Immortal Tears

Before the idea of Purgatory ever existed, I had been developing a story concept inspired by my new-found love of the Steampunk genre at the time.  While Immortal Tears ended up unfolding less dystopian and lacked the appropriate grit, I still thought it was an idea worth pursuing.

The idea began, yet again, with a drawing.  I was never particularly fond of the way it came out, and originally it was to play with jewelry concepts.  After drawing what was supposed to be the pendant, I became fascinated by the placement.  It was a fantastical and completely unrealistic idea to have something like that inset into skin and fused to the bone.  I had actually injured my sternum once, and it was quite painful for some time while I healed.  But for whatever reason, I wanted to write something completely unrealistic and far fetched, like a superhero story.

I knew that if the key was set in stone and fused to her bone, there had to be some importance to the key.  At first she was going to be a clockwork android who held the key to everlasting life, and then I decided to go with a more human approach to be more relateable.  I then came up with the idea of creating a new concept for superheroes.  Superheroes seem to either be born with superhuman abilities, gain their abilities later on in life, or they have human abilities with fancy gadgetry.  I decided to merge all the ideas together.  No one is born with super powers, but there are keys that are imbued with superhuman abilities and handed down generation to generation.

It was difficult to push the boundaries of types of abilities.  It seems like the comic book world has thought of everything in that respect.  So instead I made it to where there were repercussions in using their key's ability, otherwise they'd be far too powerful and I didn't see how that was fair to any villains.

This story was also supposed to go into a more grey area villain.  Instead of being all-out evil, she was to blindingly carry out her plans for what she thought was good.  Eventually, a very basic villain would take over, and I didn't know how I felt about that.

I created a lot of lore and a long timeline of events and happenings for this storyline, and even wrote a good chunk of the story down.  I became dismayed and frustrated after a while.  Parts of it were incredibly unrealistic to the point where some characters should have died but never did and I didn't know if the story's justification was enough to keep readers from rolling their eyes.  The first draft moved far too quickly in character development, and in my second run through I fixed what I could but became even more frustrated with the characters I had written.  At this point I had already started writing Purgatory and loved Helena's relateable persona.  Amber, the main character of Immortal Tears, was more annoying to me.  The supporting characters were also far less dynamic, and Amber's brother, Alexander, was to the point of abusive.

Alexander was supposed to have a tragic edge to him, but I wanted him to come in at a point where he was learning from his past mistakes.  He came across as whiny, jealous, and overly protective instead.  I edited a lot of that out before posting on Wattpad, thankfully.

I knew where the story was headed, though.  Because of how long I had been formulating the entire story, I had created enough content in my mind to write six to eight novels and a compilation of short stories.  None of the endings were satisfactory, even for me as the writer.  They were all tragic to some degree, and it was partially designed to do so.  Why should the good guys always have to win over evil?  Why does triumph have to be the only way to be happy with an outcome of such a story?  I wanted to push that notion, but I only wanted to write it if I felt it was successful.

I still want to one day finish the Immortal Tears stories.  That universe has some of my favorite concepts tied to it, especially with the interpretation of Hell, the world's Genesis, vampires, and zombies.  It is supposed to go into a few social issues that are relateable to what goes on today, which is something I always want to incorporate into my writing.  Maybe one day I will bring myself to complete it, or perhaps even rewrite the whole thing.  Who knows.