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ellarienSummer is bearing down on me, and I don't have time or energy to think about much beyond work, but my backbrain keeps throwing up fragments of story and setting for Behemoth. Some of them are recognizably older ideas, transmuted, softened and worn into shape, almost ready to use; I'm starting to think that it's almost time to start just writing the thing again. What it did to me this morning, though, was disconcerting.
Behemoth isn't a new thing for me, but it does postdate my moving to America by a few years. I have another thing, though, that goes all the way back to Birmingham days. It isn't quite a story; it's a setting, a few characters, a magic-tech concept, a hidden race, a few disjointed early scenes. The problem is, it eats my ideas. It started off as 'Pylon', the story of an engineer and an overambitious teleport network; later on I started playing with an idea I labeled 'Mountainheart', in which intrepid adventurers explore cave systems in search of crystals to power a teleport network, and after a certain amount of noodling that turned out to be another part of the same thing. About three years ago, in a heavily Tolkienated mood, I started noodling another thing, and even wrote a page or two, in a folder labeled 'Ardan', about a warrior thrown a hundred years forward in time to a world where his battle is long lost and almost forgotten -- and Pylon-Mountainheart assimilated it again. This morning, something stirred in the story-fog at the back of my mind. Yes, Pylon-Mountainheart-Ardan was making a bid to swallow my Behemoth, too, never mind that it's completely the wrong tech level. It has crystal-mediated transport systems; therefore it must be the same universe, right? And now that it has my attention, aren't the Shipwights a lot like my cavedwelling Others?
Wrong. This time, I'm not going to let it happen. Maybe the old material can be deep, deep legend or fairytale for the world of Behemoth, but I refuse to let it take over yet again.
Behemoth isn't a new thing for me, but it does postdate my moving to America by a few years. I have another thing, though, that goes all the way back to Birmingham days. It isn't quite a story; it's a setting, a few characters, a magic-tech concept, a hidden race, a few disjointed early scenes. The problem is, it eats my ideas. It started off as 'Pylon', the story of an engineer and an overambitious teleport network; later on I started playing with an idea I labeled 'Mountainheart', in which intrepid adventurers explore cave systems in search of crystals to power a teleport network, and after a certain amount of noodling that turned out to be another part of the same thing. About three years ago, in a heavily Tolkienated mood, I started noodling another thing, and even wrote a page or two, in a folder labeled 'Ardan', about a warrior thrown a hundred years forward in time to a world where his battle is long lost and almost forgotten -- and Pylon-Mountainheart assimilated it again. This morning, something stirred in the story-fog at the back of my mind. Yes, Pylon-Mountainheart-Ardan was making a bid to swallow my Behemoth, too, never mind that it's completely the wrong tech level. It has crystal-mediated transport systems; therefore it must be the same universe, right? And now that it has my attention, aren't the Shipwights a lot like my cavedwelling Others?
Wrong. This time, I'm not going to let it happen. Maybe the old material can be deep, deep legend or fairytale for the world of Behemoth, but I refuse to let it take over yet again.
