Altarland, or how I learned to stop tinkering and love the AU

So it is Sunday again and the first month of the new year is nearing its close. I still haven’t finished my work on the short story I’m making for the new DD Anthology, but I am coming back from my updating hiatus next week anyway. During my hiatus I admit that I’ve been a little bit absent from the Duck site, just checking in now and then, as I’ve been going through a lot of interesting, personal conundrums (also I’ve been sick) in the past few months.

One of them being the conundrum regarding focus. Focus has never been my greatest strength. I tend to always get caught in new inspirations and attempts to salvage old story ideas that will either get me side-tracked or have me spend more time tinkering with the writing of the setting of my comics more so then actually writing the stories that I’m supposed to be telling.

Seriously! I’m starting to feel like I’m more of a journal writer, then a story writer. Thing is, I have for a long time wanted to write a fanfic. But all my attempts at doing so has failed because I always very soon realize that the idea I have is pointless or could be better implemented in my main work. I’ve just recently come to accept the fact that the one and only thing I can ever be a devoted and consistently enthusiastic fan of is my own creative works (go figure:P).

Now one thing fan fiction writers often likes to do is to write Alternate Universes (AU’s). Taking the characters from whatever franchise that they love and put them in a different setting with a different narrative going on. And lately – and I’m not even sure how it even happened – I started to take characters from my own comics – most particularly from Imsies the Imthology – and put them in an AU of my own that I’ve started to write down ideas for.

I decided to name it Altarland. It’s a dark high-fantasy setting where the Imsie races – among the many different character groupings that I’m lifting from my comics – are human sized and coexisting in a setting more reminiscent of the kind of universe you’d come across in Warcraft 3 or any of its MMO counterparts. The idea with this thing is that I’m gonna use it as a fixed point - and a my-eyes-only-project - for all of my obsessive scribbling, while focusing the actual story writing on my comic scripts.

Since I’m not planning to actually post or publish it in any way shape or form – not now at least – it will give me that non-conventional, experimental freedom that my creative mind always craves. Doing this I’m hoping that my endless refinement of my scripts will finally seize and I can just get on with it because, hey—I got this other place my ideas can go now. And that is pretty much all I had to share this Sunday.

Just another bit of “What’s the buzz? tell-ya-whatz-a-happenin’ as I’m always keen on keeping everyone informed on what I’m up to at all times. Also before I close this I might as well share with you a new thing I learned today about trying to upload image files with really, really long file names in the image locker here on the site. I kept getting internal server errors until I shortened the name down. Just something to keep in mind. Comments down below. Have a good one.

NaaN (Now, always and Never)