Overseer began on Saturday, January 24th, 2015 as I was driving to work. My mind was wandering as it usually does on the monotonous 10-20 minute drive, and somehow I got to thinking about lizards, and flying lizards, and mer-lizards, and the entity that caused them to be that way. Suddenly Overseer was born in the span of a few minutes. When I got work, it was pretty dead (being the receptionist over a weekend has little work usually), so I did something I hadn’t done for a long time, years in fact. I opened up google drive and I started writing. Over the course of two days, I wrote the first five chapters, the words just flowing forth from my fingers, unable to stop once they had begun.

I have started other novels (which I still add to every now and again), but this was the first time I’d been in such a fervor to write. The short chapters were instantly gratifying, as I could sit down and write a whole chapter most every day despite my busy life schedule (most of my other endeavors tend to drag on for about 5K words, so they take time, and with my terrible attention span, I can lose interest). The support from lovely comments, both in the reviews and on the chapters themselves also helped inspire me to write every day.

When I had first thought up Overseer, it was a simple ‘deity-kind-of-thing makes lizards evolve, yay’ (I have a great love for science), and turned into something so much more. The emotion came to be the core of the story. As mentioned in chapter 9, I saw myself starting to go back to the original more science-fact style, and wondered why that was. That line of thought spawned the inner turmoil of chapter 10, the need to find something to validate your existence (which is needed whether you have a body or not). Around chapter 6 I had a few ideas on where I wanted to take the story (little more than keywords to touch upon), but chapter 10 derailed my plans for the better.

Having felt that same isolated, lonely feeling not that long ago, chapter 10 was almost a kind of therapy for me, and I have been so grateful for my friends and family that pulled me out of that dark spot. They had been trying to tell me for a long time, but I didn’t listen, convinced I knew what I was doing and what was best for me, and they did their best to still be supportive of me in my decision even though they could see I was being hurt. It was only when I sank to the very bottom, when I was reaching for something, anything to help that their words finally reached me. It is fulfilling in a way that is difficult to express with words. And it is those emotions I feel from that experience that drive the family heart in the story.

Back to talk of the production of the story, I actually had a whole draft for the creation of fire around chapter 8, but it didn’t feel genuine, it felt forced. So I archived that draft and focused on other things (and used pieces of it throughout other chapters). When I first wrote chapter 15 I had intended to broach the subject of fire, but it didn’t even make it into the first draft, however I knew it was finally time to make it happen, they needed it. The second draft once again felt forced and happened in the span of a paragraph. I thought to myself ‘No, they can’t discover fire this way’, it was uninteresting and more ‘it just happened’ without any real thought to it. Again fire was scrapped and I decided to just step away for a while and not think of it. Then, as most everything else in the story did, it suddenly came to me in a flash of inspiration, much like the Overseer’s flashes of memory, and the the age of fire was born from the laziness of Firestarter.

Although it hasn’t been touched upon yet (though it will come up later), neither Firestarter nor his female were Defenders. As for what this means for the future, it’s hard for even me to say right now. Loose ends like this are often the spark of a fantastic new venture into the world of Overseer.

It was difficult to write chapters 15 and 16 with the death of so many lizards. But with the length of time the Overseer has been around, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Tectonic plates never stay still, they are always on the move for some far away destination, each aiming to remain on the surface as long as possible until some other, stronger plate pushes them back into the mantle to be recycled. 17 was intentionally a little duller on the emotion. When you go through so much in such a short amount of time, it’s hard to have more of yourself to spare, and is just another part of the healing process.

So ask/talk away! And thank you for reading Overseer.