It all began in my English class of grade 9 when I received an assignment of creating a short story. Keep in mind, at that time, I absolutely HATED writing; it was the most boring thing in the world to me and homework was always a nightmare, like most boys at that age. But when the teacher told the class that the assignment didn't have to be about some textbook or boring stuff in the library but to make up a fiction story about whatever our little hearts desired, that changed everything. I was really young at that time (not saying I’m old now, because I’m most definitely not), so of course I was into TV shows, video games, and read a lot of novels. This meant that I had a million ideas popping into my head like popcorn in a crazy hot microwave (not funny, I know).
I had the wildest vision of my favorite characters (one from my favorite video game, one from my favorite show, and one from my favorite book) together in one story, fighting to save their loved ones against an evil tyrant that was threatening to take over the entire land. Classic, eh? (No, not all Canadians say "eh." Just thought I'd throw that out there.)
So I began to write away, and dang was it fun! It was the first time in my life that I felt that way when writing something down on a piece of paper! So fun that it turned to four pages! Then six! Then 12!!! And that was way over the page limit, which was only supposed to be a max. of 4. So even though it killed me, I shortened it down to 7 pages and submitted it to my teacher. This is where writing truly infused itself into my life.
I was handed the short story project back to me the week after, which was out of a big whopping 50 marks I must add, and I swear that my mouth dropped so far down I could've looked like a Looney Tunes character. Why? Because I scored a giant bundle of 15 marks! ...I even literally spoke at loud, "why?!" I had so much fun and I could have sworn that I did an amazing job! Then I read the comment attached to my work, and my mouth somehow dropped down even lower. What was her comment? Here it is in exact words because I can still remember it clearly:
"Michel, I'm giving you 15 out of 50 for good proofreading, making sure that there were no mistakes in the entire story, and for making it look nice," (I had done a fancy title page with pictures and page borders to match) "but I'm failing you on this assignment because this story was far too well written to have been done by you."
I didn't know whether to take that as the biggest slap in the face or the best compliment of my entire young life! I was so dumbstruck that I didn't even know what to do; I didn't even go straight to the teacher or anything to talk to her about her note. Instead I just went home, because that was the last class of the day, and told my mother. I don't even remember her reaction anymore, but it was somewhere in between extremely mad, not at me of course, and super proud and happy, for me of course. But she did tell me to talk to my teacher right away or she would. And she didn’t mean that in a nice way either. I told her I would, and so I did the next day,
bringing all my work with me as proof that I did write that entire short story on my own, and went up to her class during my break. I first asked her why she thought that I wasn't the person who wrote the story, and she said that, after looking online, she found many stories being extremely similar to mine using the different character I had in my story. She also said that I shouldn't worry, she will not let any of the administrators know that I had plagiarized to an extent so I wouldn't get into any real trouble, but to please not ever do it again because it was wrong. Right away I grew mad and just dropped the papers and my floppy disc on to her desk. "I did not cheat," I said to her straight out. "I made this story all by myself. I didn't make up the exact characters on my own, but I made the story and everything that happened in it all by myself."
She looked at all the papers: the rough draft, final copy (before I cut it short) on both the disc and the printed copy, and sat silent for quite some time. The warning bell rang, all the students started pouring into the classroom, and I was still there, waiting for her to say something but too scared to say anything myself. 5 more minutes passed, the final bell rang, indicating that class was supposed to start, but she told the students to just sit still and wait for a bit. I can still remember the other older teens staring at me with strange curiosity and I swear I was so nervous that I just wanted to run. Finally, she turned to me and broke the silence. "In all my years of teaching, I haven't had a student as young as you write like this before."
I know I turned red because I felt extremely hot and wanted to rip my sweater off. I quickly thanked her and she said she would talk to me when I had class with her next.
Needless to say, she fixed my mark by then, which turned to be 55 out of 50, and surprised me and the rest of my class by giving everyone a copy of my story and said, "This is how a real short story should be done."
Ever since then, that teacher became a great friend of mine that constantly encouraged me to pursue the path of writing and I always see her when I visit my old high school to see all my favorite teachers and old counselor. And ever since then, my dream of becoming an author began.
I started a medieval-fantasy book just days after that short story drama, which I don't even remember the name of. I worked on it for nearly three months, turned out to be around 60 pages of written paper, but then I lost all interest in it. It felt like it was lacking cool ideas and seemed like it was drawing too many ideas from other stories I had been reading so it didn't fully feel like something I created from the depths of my brain. Even so, I let other friends read it and all of them thoroughly enjoyed it, bringing me lots of joy to see people liking what I wrote. Alas, I dropped it because I didn't feel right about continuing it anymore. Instead, I wanted to do something more fun, unique, and more epic! At that time, I was obsessed with a game called Halo: Combat Evolved and felt drawn to the world of science-fiction, even though my absolute favorite genre at that time was medieval-fantasy. I grew up with those kinda things and friends who shared those interests. But my love for a video game suddenly turned my head towards writing an epic tale of armored heroes fighting aliens to save mankind.
And so, Reign of Darkness was created.
Right away, once deciding I wanted to create a story about these teenagers being chosen as super soldiers by a secret organization to defend earth, I automatically came up with numerous ideas of what to write, the setting, the plot, everything! Just like that! For a long time, though, this story was just that: ideas. I kept jotting down notes of what my story was going to be about, what was going to happen, all these different exciting events, but I never really began to write the story. Near the end of my 9th grade year, I sort of completed a rough outline of the book and decided to begin writing. All the while, my favorite game, Halo, evolved into Halo 2, which was an outright amazingly epic game of epic proportions. So epic that it made my story idea seem a little more shallow and decided to re-do my ideas. Finally, during summer vacation, I started working on my book.
It came slow, really slow, because I just kept changing things around, redoing it over and over again, and never got anywhere. When I hit grade 10, I was drawn away from Lunar Void once again because I got back into Soccer and made a lot of great friends that I knew were true friends to stay for the rest of my life. We sort of formed a group that stuck together all the time and played Soccer every single lunch break from then on. Around two months after school had started again, being settled with my new buddies and our on-going routine, I had a newer vision for my book. I felt like my characters were a little dull and could be a lot more exciting, so I found myself actually putting real people, my closest friends, into the story as the main characters! 11 in total, but no names will be disclosed at this time.
I had no complaints from my friends; in fact, they were all excited to see what the turnout would be. So I began to re-write the story again, from the start and with the similar ideas, but with awesome characters that brought my story to life a great deal more. I even ended up using real places as a setting, including my neighborhood, school, and the entire city of Vancouver! And then came the day that I saw the movie War of the Worlds, the re-make by Steven Spielberg, one of my biggest movie idols. That movie blasted right in to my favorites list and inspired me to keep writing my book but with more fury! So I did. I worked on the book for days and days straight, during classes even, but mostly at home. I had written a huge amount by Christmas Vacation when I decided to watch War of the Worlds yet again, and this time, it impacted me, and my story, majorly. So majorly that it completely changed me and my story...yet again.
I had a dream of my story, only with a bit different of a plot. I can't say much of the dream, for a lot of it is still used in the book and would be a major spoiler, but I can say that it changed my perspective of aliens entirely and gave me a more intriguing idea for a story that would capture people with similar interests of mine and not be able to say, "Hey! This is kind of copying Halo!" I woke up from that nightmare and right away jumped over to my desk, pulled out a piece of paper and grabbed my pen, and wrote it all down in point form while it was still fresh in my head. The whole dream turned out into nearly five pages of ideas and re-reading them all totally blew me away, because to me, it felt like my story just turned into an award-winning novel! Straight away on the following day, I started to watch more sci-fi movies like the Predator franchise, and I got even more ideas! So I started to fuse my masterful ideas into my already started story and in the end, it turned out that I wouldn't be writing Reign of Darkness anymore. Instead, Reign of Darkness turned into a trilogy name for a planned three books! I didn't want to write just a single book anymore, I wanted to do way more!
And so Lunar Void was created! It is the first book in the trilogy and the three titles all have to do from going from darker to lightest, but all have a giant twist and in no means goes from sad to happy.
Everything from then on seemed to come super easy. I wrote with a definite flow of ideas, never once had a writer's block, and never ran out of cool action scenes and funny characterizations.... I was having the time of my life. For the first time, I actually had a vision of me becoming a fully fledged author, and I would stop at nothing to make that happen, because dreams do come true if you work hard for it. I even had a kid fantasy that I would be the youngest author to publish an international phenomenon, being at the age of 17 at the latest. Of course, that didn't happen, but not because I didn't try. But because I ran into a movie that again gave me yet another dream and a realistic take on a monster invasion that made me rethink my newly completed book. That's right, I was already finished my first book as far as I was concerned…, but then I saw Cloverfield, produced by J.J. Abrams. That movie completely changed my view on absolutely everything on my book and when I had an extremely long dream (yes, I dream a dang lot about things like this), which continued after falling back asleep when I woke up from it, I decided to re-write the entire book completely. Why? My dream, or should I say "vision," thrust me into the same world of my book but without a lot of the fantasy heroism and Hollywood style happy endings. I dreamt of a dark world where realism took a harsh impact on the outcome of my characters journey to save Earth. When I woke up, back to reality, I thought hard and hard about this dream. Did I really want to change my story around so much that I was basically writing an entirely new story? Was it worth it to change all my hard work to make it more unique, less predictable and fantasy like, and a lot more emotionally gripping? The answer came to me right away. HELL YES! After all, my writing style and skills developed on a great level by then, so my old story seemed out of date.
I began to write the real version of Reign of Darkness: Lunar Void by the end of January of 2008 and did not stop since, and all the while, I was showing friends and good classmates my work in progress to get some real feedback and tips/advice. I got a lot of help from that, even from teachers, and was on my marry way to creating an amazing story that I hoped would captivate many interested readers in the near future. And this time, I was in no rush to have it done, nothing else on my mind but my story and how to make it what I wanted it to be. Around the end of 2010, a last change was made to RoD: Lunar Void, which was only the title. I felt that Reign of Darkness was both too long and not catchy, and seemed way too dark to fit with the book titles, taking away focus from the main characters and plot, and more focusing on the enemies. Instead, I changed a few details within the story when I got the idea for a joke scene in one of the longest chapters in the book. In that scene, the characters basically come up with a new name for themselves because their chosen name seemed to 'formal,' and they came up with Helljumpers.
That's what the main characters are, and that became the trilogy title.
Lunar Void, Helljumper Book 1.
From beginning to where I am at right now in the first book, I saw the whole story in my head, playing like a movie, letting me capture the emotions of the characters, what they were feeling and seeing, the environments they were in, the battles they fought, and losses that they had to bare. It’s a book where Halo meets War of the Worlds meets Cloverfield.
Life
is normal for eighteen-year old Seph McCauley and his three closest friends,
Darryl, Derek, and Ivan, until strange bombings on nearby cities spread to
their home, Vancouver. It only worsens when they learn that they were chosen -
millions of years ago - by deities of unknown origin to be mankind’s
‘Redeemers’ and the greatest hope for survival against the merciless aliens
called the Inaron. But as Earth starts to fall, the Redeemers learn that the
battle goes deeper into the past, before humans existed, and that the aliens
are after ancient technology that can alter the fate of the world…and the
entire universe.
LUNAR
VOID is a fast-paced, 108,000 word young-adult science-fiction story - book one
of the planned HELLJUMPER Trilogy – set in the present time in Canada and the
United States where alien invasion nightmares come true without the overly used Hollywood
happy endings. My story will appeal to fans of Steven Spielberg’s and J.J.
Abrams’ films, Bungie’s and 343 Studios’ Halo Series, and to any
science-fiction lover. It combines elements of fantasy, humor, a touch of romance, suspense, and
despair; in the end, it’s a gripping story about the action-packed journey that
six friends take towards the inevitable fall of mankind.You'll find out what they accomplish as you read my story, which finally, after many long days of passionate writing, is almost finished. I plan to finish it by Christmas Vacation so to have all that time to present my work to a literary agent and/or publisher. And if you made it this far in my post, then I must thank you for taking your time in reading and thank you for showing interest in what I have to tell.Many updates to come, so stay tuned!
This is Michel signing off.
~
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