My unlikely journey toward ‘Scions’

Six months ago, this project wasn’t even on a bucket list.

Sure, I was researching and relearning narrative structures, but that was only to improve my composing. I needed improvement because the pieces I was composing were backing tracks to scenes in a video game I never finished.

Let’s backtrack a bit.

Five years ago I became a stay-at-home parent. Logistically speaking it was the easiest course of action to get the support our older, autistic son needed. Our younger son had is own struggles. At that point it had been three years of unusual combinations of health and behavioral symptoms with no end to the doctor’s appointments and principal office visits in sight.

Some of this may be my own observational bias—or a result of decades of masking—but I believe a weight lifts when another person “sees” you. Understands you. Reminds you that you’re not alone or the only one that’s had a particular struggle. I’ve seen it to varying degrees with my sons and other children I’ve worked with.

For first few years after my youngest son’s strep throat devolved into PANDAS, I struggled trying to lift that weight off of him. I’m not sure if this is a primary or secondary symptom, but it’s not uncommon for children with it to latch on to one parent and take everything out on the other. I fell into the latter category.

I tried building on similar interests, but when your child’s anxiety is so high that he watches Y7 shows with one foot literally out the door, it is a challenge. We finally started to bond over video games—specifically, third- and fourth-generation (NES, SNES, Genesis). Legend of Zelda, Mega Man, Mario.

Phase 1: The game

It turns out he shares the same tinker genes I do. It wasn’t long before we started looking into custom Mega Man builders and custom Zelda mods. That’s where I found Solarus.

Solarus, the 2D game engine.

I settled on an idea where two brothers were descendants of the gods of Irish mythology and that the younger one would have to save the older. (And after the first playthrough, you could play as the older brother, the mage.)

I played around with it for a few months, trying to scrounge up free game assets that I could pass off as related to the story. The final battle was on Tory Island, which meant the game would take place in the northwest corner of County Donegal.

The original game map. Orange lines were separate map files.

I built half the world, connected the maps, added a few wolves, even turned Link’s hook shot into the whip of a certain figure of Irish myth. I crept the scope until it could not be completed in my available spare time, but my son and I had fun messing around with it.

Nothing ever came from it, however. Except…

Phase 2: The ‘score’

I had written music.

And it rolled in my head for three years.

Over the course of several summers, I had set up a schedule to keep the boys busy during the day (see: not on electronics every waking moment) and that included a 45 minutes to an hour of music. Sometimes I’d sit them down to watch brief breakdowns of chords and scales.

Because here’s the thing: nothing quashes my sons’ enthusiasm faster than their dad offering but one small tip.

The more videos that I watched with them, the more impressed I became with composing software and virtual instruments, and the more videos I watched on my own. I was learning things that my undiagnosed-ADHD brain didn’t care about during piano lessons as a boy, things I didn’t have the patience to sit down and re-learn after teaching myself guitar as a teenager and twenty-something.

The first two songs were straight forward enough. They were “feature” pieces, more about a character or setting than an event. Each took about four week from writing to final mastering. The third song, however, took much longer.

I was scoring to a fight scene that existed nowhere else but in my head. I was incorporating more instruments. I broke out of a traditional Irish/Celtic structure. It took several months, although a health concern and other scheduling issues played as big a part in the delay as my own frustrations.

The third finished piece is fine. When I look back at these first three demos, this will be the piece full of “I could have done that better” moments. But I learned a lot.

It was clear that I needed a better plan.

Phase 3: The outline

I’ve had several jobs that relied on writing skills, whether its writing for small papers, web content for a TV station, or explaining advanced front-end and back-end software issues to customers. My writing’s been passable, but never turned pages. It wasn’t meant to.

I was about to endure some forced downtime for wrist surgery, so I spent several weeks before reading up on the different narrative structures, such as three-act formats, “Save the Cat,” Fichtean curves, Hero’s Journey (and Dan Harmon’s offshoot, the Story Circle), etc.

After the surgery, it was time to revisit all the all sources from which I drew inspiration and context—books, websites, podcasts.

The more post-it notes you add to a book, the more that it looks like you're reading the crap out of it.

I created an outline in Google Sheets. Each section had several scenes. Each scene had five beats. On the far right I had cells for characters in each scene and potential pieces for each scene. Each character would get a leitmotif.

When my hand healed I spent several days—perhaps a week—filling out the outline. My wife noticed the extended run Google Sheets had on my screens and asked about it. I shared the doc with her, and as she made it to Act 2, she said, “This is more of a story than an outline. Why don’t you just write it?”

Phase 4: Down the rabbit hole

Because it’s that simple, right? Back to YouTube. Back to the web. Let’s figure this out. Except all I could find were the same general set of “list’ videos. “Do these things.” “Don’t do these things.” “Mistakes new writers make.”

They all said similar things, but none of them really taught me anything. It wasn’t until this past summer break where I filled up my Spotify with podcasts (The Gen X music snob in me won’t use it for anything else). That’s when I found the podcast that propelled me forward:

I could go on for a long time about how Jim Thayer’s podcast affected my writing. Instead, I’ll leave it at this:

I had five glaring issues with my first three chapters that the “list videos” on YouTube warned against. But the rules, as explained by those videos, never felt tangible. Each time I came away thinking,”I get why they said that, but I think it can work in my case. I’m an edge case.” Thayer, however, explained—with examples consistently repeated over several episodes—how it wouldn’t.

It made sense. And I was off.

I finished my first draft on the last day of September, roughly four months and 88,000 words after I started. I’m taking a break to address the cover, retool my site, and finalize my distribution plan.

That should give me enough time and space to effectively edit it, a technique Thayer relays from Stephen King.

I have no illusions, though. It’s historical fantasy, and I have no social clout whatsoever. I’ll be releasing it first as a serialized platform with an eye toward self-publishing.

Whatever happens—or likey doesn’t happen—next, it’s been a fun experiment.