Sometime in the 90s, I began reading The Hobbit. I had a kind of dreamy casual daydream of my own world similar to The Hobbit, except with magic that was far more out in the open than the more suppressed variety in Tolkien's world. I envisioned a huge battle between two parties: a large unnamed beast, and a tiny hero, embroiled in battle that was predicted by ancient texts. I gradually built a world around it, drawing on loads of influences, like Dragonball Z, Studio Ghibli, the Destiny video game series, and bunches more.

It was quite some time into the first several attempts at beginnings, that Harry Potter came into my view, and exploring that world, I found several overlapping problems that got me discouraged from writing any more for fear I would be seen as copying Potter, so it went on hiatus. There were several re-starts and re-stops, especially when running aground on a specific scene, or losing the muse. Imagine having a favorite movie, and having to write out that whole movie in order to share it, but at the same time much preferring just to watch the movie.

At one point I realized that I really enjoyed telling others about the story, more than I liked writing it, so I began to write from the perspective of me telling someone else about it, just to figuratively get those ideas down to paper. 'Me' became a character, a writer, trying to pitch his fantasy novel idea, to an NDA-signed editor who was willing to entertain this writer's world and explore it, and help flesh it out in discussion. I called that style Pitfic, or pitch fiction, a kind of frame story.

At another point I considered the graphic novel route, but that rabbit hole became too much of an undertaking. Another idea was to make a wiki about the book as if it had already been written, which the wiki would be the assistant to, but never actually have a real book for it (with inspiration from The Mysteries of Harris Burdick).

After fussing with story-writing AI, I decided not to use an AI to write it – but rather, building a prompt-like version of the story from which an storytelling AI user could use as the basis for an AI of their choosing to write a story in a style more personally tailored. I could have a dataset which I define on my own without AI, and give AI permission to generate versions of the narrative base on my official lore, while allowing the person pasting the prompt to include aspect of style they personally prefer. The provider of the dataset would have official ruling on matters of actual lore, like a referee, while the user would employ their own AI story-telling generator/LLM at their own expense, to craft a narrative suitable to their preferences that I have no way of predicting.

Another idea I had was to not even generate anything of the kind at all, and be released from the burdens of sharing this story. It is a vastly detailed, personal world which I inhabit on a near-daily basis, moves me to tears with the way battles progress and gives me chills upon chills of the highest order when I imagine walking through such a world, and I am so hyper-visual that I can see the movement of every leaf, smell the scents of the forest, and craft it like my own personal Holodeck, unbound by the pressure to publish it in some way. I document so much of myself already, but perhaps this one world could be truly uniquely mine and not be shared. That may be a monumental challenge on its own.

I will, however, post many of the past versions of it, and jot down notes or lore dumps and ideas before I forget them..

• Vang What
  • This version contains a major milestone, which breaks down the entire story into loose scenes. My theory was that if I could make, at the very least, a solid outline with scene headings, I could conceivably just write out any scene, in any order, and then piece them back together, and this version was a collection of those scattered scenes. I have kept this scene layout in mind generally ever since I made it, except changing the beginning a lot.

• Black Spiral Notes

• Lore Dump
  • This is just a dumping ground for notes I had that came to me suddenly and I needed a space to stash them.