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Creating A Reality
By William Butler
Not "rated" by the Author.
Last
edited: Monday, July 14, 2008
Posted: Monday, July 14, 2008
When designing a multi-volume series it can be difficult to establish characters and places in a space and time that's believeable.
Creating A Reality
by William Butler
When I began writing the story that eventually became Nightrun, I believed it was just another bit of science fiction, set in a futuristic world where people traveled about in spacecraft and used directed energy weapons. Over time, I learned nothing could be further from the truth.
The more I wrote, the more I developed the characters, the more I came to realize the story was not just another piece of "space opera"; the likes of which I had grown to love as a child. Instead, it had developed into something, if not better, at least, larger. What began as a simple story about death and destruction became something that spanned more than six thousand years, nearly a dozen worlds, involved witches, dragons, time travel, and the tale of two Helens.
To better envision that reality, I began to develop side stories with people and places apart from the primary storyline. Some of these chronicles eventually became stand-alone short stories. Others became snippets of dialogue or narrative designed to illuminate some aspect or other in the overall universe that hade evolved.
I've already posted two such stories at Authors Den; both outgrowths of this process. A Cold Morning, written on a whim, and The Roots Of Hatred, written after seeing a photograph of a pitch-roofed barn in the middle of a snow covered farmyard. While the stories are set in the same reality as Nightrun, neither will appear in the finished product.
In addition to these, there exists, six spiral-bound notebooks and many hundred pages of electronic text designed to expand or explain the worlds and people in the main story. As of this writing, book one of the Nightrun series is, at just over four hundred manuscript pages, being finalized for editing purposes.
Keep an eye out for additional excerpts from the same reality.
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