I’ve talked about this before, but I’m going to bring it up again because things have probably changed.  First, the question:

What is my goal with Windemere?

Now, I don’t mean Legends of Windemere, but the overall world.  This where I start to lose people.  With the exception of Crossing Bedlam and the Dawn Addison stuff, all of my stories connect to Windemere.  I’m trying to craft an enormous world where there are multiple, unique stories that can cross various genres while still having even a hint of fantasy.  So, how did I come to this point?

Super Earth, Realm of the Night, & Windemere

At one point, I had these three words that divided into superheroes, vampires, and fantasy.  I gave each one a unique structure and tried to keep them separate, which eventually failed.  Some of my fantasy characters were turning out like superheroes and I ended up having day-walking vampires in all three worlds.  Friends began asking what would happen if Luke Callindor squared off with Clyde or the superheroes invaded Windemere.  What if Fizzle appeared in Project Phoenix after a tear?  Well, there was already a hole between Windemere and Earth thanks to an older Gabriel story.  Not to mention there were several smaller worlds like the Angel of Tears who was taking people from different times and places.  It was frustrating to keep it all together and separate because there were so many similarities between them.

One summer, I decided I’d had enough and used what little free time I had to merge everything together.  Some things were cast aside or combined with others, the possibility of the series returning in the future.  The vampires were the easiest since they were practically there, including a fake Clyde.  Also, I’d merged Realm of the Night with Super Earth the year before.  This actually filled in gaps with the Dawn Fang mythos and made them a much more interesting society.  It also cleared away some of the stuff I didn’t like about the other series, which was that I used Dracula and had werewolves running around.  It also meant I didn’t have to do the ‘unknown to humans’ thing that shows up a lot.  At least that was a smooth transition.

So, Windemere swallowed everyone.  What happened to Super Earth?

Crisis on Infinite Earths by DC Comics

Homeless Superheroes

There were big changes here because I had more species to work with for superheroes.  I had to go through the roster and see what worked and what failed.  The government conspiracy that was part of Project Phoenix was gone, but that was always the biggest headache that I had with the original idea.  It also meant the idea of a large team would be tough, especially since I wasn’t sure where they were going.  Not until I wrote an outline for another story and created a city of bizarre ghosts that was abandoned after the gods sealed the denizens.

The superheroes became the Mylrixians, who were born from the plane of magic smashing into the physical plane.  Very powerful beings that were protecting the world before the Great Cataclysm.  That is until one went mad and attacked the gods, creating a loophole in the Law of Influence.  Now, if a ‘chosen’ or being that is too powerful for mortals threatens the gods, they can seal that being.  Well, there was an overreaction and all of the Mylrixians were erased.  Sort of.  They’ve been continually reborn into destinies where they’ll never be awoken.  Take a guess what happens when this story kicks off.

I still have a lot of trouble here.  Mostly due to format because a massive team makes it hard to give characters a good growth.  I’m thinking of a ‘series’ where every book is contained.  First one is the revival and then all of the others will involve one or two heroes getting into an adventure.  Then things will go to hell in the finale.  Some may get separate series or not even be Mylrixians.  Savior and Gearhead Princess (The robots thing) are tech-based with good solo adventures since they have a more contained thing.  At one point, I thought of having Savior being the focal hero and one of his adventures results in the awakening.  That became a problem because it meant a lot of heroes get only background.  Then there’s the finale that might work out better than on Earth because I get to flush out the least used of my continents.

The Alien

Not everything has gone smoothly.  The witch story has been an issue, but I might have solved that by merging it with the ghost hunters.  Yet, the one that has been the biggest head scratcher is the alien bounty hunter.  She’s actually been around since high school and used to be part of a team that merged my original series.  Then I moved her completely away from Earth and had no humans in the stories.  This put her in limbo when I was merging everything together because I couldn’t find a way to have her transition.

You might be saying, “Then let her stay solitary!”  That was going to be the plan and then I tried writing some test scenes.  I suck at designing space ships and have such a casual relationship with reality that the science was always flawed.  Seeing how people shred sci-fi that is more fiction than science, I figured it might be smarter to go back to the merging idea.

This has required that I throw out a lot of what I had designed around her like the alien species and other things.  Still, I’m slowly designing new stuff.  Having her crash land with a small force of villains that escape from her ship is a way to go and rather classic.  Making that each alien species has a different reaction to magic is fun.  I’m leaning toward a reveal that Windemere is actually a forbidden planet due to the unpredictability of magic and the dangerous beings living there.  Maybe a cult that finds lost aliens and does stuff to them too?  This is where things get iffy until I really hunker down.

Closer

I may have jumped away from my original point to hit specifics.  This is all about what I’m doing here.  It isn’t just writing any story for me, but creating a web of adventures.  I want to leave a vast playground of a world behind, which is why I’m trying to piece so much into Windemere and make it work.  For example, I have been working on robots and how to get them into the world.  At least in some form because without computers and programming of such things, it wouldn’t be an exact robot.  Golem technology would probably be the way to go.  Still, every topic I bring up has been considered for Windemere itself.  Unless it’s Bedlam related, but that’s another story.