It’s been a long painful journey for me to get Archives of Fabella to the point it is today. Writing is a slow, complex, artform that takes formulate into a masterpiece. I think it’s safe to say something on this massive scale has never been seen before. It may have been attempted by other writers in the past, but I have yet to see a series that covers the creation of a fantasy world like Fabella. When I started this project, I wondered why no author had ever done it before. Now I know from experience the amount of work that is required to fully realize this massive world. It takes time to put this puzzle together. How much time? Here’s how long it took me.
2007
I’ve been thinking about this for a while. It’s tough to pinpoint an exact point in time when an idea first struck me when it has been a part of my life for so long. That said, I think it’s safe to say Archives of Fabella first started in 2007. We could go back further to when I really started writing, the two aborted projects I had started and given up on, or to when I played with toys up in my room creating stories far longer than any boy probably should. However, when I look back on what happened I feel safe saying Archives of Fabella first started taking form during my senior year of high school in 2007.
Senior year makes you miss high school. I was never popular in school. Years of being bullied non-stop just made me retreat inside myself. I was a loner. The idea that I would ever have one good friend didn’t seem possible. So, when I prepared to graduate high school with several people I felt safe to call my friends, it made me sad to think we would all be going our separate ways quite soon. I wanted to do something to thank these people for being kind when most of my classmates acted like I shouldn’t breathe the same air as them. I wanted to do more than thank my friends, I wanted to immortalize them. With only my ability to create stories as an actual strength, I went around asking my friends if they would consider lending their names to a project I was working on and they all agreed. Although I intended to use their names for a completely different project, my high school friend’s names and characters based on them will appear in Archives of Fabella.
This was also the year when I wrote and directed my first ten-minute play produced for an all school ten-minute play festival. It was called Arcadeus, and entered around a greek fisherman’s romance with Aphrodite. This is relevant to the story of how the series began because it had the first appearance of characters from Archives of Fabella. The main character of “Arcadeus” is very similar to “Lucis” and the story will be featured in a later volume. By the time I graduated high school, I had the beginning of the series formed in my head, but I didn’t know what I had yet.
Summer 2008
The next major point in Archives of Fabella’s infancy is the date Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian was released in theaters. In Chronicles of Narnia series, time moves much faster in Narnia than it does on Earth. That’s all fine and good, but I felt there should be more changes to the world if one thousand plus years are passing. Then I realized how the fantasy genre, in general, is stuck in the middle ages. Even Harry Potter, which takes place in the ’90s, is openly ignorant of all the technological and social advancements made since the dark ages. There are other eras of history worth exploring in fantasy. Why stick with one? I wondered what a world like Narnia might be like in modern day. And Archives of Fabella was truly born.
Summer 2010
I was going to college at the University of Montana during this time, and between school life and other projects, work on the series had not progressed past the idea stage for a while. I had sketched out a couple characters and taken a couple shots at starting the series, but didn’t know where to begin. The summer of 2010 found me subletting a room in the basement from a friend and working at a local supermarket deli. With so much time to myself I decided to start Journey to Klieo. This was a screenplay based on my original concept of a fantasy world in modern-day about a young teacher who must travel to an alternate universe in order to rescue her kidnaped sister. This is really where Fabella (called “Kleio” back then) began to take shape. Later events like Amelia Earhart crash landing in the world, the vortex, multiple continents, the USS Insurgent, and the laws of magic, were first conceived here.
It was an okay screenplay, but I learned that something was missing. This fantasy world of mine needed to have a history. A generic backstory would not do. My world had to have a history just as long and intricate as Earth. That’s the point when the series became less about imagining what a fantasy world would be like in modern day and more about what it was like in the past. I didn’t want to switch gears again and have another couple years wasted on a promising project that did not go anywhere. If I was really going to do this series and do it right, I had to go back in time … further, than most writers dare to go.
Winter 2012
I never work on one project at a time. After spending two years doing research and several false starts I had a working outline for volume one. Part of the reason it took me so long was because I had to decide what the series would look like. Should it be a collection of novels or short stories? I settled on short interconnected stories because I thought it would be easier. Then I had to decide how to space it out. I started out thinking I would do one volume with stories from the stone age to modern day organized by era. Then I had an outline for six volumes; the first one would have gone from creation to the fall of the Roman Empire. I envisioned the series being one first made up of a couple core stories that other writers would be allowed to contribute to.
It was also around this time that the romance angle between Emit and Bastet was developed and the world was officially renamed “Fabella” (After being called “Orenda” for a couple years). Emit was always a character, but the idea of throwing Bastet into the mix and having the entire series be about the relationship between these two was a big piece of the puzzle.
November 2013
Archives of Fabella: Volume I finally made its long overdo premiere on Amazon. I chose publishing though Amazon’s Kindle Direct Program as opposed to traditional publishing because I was afraid of putting the power of the series in the hands of a publishing company. If volume one did not do well financially, it would be nearly impossible to get subsequent volumes in the series released. All my hard work over the years could be useless. With it published in exclusively in e-book form, I can work with the knowledge that the entire series will be published.
So, in a a nutshell, that’s the long creative journey that has led to the publication of Archives of Fabella in ebook form and the creation of this website. Volume Two will take considerably less time to write now that there is a firm plan for the series in place. The series will consist of a total of twelve volumes plus a few interquels rewriting Egyptian Mythology, Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology, Arthurian Legend, Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and American Tall Tales. This is going to be a thrilling roller coaster of a ride and the most important person in it is you, the reader.
This massive project can only be successful with readers like you sharing what you love about the series. If you’re reading this, you are part of the elite group of readers who will see it from beginning to the bitter end. I need your help to spread the word about Archives of Fabella and tell your friends that this is something really special. I can’t promise that everyone will like every story, but I can promise the journey will be so very worth it.