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“...a whole series of really interesting characters emerged.”
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Background:
The birth of Andrew
At the time, I was totally unaware of what was happening.
It was the fall of 2001.
I had stumbled across this charming little piece of freeware on the internet, and I knew exactly what to do with it, or so I thought.
At the time I was hosting a small website which needed some bells and whistles to spruce it up a bit.
I happened upon an interactive story program, free for a webmaster to download, and the program struck me as being a bit out of the ordinary.
Little did I know how out of the ordinary it was, and where it would lead me. 2012 Saga? The furthest thing from my mind.
Now lots of very ordinary story programs exist on the internet, and as a rule they range from ho-hum at best to appalling at worst.
You arrive at a website to discover somebody has written a usually awful chapter, and you the visitor are invited to write the next chapter. And so it goes. They are not worth reading, much less writing.
But a lady named Valerie Mates in Ann Arbor, Michigan, posted a perl script (a website computer program) with a unique twist. At the end of each chapter the visiting author would list two different options from which a later visitor could choose to write about.
The story would thus quickly tree out into a rather large series of unrelated story lines.
Click here for her website if you're a webmaster, a perl programmer, or just plain curious. There are links there to a few websites where the feature has become a smash hit.
However, a smash hit website feature was not the reason the program came into my life. I did try posting it on the little website I was working on, but it didn't attract a lot of attention, so I pulled it down and started playing with it myself for my own amusement. Only now do I realize that was the reason I was shown the program.
"It was a dark and
stormy night"
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First, a little confession is in order here. I won't deny it. Not for a second. If you've heard the rumours, they are true: I do love purple prose. Look, I'm not proud. I can write it with the best (or worst) of them.
So you guessed it. My opening chapter for the story. was titled: "It was a dark and stormy night." Initially the idea was to write the prose as purple as possible.
I still cringe when I think about about the "forboding darkness lurking behind the lonely dimly-lit lamp posts darkly suggesting insidious unseen dangers to the ignorant or unwary."
Oh, yuck. Barf City.
(For those of you with English as a second language, purple prose generally consists of the most hackneyed over-used cliches known in the language. And that's only on its good days.)
So I dredged out all the ghastly verbiage I could think of to describe a dark and stormy night. After a few paragraphs of horrid descriptive sentences (be careful about trying this at home, kids, for it can get very addictive), I realized it might be a good idea if I had a character actually doing something.
Well, why not have an ordinary guy walking home from work in the midst of all this meterological Sturm und Drang? Not terribly exciting, but at least it's a character. Maybe we can figure out something for the character to do a little later on.
Thus was born Andrew, walking home from work in a dark and stormy night, shivering in the heartless cold, dodging the slings and arrows of outrageous lavender adjectives, each more piercing than the frigid driven rain cutting into the marrow of his very being. (Ouch! See how truly dreadful this purple prose can get?)
You'll be happy to hear this ludicrous description of Andrew walking home in the rain was immediately axed in the Return of the Pleiadians. In the book, we first meet Andrew after he's come inside and as he's putting the key in the door of his apartment. The dark and stormy night nonsense is gone, and we have instead the Moon peaking in and out from clouds in the outdoor scenes.
Another difference in this early version of the story is that the world is humming along just fine, so it's a much more peaceful place than the collapse and impending chaos portrayed in the 2012 Saga.
At the end of that first chapter in this orginal version, Andrew had arrived home from work, and the choice I gave for the next chapter was either go to the gym or go to his favourite bar. I figured, let's give an ordinary guy an ordinary choice. So far, Andrew is just ordinary.
Right away two separate plot lines emerged. The bar plot line quickly split into two more plot lines. In the first, Andrew meets his old high school track coach who talks him into running track again as a Master's competitor. Well, that plot line didn't go anywhere fast (Andrew wasn't much of a runner, it seems) and the track story died a quick and merciful death.
However the other bar plot line did go somewhere, and I eventually wrapped it up as a little 20,000-word novella, a simple little love story more or less. From a literary point of view, it is pretty forgettable, too.
But along the way a whole series of really interesting characters emerged, a few of whom you will meet in the 2012 Saga books.
Roach, by name, appears, although in the bar story he's a 40-ish hippie just getting out of jail for smuggling marijuana. Also in the bar story is a Jeffery-like character, who knows far too much about subterfuge and clandestine activities and far too little about ethics.
Walter appears by name as well, although in the bar story he is as dumb as a sack of rusty nails, not the mathematical genius you meet in the 2012 Saga. Nonetheless, a character such as Walter can be a dysfunctional twit regardless of intelligence.
There are also several other characters in the novella I won't mention, because now that I've mined that exercise for a few characters to populate the 2012 Saga, I am likely to do so again.
Getting back to square one of the computer story, we also have the parallel plot in which Andrew goes to the gym instead of the bar. This branch of the story quickly splits into two subplots as well, neither of which went very far, although that did not diminish their importance.
The first was a James Bond sort of thriller, again complete with a different Jeffery-like character who is a friend of Andrew's at the gym. I only got as far as the opening car chase scene and dropped it. It's easier to rent a video if one wants to see a car chase, so that was the end of that. Another boring, ordinary plot line. Scratch that puppy.
But the other plot line in the gymnasium. Ah, yes. The mother lode. Welcome to The Return of the Pleiadians, although I didn't realize it at the time.
The idea at the time was to throw Andrew into an other-worldly situation and see what he might do. Just what does a boring and ordinary guy do when he discovers he is neither boring nor ordinary?
In the Return of the Pleiadians, this happens in Chapter 5 where Rocco and Andrew have their rather remarkable conversation in the lobby of the gym. That chapter is almost verbatim out of the original effort of 2001. It was the one chapter which had the fewest rewrites and revisions.
What I didn't realize at the time was that the dialogue in that chapter was establishing and defining the entire 2012 Saga.
My work on the perl script program version ended at that point, and I dropped it. It just wasn't obvious to me where such a plot line might go. This is truth. It wasn't obvious in 2001 and couldn't be. It wasn't time.
It would take more than two years before I was shown where the gymnasium story line was to lead.
Nonetheless, a door had opened and the ball was rolling, even if in 2001 I had set the story aside for what I thought was permanent consignment to the recycle bin.
The recycle bin, of course, is not quite what happened. In early 2004 came the announcement of the discovery of a new planet, Sedna. And all of a sudden, that little story about Andrew going to the gym became very seminal, the beginning of the saga.
All that would be required was to strip out the ghastly purple prose and start writing again.
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“ Thus was born Andrew, walking home from work in a dark and stormy night.”
“ Nonetheless,
a door had opened and the ball was rolling.”
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