Mirrories: Early thoughts and plans
Stories can take many forms, though I'm still considering which ones mine should take.
Hey, all! I’m still alive.
Admittedly, it’s been a while since I’ve done much on this site. Though I did take some time to update the Now page and fixed up some of the emoji variants on the Home page, most of my recent efforts have been entirely offline.
I’ve been doing plenty of writing on the Mirrories series. Back in the day, whenever I played in a Tabletop RPG game, along with recording all the sessions, I would take very frequent notes of everything that happened, writing down dialogue and scripting scenes and such. I have countless pages of logs from previous stories and campaigns, which are a joy to revisit for me and make for fantastic references when novelizing the story, but they’re… not really ready to share. I mean, sure, I can just link around the Google Doc they’re in, but the notes are mostly pretty unpolished, full of side jokes, in some parts taking all the dialogue even in roundabout conversations, overly shorthanded and summarized… It’s a fun read for people who are fully invested in the story and really want to see what happened in the original campaigns, but it’s not exactly presentable or a great story just yet. (Maybe in the future I can polish them up and share them as they are. Maybe for supporters who want sneak-peeks on future chapters or who want to read the original unedited and uncut versions of the stories!)
Much of what I’ve been doing lately is using those logs as references and outlines. I’ve been taking in the whole of our stories from bottom to top and scripting it out in a way that leaves out the loose ends that were never and will never be addressed, smooths out any plot-holes from the original story, and tightens the themes together. And for the stories that were never really meant to be cohesive or deep expansive reads, taking scenes from those as standalone highlights would likely be the best way of presenting those.
For the current campaign that I’m GMing, it’s actually been a lot easier than in the previous games where I was merely a player. Since I know what the intentions of the plot are and which details will be relevent towards presenting or solving the story’s greater mysteries, I can mostly novelize or effectively summarize the events and discoveries of each play session live as they happen. That way, instead of just having a huge log and having to rewrite the whole story in a different format afterwards, I would have a narrative that would only need some proofreading and occasional restructuring before being ready to go!
I ideally would want many of these stories to be comics at some point, but my talents as a writer definitely exceed my talents as an artist by far. So I’m working to bring this story to life in the best way I can, by any means at my disposal. I’m treating Mirrories as a sort of multimedia series, which will be full of writing, music, art, and comics, and perhaps audio versions of the narratives as well. Gonna start it off with what’s in my grasp, likely as a web-novel of sorts, and expanding my way outwards from there.
Though I’m actively novelizing my current campaign-in-progress as we play, there’s many years of stories that came before this current one. Though I’ll likely do some kind of simultaneous releases, I’m actually hoping to release these stories more or less in chronological order in terms of when they actually came to be. That means starting from the first campaigns our group started running, more or less from 5 years ago. There is… a lot of story to share. It’s gonna take a while. But I’m pushing forward to do my best to bring it all to life and finally share this growing story that has been a huge part of my life and the lives of my closest friends with the world at large.
I’m almost halfway done with the first arc of the first story I’m planning to share, which will be Curious Tales of Nestris. It’s a more traditional fantasy adventure, focused on a group of travelers that bands together as they ignorantly travel across the small but still-thriving remnants of a dying world. In the meantime, I’m trying to redouble my efforts to be more active on Bluesky and gush and tease way more about everything I’m working on, along with sharing blog posts from here.
Speaking of which, today’s the first time I’m gonna link to this blog from Bluesky, and may be the first time basically anyone reads any of these posts as a result. Good to have ya! I’ll see you all around.