The Truth about Heroes: A Short Story that Grew Up

I didn't love every Final Fantasy game ever made blindly. My preorder history shows a rather embarrassing trail of chances given before the burns created hesitation. However, Final Fantasy XII, though vilified in the fandom, was a romantic playground for my budding imagination. It took the recurring theme of airships to a new level, adding dimension to the bad guys of the sky, making sky pirates three-dimensional-- beyond just the beautiful graphic Square always pioneered. Many of the characters felt... kind of flat though, aside from the charismatic Balthier but there was a short cutscene involving the Princess Ashelia that hit the nerve.

If you haven't played the game, the scene shows her political marriage to the dashing prince Rasler but while the marriage was still in its infancy, a war breaks out and he is killed. Ashelia's lackluster reaction might have made it forgettable but something stuck (and not for lack of great story-building. I'll link you so you can read the full story HERE). I saw Ashelia become Rienna and envisioned a smiliarly strong young woman who struggled to find her place, not a princess but the daughter of the Commander of the King's Army and her disjointed relationship with the young man her father favored to follow his footsteps someday. I lowered the expectations of entire kingdoms on their shoulders; my retelling didn't feel like one of power and prestige but the raw emotion of young people reaching for happiness. I was a young one myself, romanticizing a troubled love with doomed aspects to lament its interruption.  I rolled it out in a montage, flashes of past and present and the big day becoming a dark stain on far more lives than her own.

It wasn't a chapter when I wrote it, but a one off bit of prose that repainted the scene. I threw it on a CD and labeled it Blazing Paths.

When I came back to it months later, I read it again. This time I looked at the space after and felt an ache and centered the text in the blank space.

Chapter 2

It's not over.

Rienna had fled on the guard Captain's horse, revenge mobilizing her in the numbness of unsorted chaos. She saw his face, the man responsible, and questions flew rapid fire and lava hot in her mind. She knew him. She remembered the heated words exchanged before he left. There wasn't a single excuse he could give her that would spare him from her wrath once she found him.

Two more characters make their way in. She's not thrilled about having company along for her schemes. She needed a tracker to find where the attackers went but that bargain unwillingly gained the loyalty of her tracker's best friend.

In the beginning, I thought this story might be hers, but plans changed. The world grew. There were more people in it, more pieces to the story.

Ashe returned, not as a princess but as a miscreant who sneaks into a circus tent. He watches the performers, drawn to a young man who fights in the same rare style he uses, only he has no memory of why he knows it. Like Rienna, he thinks it is a day for closure until the shit hits the fan and another city is torn down.

Somewhere along the way, it started to become The Truth about Heroes. I got into the heads and lives of people who are not just heroes leveling up in orderly fashion but often pawns struggling for a sense of free will. There are absent gods, people without souls, tribes with dual magical affinities and the shaky pacts of elementals who promise power at a steep price.

It's not about romance or war or magic. It's about the large and small scale effects, pieces that struggle to reform and fit in the shifts of time. The world moves from the grueling concerns of one person's aspirations to the grand 'fate of the world' and often the unbalanced hands that claim to know what's best.

It's philosophy without the definite bias. It's psychology that doesn't play nicely with the DSM-V (or rather shows why brain sciences have a pseudo side). It's character development behind the scenes and laid bare, flaws and all. Above all, it's fantasy-- magic, mythical creatures, new rules and discovery. Oh, the struggle to blurb this one because it's not just a neatly packaged entourage, a party of fast friends with clear roles. It's a series about adaptation and growth. It doesn't tell you how to feel and the characters are only kind of sure about what is true even when they spout it as fact.

Up to that pivotal point, I was about poems and short stories. I was about comics in blue-lined spiral notebooks. I was always about stories but until that point, when chapters became books and books became series, I didn't know I'd be a serial novelist. I didn't know I'd have that kind of discipline and desire to grow a world from a few choice scenes. I didn't know I'd renew my love of drawing through writing. To start envisioning comics again.

Maybe it's not quite as laser focused as it could be. I know that between the three-- comics, writing and illustrating--there's going to come a point where I'll have to choose. I follow the muse but I follow the opportunities. I've seen so many people sink themselves into vast voids of marketing and networking to try to get their babies noticed, but I feel the freedom of ninja production. The flitting between all the plans I once only dreamed of. 

I feel the pulsing edges of finished things. I say finished, but in truth, those edges whisper the possibility of more. I still see the flashes of the War of Black Violets and the ogre uprising. I still see the past antics of my unnamed mercenary in the series I have yet to finish. I see them in comic, movie and video game form. I see a possible future where people open up to my ideas and my voice, but right now?

I see the forest for the trees. I build small fires on still cool nights and write lip-biting tales.

There's the romantic again. Because I'm also growling at computer screens in epic battles of editing and formatting. Every epic brain is tied to a frustratingly finite body that succumbs to eye strain, wrist cramps, neck and back slumps and the need to eat, sleep and human.

However, I once battled a borog on the way to picking up my nephews from school. Storytelling is everywhere!

It's okay if you didn't know you wanted to be a writer since you could hold a pencil. It's okay if you don't find your muse until you're 50. You don't have to have big plans to end up with big stories. Just that little torch that keeps burning with the promise of more.

Get Rid of the Entitlement: Your Unique Opportunity for Growth

As I've said before, crocheting happens to be something I excel at, but it was a hard won path that took years of patient dedication, like any craft. Sometimes, there are points where crafts cross over with philosophies that boost another of your outlets.

Comments I see time and again in crochet groups. "How do I make this? There's no pattern!" It is then followed by more increasingly entitled lamenting "I found a pattern in Russian. Can I have it in English?" "I've only found a diagram and can't read that kind of pattern?" "Ugh, I hate when there's no pattern, but I REALLY want to make it!"

People tend to get passionate only as far as the comments go, but most of them give up when the conditions aren't completely ideal. There's rarely any spirited chirps of 'well, guess it's a good time to learn Russian/read diagrams' or 'maybe I could look at the stitches and attempt to make it from the picture!' but damn it, there should be! Age or patience or sheer laziness and entitlement shouldn't ever be an excuse to cut yourself off from attempting a new learning experience.

And yes, this absolutely applies to writing.

I get it. One thing crochet has over writing is that the mistakes can often become a part of the design, unknown to all but the proficient crafter themselves and even another master would have difficult spotting it without being told. However, writing also has an edge over crochet in that the mistakes are easier to correct, that a story doesn't have to be unraveled to be fixed. However, it does require you to shed entitlement, to welcome humility in the process and take the bad with the good (and realize bad and good are subjective).

See the failings of a perfect scenario as your place to make it better. Take the time to write the non-existent pattern and you can turn around and charge for that coveted design. Take the time to write that non-existent book! Or shrink it down-- novella, short story, poem. A lot of short pieces grow with inspiration into something much bigger than you imagined. Even a proficient crafter can float as run-of-the-mill, always passing up challenges beyond the comfort level for any number of excuses.

We're modern creatures, often spoiled by its conveniences, so many of us resorting to whining, looking for the bleeding hearts to do the hard work for us. It's one of the reasons I started plugging up the holes on my own bleeding heart tendencies. There's only so much you can do, only so much you can let yourself be sidetracked by the monumental amount of pleas begging you to their cause. I can't say I never cave. Sometimes I'll translate patterns or make my own when I see the whining, not because of some genuine urge to please the masses, but because the challenge DOES appeal to me and I DO see the sense in appealing to a profitable demand. Yet sometimes I withhold that urge, wondering how desperate or passionate that 'need' will be, whether it will encourage just one of those entitled commenters to take matters into their own hands.

It's okay to be an enabler sometimes, to be selfless in your work or selfish too. I don't push back and try to shame those commenters because who really cares about the opinion of some internet stranger? It's not going to reduce their number and could even do quite the opposite. I do want to see people reach their full potential, but coddling is NOT the same as nurturing. When someone feels the edges of confidence, you have to push them ahead of that sense of instant gratification, to let them know that it's just going to get scary sometimes. Ultimately, that's where the greatest sense of accomplishment always seems to reside. Not in who you can look to for help every time, but where you can go inside yourself to try and help yourself first.

No shame in looking for some help sometimes, but the temptation to treat it like a crutch is where people fall astray so much. Don't be 'too old' or 'too impatient' or have 'too many other easier options' to reach for goals that might require both some help or some scary alone time.

Think of it like learning a language. You can either trust the interpreter to speak for you or you can speak for yourself. Even the most well-meaning interpreter can fall short of what you mean to convey. There's a lot of benefit to shedding ignorance in your craft, even if it's just a little at a time. Can you spot a misspelled word? Can you proofread your own work? Can you shed more excuses and say exactly what you're trying to say? Sure, you can pay someone to do it and that's a great way to encourage people to develop such skills. But don't always shuck a learning experience to take the easy way out either. You might surprise yourself and spread that proficiency across the board.

I became a better artist over a 5-year dry spell with drawing. This doesn't mean you can piss away the importance of practice because, honestly, it was torture and the longer I went, the more I thought I'd lose it altogether. It doesn't quite work like that-- you do lose some things but some things are innate, locked into you. Writing was the same way. I can't say for certain it was confidence or 'the right time' but I do know that much had changed and I saw too much entitlement in myself with nothing MORE to back it up. Why can't people see what I've done and snatch me up? You'll notice that no matter how wonderful it feels to get a big response, people will just as quickly forget if you're not DOING, producing and working on something else. People will hesitate to invest in you if you tuck it all in after a victory. What makes writers like King so successful is he keeps popping another title in his library. It doesn't have to be solid gold-- people can hate it, but it keeps his name reappearing on those New Books lists before it ever fades out. Of course, there's no lack of talent and hard work in his case, but one thing that keeps creatives afloat is visibility. Stay relevant and it's not just your new work that flies off the shelves, it's the curiosity for the old work too.

I say this time and again, but you ultimately decide how far is far enough. But you're totally a dick if you're whining about something out of reach and have no intention of contributing towards getting it. "Oh, the pattern exists, but it's soooo expensive. Can I get it for free?"

Get out. Just... get out with that. It's just as nauseous when you're an 'idea person' wanting other people to write your damn book for you, but 'you'll pay them with royalties'. Or worse. Exposure. *shudders* If you want to gamble with your time and money to see your vision, fine and dandy. Don't undercut or undervalue the skills of others with entitlement. Entitlement never looks cute or even acceptable. Even if people are too polite to say it, they're disgusted with you.

Go ahead and pass it up if it's not that appealing to pursue. A parting shot is not a mic drop-- ride off into the sunset, quietly, and take your highest horse with you.