An Unfathomed Sky

A few years ago, I was in the final week of a summer holiday, shocked by how little I'd managed to accomplish in that time. It occurred to me that it was a good opportunity to begin realising my lifetime ambition to complete a piece of creative writing. An opus. It seemed I had two options:

One was to write a season of Doctor Who, though Russel T. Davies seemed to already be doing a great job on that. The more I thought about it, the less confident I became. It's a show with a massive history spanning back to the 1950s... there was too much established lore to consider.

The other option was to write an adaptation of a computer game, a MMORPG I'd been playing for some time, called Everquest 2. Particularly the quest line known as "The Claymore Quest". I imagined that it could be written within maybe 150 pages (if I stretched it out) and then I could move on to what I really wanted to do.

But

I didn't want to write this FOR fans/players of Everquest 2, I wanted to write it for the literary critics at The Times. I wanted a high level of authenticity, research, detail. I also wanted to remain faithful to the history and lore that has been established for EQ2. There is a LOT of it. More than I ever knew during that summer holiday. I wanted an emotionally satisfying and well motivated tale. Those wants of mine are difficult to realise all at once, but all I can say is that I am trying. I expect the final page length for this tale to be more than 1000 pages. For that reason, I am planning to divide it into at least two and maybe three volumes. What you see below is my first draft of chapter 1.

I already don't like the first 3 pages and I intend to make extensive cuts to them. The chapter itself will change as themes develop over subsequent chapters. I am almost ready to start writing chapter 2. I will almost certainly change the chapter titles as I go. Right now, they share the names of the quests within EQ2 that you play through in order to complete the Claymore quest.

An Unfathomed Sky