I already know how it’s going to end? So I deliberately avoided doing this when writing “The Watchers.”
The problem is, as I tried to juggle several plot lines at once, the plots didn’t so much compliment each other as cancel each other out. I’d have one plot going, I’d try and introduce another plot to make things more complicated, and I’d find that the new plot now made the old plot obsolete.
There is also the problem of the difference between the time it took me to write it and the time it takes someone to read it. A chapter a week was pretty common for me. Sometimes I’d miss a week. And when I got discouraged sometimes I would leave the work untouched for a couple months.
Therefore it seemed to me while I was writing it that a single plot line had simmered on for about a month now, and it was time to shake things out by adding a new plot. However, when read all in one sitting (and especially when skimmed over), it seems as if one plot is barely getting started, when all of a sudden the story takes a wild turn in another direction.
Also I now regarded each issue as a finished work. I’d go over it once for spelling errors, (you may note I missed a few), and then it was already “issued” and I couldn’t revise it as if I was writing a novel. Any plot strings that didn’t work out I would have to leave just as they were. If I discovered I was taking the story in a direction that didn’t make any sense, rather than re-write it, I had to make some sort of clumsy attempt to redirect the story back on path in the following issues. The finished issues were off-limits.
Anyway, I’ll point out specific examples of this as we go through the story. But this is just the structure I was operating under which explains in general why the story gets so confusing.
The Watchers
The first issue of “The Watchers” breaks chronology briefly to explain how a thousand years ago, these humans happened to stumble upon the hidden city. They are fleeing exiles from Calet who, while crossing the mountains, are attacked by the Icelers. While trying to defend themselves, they fall into the buried city.
The Icelers are beings of human shape made entirely out of ice. They may be the cheesiest characters I’ve ever created, but in a way deliberately so. One of the things I’ve always liked about Greek mythology is the way everything is personified. The river, the trees, the winds, everything is a character in the story. I wanted to imitate that in my own fantasy writing. Even the ice becomes a character.
In the first issue the Icelers are portrayed as monsters, and I was originally intending to make them the villains of “The Watcher” story. But the more I thought about it, I decided they would make terrible villains. They were way to easy to kill. The Watchers, with their futuristic technology, simply had to shoot a heat ray or something into the Iceler and melt it.
So I thought it would be more interesting to make the Icelers victims. What if one Watcher was to go a little bit insane and start shooting heat rays and throwing heat bombs at innocent Icelers? And then another Watcher would have to protect the Icelers.
I started to think about what would drive a Watcher to go out and start attacking Icelers. Since the Watchers kept to themselves in their city hidden inside the mountain, they normally wouldn’t have any contact with the Icelers who were wandering around on the mountains surface.
In the 2nd chapter a freak accident causes the Watcher technology to mal-function, and the mountain starts to gradually heat up as a result. All the Icelers have to be evacuated, or they will die. But the Watchers have grown to value their secrecy so much, that many of them don’t want to emerge into the outside world even for the purpose of saving the Icelers. The main spokesman for this sentiment is Rodens
I was writing this in 1993, and the 1992 presidential campaign was still fresh in my mind. My political understanding was very limited then, but I do remember hearing several commercials on the radio for Pat Buchanan’s campaign. Pat Buchanan, you may remember, was running on the platform of “putting America first,” and cutting back on foreign aid to other countries.
Much of America’s foreign aid budget is military to allies like Israel, but that’s not how Pat Buchanan framed the debate. He usually talked about cutting back on aid to development projects. I imagined Pat Buchanan was talking about cutting back aid to starving people in Africa. I thought it was horrifying that someone would suggest such a thing, and even more horrifying that it would get so much support. So, I made Pat Buchanan the villain of my story by putting his words in Rodens’ mouth. I didn’t have a transcript of Buchanan’s speeches in front of me, but tried to imitate them as best I could remember. When I could remember exact quotes, I used those. For instance, on Pat Buchanan’s campaign commercials he would say, “There’s nothing wrong with putting America first.” I simply substituted “the Watchers” for America and put the phrase into Rodens’ mouth.
The scary thing about Pat Buchanan’s rhetoric of course is that it has so many supporters. So I imagined in The Watcher city there would be a lot of support for this kind of rhetoric as well. Rodens’ ideas are very popular. And yet at the town meeting, the city votes in favor to save the Icelers.
Our hero Hans is initially puzzled by this result, but later finds out that the idealistic Watcher President Jistap rigged the vote in order to save the Icelers. Hans has a moral dilemma about whether it is acceptable to subvert the democratic process in order to save lives. The debate is continued in chapter 4 when Rodens learns that the vote has been subverted.
Obviously this story would be a lot different if I wrote it today. This was before the Florida debacle in the 2000 election. This was also before I learned about the Senate Church Committee meetings, or Cointel, or the many other un-democratic things our country has done.
At the time I had a much more innocent view of American government, which was influenced by my 8th grade civics class and my junior high American History courses. I believed that in our 200-year history, we have had a flawless democracy. Even the Watergate break in seemed like proof the system works because the bad guys were soon caught and punished.
I thought that if somehow the democratic process were to be subverted even once, the damage would be permanent because it would set a precedent, and people would loose their faith in our democracy. I thought the same was true of The Watchers democracy. Because the democratic vote had one time been tampered with, it had the potential to ruin the democracy forever. That is why there is a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric by the characters about the destruction of democracy. This is also partly why Rodens over-reacts like he does, although I had always meant to set him up as an unstable character from the beginning.
What intrigued me about this part of the story is that it was a moral quandary that I myself was unsure of who was in the right. Was President Jistap right by saving Icelers, or was Rodens right by wanting to save democracy? My writing up until this point had always been pure good versus pure evil, but I began to enjoy the complexity of this situation, and throughout the story would try and set up similar moral dilemmas, some of which got a bit cheesy.
Dishon 5-10
During this time I was also continuing on with my story about Dishon. Dishon was a lot more boring for me because I had already written the plot out, so I knew where it was headed. For “The Watchers” on the other hand I had no idea what was going to happen, and was eager to find out. I started thinking of the weeks when I wrote for “Dishon” as just a chore that had to be done so I could get back to “The Watchers.”
My original plot outline called for the civil war in Calet to be a small sub-plot that was happening off scene. We find out the civil war begins in chapter 5, but then I wasn’t planning on returning to Calet until after the civil war was over.
But, because the story in Dishon was interesting me less and less, I started to write most of the time about the civil war in Calet. I began to develop intrigues on both sides. I decided Polad’s adviser, Dabine, was secretly aiding Miktesh. This was never stated outright, but hinted at. For instance the reason Miktesh escaped in chapter 5 was because Dabine allowed him.
Miktesh’s advisor, Jole, after becoming discouraged with Miktesh’s tactics, starts secretly aiding Polad. But then Jole is killed by Dabine in chapter 8. (Again, Dabine isn’t identified by name. I was originally planning on keeping Dabine’s loyalties a secret until the end of the story).
By the time we arrive at chapters 9 and 10, the story deals almost exclusively with Calet, or more specifically, Miktesh’s faction. In chapter 9, we find out that Perez had a son, Drusus, who was in Miktesh’s camp. Again, this was another detail I hadn’t originally planned out, but I though it would make things more interesting.
I was reading Tacitus history of Rome at the time, and enjoyed the story about how the historical Drusus was able to talk his soldiers out of a mutiny. I wanted to create a character like Drusus in my story: a young, honorable, tough soldier, who will go for any lengths for the good of his fellow soldiers.
Naturally I had to explain why Drusus had been estranged from his father Perez, and Drusus tells the whole story to Miktesh. My inspiration for this was “The Chosen”. I don’t remember it well, but there is a passage in “The Chosen” where one of the characters asks his father a question about another character, and the father says something like, “to answer that question, I have to first explain to you what happened to our people 1000 years ago.”
Something like that. I’m not remembering it well. But I do remember that I was fascinated by the idea of an event in distant history having a direct affect on people in the 20th century. I wanted to imitate that. I wanted to see if I could somehow design a story so that something that happened 500 years previous was the direct reason why today Drusus does not get along with his father.
And that was pretty much my only guideline for writing this long-winded flashback. Since I was trying to imitate “The Chosen”, the history of the Nathor race at times very closely resembles the history of the Jewish race. But the other stuff I just made up as I typed, which is why it is so bizarre and needlessly long. The flashback part ends up taking up almost two whole chapters.
The Watchers 5-7
Jistap imprisons Rodens to prevent him from exposing the voting fraud. Rodens is so angry at his unjust imprisonment that it causes him to lose what little sanity he had left. He manages to inflict injuries on himself, then escape when the guard comes to check on him.
Rodens, insane with rage, decides to take his revenge on the Icelers by melting them. Hans is sent to stop Rodens. While Hans is gone, Jistap and his team decide to consolidate their power by officially ending democratic rule in the city, and establishing Jistap as the dictator.
This is a classic example of the plot framework I mentioned earlier. While Hans was leaving the city to fight Rodens, I decided to make things more exciting by having Jistap grab power at home while Hans was gone. Jistap and his team had shown no previous inclination towards desiring a complete dictatorship, and I wasn’t originally planning this, but I figured after they had already fixed the vote, it wasn’t a big step for them to take power completely.
However I didn’t plan this out very well, and this is a classic example of one plot line canceling another out instead of supplementing it. If Jistap has officially taken power anyway, why does Hans have to sneak around in one ship when Jistap can just send the whole fleet? Therefore shortly after this Rodens was apprehended, and the whole Rodens section of the plot fizzled out.
In addition to Jistap there were 13 other members of his team (including Hans). I chose the number 13 because it was unlucky, and a foreshadowed a sense of disaster (although again, I hadn’t planned out the plot in advance, so I didn’t really know where it was heading myself). However, I sometimes forgot if the number 13 included Jistap, or if there were 13 members of the team plus Jistap. You might notice the math varies from chapter to chapter.
Also, the epitome of lazy writing, I felt like it was too much trouble to sit down and think of 13 other people all at once. So I just introduced characters as I needed them. By the end of the story all 13 are named and identified, but in the beginning I only identified a couple of them by name. Therefore whenever the 13 are meeting, I can only use the names of the characters I’ve already identified. The rest of them are mysteriously silent.
Later in the story, when all of the 13 are finally identified, it turns out some of them are extremely opinionated and vocal, and begs the question: where were they in the earlier chapters?
I was somewhat thinking of Julius Caesar when I wrote this part. Some of the more sympathetic biographies of Julius Caesar claim that he wasn’t power hungry, he just had a lot of reforms he wanted to get through, and he was frustrated with the way the Senate kept blocking him. So he took power for himself, but then he used that power to push through a lot of reforms that benefited the average soldier and the average farmer, people who had been neglected by the senate aristocracy.
But ultimately, the imperial system that Caesar started gave birth to monsters like Nero and Caligula. I always used to think that maybe, if someone would have just explained that to Caesar, maybe history could have been different. I used to imagine Caesar’s responses: “I’ll be sure to pick a worthy successor. And anyone I pick as a successor will be smart enough to pick a worthy successor himself.” And I would try and explain to Caesar that ultimately he would run out of good men, and the abuse of power would be inevitable.
This was something I often thought about, so I just worked that dialogue into the story in the conversation between Pericula and Jistap.
In an attempt to complicate the plot even further, I added a couple more details. Although Jistap was the leader, all of his power came from Bakes, who was the only one who knew how to manipulate the computers which ran the city. Bakes laughs after leaving Jistap, which I intended to indicate Bakes was not being completely honest.
Also at the very end there is a mysterious conversation between two unidentified people, which hints at more complications to come.
Because I was a little embarrassed about how much of “The Watchers” was ripped off from Star Trek, I made a couple clumsy attempts to give things my own twists. For example I couldn’t have everyone running around with “phasers” because that would have been way too obvious. And yet I thought “laser guns” sounded too cartoonish. At first the characters use “a burner” which sends heat waves that severely burn the victim. After a few chapters, I got sick of writing about the burner, and just swallowed my pride and substituted a laser gun.
I’m not sure how a laser gun really works, which is one of the reasons I was reluctant to use it. In my story, a laser gun hit anywhere on the body is an instant kill. A burner, on the other hand, will only severely burn the victim, and there is the possibility of survival
The computers work much the way as the computers in Star Trek. When the characters want something, they speak into the air, and the computers obey. I thought the comparison would be too obvious if my characters addressed the computer simply by calling it “computer”, as in Star Trek. So, I divided the computer into two different entities. When the characters want the computer to teach them about something, they must ask for “The Teacher.” If they want the computers to do something, they must ask for “The Executor”.
And lastly: obviously having “transporter beams” would have been too obvious of a Star Trek rip off, so I invented the Super-Elevators which can whisk my characters anywhere in the city within seconds. That only works for inside the city though. When they leave the city, they must fly in their shuttles.
Plot Structure
After I had decided on the comic book structure, I went and re-printed the first four chapters of Dishon as if they were each issues of a comic book. I made up a cover page and a cheesy title for each one. I decided to name the whole mythical world “Fabulae” after the Latin word for stories, and so both the “Dishon” story and “The Watchers” story were part of the Fabulae series.
Aside from the fact that I was now calling my chapters “issues”, the Dishon story didn’t change all that much. I was still working on my war epic.
Even for “The Watcher” series, I never really attained what I had originally envisioned. I decided that 4 pages would equal an issue. That was really all I could write in a week anyway. But 4 pages was way too short to write a story in. So the idea of a string of self-contained, and yet inter-related stories, never exactly worked out.
However I tried to imitate comic books in another way.
Many of the comic book series I was reading at the time were jugging multiple subplots at once (usually involving minor characters.) These subplots would boil for months or years in the background before emerging to effect the main story (or sometimes quietly disappearing.)
I wanted this in my own story. I wanted to have several different subplots going on at once in a story that gradually got more and more complex.
It was an ambitious attempt at least. The thing I didn't realize at the time was just how much work and careful plotting was required to keep all these subplots from stepping on each other. And this is the problem I soon developed. The problem was I never really planned out where any of my subplots were going.
When I first started “Dishon”, I wrote out the whole plot first. This was how my 8th grade English teacher had taught us we were supposed to write a novel. But that made it extremely boring for me to write. What’s the fun of creating a story if I already know how it’s going to end? So I deliberately avoided doing this when writing “The Watchers.”
The problem is, as I tried to juggle several plot lines at once, the plots didn’t so much compliment each other as cancel each other out. I’d have one plot going, I’d try and introduce another plot to make things more complicated, and I’d find that the new plot now made the old plot obsolete.
There is also the problem of the difference between the time it took me to write it and the time it takes someone to read it. A chapter a week was pretty common for me. Sometimes I’d miss a week. And when I got discouraged sometimes I would leave the work untouched for a couple months.
Therefore it seemed to me while I was writing it that a single plot line had simmered on for about a month now, and it was time to shake things out by adding a new plot. However, when read all in one sitting (and especially when skimmed over), it seems as if one plot is barely getting started, when all of a sudden the story takes a wild turn in another direction.
Also I now regarded each issue as a finished work. I’d go over it once for spelling errors, (you may note I missed a few), and then it was already “issued” and I couldn’t revise it as if I was writing a novel. Any plot strings that didn’t work out I would have to leave just as they were. If I discovered I was taking the story in a direction that didn’t make any sense, rather than re-write it, I had to make some sort of clumsy attempt to redirect the story back on path in the following issues. The finished issues were off-limits.
Anyway, I’ll point out specific examples of this as we go through the story. But this is just the structure I was operating under which explains in general why the story gets so confusing.
The Watchers
The first issue of “The Watchers” breaks chronology briefly to explain how a thousand years ago, these humans happened to stumble upon the hidden city. They are fleeing exiles from Calet who, while crossing the mountains, are attacked by the Icelers. While trying to defend themselves, they fall into the buried city.
The Icelers are beings of human shape made entirely out of ice. They may be the cheesiest characters I’ve ever created, but in a way deliberately so. One of the things I’ve always liked about Greek mythology is the way everything is personified. The river, the trees, the winds, everything is a character in the story. I wanted to imitate that in my own fantasy writing. Even the ice becomes a character.
In the first issue the Icelers are portrayed as monsters, and I was originally intending to make them the villains of “The Watcher” story. But the more I thought about it, I decided they would make terrible villains. They were way to easy to kill. The Watchers, with their futuristic technology, simply had to shoot a heat ray or something into the Iceler and melt it.
So I thought it would be more interesting to make the Icelers victims. What if one Watcher was to go a little bit insane and start shooting heat rays and throwing heat bombs at innocent Icelers? And then another Watcher would have to protect the Icelers.
I started to think about what would drive a Watcher to go out and start attacking Icelers. Since the Watchers kept to themselves in their city hidden inside the mountain, they normally wouldn’t have any contact with the Icelers who were wandering around on the mountains surface.
In the 2nd chapter a freak accident causes the Watcher technology to mal-function, and the mountain starts to gradually heat up as a result. All the Icelers have to be evacuated, or they will die. But the Watchers have grown to value their secrecy so much, that many of them don’t want to emerge into the outside world even for the purpose of saving the Icelers. The main spokesman for this sentiment is Rodens
I was writing this in 1993, and the 1992 presidential campaign was still fresh in my mind. My political understanding was very limited then, but I do remember hearing several commercials on the radio for Pat Buchanan’s campaign. Pat Buchanan, you may remember, was running on the platform of “putting America first,” and cutting back on foreign aid to other countries.
Much of America’s foreign aid budget is military to allies like Israel, but that’s not how Pat Buchanan framed the debate. He usually talked about cutting back on aid to development projects. I imagined Pat Buchanan was talking about cutting back aid to starving people in Africa. I thought it was horrifying that someone would suggest such a thing, and even more horrifying that it would get so much support. So, I made Pat Buchanan the villain of my story by putting his words in Rodens’ mouth. I didn’t have a transcript of Buchanan’s speeches in front of me, but tried to imitate them as best I could remember. When I could remember exact quotes, I used those. For instance, on Pat Buchanan’s campaign commercials he would say, “There’s nothing wrong with putting America first.” I simply substituted “the Watchers” for America and put the phrase into Rodens’ mouth.
The scary thing about Pat Buchanan’s rhetoric of course is that it has so many supporters. So I imagined in The Watcher city there would be a lot of support for this kind of rhetoric as well. Rodens’ ideas are very popular. And yet at the town meeting, the city votes in favor to save the Icelers.
Our hero Hans is initially puzzled by this result, but later finds out that the idealistic Watcher President Jistap rigged the vote in order to save the Icelers. Hans has a moral dilemma about whether it is acceptable to subvert the democratic process in order to save lives. The debate is continued in chapter 4 when Rodens learns that the vote has been subverted.
Obviously this story would be a lot different if I wrote it today. This was before the Florida debacle in the 2000 election. This was also before I learned about the Senate Church Committee meetings, or Cointel, or the many other un-democratic things our country has done.
At the time I had a much more innocent view of American government, which was influenced by my 8th grade civics class and my junior high American History courses. I believed that in our 200-year history, we have had a flawless democracy. Even the Watergate break in seemed like proof the system works because the bad guys were soon caught and punished.
I thought that if somehow the democratic process were to be subverted even once, the damage would be permanent because it would set a precedent, and people would loose their faith in our democracy. I thought the same was true of The Watchers democracy. Because the democratic vote had one time been tampered with, it had the potential to ruin the democracy forever. That is why there is a lot of hyperbolic rhetoric by the characters about the destruction of democracy. This is also partly why Rodens over-reacts like he does, although I had always meant to set him up as an unstable character from the beginning.
What intrigued me about this part of the story is that it was a moral quandary that I myself was unsure of who was in the right. Was President Jistap right by saving Icelers, or was Rodens right by wanting to save democracy? My writing up until this point had always been pure good versus pure evil, but I began to enjoy the complexity of this situation, and throughout the story would try and set up similar moral dilemmas, some of which got a bit cheesy.
Dishon 5-10
During this time I was also continuing on with my story about Dishon. Dishon was a lot more boring for me because I had already written the plot out, so I knew where it was headed. For “The Watchers” on the other hand I had no idea what was going to happen, and was eager to find out. I started thinking of the weeks when I wrote for “Dishon” as just a chore that had to be done so I could get back to “The Watchers.”
My original plot outline called for the civil war in Calet to be a small sub-plot that was happening off scene. We find out the civil war begins in chapter 5, but then I wasn’t planning on returning to Calet until after the civil war was over.
But, because the story in Dishon was interesting me less and less, I started to write most of the time about the civil war in Calet. I began to develop intrigues on both sides. I decided Polad’s adviser, Dabine, was secretly aiding Miktesh. This was never stated outright, but hinted at. For instance the reason Miktesh escaped in chapter 5 was because Dabine allowed him.
Miktesh’s advisor, Jole, after becoming discouraged with Miktesh’s tactics, starts secretly aiding Polad. But then Jole is killed by Dabine in chapter 8. (Again, Dabine isn’t identified by name. I was originally planning on keeping Dabine’s loyalties a secret until the end of the story).
By the time we arrive at chapters 9 and 10, the story deals almost exclusively with Calet, or more specifically, Miktesh’s faction. In chapter 9, we find out that Perez had a son, Drusus, who was in Miktesh’s camp. Again, this was another detail I hadn’t originally planned out, but I though it would make things more interesting.
I was reading Tacitus history of Rome at the time, and enjoyed the story about how the historical Drusus was able to talk his soldiers out of a mutiny. I wanted to create a character like Drusus in my story: a young, honorable, tough soldier, who will go for any lengths for the good of his fellow soldiers.
Naturally I had to explain why Drusus had been estranged from his father Perez, and Drusus tells the whole story to Miktesh. My inspiration for this was “The Chosen”. I don’t remember it well, but there is a passage in “The Chosen” where one of the characters asks his father a question about another character, and the father says something like, “to answer that question, I have to first explain to you what happened to our people 1000 years ago.”
Something like that. I’m not remembering it well. But I do remember that I was fascinated by the idea of an event in distant history having a direct affect on people in the 20th century. I wanted to imitate that. I wanted to see if I could somehow design a story so that something that happened 500 years previous was the direct reason why today Drusus does not get along with his father.
And that was pretty much my only guideline for writing this long-winded flashback. Since I was trying to imitate “The Chosen”, the history of the Nathor race at times very closely resembles the history of the Jewish race. But the other stuff I just made up as I typed, which is why it is so bizarre and needlessly long. The flashback part ends up taking up almost two whole chapters.
The Watchers 5-7
Jistap imprisons Rodens to prevent him from exposing the voting fraud. Rodens is so angry at his unjust imprisonment that it causes him to lose what little sanity he had left. He manages to inflict injuries on himself, then escape when the guard comes to check on him.
Rodens, insane with rage, decides to take his revenge on the Icelers by melting them. Hans is sent to stop Rodens. While Hans is gone, Jistap and his team decide to consolidate their power by officially ending democratic rule in the city, and establishing Jistap as the dictator.
This is a classic example of the plot framework I mentioned earlier. While Hans was leaving the city to fight Rodens, I decided to make things more exciting by having Jistap grab power at home while Hans was gone. Jistap and his team had shown no previous inclination towards desiring a complete dictatorship, and I wasn’t originally planning this, but I figured after they had already fixed the vote, it wasn’t a big step for them to take power completely.
However I didn’t plan this out very well, and this is a classic example of one plot line canceling another out instead of supplementing it. If Jistap has officially taken power anyway, why does Hans have to sneak around in one ship when Jistap can just send the whole fleet? Therefore shortly after this Rodens was apprehended, and the whole Rodens section of the plot fizzled out.
In addition to Jistap there were 13 other members of his team (including Hans). I chose the number 13 because it was unlucky, and a foreshadowed a sense of disaster (although again, I hadn’t planned out the plot in advance, so I didn’t really know where it was heading myself). However, I sometimes forgot if the number 13 included Jistap, or if there were 13 members of the team plus Jistap. You might notice the math varies from chapter to chapter.
Also, the epitome of lazy writing, I felt like it was too much trouble to sit down and think of 13 other people all at once. So I just introduced characters as I needed them. By the end of the story all 13 are named and identified, but in the beginning I only identified a couple of them by name. Therefore whenever the 13 are meeting, I can only use the names of the characters I’ve already identified. The rest of them are mysteriously silent.
Later in the story, when all of the 13 are finally identified, it turns out some of them are extremely opinionated and vocal, and begs the question: where were they in the earlier chapters?
I was somewhat thinking of Julius Caesar when I wrote this part. Some of the more sympathetic biographies of Julius Caesar claim that he wasn’t power hungry, he just had a lot of reforms he wanted to get through, and he was frustrated with the way the Senate kept blocking him. So he took power for himself, but then he used that power to push through a lot of reforms that benefited the average soldier and the average farmer, people who had been neglected by the senate aristocracy.
But ultimately, the imperial system that Caesar started gave birth to monsters like Nero and Caligula. I always used to think that maybe, if someone would have just explained that to Caesar, maybe history could have been different. I used to imagine Caesar’s responses: “I’ll be sure to pick a worthy successor. And anyone I pick as a successor will be smart enough to pick a worthy successor himself.” And I would try and explain to Caesar that ultimately he would run out of good men, and the abuse of power would be inevitable.
This was something I often thought about, so I just worked that dialogue into the story in the conversation between Pericula and Jistap.
In an attempt to complicate the plot even further, I added a couple more details. Although Jistap was the leader, all of his power came from Bakes, who was the only one who knew how to manipulate the computers which ran the city. Bakes laughs after leaving Jistap, which I intended to indicate Bakes was not being completely honest.
Also at the very end there is a mysterious conversation between two unidentified people, which hints at more complications to come.
