Being a writer and game designer, I\u2019m always coming up with ideas for different projects.\u00a0 The majority, I discard for one reason or another.\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019re too generic, fail to hold my attention, lack that special spark, or just plain aren\u2019t good.\u00a0 It\u2019s fairly typical for creative types. Talk to any serious writer, designer, artist, song writer, etc. and they\u2019re bound to have a huge collection of ideas that just weren\u2019t good enough to finish.\u00a0 But there\u2019s the occasional idea that catches on and really sticks in my head.\u00a0 At which point I\u2019ll spend the following hours, days, or weeks mulling over it and further\u00a0developing it before deciding what I want to do with it.\u00a0 Aurora\u2019s Nightmare was the same\u2026<\/p>\n
I tend to remember when I came up with most of what I consider my best ideas.\u00a0 The basic story of Aurora\u2019s 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).\u00a0 Like a couple other stories ideas of mine, it came from a dream.\u00a0 I remember two scenes from the dream.\u00a0 One is an interaction between Ars and Aurora, which really defined his relationships with both her and Tia.\u00a0 It\u2019s still in the game all these years later, and pretty much unchanged.\u00a0 The other scenes, which is just as vital, is a conversation between Ars and a certain cat (yes, a conversation with a cat, I\u2019ll 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.\u00a0 It too has survived mostly unchanged.\u00a0 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\u2019t remember any details about that so I\u2019m not entirely sure.
\nSo anyway, I woke up with a couple of very intriguing scenes replaying in my mind.\u00a0 Over the course of the day (during which I remember shopping for a cellphone), I was working to put the pieces together.\u00a0 How exactly were those two scenes connected? \u00a0What did the world look like (I only glimpsed a couple of areas in my dream)?\u00a0 Where did the story go after that?
\nBy 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.\u00a0 It was a rather cool storyline though, in many ways, very different from the types of things I normally wrote.\u00a0 Since I was already in the middle of writing another novel at the time, I kept the story of Aurora\u2019s Nightmare in mind, but shelved it for later.\u00a0 I do that a lot since, if I switched projects every time I came up with a cool idea, I\u2019d never finish anything.
\nOver the years I thought about Aurora\u2019s 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\u2019t part of the series I was working on, or I wasn\u2019t sure about doing something in that style, or I wanted to focus more on video games than novels.\u00a0 But then\u2026then I had an idea\u2026\u00a0 But we\u2019ll save that part of the story for next time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Being a writer and game designer, I\u2019m always coming up with ideas for different projects.\u00a0 The majority, I discard for one reason or another.\u00a0 Maybe they\u2019re too generic, fail to hold my attention, lack that special spark, or just plain aren\u2019t good.\u00a0 It\u2019s fairly typical for creative types. Talk to any serious writer, designer, artist, … Continue reading The Creation of Aurora\u2019s Nightmare Part 1: Origins of the Story<\/span>