Prequels and a Retroactive Multiverse Backstory
My Writing Journey Vol. 6
Welcome to the sixth post in this Writing Journey series. Last week I talked about the writing and release of my second self-published book, and how it opened up the possibilities for a whole universe, or multiverse, even, of stories. As you can tell by the title, we’re getting more into that today.
In March 2016, my father and I released the first volume in a joint series called The Cave. (I think, after the success of my two Minecraft-based books, he fancied jumping in to that market too.) He did most if not all of the writing in this first volume, while I worked it into the mythology and backstory I was creating, deciding that his works could be set in The Emerald Dimensions, another group of interconnected worlds in the multiverse, and that this would be a prequel hundreds of years before my story, when humans were just living in villages.
After writing Volume 2 of The Diamond Dimensions, I took the time to fully explore and expand what I was going to tell next. I’ve found scribblings and pages of ideas in the back of many school workbooks from this time, up to 2017 as well. I had characters I knew were going to be introduced, and ideas growing and growing about some other story I could tell, a way to discover and tell the histories of the worlds Dan my protagonist was exploring or would explore in future volumes, while revealing the mystery of The Watcher.
I decided The Watcher was called Mara, that she was once human hundreds of years ago and now was a part of an order of wraiths that watch over every dimension in existence and chronicle it all in vast libraries in a void between worlds. Each Watcher watches over a set of different-classed worlds, like The Diamond or Emerald Dimensions. My father actually started writing this as well, but as I was working on Volume 3 of the main series, this book got pushed back.
Some of what he had written we transferred to a new document, and he thought up the story he wished to tell, some mixture of Narnia and Vesaas’s The Ice Palace. It involved a group of three friends going through one of four neon coloured doorways in an ice cave, and in this adventure, visiting a world where anything they imagined came to life around them, especially after they sleep and reflect on what they want to see, but also from unconscious desires too.
Meanwhile, after 259 episodes across three and a bit seasons, DanTDM’s Diamond Dimensions series finished, suddenly with no real resolution. I’d only novelised the first twenty episodes, but now was working on a backstory that would not only explain everything Dan had encountered in twenty episodes, but would hopefully encapsulate and set up the events and worlds of every episode.
This was a long process, which is why The Cave’s first volume was released before any further Diamond Dimensions. Still, I must’ve been working on Volume 3, though it took me from October 2015 to August 2016 to release it. For a while, I was stuck with exploring the world of The Eternal Frost, coming up with the idea that when humans migrated there they took over from the native yetis, built castles and villages and stole all the magical items and resources, twisting them to their own human gods. Dan visits hundreds of years later.
I remember being on holiday in the Netherlands, and then some things clicked into place and I used a Dutch castle as a model, and invented this whole political situation and lineage of human kings. This was the first volume that really became an original story, introducing Dan to other humans and him helping them free the caverns below from their tyrant king. Dan also ventures to another world and meets another non-human friend who he saves and so he comes to stay with Dan for a while. This further set up the multiverse and Dan’s allies for an event I was only just sketching up, how I would end my version of Season 1.
The big thing in Volume 3 was having Mara actively help Dan, coming to visit him in her wraith form and telling him she has a way to get him home, the beginning of the main quest plot that works its way through the next five volumes of the main series. Writing that section of Volume 3, I must’ve had the next book fully planned out, the book that I would come to call (after X-Men Origins: Wolverine) The Diamond Dimensions Origins: The Watcher.
This was my fourth solo book (though I normally count The Cave as they were joint ventures). It was definitely the most ambitious, releasing in 2017. It was also the first not to be a form of novelisation, and instead was the story of an original character and her journey over hundreds of years, from being recruited as a child after losing her family, to trying to save her homeworld from a zombie apocalypse, to preparing for the prophesied arrival of a human who would save her world - Dan. I made every ruin, mention of an event and creature retroactively fit to one history. The first chapter is in The Diamond Dimensions’ medieval time, and the final chapter is Dan’s arrival in 2013 and leaving Companion Cube for him to find, and in between I set up a multiverse of nearly a hundred worlds, and tied The Watchers to Earth’s past.
I remember wondering whether our Earth should be a part of this multiverse, and when I did I then had to explain away how Dan’s Earth has all the same references as ours… But I tied The Watchers to Ancient Egypt, to the Atum dimension Dan had already explored.
I chose Pharaoh Ramesses VIII to the be the first Watcher, but didn’t tell his story in Origins. This was a decision that would change my storytelling from then to things I’ve written this year. Ramesses VIII was a real pharaoh, a son of Ramesses III who only ruled for a year - and his is the only tomb not to be found in the Valley of the Kings. So, in my multiverse, he uses some magic to discover five sets of worlds, and sets up The Watchers to watch over them. The Watchers that are Mara’s colleagues are many generations down the line, though Watchers have been wraiths since almost the beginning. The children’s mentor character in The Cave is another Watcher who we learn more about in Origins, she’s a motherly figure to Mara too, though in that book something bad happened to her and some children years before…
That’s probably enough info on the worlds of my self-published stories. Origins was the book that changed everything though, a turning point for my universe of stories all initially based on Dan’s videos but now so much more. From then on it was like the MCU post-Avengers - if that’s something I can compare my own work to…
Next week though, we’ll delve into some different subject matter, back to Children of Shadows and the evolution of that non-Minecraft story. While writing Origins, I was also writing a playscript, and working on producing its first scene…
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. (All four volumes of The Cave, and all but the last chapter of Origins, are in the first omnibus, whereas The Diamond Dimensions main series starts in the second.)
Cheers,
Harvey