Finally!
After 167 days of writing, Legend of the Moon is done. I'm so pumped up, I just have to share
my thoughts and feelings about the experience. Just to make it a bit different from
a normal post, I'll be doing this like an interview.
Q: What brought on the story?
A: If you read the story from the beginning, you'd know it was
inspired by...of course... the moon. I was doing my daily walking exercise just
before dark when I saw it, a full moon in a clear sky. It brought back a
childhood memory of me riding in Dad's car one night and commenting that the
moon seemed to be following us. Like most adults, Dad shook it off as something
ordinary (or maybe he was just concentrating on driving) but I gazed at that
moon for almost the whole trip. The memory ended and, right there, the story
just formed and I began writing it in my head. When I got back home, I opened
up my blog and started on it.
Q: Did you intend to make it as long as it did?
A: No, I actually thought it was going to take just one or two
posts. It was supposed to be a short story, something like Aesop's fables or
the Brothers Grimm folk tales. I was envisioning around 3,000–4,000 words but
it turned out to be 80,000+.
Q:What made you decide to lengthen it?
A: I happen to like detail. If the story was going to be just
4,000 words long, detail would have to be sacrificed. If you read the first
seven paragraphs, you'll notice there are no names. I didn't plan on putting
names on the characters except for the princess, just tell the story and keep
the characters unnamed.
Q: So, what was the original plot of the story?
A: It was fairly simple. Guy saves princess and they fall in
love. A man, who turns out to be a wizard, gets jealous and attempts to kill
the guy. Guy tries to enlist the aid of a fairy but that fairy fails and the
guy gets turned into the moon.
Q: You mentioned that the princess was the only one with a name
in the story. Why is that?
A: If you stretch your imagination a bit, the moon looks like a
giant eye in the sky, right? When the guy was turned into the moon, he kept searching
for the princess and calling out her name, Luna. Finally, I planned on putting
a funny twist on the ending because the guy eventually loses his voice but the people remember that
lonely call...Luna...and start calling the moon, you guessed it, Luna.
Q: Okay,
so the story plot changes and it gets longer and longer. How many words were
you planning to write?
A: After
one post, I decided I'd use the story to practice for the NaNoWriMo—National
Novel Writing Month in November. You're supposed to write a 50,000+ word novel
in one month from November 1 to 30. It doesn't have to make much sense, doesn't
have to be perfect, spell and grammatical errors are acceptable. There's no
prize, just the satisfaction of finishing a novel in one month.
Q: But
you didn't make it, writing the novel in one month, I mean.
A: Nope,
I didn't. I said I liked detail, right? I also happen to like perfection. I'm
not saying I'm perfect but if I find a mistake, I just have to go back and fix
it. After I finish a post, I usually go back over it, correcting spellings and
rewording things to make them clearer or more understandable. Then there were
the interruptions, the battle over computer time (there's only one computer in
the house) and, sometimes, laziness steps in.
Q: What
about writer's block?
A: Yes,
that too. There were a few times when I couldn't write anything because I
couldn't think of the next scene or situation.
Q: Didn't
you have an outline?
A: No,
the story was written without a plan or outline. I had an idea of how I wanted
the story to end but had no idea how to get there. I just kept typing and
inventing as I went along. Occasionally, I would paint myself into a corner
when I introduce a scene or situation that made it difficult to proceed.
Q: For
example...
A: For example, one of the main characters was a woman named, Iole—later,
as Elsie—and she was first introduced as a witch. I figured, the only way that
a moon was going to appear was by magic so Iole came in as a witch and she
would be the one to create the moon. Then, for some reason, I decided the story
was not going to have any magic in it. Everything was going to be scientific,
albeit with a fictional slant. I had to think of a way to weave the possibility
of a scientific explanation into the story without changing posts that I had
already made.
Q: Why not change previous posts?
A: Because people would have already read them. If I changed
the flow of the story drastically, you'd wonder how that came to be but you
wouldn't think of going back to previous posts to find out why. It would
confuse people and I don't think they'd like that.
Q: But you did end up with a magical reason for creating the
moon.
A: Yup, coming up with a scientific reason became too much of a
burden. Magic, on the other hand, frees you because anything's possible when it
comes to magic.
Q: If you would have stayed with science, how would the moon be
created?
A: It wouldn't be created in the real sense. I thought of it as
a rogue moon—a moon that's wandering through space—which comes too close to the
planet and gets captured by its gravitation pull.
Q: So what's wrong with that, why didn't you go with that
scenario?
A: Because I have absolutely no idea what happens to a planet
when it captures a moon. Would the force of the event result in massive
earthquakes and tsunamis? If it does result in such calamities, most, if not
all, of mankind would probably die and that would make a lousy story ending. I
forgot to mention it earlier but, in addition to detail and perfection but I
also like to be as realistic as possible. Of course, there's nothing realistic
about magic but I try to be as accurate as I could be. I researched about
things like archery, the construction of castles, medieval terms, clothes,
battle tactics, and even names and surnames. Unfortunately, I couldn't find
anything about what happens on a planet when it acquires a moon that wasn't
there before.
Q: You keep referring to it as "planet." The planet
in Legend of the Moon isn't Earth?
A: The original story idea was that it would be set on Earth in
Medieval England. Then, I got to thinking: Earth has always had a moon. Therefore,
this planet cannot be Earth. I decided it would be another planet somewhere in
the universe that somehow paralleled Earth during the Middle Ages.
Q: The book mentions that Iole/Elsie/Liona comes from another planet.
Was that Earth?
A: Maybe. If it is Earth, it's probably in our future because
of the technological advances that she brought with her. I'm not sure.
Q: Not sure? But you created the story!
A: I'd like to think that it created itself. Like I
said, the story had no outline. Words just appeared unto the computer screen—like
magic—and that was part of the fun of doing it that way. I really enjoyed not
knowing what was going to happen next. Or at least, not how it was going to
happen. There were times when I'd get an idea while walking or doing something but
when I started typing, the whole thing changes. I was always wondering how the
story would turn out.
Q: What other aspect of the story was changed, other than the
decision to use magic rather than science?
A: There was quite a number of them. One was that Elsie could
never return to her home planet and, when she died, Tilly would build a sort of
mausoleum for her...the moon...so she could be that much closer to her planet
than if she had been buried on the
planet surface.
Q: That's awful!
A: That's why I didn't go through with it.
Q: What else?
A: Well, originally, John's planet actually was Earth and Liona—a.k.a.
Iole/Elsie—was supposed to be a time traveler. In her time, she discovered there was no
mention of a moon in the history books until the Middle Ages, around the time
that John was living in. She goes into the past and instantly changes it, meaning,
the Earth will not acquire a moon unless a certain series of events take place.
Q: And?
A: It got too complicated. There's a theory called the temporal,
or time travel, paradox. If you watched the movie, Back to the Future, you'll know what I mean. In that movie, Marty
McFly accidentally goes back in time and inadvertently causes his future mom to
fall in love with him (Marty) instead of his future father. As the movie
progresses, Marty starts to disappear. The reason for that is: if his mother
doesn't marry his father, he would never have existed and, therefore, could not
have returned back in time.
There's another version to that theory that says: even if
you can travel back in time, you cannot change the future because history cannot
be changed. Anything you do will merely result in history moving in the
direction it was destined to do.
Q: That's pretty heavy stuff.
A: I know. It certainly got too heavy for me. I had to find a
different approach. Other authors sometimes ignore reality just so the story
goes the way they want it to be. It's called literary license. I'll probably
have to learn to do that but for now, it's not how I work.
Q: You're planning to turn it into an ebook, right? Why would
people want to read an ebook when they can read it in your blog?
A: I'm planning to rewrite the whole story which means the
ebook version will be slightly different from the blog version. I don't intend
to change the story, just improve it for readability and that includes, spell and
grammar corrections. A few sceneries might need to be rearranged or completely
reworded to make it more "interesting."
Q: Speaking of interest, how much interest did your story get
from readers of your blog?
A: Honestly? Not that much. My biggest fan was my sister Eva. The
numbers on the stats don't show that many reads. The earlier posts had higher number
of reads than the later posts but that's probably because of fatigue. The story had been
cut up into chunks of about 1,200 to 1,700 words and that's probably tiring for
people who want to read a story from beginning to end in one sitting. Who wants to take five months to read a book eh? I hope
the ebook will do much better.
