Writing original fiction is hard. I took a stab at it, got maybe a chapter done, but lost my work. That kind of killed it for me.
I can believe it. I mean, I've been wracking my mind for ideas for the past few months, and so far very little has solidified. Keeping things hammered down is a lot of work. (Case in point: my semi-original "Taking Out the Trash" story from 2020 took me pretty close to seven months to finish, and I don't feel like it was all that big.) For example, I know that I want to include Callista as a central character, but I don't want to use the version of her that I'd been using at Spamville and Muffinville. For one thing, her complete power-set is a bit much. For another: the fact that she started her existence as Curtis before being transformed by Stacy's death crystal makes sense for those locales, but without that context a lot of people are going to be giving me strange looks. So, step one was to reduce her abilities down to her speed, claws, and shape-shifting purse. Step two was to create an entirely new backstory for her where she was born female, never created the Infinite Defense organization after being mutated, and never got involved in the same level of tomfoolery that the original Callista did. This actually took me a week or two just for things to fully manifest. And don't even get me started on the setting.
With setting it's so much harder because people will ignore you intention and see something similar. You create a world with Vampire that love garlic, and they rant that Vampires don't like garlic. It's you world, it doesn't have to follow another authors rules unless it's set in their world.
I've taken quite a liking to writing, myself. I've really solidified my settings, characters, and stories over the years. Just about 4000 pages worth of nonsense like worldbuilding and other stuff like that. Of course, the important part is that you like it, rather than anyone else finding it to be any good. I like to think I'm happy with whatever I can make.
I tried writing a novel about a kid that goes through a gateway into a world of anthro wolf people. The main villain was a former guardian of the gate who went rogue and tried to take over both realms. I wrote 10 chapters but they were really short and the main character never even made it over the mountain that separated his town from the gate. I pretty much had run out of steam at that point. So I guess you could say my creativity literally hit chapter 11 bankruptcy. Bad puns aside, I've got illustrations somewhere so if ever find them, I'll post them.
Heh. I can't really say that I've had that level of development with my cast of idiots; I've tried writing down details on what their home world's like, but as of now I only have about a half-dozen pages worth of information at best. Best I can really do is try to allude to it through my characters' backstories and profiles. (And this is despite the fact that their world and a few of those living on it have existed in my imagination since the early-to-mid 1990s. ()^_^) Okay, that one was excellent, and I applaud you for it.
