Giving Up on Price, Starting Midara

Oh, fuck, what a year 2018 has been… I’ve had deaths in the family, chaos galore, and a nice, fat, tasty load of what it feels like to experience depression.

And it took me a god damn year to drag my ass out of the quagmire. In that time, I’ve found a new job, replaced two computers, spent nine months telling myself to get back to finishing Nothing Given, failed to do so, got mad and myself for failing, got upset with myself, and… well, the cycle repeats itself ad nauseam.

Part of it was me trying to get into Beth’s head… I will never ever write another depressed character again. It does terrible things to my headspace. I eventually forgot her voice, and then I came out of the fog. And I am not going back in. Fuck that shit, I am out and I am staying out.

A little over a year after my last Price chapter post, I have finally allowed myself to just give up. The book will never be finished- not by my hand, at any rate. Perhaps some day some fanfic writer will put together the “what may have been”, that might be some nice closure. But I am done

For the first time in my life I’ve truly given up on a story. Not tossed it because it just wasn’t a good idea, not tabled it until I have time to come back to it, not set it on the pedestal of “finished”. Straight given up.

It was, perhaps, the most liberating experience I’ve had in my life. I am free, and it feels good.

So now I start Midara. In many ways, the first fictional setting I ever created… originally cobbled together out of various inspirations I had in middle-school, starting with a little idea created from one of the Nintendo era Final Fantasy games. Specifically, the idea of “Dark Warriors” as a necessary counterpoint to that setting’s “Light Warriors”. My barely-teen brain really got hung up on the idea, asking myself what sort of universe would need to exist for it to be necessary for Evil to protect the world from Good.

… I was a weird child. Now I am a weird adult.

Toss in too many D&D games, a setting named after moths, philosophy courses, and my childhood dream (and temporary young adult job) of writing stories for video games, and you have yourself my Midara setting.

And the first project of what I hope to be many. Midara: Requiem… you’ll find it here for now, in the format of a “Quest” game. Which seems appropriate for the script of a story that was originally designed to be an Open World RPG.

https://www.digitalwildwest.org/threads/midara-requiem-aka-necrololi-quest-playthread.330/

I’ll get around to setting up a proper blogsite for the story… sooner or later, right now I’ve got a lot of crap to sort out and will be busy for a minute. But my muse is back, and even though she abandoned me for so long, I’ve accepted her apology and taken her back. … That analogy got awkward fast…

Soon (probably tomorrow) I’ll have a second post up, giving a list of all future Price books I had imagined, and the plotlines that would have revolved around them. As well as the conclusion to Nothing Given. It won’t be the completed novel(s), but I hope it’s better than nothing.

For now, thank all five of you who’ve waited this long for your patience. I don’t deserve you. You’re the best.