The story I currently call Feral World was born out of a day dream I had when I was in middle school and the first two years of highschool. My young mind raced with what if scenarios of what an apocalypse would look like. Surrounded by movies like; The Matrix, Pitch Black, Space Cowboys, Titan A.E., 28 Days Later, Cowboy Bebop’s Movie, Minority Report and Resident Evil among others, I was immediately drawn to stories of outlandish and amazing, if not equally horrifying, premises.
Something life changing – world ending ocurrs.

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What do you do after? What do WE do after?
How would people really pick up the pieces? There’s always the hero who seems to be right in step with what’s going on but I also came across something else around that time. A pair of stories named The Iliad and The Odyssey.

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My main take aways from them, besides the morality stories of character flaws and essentially human nature, was that you don’t need a perfect lead character. Life is chaos and if you strip away the Gods and Goddesses there’s a story there that is just as real as reading your facebook timeline(minus the fakenews but including the shitposts). He did this, she said that, this cousin or friend is mad at the other because of some reason. Drama can be a wonderful read if it doesn’t become full of itself, like an an attention whore who causes drama to validate their existence.
It was all those years ago that I made a decision that would pull me through a low point, that decision and friends and family would help me persevere.

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I wanted to write a story like the Odyssey and the Iliad but I wasn’t sure if I could. To be honest I knew I couldn’t. Every so often I could string together a few words and sound insightful but to be able to do that for page after page and hold someones attention, THAT would take some practice, a LOT of practice.
There’s a point to this post, I swear.
I’d start my journey with two tasks. If you want to be a writer you should write. A simple concept I kept coming across and decided to just do it. Not too long after that this Blog was made. I’m sure I’ve written a post about it’s name before but in short, I needed to make myself less ignorant. As an introvert and someone who doesn’t really do well socially the best thing was to write my thoughts down for others to read, but more so to make myself ok with putting incomplete or inaccurate thoughts out there. Trust me, reading something you wrote years ago and seeing how stupid or ignorant you were is tough but it’s useful. The second thing I would do was write a story. A simple throw away story that I’d put together off the top of my head at a friends birthday getaway.
Aurora Cave is something I wrote about frequently on this site and it truly allowed me to see how writing a book would work. Things like narrative, and creative choices are amorphous things but to understand their intent, and purpose, that’s why Aurora Cave was born. When I finished the 3rd draft I gave a copy out to a few people. My Ex girlfriend whose opinion I still respect told me she hated the way the characters spoke in the beginning. It was jarring and over the top. But that taught me something. I was capable of delibrately drawing something from a reader. I had made the choice to make the brother and sister sound so over done. Like so many movies I’d seen where characters’ forced accents were just as annoying for others as it was for me. I’d finish that book in about a year, a dealine I set for myself. Could I still do work on it? YES. God yes, it’s really bad. But finishing that book taught me a bunch of things, most importantly it told me I could commit to writing a story. That I could follow through.
But I wasn’t ready to write Feral World.
I had to put the mindset together with the skills I’d yet to cultivate.
Over months and years I’d write all sorts of things on this blog. It was less of a diary and more of a set of assignments about writing and what made sense to read and what didn’t. What was annoying and full of itself and what was relatively mundane and boring. I’d also share various stories that came to mind for one reason or another that I thought would be interesting.
Then I got to my second book Flummox. My goal was to write something I wouldn’t mind having other people read. Compared to the other books on the market what would I be comfortable with asking money for? I may have gotten a little ambitious writing a psychological, Alice in Wonderland kind of story with reality constantly switching but the process just flowed. This story lead me to the hardest thing I’d have edited thus far. Many writers better than I would say I didn’t do enough and they’re more than likely correct. But I learned so much from Flummox about editing and that no matter how badly you want something in the book, it just won’t fit and you need to get rid of it. It also taught me that I had to improve my outline process. With only around 200 pages of content, the rewrites and edits came and went and in about another year I’d written another book.
What did I know now? I’d have to spend multiple years on Feral World and I wanted and needed to get a literary agent. Probably in that order… definitely in that order. Feral World will take a decade or more to get published but that was alright with me because I realized that as much as I wanted to finish this story, more than anything I wanted it to be something that others would want to read. I wanted it to be something someone could read, whom was in a low place, and they could come away from it feeling like they have another chance.

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I formally started work on Feral World in 2015 and since then I’ve finished the book and rewritten it 3 times. I’m currently doing a major rewrite and am very happy with how it’s gotten better. However I’m not naive enough to think that when I’m happy with it that it’ll be perfect or that I’ll land an agent immediately. I’ve already gotten silently turned dow by at least 20 agents so far. The non-responses lead me to ask questions, why didn’t I get a response. Was there a narrative issue in the first x-pages? Was it boring? Was it predictable? I took everything I’d been reading that other authors avoided asking themselves and focused in. I had to be determined to write this book and get it published and that means I can’t give up. Could part of the problem be my robotic and cold way of speaking to people professionally throught email? Yes, but that’s just how I am and there have been many an author far more introverted than I who were able to get an agent.

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So, the point? It’s cliche and I love to annoy my brother with it. It’s a phrase: Strength and Perseverance. If you want something, keep trying. Trying means looking at yourself objectively and improving what you can and getting used to that which you can’t. If something keeps failing, ask yourself why it’s failing. It’s easy to put blame elsewhere and in some cases it may not be anything wrong with you but when you’re trying to do something and it seems like an uphill battle you either need; to get yourself a truck, work out them legs muscles or start with a smaller hill. You don’t have to turn yourself into Sisyphus.