Origin of my Writing and The Kallans
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I’ve been asked why I write stories, and in particular, where did I get the idea for The Kallans from? One is easier than the other to answer!
When I was younger, one of my siblings struggled to sleep in the dark. They often worried a lot about whether there were monsters and scary things hidden away. I guess in this way, it’s not very different to how many people begin life. They’re scared of the dark, of things they can’t see, of what their imagination tricks them into believing.
It was this fear on the part of my sibling that led to me first telling stories. I would tell stories of how any baddy monsters would be sorted out by our friendly monsters. In a few weeks we had drawings and stories about so many monsters and creatures and fantastical events. Those weeks of story telling turned into months, then into years. As we grew up, the stories morphed into more realistic tales, but the core was the same, they came from our imaginations.
It was as we were approaching our teens and we started to watch more science fiction movies and shows, and then I started reading stories that my interest in space started to take hold in my stories. I wanted to put the creatures we had encountered in our stories into a place where they could belong. That was no easy task.
Often they were capable of things that just simply wouldn’t be possible in the real universe. I needed to make these stories work in the real world, well, at least that’s how I felt as a teenager.
My family could tell you about the many countless pieces of paper filled with drawings and scribblings I made. There was far much more in my imagination that I hadn’t put down on paper.
The next few years didn’t result in any proper writing, not until I was coming out of my teens. Then things changed. With some friends I started to create the environment that became Kalla. Now my pieces of paper were switched to spreadsheets and MS Word documents.
Ravika and Rikardo the Kordagsar developed. Then the other characters that made up my first story, The Kallans – Beginnings: Empire, suddenly became vivid. I had characters and places and ideas. Far too many ideas to write stories in a complete form. I began working on Empire at that time, completing it within a few weeks. Then life took over, I got married, and it all went on to the back burner. I tried writing again the second story in Beginnings, and got a few chapters down on paper. But it still didn’t take off.
I found Lulu.com not long after that and toyed with trying to self publish. I wanted my stories to be read and enjoyed by others. I didn’t end up doing anything at that time.
A few more years moved along and chatting with some of my old friends, as well as a few of my more recent friends, I decided I was going to try self-publishing. At the very least I’d have a story printed as a book for myself to look at on the shelf and know that I had put at least one story into book form.
I reread my story with this goal in mind. It was tough reading. I had written well enough back when I first wrote Empire, but now I had more life, more knowledge, more experience. I had to rewrite what I had already done. Well, to say rewrite would be a bit harsh on my younger self. I rewrote sections, expanded on elements of the story, trimmed down on things that didn’t work, etc. Revamp might be a better expression.
The result was something I was happy with, and together with some encouragement from friends and family, I soon had a finished product ready to put out in the world. So was born the first instalment of The Kallans.
Since then, more and more stories have been jumping into my mind. Much of my work in writing Empire involved trying to make things realistic and accurate. In another blog I’ll write about some of the efforts I went to to achieve that. In the end I now have the second story on the go, along with plans to write short stories to flesh out some of the characters and fill in sections of the history. I have ideas for writing along much of the timeline of The Kallans as is revealed a little in Empire.
Looking at what I’ve written for the blog, this seems to answer the opening questions. In short… in summary… I’ve always loved stories, both reading and creating them. I had to take the ideas I had and put them down on paper. But without the backdrop of the friends and family that have helped and inspired me over the years, I don’t think I would have actually got to putting any of these stories into the world for others to read. I owe much to their encouragement and support.