Don’t ever give up.

I’ve been developing a world I created since I was eleven. My inspiration came from the Zelda franchise, and included its’ lead character…you could call it “fan fiction” if you wanted to be basic about it, but as it developed and hundreds of characters and side stories and eight book concepts came out of just one world, it grew on me and with me. I was iffy about sharing it with people in its early stages though. I was afraid people would bash it, and me, for not being very creative and tell me that my art sucks (which at the time, it did) and that the title itself was ridiculous. Sure enough, at sixteen, I sneak onto deviantART and other sites as an Internet-stupid person (meaning I had no clue what a meme was or anything like that…I used the Internet to research but that was about it) to attempt at connecting with other Zelda fans, and hopefully find someone whom I can relate to and share my world with.

Most of what I got was what I was afraid of. What pissed me off was that they didn’t even bother to ask questions when they heard the pitch. They took it at face value and didn’t let me tell them what I had researched or what I planned to do next. For every negative comment, I spent hours hating myself for not being “creative” or “original”. I went through cycles of wanting to delete everything but stopping myself from doing it, until at eighteen I deleted every file related to the “detestable fan fiction” from my laptop and jump drive. I cried for hours afterward because the heartache from essentially killing an entire world was excruciating. All of that work, all of that research, thousands of hours of my life, all for nothing. The only notes left of the story were in a binder I carried around, but even that couldn’t replace the actual story. I was so uninspired to do anything else after that. The year succeeding its’ destruction became an uninspired virtual hell.

About a month ago, I decided to rewrite the story. I had started playing The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword just before my decision. This game found the tiny, barely-lit ember that was my “inspiration” and patiently stoked it until it burned brighter than before, and everything that I had written came back to me. The plot, the characters, the designs, the language, everything. And I owe it to a game.

I am willing to do so much research for this story. History, mathematics, sciences, literature, art, you name it. I wrote songs for this story. I took an elective class in high school (AP European History) for the story and received a 95.5 at the end of the year. Go figure, the race I created for the story is an experiment in a European lab. I’m still writing the language for that race. I have laws to write, types of governments to designate, history of the world to write, architecture to design, education to develop, weapons, temples, religions, and a huge planet that needs a map of anything I can reasonably think of, like topographic features, territorial boundaries, statistical analysis of resources in relation to the population, etc.

There’s so much potential for this world, and I haven’t even told you everything. I haven’t even told you the eight main stories I got out of the existence of just ONE race. Some day soon though, I will show the first bits of this story. The first chapter of the sixth book (it’s the one I started with). With each chapter, I hope at least one person will read and understand how very much it pained me when people dismissed it as “fan fiction” instead of a world with depth and lessons to teach that happened to involve a character who inspired me and whom I fell in love with. As a parting thought, I will leave with you a quote from the first chapter, since I feel it is significant (which is also on my blog):

“War is inevitable no matter where we go. It is internal, external, and eternal. It gives us shifty eyes, doubtful minds, unyielding hearts and weary souls. But there is one thing that it doesn’t give us, and it is how we survive. We delay the war…with our spirit.”

 -timeandabsolution