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.

The Idea Evolves

When the idea of an underworld society secretly protecting the world came about, I then invented Purgatory as the name of its headquarters.  Those part of the society were at first dubbed "Purgators" but I felt it was too campy, so I went with the idea that the armor made them invisible, and thus they became ghosts.  Where the world thought they were experiencing echoes of the past or trapped souls, it was actually the armored warriors of Purgatory.

Originally, the idea was intended for a game that I knew I'd never create.  I was really into Mass Effect and Fallout 3 at the time, and thought the story would definitely suit that medium best.  But I knew it also wasn't innovative enough to catch anyone's interest in creating it to the scale I thought best.  The idea remained with gaming in mind for whatever reason.

I pushed the idea aside to focus on school for a while.  Every now and then an idea would pop into my mind, such as the idea of those within Purgatory being there against their will.  I wanted a better reason than the evil overlords threatening the lives of the people they loved.

Eventually, the woman behind the visor was given a face, and as soon as I completed it I sat back and knew her name was Helena.  She was inspired by a woman I went to school with who not only had a really cool heritage, but expressed herself less feminine than I ever did, and yet still kept a womanly presence.  She usually kept her hair short, and one time she styled it in a really cool faux hawk.

I had just completed a Classics of Science Fiction class, and I remember my professor speaking about an author who only wrote female leads in a not so typical form.  I wish I could remember the author's name, because I found the idea really neat.  I was so used to the mindset that only heroes could captivate an audience, and the idea of a woman being herself and still be interesting enough to read about interested me.  I wanted to create a character like that, and I knew Helena could be that.

Commander Shepard from the Mass Effect series greatly influenced the initial concept of Helena.  I love how FemShep was a leader everyone was willing to stand by, and no matter how you played her either.  As tempting as the idea was, I did not want to make Helena a willing leader, or impose leadership onto her.  I wanted to take a stance to show that there can be interesting female leads who aren't leaders.  I wanted to make her more relateable and less of a daydream.

After I graduated, landing a job was difficult.  I did little odd things like making necklaces and selling them on ebay, or taking art commissions in exchange for a little money, but I could never find a work place that would hire me.  I debated on the idea of turning Helena's story into a web comic, even though I know very little of sequential art.  My husband had told me about the success of a lot of web comic artists out there and how their sites gain revenue through adds.  I hit a roadblock as soon as I realized this story was set in a futuristic city, and I was terrible at drawing backgrounds at that time.

Two years passed before I finally sat myself down and began to write it all out.  I wanted it to be only one book, because I felt like sequels are too forced in today's entertainment.  It was a mindset I had adopted after watching some of Christopher Nolan's works.  I loved how the stories he told all came to a lovely close at the end, and that he never really pushed for sequels.  I wanted that in at least this story, but I became too immersed in the lore.  It started to unfold more like LOST as I began to write it all out, and I was concerned that I'd have more questions than answers at the end.

While I feel Purgatory does come to a close and that it wasn't completely open-ended, there were still questions I left that I just wanted to answer.  One book became two, and now the idea has unfolded to three.  There is an idea for an innovative perspective on a game involving the start of the Purgatory program, and I've also debated on writing short stories about the other characters.  I feel like I've gotten carried away.