Story Evolution
I've always enjoyed writing, and somewhere around fifth grade discovered that I loved reading fantasy novels. I combined the two in seventh grade, when I began writing stories about a fantasy world called the Land of Seven. In retrospect, the stories weren't great, or even good... But then, I was in seventh grade. I thought was I was doing was remarkably complex and well done.
It wasn't, really, but for a seventh grader was probably darned good. I wrote about fourteen stories (mostly about twenty pages long each) about the Land of Seven before I began to branch off with it. I tend to get remarkably obsessed with back story, and soon found myself plotting out the histories of the various countries and how they had all been founded. It didn't seem all that important to me at the time, but one of the foundings had a throw-away character named Islan, who had been a Knight and ended up becoming a pirate.
That stuck with me for longer than the rest of it. I began to play around with the idea of the pirate and eventually decided he landed on some islands that were at war, and played around with that. I invented a character who'd been named for him, Islana, and wrote a story about her in eighth grade. I began to invent other characters from the Islands, and slowly my focus shifted from the mainland to the islands.
I didn't do much of anything with them for awhile after writing the original version of Islana's story. It, and the rest of the stories, slipped to the back of my mind for a few years. It wasn't until I spent the summer between ninth and tenth grade at camp that things started to pick up again. I don't know why it was that summer, though I suspect it was because I didn't have a TV or computer to distract me. I began playing around with a character named Kalin, and wondering what would happen if he was a slave, and fell in love with someone who wasn't...
I did a little bit of writing on and off through the next years (tenth and eleventh grade, for those keeping track) but nothing major. I mostly played around with ideas, occasionally writing out a scene or two. It wasn't until I started a writing web page, sometime during tenth grade, that I decided I wanted to put it online, and thus had to have a substantial amount written.
Even then, I only wrote the first two episodes (I think it shows, the writing of the first few was done months before the rest of the series, and are not nearly as good.) I eventually got a domain (well, it was a birthday present) at the end of eleventh grade and decided I wanted to make the Saga its cornerstone project. I forced myself to buckle down and get to work, and it finally became something resembling the present-day Saga.
It was only recently that the world that contains the Islands (as well as what used to be the Land of Seven) was named Temira. I'm not sure where the name came from, but it stuck. Although the Saga, and thus the Islands, are my main focus, I still occasionally write about the main continent of Temira as well. Chances are that Season Three, when I eventually get there, will take place at least partially on the main land.
Today, the Saga is much more to me than just an online story. I do this in my free time, but it's a labor of love. The Saga is my baby, and the characters are very much a part of me. I think I'd be doing this even if no one read the story or visited the site, though the readers do provide me with encouragement to keep on the ball with my writing. If you read through both current seasons, you can see how my writing has improved and evolved. I'm very proud of the story and the site as they currently are, and see only good things happening in the future. :)