These here are my earlier works and the ones I am most conflicted about: Beyond Series!
Plot goes a little something like this: Actually, before that...
I need get something across first. This is specifically about me and this series in particular. My relationship with this series is very... Strange.
I can't say I hate it, how could I? But it kinda fills me with a relentless sense of awfulness. Not to say that these novels are awful, I'm saying that I am the one who's awful.
To make a long story short, I started this novel at the age of 16 in the form of daydreams, then I had ambitions to make it into a videogame, then... here we are. Novels. Starting from age 17 up to 19, I dedicated my spare time to writing this series and I know what this sounds like, you expect me to say something like "I feel like I wasted precious time working on this singular thing" but no, that's not it in the slightest.
I reached halfway into writing the fourth one, 3B, but then my thoughts started to stray toward something "better". I put "better" between quotation marks because that's what it felt like at the time. If you look around this website for a little bit, you'd spot a page for a novel called "Mechamera". That's what this "better" is referring to.
I saw all the elements of the story of Beyond and I started impulsively remixing them. and remixing them, and remixing them nonstop until I couldn't take it anymore. I stopped midway through the fourth Beyond novel and started writing Mechamera and didn't look back, not until after a little while. And when I did, I just couldn't stop noticing and complaining about certain narrative choices I made.
the project now sits in my drive, untouched for a year and starving for completion, and I just feel so awful about it.
Beyond, for me, is special. More special than words can describe. And it's beauty is in it's imperfection, I think. I could sit here and nitpick every single little thing I want to change, but I'm not going to, nor am I going to change anything about it. It's imperfect but GODDAMN is it oozing with youthful ambition! I had many aspirations for this story, I wanted to be a big shot from the start. So many characters, extended lore, deep themes, and so much more! But here's the thing. Nobody gets it on their first try, it took me until the second draft of the second novel to finally notice what the hell was going on.
I wasn't thinking like an author.
I added a lot of stuff, but I didn't think about what the purpose of that stuff is!
I added a lot of characters, but unless they're especially important, they go nowhere or serve no real narrative purpose!
I added a lot of events, but some of them could be cut shorter or outright removed!
But it's perfect that way.
It's perfect in it's imperfection.
I like it a lot, not because it's some masterpiece of literary genius, but because it's feet were too small for the shoes I tried to put them in.
Have you ever seen that one pic of a rooster in large boots? "He foot too big for he gotdamn feet" and whatnot? That's how I see the Beyond Series, and I think it's very adorable.
(Side note, I think it would have benefitted much more from being a webcomic or at least something visual, rather than being words on a screen)
Ya done?
Yeah.
Then get on with it.
Yeah, yeah.
The plot goes a little something like this:
The spirits made manifest by mankind's consciousness seek nothing but tyranny and chaos, possessing humans and corrupting them into monsters. However, those with enough mental fortitude tame these spirits within them and become capable of controlling the powers of these spectral demons. In this Journal that I have salvaged, you'll follow the perspective of the blindfolded Damien Lopez, a boy (Probably) with more going on with him than what meets the eye in his struggle to reclaim the peaceful life robbed from him by the cold whims of fate and discover concepts along the way, such as 'Love', 'Friendship', 'Forgiveness' and most importantly, 'Clobbering the life out of demons'.
But let's be real for a minute:
This description feels very vague, doesn't it? Like, it doesn't really tell you anything about what's going on in the story.
To put it in the most blunt fashion possible, the main character, Damien Lopez, is a blindfolded freak, born of science and horrific human experimentation. He lived the past seven years, basically on auto-pilot mode, working away in a lonely restaurant in the woods, up until an earthquake destroys his house, prompting him to seek a job with an organization than specializes in handling all things supernatural. Said supernatural things enclude the titular "Beyonders" who are demonic spirits that wander around the world in a parallel astral dimension and possess humans and feed off of their emotions, turning them into monsters that blindly and often mindlessly cause destruction and chaos.
Now, the whole thing with Damien's house crumbling down and him needing to earn money to repair is all one of those uhh... What would you call it?
fish bait goal?
There, let's go with that. The purpose of that first objective is to reel our guy into the greater plot of things. Stuff involving terrorism, ethics, exploitation of the unfortunate, and what have you. Basically, by the third novels, things devolve into summoning a demiurge Cat God and awaiting a new age of demons. Y'know, average cult stuff. Keep in mind, I'm trying to recall all of this from memory, and as you can conclude from my earlier tangent, it's been a long while since I kept track of this series' plot
You can read it here if you want, it's probably better than my memory is leading me to believe, but you should probably go in there with, like, a minecart of salt for every strange choice I made in the earlier ones. Not 3A though, I think Beyond 3A is the better one of the three, only held back by the material it had to continue off of.
And what about that fourth one?
I'll get back to finishing it once I'm done with Mechamera. In the grand scheme of things, I'm planning on two more entries to wrap it all up (fourth included) and once everything is behind us, well and proper, we can then explore greater visions and prospects.