In the Endgame now...
My Writing Journey Vol. 10
Welcome to this week’s writing journey post. Here’s the rest of this series for those of you looking to catch up or refresh - I will be talking a lot about characters and places featured in earlier works.
The title of this post is not just a vague MCU reference; I’m fulfilling what I said in last week’s post and talking about the last two books in my main self-published series, as well as the others from that time.
It was April 2019 by the time I released Volume 7 of The Diamond Dimensions that I subtitled ‘The Final Frontier’. The first half of the book follows Dan as I make a story out of a few episodes in the series he spends on the moon. I had stranded him through a portal that explodes, scrambling to find something to breathe through in an ancient moon base built millennia ago by a magical civilisation, meeting a group of alien Observers, like blue-headed versions of those from Fringe, and then helping him fulfil ancient blueprints of a rocket to take him back to The Diamond Overworld - the world he’d first been trapped on in the very first book.
The second half of the book does something I hadn’t done before in the main series and alternates chapters between Rana and Dan’s clone, filling in what they were up to while Dan was in the world of The Lion King, and since. Through another act of portal-fate, Dan’s clone is spat out in The Diamond Overworld too, and Rana finds him, helps him, and they investigate an army camping out on the edge of the forest Rana calls home, an army of aliens, a third party in the war that was coming. These chapters were wholly original, based on the world Dan was playing in, but setting up the events I wanted to tell in what would be the final book in the series.
Meanwhile in the Back at the Lab sections, the story, through some other mind-controlled clone of Dan being trained, infiltrating the Lab and taking Dan’s scientist friend prisoner, things were also set up for what I had in mind for Volume 8’s ending. When the evil scientist back on Dan’s homeworld finally takes the Lab for himself, he exclaims “We’re in the endgame now.” Which is of course a Marvel reference but, I’d been using chess metaphors anyway throughout the series before then so…
When it came time to give the book a cover, I think I preliminarily tried some Minecraft-based designs, but with the new KDP cover creator, I couldn’t recreate anything like the covers for the previous six volumes, or anything that I thought looked good. So, it came time to find an artist. Luckily, I had an friend at school who was willing to do it for free (thanks so much). He was also a fan of Minecraft and fantasy worlds in general and got exactly what I wanted, even giving me the choice of two backgrounds.
Here’s the artist’s YouTube channel if you’d like to check out more of his stuff, some great time lapses and animations: The Industry. It would be great if you showed him some support.
Three months after Volume 7’s release came the third ‘chapter’ in The Watchers series. I think that series kept improving; I have fond memories of writing the present-tense interlude sections, and creating my own magical artefact based on Ancient Egyptian mythology so the main group of eight characters could communicate across different worlds. Everything for the rest of the series fell into place in this book. The characters are all split up across three worlds, some finding each other, some losing each other, and there’s a major twist…
The next book was one my father chiefly wrote, with some inspiration, guidance and editing by me to fit it into the wider universe I’d created. I think he wanted a break from his Cave series. This book is a standalone, taking place after the events of my Diamond Dimensions Volume 5 but with unique characters and in a unique world, based on a world Dan explores in Series 3 of his YouTube series, one that I knew at this point I’d never get to…. or would I?
The Rift Chronicles was meant to be a sort of anthology series with different stories based around the appearance of magical rifts between worlds appearing. This one had some sort of solar alien with a timelight energy come to a dark, gloomy world where everything living is fungus-based, and magically cause all the plants to grow unnaturally fast and shrivel and die wherever it flew. A human wizard living in this world must stop it. I think it’s a great standalone story. I’ll link it here. We never did anymore Rift Chronicles though, apart from a short story I wrote to be included as a bonus in my third big omnibus volume of every book in this universe.
Anyway, for a long time after Watchers 3, I was working on the finale of my Diamond Dimensions series. I released it in April 2020 on the six year anniversary of releasing the first volume. I must’ve started writing it though sometime before the summer of 2019 - I remember working on some sections then. I think it was the first and so far only time I’ve really written a book out of order. I wrote the Back at the Lab sections first, and then some early chapters putting pieces in place, because the End Battle in this book, that I’d been building towards for years, would take a lot of planning.
The battle has five point of view characters, each with a time to shine in three long chapters. There was a lot of information to get across in the early chapters of the book. I won’t go into everything but there’s one party wanting to hatch a dragon that will tear apart the world Dan and his allies are in, there’s the foes of that party in their encampment that just want to destroy their enemy without caring about casualties - and they also have something the heroes will need if they’re to stop the dragon hatching. It became very complicated, but I remember spending fun ‘study’ sessions at school planning it all out, writing sections. It was a nice distraction during those early months of COVID to be finishing this book and focussing on releasing it to the world.
The battle ends in what I hope is a satisfying twist - it’s probably the best book in this universe, carefully constructed and more of a traditional book length. It also sets up the remaining stories in this universe, because as well as planning this battle, I was planning how to novelise in some way the other hundred and eighty episodes of the series Dan had done, plus the short-lived series he’d done in 2017, where The Watcher finally comes back to his channel, but as a villain! A cliff-hanger for that series, and a major problem for me to solve if I wanted to include it in my canon, or rather work my canon to Dan’s videos. That’s a problem for another post.
My artist friend did the cover for Volume 8: Endgame, though the kindle cover doesn’t really do it justice so that’s the full piece above. There is a scene in the book some may think is copying the Avengers film of the same name, but I’d had that idea in my notes from years before so…
Like Avengers: Endgame, though, this book brought together nearly every story from before, all the allies and enemies Dan had met from Rafiki to a hawk spirit to a talking pigman, characters from the then-unfinished Cave series plus from the world of The Watchers. It was so satisfying a conclusion to write - and I won’t even mention the final chapter. It fulfilled the prophecy I’d come up with for Dan when I was twelve, and over five and a half years later it had come true.
Above is another piece of artwork my friend did for Volume 8. It’s an engraving of an engraving of an engraving… a scene from an artefact I invented called the Timeline Tusk, depicting the End Battle of the book.
I thin that’s enough for today, but there’s still ten more self-published books for me to talk about, can you believe it? Next week I’ll backtrack a little from before the times of lockdowns to the second play I’ve written, or at least partly written, based on an old Amazonian tale. I’ll also talk about another work my father and I worked on, separate from any Minecraft worlds, and instead set in the real world(ish).
Thank you so much for reading! Once again I’ll link the omnibus volumes that collect all 22 books in the universe that sprouted from Dan’s videos, if you fancy checking them out in any form. (The earlier books in this post are in the third volume, whereas Endgame comes in the fourth and final one.)
Cheers,
Harvey