Being a writer and game designer, I’m always coming up with ideas for different projects.  The majority, I discard for one reason or another.  Maybe they’re too generic, fail to hold my attention, lack that special spark, or just plain aren’t good.  It’s fairly typical for creative types. Talk to any serious writer, designer, artist, song writer, etc. and they’re bound to have a huge collection of ideas that just weren’t good enough to finish.  But there’s the occasional idea that catches on and really sticks in my head.  At which point I’ll spend the following hours, days, or weeks mulling over it and further developing it before deciding what I want to do with it.  Aurora’s Nightmare was the same…

I tend to remember when I came up with most of what I consider my best ideas.  The basic story of Aurora’s Nightmare first began developing either shortly before or shortly after I first moved to Arizona for college (which would put it in late 2004 or early 2005).  Like a couple other stories ideas of mine, it came from a dream.  I remember two scenes from the dream.  One is an interaction between Ars and Aurora, which really defined his relationships with both her and Tia.  It’s still in the game all these years later, and pretty much unchanged.  The other scenes, which is just as vital, is a conversation between Ars and a certain cat (yes, a conversation with a cat, I’ll talk more about said cat in a future post) which contained a lot of the critical backstory for the world of Lucerna and some of its greatest mysteries.  It too has survived mostly unchanged.  I have a feeling a Nightmare showed up somewhere in the dream as well, since I had their basic appearance in mind pretty much from the beginning, but I can’t remember any details about that so I’m not entirely sure.
So anyway, I woke up with a couple of very intriguing scenes replaying in my mind.  Over the course of the day (during which I remember shopping for a cellphone), I was working to put the pieces together.  How exactly were those two scenes connected?  What did the world look like (I only glimpsed a couple of areas in my dream)?  Where did the story go after that?
By the end of the day, I had a rough outline planned out for an entire novel which would tell the story of Ars, Tia, Aurora, and the cat.  It was a rather cool storyline though, in many ways, very different from the types of things I normally wrote.  Since I was already in the middle of writing another novel at the time, I kept the story of Aurora’s Nightmare in mind, but shelved it for later.  I do that a lot since, if I switched projects every time I came up with a cool idea, I’d never finish anything.
Over the years I thought about Aurora’s Nightmare occasionally but whenever it was time to pick a new project to work on, I always pushed it down the list since it wasn’t part of the series I was working on, or I wasn’t sure about doing something in that style, or I wanted to focus more on video games than novels.  But then…then I had an idea…  But we’ll save that part of the story for next time.