[Diary] The Saga of Life (Cycle 3)

Welcome to another “writing diary” for the Saga of Life! In this article, I describe my process of writing the 10 short stories for the third cycle. Hopefully, it’s fun, interesting or educational to read. It’s also rather long, because I document the entire process from start to finish, leaving nothing out.

This is the first writing diary in English. The previous two were in Dutch, in a time when the Saga of Life was only available in Dutch.

For now, stories appear in Dutch first, and in English later (whenever I do the next batch of translations). One day, I might catch up and do them simultaneously, or even become English-first.

As always, beware! All the spoilers for cycle 3, and light spoilers for what came before.

What’s the idea?

For those new here, let me introduce the general structure.

• Each year, I write one “cycle” for the Saga of Life
• This means 10 short stories—one in each “time period”—revolving around a common theme.
• I usually write these in batches spread across the year, in chronological order. (For example, stories 1-4 now, stories 5-7 in a few months, then 8-9 near the end of the year.)

I have a huge document with all planned stories, divided into “eras” (10 cycles), then into “cycles” with a theme. To create order in this chaos, I decided to rank these based on the number of story ideas about which I was already certain. For example, some cycles are nearly full with 8 or 9 ideas inside, while other cycles only have 1 or 2 stories and are otherwise left open for now.

For the third cycle, the third “topic I’m most certain about”, the theme was civilization. And, as an extension, culture, empires, technological advancement, etcetera.

(Cycle 1 was about the creation of this world and its general structure. I realized I needed to introduce the Saga of Life first, before I could delve into real-world topics. Cycle 2 was about the Chain of Food. The first ten cycles or so will generally be about big pillars of “life”.)

I already had 9 story ideas, only missing the very first one. (When I say “idea”, it can mean a fleshed out story outline, but it usually means a general direction and topic for the story. So most of these ideas are just a one-page document that still needs to be fleshed out for sure.)

While finishing the previous cycle, I decided that I wanted an origin story for each god. I’d planned a lot of things, but neglected to plan a proper set of stories for the moments before the godchildren landed on Somnia. So, as I did, these stories automatically found their way into the first “time period” slot of many cycles.

Writing challenges

Additionally, I wanted to improve the unique formula of the Saga of Life.

There’s a clear narrator, but in the first two cycles … it really isn’t that clear. They pop up from time to time, but that’s it.

Similarly, I aim for stories that read a bit like “myths” or “fairy tales”, but also haven’t hit my stride concerning that aspect.

As such, for this cycle I wanted to make the narrator far more prominent and structure more stories like a classical myth or fairy tale.

Recurring elements

Finally, I always try to have one new idea or storyline that is a recurring element throughout the whole cycle.

Last cycle, I had a story in which I wanted to introduce “life lessons” or “philosophy” of the god children. However, as I only came up with the idea at the end, I decided to keep it for this cycle.

It’s about civilization. Civilization is about shared culture, laws, rules, etcetera. It felt fitting to have each story introduce another “law” or “philosophy about life” from the godchildren. (Or some other character/group, haven’t decided yet.)

This could be introduced in various ways.

• You witness the creation of it (in a story involving the demigods themselves)
• In later stories, others find these sayings, or read them in books, or discover them in some other way.
• The narrator introduces it, and the story is about people who did (not) learn this lesson

With that, I had 10 ideas and a general structure. I could start.

Story 1: The Coldest Demigod

Firstly, this is a pun that works both in Dutch and in English, so I was pretty happy about that. It’s both about the early life of the oldest demigod (Ardex), and the fact he was ice cold when born.

This story was supposed to be another “starter”: an easy entrypoint for people new to the Saga of Life. From now on, I want to regularly mark stories as such. This way, people new to this project have an easy list of “here are a handful of stories to start with”, instead of saying “start anywhere!”.

What’s the idea?

• We learn a bit about the Father and Mother of the demigods. Mother has heard a prophecy that she interprets as “one of your children will be a monster that destroys everything”. (This is something I wrote long ago and part of the overall lore, not just something I invented to kickstart this story.)
• Then Ardex is born. They test him and increasingly find signs that he is that monster.
• While Mother fears she has to lock him away, Father secretly gives him a bit of power. To see what he does with it, to make his son more powerful, so he can help with tasks.
• Slowly, we see Ardex grow. Following a certain tradition (I didn’t know what yet), he finds his own Heavenly Matter.
• The first seed of life appears in the universe. Ardex is sent on a quest to check it out and help. But the seed almost instantly dies (bad luck, harsh planet) … and Ardex does nothing. “Let them die, don’t interfere.”
• This confirms Mother’s suspicions. They try to lock him up or remove him.
• They manage to do so. Ardex both doubts himself and is furious and planning revenge. The story ends with Father secretly handing Ardex more power, leading to him being the only god with two Heavenly Objects. (While Mother is delivering their next demigod child.)

That, well, sounds like a story!

Honestly, I prefer these types of stories. Very character-focused, very focused on their vices and the anger/revenge/stupid decisions that come from it. They come a bit more easily than stories more focused on adventure, or action, or your typical hero’s journey.

As such, I wrote this story in a very loose way. Here and there, whenever I had 30 minutes of free time, I’d just write the next chapter as it came to me.

That means the story was written over the course of a few weeks (instead of a few days, as usual), while I was actually busy with other projects.

I mostly struggled with the “test” or “ritual” for getting the Heavenly Object. At first, I wanted to create some unique memorable ritual that all demigods could repeat (in their own stories, with variations of course). This proved difficult, however. I just couldn’t see far enough ahead to be certain about what kind of ritual I needed, and the more specific I made it … the more each “origin story” would just be an exact repetition of the previous!

So, in the end, I decided that this ritual would be different for each demigod. Designed specifically for their powers and character. Only the general structure and reason would be the same: the supreme gods want to lock some of their children’s power inside an object. Both to weaken them and make them vulnerable, but also to help them focus their power and not be overwhelmed.

(Only Ardex will know the true reason behind this: they’re afraid their children might become too powerful and usurp them, especially “the monster”. But for now, he decides not to tell his brothers and sisters, letting them think this is just a great “gift”.)

I’ll need to tidy up some sections during a revision (explaining the reason for the rift between Ardex and his mother better, rewriting some paragraphs to flow better), but otherwise this story came out quite well without having to push it.

Story 2: The Munchers and Featherers

Hmm, I’m starting to notice how many story ideas start with a Dutch pun. This might become an issue as I translate more stories, but we’ll see.

It’s a play on the famous Hunters & Gatherers.

The Dutch version of that is “Jagers & Verzamelaars”, and the Dutch title for this story is “Jaguars & Verzamelbaars”. Which, in English, means “The Jaguars and Gatherperch” … which just doesn’t work.

Obviously, this story is about one of the earliest signs of civilization and collectivism. Humans came together and assigned groups to either hunt for meat or gather fruits and nuts, which could sustain the whole colony for a while.

It’s a nice topic. How on earth do we make that a story?

While researching, I always look for both the most crucial and the most interesting bits of information.

• Hunters & Gatherers were, in many ways, more healthy than us. They had more leisure time and devoted a lot of that to art/music/storytelling. They had strong bodies fed through a rich diet.
• They had very egalitarian societies. In fact, they had systems/habits that would prevent any male from dominating: if one person wanted to seize too much power, the others would gang up on him and put him back in his place.
• They traveled in small packs, usually family and extended family. They weren’t even violent or unfriendly towards other tribes, especially because those were likely family as well!
• They needed a large area—much larger than you’d think—to sustain even those small groups. That’s why they stayed small, and spread out, and were nomadic: moving to wherever the food was.
• Generally, males hunted for meat, females gathered “stationary foods”, and children moved from one to the other as they grew up. Fishing was very popular and even children were allowed to do it. (Low chance of screwing it up or the fish fighting back.)

In summary, the vast majority of our history consists of hunter-gatherer tribes, and by all accounts they led more comfortable and equal lives than we do today.

Now that is worth exploring.

An outline

Let’s sketch an outline for this story. As always, I’m just writing down my ideas and thought process directly here.

• As a tribe (A) searches for food, they find most of it is already eaten. They first assume there’s a big animal they can hunt, until they stumble upon another tribe (B).
• Initially, they try to work it out. Share food, share land, though supplies are running really thin.
  • Initially, they just want to walk past them and continue to the next available land. As always.
  • But this other tribe has colonized and walled-off the area.
• B has accidentally turned to “agriculture-like” behavior. Some magic allows them to hoard food. This introduces the inequality and unhealthy lifestyle associated with it, which the story clearly shows.
  • Maybe our main character is treated like a slave, with the threat of “or you won’t get any food!” Because they’ve been living like that for a while, they don’t know how to hunt for the food themselves and are stuck here.
  • Then they meet our other main character—from the other tribe—who teaches them the “old ways”. At the same time, this other character has a physical disability and longs for the safety and certainty that a big pile of food brings.
  • These two befriend each other and spend time in each other’s tribes, but both grow restless and unsatisfied after a while.
• Tribe A considers what to do. A dominating male stands up, but, as per tradition, is shot down.
• This means tribe A is unprepared, however, for the surprise attack from tribe B.
• They are decimated and have to flee, until they realize they are far stronger physically and have better weapons.
• They win the fight and seize the territory (including all food sources). But the remainder of tribe B promises payback/revenge, and they’re uncertain what to do with it.
• (At some point, the gods get involved, potentially taking away the magic that allowed this in the first place.)

I also want to show how “education” for these tribes is play-based. Games and challenges are invented to help kids grow and learn to hunt. (As opposed to the more modern approach which somehow seems play as a bad thing inhibiting children.)

Let’s check if this story ticks my boxes.

• Is there conflict? Yes, two tribes with different values and desires must share the same space/resource.
• Is it urgent? Yes, they’re currently right on top of each other and must feed their members.
• Do they lose something if the conflict isn’t solved? Yes, their lives.

Within that framework, we follow two characters who struggle with the tribe lifestyle (for different reasons) and want to find a way out. Two “subconflicts”, if you will.

I think that’s enough.

A theme

As I researched this, a common theme kept cropping up.

Are humans inherently violent and warring, or is it a result of our history?

This seems extremely interesting to explore, so I chose that as the general theme of this story.

There is evidence showing how hunters and gatherers were extremely peaceful and violence increased after them. There is evidence that they, just like many people expect, would fight wars and kill each other if they had any reason (resources, territory, women).

As usual, my story won’t provide an “answer”, but it will try to explore this idea.

Let’s write that

Pfew, rarely do I spend so much time planning a story and theme in advance!

This one was simply really hard to “storify” because …

• We don’t know that much about this prehistoric piece of history. (Even the things we thought we knew are now uncertain.)
• They didn’t lead spectacular lives. That’s the whole point: they led simpler lives, hunting when hungry, enjoying leisure time otherwise, that’s it.

I wrote 5 chapters in one day. (I was inspired, I guess.) Then I realized that one of the main characters (Kesho) really wasn’t doing all that much. That’s never a good sign, because why should they be the main character then? If they don’t make impactful decisions and they’re mostly along for the ride?

The next day I wrote the remaining 5 chapters, but I’d already planned a pretty big revision. What was the problem?

In the old version, Kesho starts out instantly hating the other tribe, but then quickly grows accustomed (one chapter later), then decides to fully hate them anyway and they should attack (one chapter later). That’s a bit confusing, useless, and not that interesting. This is just a mistake on my part. I forgot the trajectory I had planned and wrote on :p

The new version has that clear trajectory.

• Kesho starts out hating this tribe by default and wanting to attack.
• But he slowly grows to enjoy their life, safe behind walls and with plenty of food stored.
• Which blindsides/counteracts his own clan and makes them unprepared when the attack comes. (Kesho actually recommends they work together and trust each other)
• Only when the attack arrives, does Kesho realize how wrong he was and try to switch sides.

Conclusion

This was a hard one to write. In the end, I also met another constraint: word count. There just wasn’t enough time to fully develop many ideas.

I finished the story as well as I could. Because I had to do a big rewrite anyway, I was already able to incorporate many of my “to-dos”, which means the list of issues I have with the story is rather small.

Still, I’ll need some time away and revisit the story with fresh eyes at some later moment.

A new writing process

In the mean time, I finished translating the previous cycle and planned to translate some Dutch books of mine (unpublished so far) to English and then publish them that way.

It showed me a new process for editing and revision that seems to work for me.

You see, I am bored almost instantly by anything. Once I’ve written my first draft for a story, it is really hard to come back and do revisions and polishing. (Even though I know it’s always needed and always makes the end result much better.)

What to do? Well, I realized that translating the stories manually …

• Gives a much better result than using AI / tools first (and then fixing mistakes afterward)
• Forces me to really think about the meaning of parts of the story and phrase them better
• And, obviously, read through the whole thing from start to finish again

In other words, I can combine translating and editing. With a single pass through the story, I do something that is surely productive, but I’m also forced to look at the story in a different way and find better language in many spots.

Once I realized this, I started to apply this process by default. That’s why the stories above released in both English and Dutch at the same time. The Dutch was written first, then the translation was used to trick myself into editing and improving the original story too ;)

As usual, this throws a wrench into my plans to slowly have the translations catch up with the original stories. We’ll see how it goes. It might mean a rocky 3–6 months for the Saga of Life as some stories are translated + edited and some are not.

We’ll see how it goes. For now, I just keep chugging along, trying to move the project forward a bit every day.

3. The Sign of the River

This story is a pretty direct continuation of the previous one, only separated by a lot of time.

This cycle is about civilization. This story shows us the very first civilization (according to many experts): the Indus Valley Civilizations.

(The previous story also happened around the Indus river. But that story is many years before this one, which means the climate has turned much hotter, and the tribes have advanced considerably.)

Initially, I had only two ideas/goals for this story.

• WORLDBUILDING: Describe how these civilizations lived and what made them a “civilization”.
• STORY: Start by delivering a message. The message is shocking, but people trust it because of its “signature” from their leader. Only the leader’s family know … that the leader has actually passed away and could not have sent this message.

This story idea was based on how communication and identification worked, which was through symbols in clay. (The early civilizations did everything through clay!)

So … how do we turn that into a full story?

We start searching for other nuggets we want to use.

• These civilizations are generally documented as peaceful. Their downfall was, likely, because they met others who were (to their surprise) not peaceful. (Their other downfall was natural disasters, as they heavily relied on the Indus river and its surrounding area, with no backups.)
• They had switched from hunters and gatherers to agriculture. They relied almost completely on that and trading, though that was also rare.
• The previous story set up this idea of hostility and warring tribes, but also tribes needing each other or being stronger through cooperation. We have many examples of those civilizations relying on trades to get goods they need, instead of making it all themselves.

I don’t want an exact repeat of the previous story. So, instead, let’s focus on the opposites of the previous story: a group of people that have already established trades and cooperation.

An outline

I tend to “lock up” when I try to think too far ahead. At some point, I just need to accept a really vague outline and just start writing the story.

So here’s the vague outline.

The story is structured around three trades (chapter 1, chapter 5/6, chapter 10).

• The first one goes wrong and starts a mystery
• The second one goes terribly wrong
• The third one resolves the whole story

Trades between whom? Indus Valley Civilization and the Sumer civilization (from Mesopotamia). (This is both true and useful within the story, as now I can display the two earliest civilizations in one story!) Crucially, these two do not speak the same language.

The character from Indus (A) is a rebel and a troublemaker. Frankly, they are spoiled / pampered. The Indus know nothing but peace and safety. (These people are the descendants of the Asha tribe from the previous story!)

A is somewhat forced into a certain job and lifestyle, and they hate that. Another character tries to explain that civilization means conceding some freedom for a greater benefit—which they obviously reject.

They screw up the trade by going off-script and ignoring customs/rules. This means the Indus are now without a bunch of resources upon which they relied. When A returns, however, they have received one mysterious item: a piece of writing that tells them to leave NOW, signed by their leader. Their leader, however, has passed away a few days ago.

This creates two storylines.

• Now A has to make things right and prove their worth to the tribe.
• They have to figure out what the message means and who faked it.

The character from Sumer (B) is in a constant state of war and aggression with nearby tribes. They barely sleep, never feel safe, have to fight for everything. They believe that anything is allowed to survive/be safe.

They, too, relied on that trade. (Mesopotamia could create loads of food, but nothing else. Resources for weapons, for example, would have to come from somewhere else.) Now that it falls through, they have to flee for their lives.

Their storyline is simpler.

• They run, run, run away from danger.
• Where do they run to? The only (peaceful) civilization they know, the Indus.
• Until they realize the Indus would be defenseless, so they divert their own tribe away during the climax
• (Optionally: they divert their own people away … but don’t come with them. They actually walk towards Indus to enjoy their safety, which is a huge betrayal, but also a logical step for a character who is only concerned with their own survival.)

As usual, I want to show different sides of civilization, war and social behavior. And I want to wrap that up into a mystery or action-packed plot. (Unfortunately, the short stories make it hard to really focus on character or deeper emotional arcs, because you simply don’t have the time to develop that.)

As I said, it’s a pretty vague direction and I’m not too sure how the character arcs and such will line up. But at this point, I just want to get to writing something.

Did that work?

Er, kind of, not really.

I wrote the first 2 chapters, then had to research something I couldn’t find in my notes. This research … showed I should’ve done more research.

In the mean time, more discoveries had been made about the Harappa civilization, casting doubt on this idea that they were 100% peaceful.

I learned more about this civilization and its trades, which clashed directly with what I had just written.

For example, for some reason, my notes made it seem as if Indus and Sumer were quite close by. As if trading would happen by just walking a few miles. Nope!

Evidence indicates that Indus made the long-ass trip to Sumer each time by boat, while Sumer refused to ever leave their plot of land for any trade.

Additionally, Indus had no money. Trading was their “money” or “transaction”.

My first two chapters were based on our protagonist not really knowing what trading was and quickly moving towards the trading spot. Well, that just felt silly now.

I did more research and left the story alone for a day, then I completely rewrote the start.

I also realized it was boring to just talk about many aspects of this civilization. I picked out the most interesting ones and made sure there was one chapter that took place there, or actually used this aspect.

For example, one of their great achievements is The Great Bath. I could say that in a paragraph, but that would be boring. It’s much more interesting to have an important conversation / action scene take place in the bath, describing it as we go. That way it actually sticks in readers minds.

In the end, this story was tough to write as there’s so many ways it can go (and so much information to give about each civilization). I could only write half the words I’d usually do in a day, because then I’d be stuck and overwhelmed by my own research. I needed to do a rewrite of chapter 3 and 4 as well before continuing.

But even at that speed, the story still gets done.

It ended up being too long. I had to remove some small tidbits of information anyway in the end, making most of my research a bit pointless :( (Oh well, at least I have this knowledge now and can use it for later stories.)

And then the story was done!

4. The Gupramils

This story is, again, a continuation of the previous ones. (I really try to keep groups of stories together, as it feels more satisfying and less confusing than hopping to an entirely different continent for each story.)

We are now around the period of Ancient Greece and Rome. Most of those earliest civilizations have now seen their downfall. But this period intersects precisely with the—often forgotten—golden age of India.

That’s what this story was originally about: the Gupta empire and what happened around it. (An alternative would be to talk about China, which is arguably an even bigger and longer lasting dynasty from around this period. But I had to choose, and I chose to leave China for later.)

However, then I realized that the timeline of the Gupta empire really did not line up with when this story was supposed to happen.

So I had to move it to an earlier point of time. Fortunately, the name still worked, because then we meet chandragupta (and the tamil kings).

The Plan

Essentially,

• India is a mess of warfare and clans and different civilizations (a semi-consequence of those early Indus civilizations)
• Chandragupta comes and wages war to unify them, which is another angle: war with a pure goal. (In fact, when famine struck his empire, the sorrow-stricken Chandragupta fasted to death.)
• His grandson (Ahsoka) is another great story. He initially wages bloody war to (re)capture even more of India, until he realizes how much sorrow and bloodshed he causes. This forces him to change his ways and actually pave the way to this blossoming “Gupta empire”
• The tree Tamil kings, however, are the only ones to resist. “Nobody conquers the Tamil Kings”

This is easier to turn into a story. It basically already is a good story!

• Chapters 1–5 are about Chandragupta and the Tamil kings resisting. (The Tamil kings being merchants claiming the shorelines of India and becoming unbelievably rich through that trade. Which helps when trying to defend yourself.)
• Chapters 6–10 are about his son trying to do the same thing, then making that unexpected shift.

In all of this, the most logical main character is one of those Tamil kings. They are the ones in danger of being conquered, they are the ones fighting for their lives/territory, and their legacy actually lives on until this day. This is a story about successfully defending yourself, dotted with “funny” or “unexpected” ways in which the Tamil kings just will not be conquered :p (Maybe the gods have something to do with that.)

(On top of that, I can bring the Tamil kings back in later stories this cycle, showing they are still not conquered!)

I did, however, write something else in my notes. Each story in this cycle has a general “life lesson”.

The one for this story was “no love without loss” or “no love without vulnerability” (which is more true but doesn’t sound as great).

And yes, the Saga of Life is lacking some good love stories!

So here’s the idea.

• There’s this woman from the Tamils who is just breathtakingly beautiful and amazing in general.
• Ahsoka actually gets her, but casts her aside and doesn’t really give her any time or attention.
• She obviously fights his invasion and dies in the process.
• Ahsoka now realizes what he had and feels such overwhelming love that he completely changes his ways.

The challenge is, again, to avoid repetition. Our history is just full of warfare and battle and bloodshed! It’s a never-ending list of empires appearing, conquering, then disappearing. I really want to try and focus on more specific and unique situations, with unique characters doing something unexpected or memorable. (Writing a bunch of fight scenes and eventually saying “side A won” obviously doesn’t make for good stories.)

That’s why I really want to focus on these unique characters (Chandragupta, Ahsoka, Tamil kings), what they stand for, and what their empire or rule looked like.

Also, this means we have a time jump halfway! Which is a unique structure with which we can play around.

Did that work?

Kind of. I had to forego more than 2 viewpoints, as it just didn’t fit in the small length of the story, and it also didn’t add much.

My initial version barely devoted time to explaining these different cultures, their technology, etcetera. I purposely wrote less than I could to keep some wiggle room for adding this extra explanation and richness in the second version. (This simply means that I try to hit 12,000 or 13,000 words on the first draft, leaving some headroom until we reach 15,000 words.)

The plan above, although it has a clear setup, is also quite vague on how to go about it. This caused some spontaneous ideas that were good, but also a few that led nowhere.

But, all in all, this story was quite smooth sailing—probably because it’s built on several interesting real life events—and the edit should fix the remaining issues.

Moving on!

The Run of Bar-Bar

The Dutch title for this has a great double meaning with the word “barbarian” (which is barbaar in Dutch). The English title is the best I could come up with that stayed true to that. It did require me to write some important running sequence into the story to have the title make sense :p

Anyway, it’s about barbarians versus Roman Empire. The great struggle in this time period that was happening in and around Europe. Unsurprisingly, the “lesson” of this story is “no civilization without chaos”. There can be no concept of order and structure if there’s no chaos and anarchy to remind you.

I did not, however, want to write another story about two opposing parties who fight it out. (We already did that multiple times now, especially this cycle.)

As I did more research, I realized a more interesting angle. The Romans actually often allied with the Barbarians. Many poor or disadvantaged Romans actually sought out a Barbarian tribe because they had heard there was more kindness and sharing there than in the great Roman empire.

It’s a theme I’ve always wanted to show in a story. Most of our advances (in terms of law and social order) have come by defying that order. By killing the mad king, deposing the dictator, revolting until things changed for the better.

The Plan

As such, the vague outline for the story became …

• A group of Roman elites secretly seeks out Barbarians. They ask them to do a “barbaric task”: kill their own leader. He is a terrible leader and leading the empire into ruin.
• We follow one storyline where they discuss, plan the mission, then try to execute it.
• We follow another storyline where a Roman, obsessed with order and civilization, tries to depose the leader using “legal” methods.
• At first, the Barbarians are unsure, and the Roman seems to make headway.
• But when he gets too close to actually changing anything, he is attacked an incarcerated.
• This exact event—seeing how justice is perverted when the king feels threatened—is what convinces the barbarians to complete their mission.

So yes. The Saga of Life is getting a Lawyer storyline mixed with a Heist storyline. Let’s not think too far ahead and just start writing that.

(I really want to make more characters reappear between stories. It feels a little too disconnected now. So I’ll try to make the shepherds from the previous story in this time period relevant somehow. Also, my notes state that the Romans and Barbarians were being pushed around by the relentless Huns at this time, so let’s keep that as a consistent threat driving things.)

Our final check: do we have a goal, an obstacle ( = conflict), that is urgent and with potential loss?

• The goal is to remove the terrible leader before they make a bigger mess. (Perhaps they’re planning an all-out attack, with the ENTIRE army, to wipe the Barbarians off the face of the earth for good.)
• The obstacle is the leader itself, having all the power.
• It is urgent, for the leader makes these terrible decisions all day and will enact their plan soon. (Perhaps they are “visiting” some town nearby that makes this moment the best one … for a brief window of time.)
• If the barbarians don’t do it, they lose good relations with Rome and/or their entire lifestyle.
• If the lawyer doesn’t win, he will be crushed by his destroyed faith in civilization and law. (Figuratively. Though it becomes literal when he is sentenced to death.)

Yeah, seems fine to me. Let’s write.

How did that go?

Pfew, this was a weird one. The setup was good enough for me to write the first 8 chapters in a single day. It’s all right there: promise of a heist, someone fighting against injustice but forcing themselves to stick to the letter of the law, two opposing cultures both butting heads and working together. A lot is known about Romans and Barbarians, which helps to find small nuggets of history to include.

My only “hesitation” came from the subject matter. The stories can be quite … adult from time to time. This story is about what civilization means, what law means, and by extension what “sins” or “vices” mean. That means I have to introduce actual vices and tough subject matter.

I only realized this as the story progressed, which means these themes are missing from chapters 1-4. So I already know I have to do a big revision to change those.

I am a firm believer in total freedom and reject almost all of the weird little rules and ideas people place on themselves. (Under the guise of “culture” or “civilization”.) I, therefore, have no trouble introducing some heavy topics, including sex or substance abuse, into stories that are also for children.

That said, I am not stupid or looking for anarchy. I want to actually write a good story that helps children understand the concepts and executes it well.

(I taught myself how to read by consistently reading stories waaaaay above my age since, well, since I taught myself to read at a young age :p This has always been a huge advantage and made me more mature and knowledgeable than my peers, in some but not all respects. There is simply no evidence that censoring content, for whatever reason, is better than total freedom. The issue is when you’re inconsistent: you censor some, but not others, which leads to growing up with a lopsided world view. All of that to say that The Saga of Life is and will always be free to tell whatever story it wants to tell.)

In the end, I found a balance through some (heavier) use of the narrator. These stories have always had a third-person narrator that pops up now and again. By having it pop up around these “sensitive moments” for some slightly longer explanation or confirmation, I feel the stories don’t stray into dangerous territory.

Then it came to chapter 9. All storylines come to a head, a big climax, stuff must be resolved. But how? I don’t know!

Even worse, the title of the story wasn’t included in any way whatsoever in the story. And, well, now was the last moment to actually use it.

I took a break, exercised, then came back with a lot of ideas and plans. Plans that required even more revision of the first chapters.

This was my best idea on how to resolve the “run of Bar-Bar” (or the “henhouse of Bar-Bar”, as is the literal translation of the Dutch title).

• The character Bar-Bar (already in the story as a tribe leader) has an odd magic.
• If they build an enclosure (“henhouse”) around an area, all animals inside become theirs. (They listen to all commands, similar to slaves.)
• This is how those Germanic tribes (Barbarians) acquired such large amounts of cattle that they use to a survive.
• It’s also the trick to making the climax work.
• Everything goes wrong and a huge revolt breaks out around the palace, involving the king (who they were supposed to murder), two protagonists about to receive a terrible punishment after being imprisoned, and more.
• So Bar-Bar goes on a run (around the square), building that enclosure, trapping everyone inside. Just in time, they finish and get them all—including the king—under their command, which saves the situation.

As always, you only realize the true themes and interesting bits of a story once you write it.

This odd magic is not only, well, odd, but also has great potential for future stories. (Mostly because it can so easily be abused. Create a huge magical enclosure around an entire city, and they’re all yours!)

The truly interesting bit is the discussion of laws and how they’re changed, the discussion that vice only exists because some rules that say what’s a virtue. I only realize that halfway writing the story, which means the first part almost always needs a huge overhaul.

(Also, the character of the Rattlerat only sprang into existence halfway. I even considered replacing the current protagonist with them entirely, as they seemed more interesting. Also, their literal Dutch name would be Gossip Rat, and I considered making them Gossip Goat, but having a character be different animal species in different languages would be too chaotic :p)

This surely made me overshoot the word count. But I decided to figure that out during the final revisions + translation and move on.

The Illness of Intellect

(The Ailment of Apprehension? The Malady of Mistreatment?)

This time period is roughly the middle ages or dark ages. Although there surely was some progress and fun places to be, the term “dark age” is still suitable (for certain parts of the world) in my view.

In this period, most science and healthcare was suppressed or perverted. The idea of a social hierarchy was strengthened and just made worse and worse, even though the leaders could clearly see the negative impact of that on the world.

A sketch of an idea

This coalesced into the following sketch of an idea:

• A story in which some person with a very simple illness, is mistreated severely, causing it to get worse.
  • All “doctors” or “specialists” are dumb and just repeating whatever nonsense cure others invented.
  • Which should kick off some adventure or race against the clock to get the actual solution.
• And another person knows this (or has another related story line), but fears speaking out against peer pressure, because it would mean losing all social status and getting even poorer / lonely.
  • In this storyline, it’s about more general “wisdom”—people are parroting some clearly false statement, all to belong to the group => in fact, a nice plot twist near the end might be that “everyone knew what the said was false; everyone was afraid to change it”

Clearly, this is extremely vague.

Researching it further, I mostly turned to a general “witch hunt” story. (It simply adds tension. It’s a well-known and related fact about that time.)

• Our first (ill) protagonist, fearing for their live, seeks out a mysterious witch.
• Which makes them a witch by association and gets them involved in a hunt, then burning at the stake, then miraculous survival (or not).
• The witch actually cures them in the end.

That could be combined with a story about “you learn by trial and error”: our protagonists are so afraid to make a mistake or entertain some progressive thought, that progression of a whole civilization is stifled.

• This protagonist should be related to the doctors and witches somehow?
• As in, they fail to progress, which means failing to find a medicine for that other protagonist.
• I just need to “connect the dots” here.
• Wouldn’t it make more sense if this person (or their parents who are scientists or something) is persecuted as a witch because of those experiments?

This is a possible combination of the ideas.

• The ill protagonist is extremely rich. Maybe they’re royal family, or noble, or something close. That’s how they can pay for all those “advanced healers” and stuff. But all that money does not actually cure her.
  • Inciting Incident: find a cure or die. (Urgent, certain loss, goal is to survive, obstacle is the illness.)
• The other protagonist comes from a very poor background. She is cast out, alone, nearly dying from hunger and cold.
  • Inciting Incident: her goal is to belong to the group, giving her safety and food. (Urgent, certain loss, goal is to survive, obstacle is the fact she has nothing to offer)
  • She lies about someone and gets them drowned for being a witch, just to belong to the group. (“Yes! I was there. This woman had a room full of skeletons and a potion brewing!”)
  • She invents something, but asks the other to really stay quiet about it or she’s called a witch, just to belong to the group.
  • But now that she belongs, she obviously has to take over their opinions and their ideas. And they especially despise those rich noble families.

This is more like it. Over time, the ill one will seek out help from those that are supposed to “despise” her (coming in contact with the other one), as the other gets involved more and more deeply in lies and potential giveaways that might mark her a witch. This culminates in both being tracked down, caught after a chase, and burned at the stake / drowned / whatever witch trial they come up with.

But an invention helps them survive and combining powers, finishing their experiments, finds a cure for her illness just in time.

(And, as stated, some plot twists about people knowing everyone is lying and still going along. And how that has stifled progression in forever. The cure is probably something obvious and simple—maybe one of the others stumbled onto it “by accident” before, but was afraid to let it be known, for fear of being called a witch!)

Yes, that’s enough for me, let’s start.

Did it work?

@TODO

The Moon of Otto

This is one of those cases where my original notes are completely unhelpful. They just said “do one about the Ottoman Empire, very big, very long-lasting”. Great, past Tiamo, just great.

I did some more research. This cycle is about “People of Promise”, and there are surely bigger or more impactful civilizations than Ottoman … but it turned out my initial choice was rather good.

The Ottoman Empire should be in your top 10 list of most influential “people”. Moreover, their peak happened exactly during the time period in which the story is about to take place.

(The Mongols, for example, are even bigger and more influential. But their time frame is wrong for a story in this time period. And they’re so influential that I probably want multiple stories for them.)

Alright, so we stick to this.

What unique thing can we do?

In the end, most empires are very much alike. The same obsession with conquering more territory. The same downfall at the hands of either a “bigger army” or “infighting for succession”.

I figured out some unique approaches:

• We can tell its entire story from start to finish. (Not in great detail, of course. But a story with large time jumps that shows both the start and downfall of an empire, which we haven’t done yet.)
• This is also interesting because it allows us to reference other stories (or them to reference this one) as we go, signaling how much time has passed, connecting everything.
• They are mostly credited with huge advances in arts, science, laws, literature, etcetera. We can focus more on that, as opposed to warfare.
• They also pretty much had a stranglehold on the Silk Route and Mediterranean trade. This is what caused the exploration of Columbus and such (finding an alternative trade route), which caused colonization and all that came after it. (Which leads into the next story pretty well.)
• This also made a city like Venice really rich, which kickstarted the Renaissance in Europe.
• They actually had a unique answer to this infighting (“hereditary nobles” who want to claim the throne, or get more power, or whatever)
  • In fact, after some trouble, they basically said “screw the old system, let’s create an entire civilization from scratch”. Which is, you know, also not something people did regularly.
  • Their answer was “devsirme” (or blood debt). They recruited Christian boys from conquered territories, to convert them to Islam, prevent them from having children, then put them to work in the most important positions.
  • Because they were outside of politics and not related to anything, and no kids of theirs would appear in the system, this problem of power struggles was mostly prevented.

That’s what you get when an empire is this big and lasts this long. They turn out to be the fuel that caused loads of well-known fires.

How do we turn that into story?

Originally, “The Moon of Otto” was just a translation of a Dutch pun. (In Dutch, if you take the name literally, it says “The Otto Moon Empire”.)

Then I learned their flag was an actual crescent moon and star. And I decided to just stick with it and see what we get.

My first instinct? Some kind of “guiding star”. In all decisions made, through the centuries, some guiding star leads the way for our protagonist and helps the empire grow.

I also think we could go for the perspective of one such boy recruited in that “devsirme” system. Their initial fear, torn from family, brainwashed. How they climb the ladder and actually get a powerful position.

We do need a second perspective for the moments before (and potentially after) this boy’s recruitment. This should be an artist or scientist woman, showing off the advancements and standardization.

• Let’s make her a (half) goddess of the Moon.
• Her control of the tides helps their naval dominance and sea trade. (This is a mystery that gets revealed somewhere.)
• Every night, she paints the moon. She also puts the Moon in everything she makes, from architecture, to poems, to laws, etcetera.
• She has the burning desire inside her to find the (half) god of the Sun?

Here’s a vague outline.

• Chapter 1 = leader is presumed dead, their sons all pipe up and nearly kill each other to get the throne. Until the leader returns alive and realizes this just won’t work. They call their current laws and systems completely void and start from scratch.
  • (As that boy obviously hasn’t entered the story yet, such scenes are from the perspective of that Moon goddess.)
• Chapter 2 = That boy is recruited for the “devsirme” and ends up in the empire.
• Chapter 3-6 = The boy slowly regains strength and starts to climb ranks. We make time jumps as the empire grows, we get references to other empires, etcetera.
  • Around chapter 6 = Columbus and such start their routes (to prevent trade being choked), Renaissance kicks off
• Midpoint = They stage a successful revolt (perhaps after a failed one) and undo the devsirme system, seizing a lot of power at once.
• Chapter 7-8 = the last of the Habsburgs (Charles II) enters the story (mostly to come back to the “inbreeding” and “that’s why people need to move around” thing from story 2)
  • However, the power struggles that entered the empire weaken it and make it shrink.
  • Their advancements and freedom is rapidly scaled back to put all resources into warfare and nothing else.
• Chapter 9 = World war 1 is shaping up. Our two protagonists make some huge decision here.
  • Here’s an idea: this one night, she is shocked to see there is no moon (or “the moon looks/feels wrong”). This causes them to flee just in time.
  • As their empire is bombed behind them, they realize that aircraft from the enemy was hiding the moon from view. They’re one of the few to survive this event.
• Chapter 10 = the empire is defeated at the end of World War 1. It’s dissolved into tiny chunks, basically leading to the MIddle-Eastern conflicts we know today.

The general lesson of this story is “No power without the powerless”, which might be amended with a general lesson about pursuing “useless” things (like art) because you never know when they might be useful.

This is still quite vague. I’ll need to figure out the details of the powers, the specific scenes, etcetera as we go.

(Like, how do we get to see the scenes at the other side of the world, with Columbus and such? Does that goddess perhaps influence the waves to make Columbus end up at the wrong continent?)

At least we have a strong start. Writing that in more detail usually reveals the other details.

Let’s write that

Okay, so, I mostly just followed the outline. Not much to say there :p

The story did become too long, though. And that’s even before some major edits I’d still like to make.

For example,

• The Ottoman arts/architecture doesn’t get enough time now. The story is very much about the importance of art in a big culture/empire, so this seems needed.
• I want to rewrite the boy’s time at Devsirme to actually include one or two named friends, because now it seems as if he—in hundreds of years of working together—never became friends or even learned their name. This would also allow a tie-in to story #4 and a better explanation for how easily the revolution succeeds in the end.
• The lesson “no power without powerless” is almost completely forgotten. It just didn’t match with the story in the end. (The much better lesson is “no empire without downfall” which this entire story barrels towards all the time.)

So yes, it will need one major rewrite and then maybe an exception to my max word count for Saga of Life stories :p Other than that, I think it turned out quite well on the first go.

The Tea Colony

Ah, we had to do one about America / American Revolution. (Not the Civil War that comes after.) This stretches the time period a little, but I’m fine with that, as the event is close enough (in time and theme) to the others in the Second Conflict.

We also can’t do one story to cover the whole thing, of course.

To hit on the major highlights of what happened and why, we’ll need at least 2 stories, maybe 3. This story will be the first one. (We already did a few stories about empires or events ending in this cycle, so I don’t want to do another one.)

Also because this allows linking it to many other elements already discussed. For example, the entire reason America was colonized by multiple countries was because it was discovered by Colombus, as mentioned in the previous story.

But how do we turn it into a story? How do we mostly start a storyline, without making this particular story feel unfinished and unsatisfying? I had no idea, because this “idea” document had no plan whatsoever. It only had a few notes.

• Structure the story around Prisoner’s Dilemmas.
• We’re following the rebellion, but there’s not much actual fighting. (They rebel mostly by boycotting or farmers refusing to work and such.)
• The leader of the rebellion is way too strict and controlling. (I want the quote “I don’t trust any rebellion where love is not allowed” to be part of the story somehow.)

More research

I already had quite a solid understanding of the timeline and events here, thanks to previous research for Saga of Life. Still, it works better to re-do the research and write all your notes down, than to try and concoct a story from knowledge in your head.

And in doing so, I found a few interesting tidbits.

• Both sides (America and Britain) employed Native Americans and their slaves while fighting. However, because the American army actually depended on these people (because they lived on the same land), they were less inclined to set slaves free or treat them well. (There’s a big “what if” here about whether all these people would’ve been treated better if Britain won.)
• For that same reason, the American army had to be much more careful about picking its military targets. Because they were fighting on their soil. This was obviously much harder in a time without telephone and internet.
• The USA had to declare its own existence/independence. The war itself was far from over at that point, because the Brits obviously didn’t agree with their colonies doing that. As such, this seems like a strong ending for this story without actually ending the thread about the war of independence.
• One of the most unique parts in all of this is just how many characters are involved. Other empires were created by one leader, or maybe one powerful family. The urge for power or selfish gain almost always won. But the creation of the USA was the end result of loads of really powerful people deciding to work together from start to finish.

There are seven “founding fathers”, and loads of left-out characters that are often mentioned as also belonging to that group, but that’s just too much for one story. Additionally, some of them really only become important after the war.

That’s why I limited to just: John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and John Jay.

• Washington used to fight for Britain, then switched sides. He was instrumental in starting the original war that led to the war of independence, so the story starts and ends with him.
• Jay rose to prominence due to his actions fighting against Britain’s shenanigans. That’s the meat of this story, so he’s the guy to spearhead it.
• Jefferson actually wrote the entire Declaration of Independence.
• John Adams was the leader and key figure throughout all of this. So key that I’m surprised I barely heard his name in all the years before. (Most of the famous names come into play after the war for independence, when trying to establish a functional state and then handle a civil war.)
• Benjamin Franklin was just the most interesting person ever, being an inventor as well. He was also sent to France to convince them to join the war, which seems important.

How do we wrangle that into a structure?

So, with all that research and all my experience writing short stories in my head, I wrote this outline.

• Chapter 1: Washington is intercepted when going to France territory to tell them to stop. They say no, but treat him really well and send him back. Later, his regiment accidentally meets one from France and an important commander carrying a diplomatic message (Jumonville) is shot. Later, when Washington must surrender he accidentally signs off on “yes I killed Jumonville”. This kicks off the 7 years war, which Britain wins.
  • Incorporate his getting intel from Native Americans. That’s how he brings one of theirs to their group?
  • The reason this meeting goes so wrong (and Jumonville is killed) is a Prisoner’s Dilemma. Both sides are asked to pick peace of war, knowing the best solution is if they both pick peace, but if only one picks peace and the other doesn’t … well this happens.
• Chapter 2: Britain declares broke and starts taxing and mistreating.
  • Boycots, Committees of Correspondence
  • In areas where it’s possible, British loyalists are bullied
  • Washington switches sides, but everyone is suspicious.
• Chapter 3: Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, Britain takes complete control
  • Our “Sons of Liberty” is formed, with a few characters being involved with the actual missions, while others watch from above and strategize.
• Chapter 4: Benedict Arnold on his way to conquer Fort Ticonderoga, meets Sons of Liberty, disputes about leadership.
• Chapter 5: The attack on the fort, which breaks into the Prisoner’s Dilemma when some are captured.
  • They start getting secret aid from France and Spain (though that is a mystery now)
  • The Brits get even angrier and lash out even more.
• Chapter 6: continuation Prisoner’s Dilemma.
• Chapter 7: Thomas Jefferson starts writing Declaration of Independence. The others start thinking about a way to reclaim Boston and win.
• Chapter 8: They butcher his declaration, Knox uses Ticonderoga to reinforce Boston
• Chapter 9: Fight for Boston, win, Independence declared!
  • Most importantly, however, this is another Prisoner’s Dilemma. Multiple people get the same ultimatum at the same time, and cannot communicate/stall/whatever, so they need to accurately predict or trust what the other will do.
• Chapter 10: hints about how it continues

When writing the little “marketing blurb” for this story, I added that they had to rely on an unpredictable myth/wonder. It just fit right and sounded cool. I already knew this would be added metaphorically (they have to rely on cooperation and trust on a large scale between the states), but how do we add it more obviously?

In previous stories, the “Demigod of Luck” has been mentioned several times. This feels like the time to actually introduce them. (Because the Americans WERE lucky a lot during their war, such as French/Spanish aid arriving when they were completely out of weapons/ammo.)

So here they actually appear. In the final climax, they can’t fight their way out, and have to trust on this demigod being who he says he is and working his magic one more time.

Finally, this outline is a bit sparse. Filling an entire chapter with “Jefferson starts writing the Declaration” obviously won’t work—that’s only part of a chapter at most.

This is on purpose. The true focus, as always, should be on the characters and their struggles or relationships. With the Saga of Life, I can actually make history personal, specific, immediate, instead of being forced to stay abstract and at a high level.

As such, all those gaps are filled with the general conflict of …

• Two lovers who are forbidden from being in love by their strict rebellion leader. (Which slowly leads to people considering a mutiny against their own leader, because they wouldn’t want them to become boss too.)
• Distrust between people from different backgrounds (a Native American, a slave, an American). How some of them bond, some of them just become more and more aggressive. Which comes to a head in the Prisoner’s Dilemma where you must come clean about your actual feeling of trust.
• The general hypocrisy / self-denial of people fighting for freedom while keeping slaves and treating them as such. (And how the Brits constantly try to lure slaves away by promising them freedom.)

That sounded like a plan. So I wrote that. (I was still very sick at this time. I don’t know what it was, but I had a high fever and non-functioning lungs for almost a month. Which is why I kept working at a muuuuch slower pace.)

How did that go?

I’m not sure, actually. Because this is a solid plan, based on real historic events, writing it was quite easy. I knew what was supposed to happen in each chapter and I knew exactly what major points to hit.

At the same time, this turned the story into more of a … history book? It’s less and less a story with character and tension, and more just a dramatized summary of events (from the first half of the War for Independence).

I probably won’t change that for this particular story. It’s fine. It’s an experiment, this is not the average kind of story, and it still flows quite well. (At least, after some revisions that reinforce themes and prolong some tense scenes.)

But in the future, any story that tries to tell so much about a historic event, should not try to include so many things. Reading the story, you feel like you can’t catch your breath as you tumble into a new event, a new event, a new reveal, and so forth. There’s barely time for introspection or character moments. Because of this, the big fight for Boston at the end also isn’t as tense and grandiose as I would’ve liked it to be.

As I said, revisions should alleviate some of those issues, but it won’t change the core structure of the story. It was simply set up as a pretty quick adventure through the highlights of a specific historic war. And that’s truly what it became.

The Supernatural Sloths

The original idea for this story was simply a fun “snack story”.

The sloths have built this paradise for themselves with slides, levers, tracks, bridges, etcetera. It felt like a fun place to visit. It also fits the animal, as all this machinery and all these inventions allow them to be lazy and still move around.

As the cycle continued, however, this story grew more and more serious. This is mostly because of the Flamefeaster, which has the power to burn relationships over time. I picked this story as the perfect moment to actually use and explore this further.

The Sloths have this object. In fact, their entire empire is built around it and connected to it. Which means …

• If you interact with another sloth, after some time … your relationship burns out and you simply forget each other. That’s why the sloths are very individual and very hesitant to play together or meet up.
• Humans have found this place before, but have always stayed too long and forgotten it before they could tell other humans. That’s why, to their eyes, this is “unexplored territory” when the story starts.

That’s a nice emotional core, but how does it turn into a story?

A general plan

At a very high level, the plan seems to be …

• Chapters 1-4: a human discovers this land, tries to understand it and open it up to other humans, ends up forgetting it by the time they leave. Though they are suspicious, this human is good and works with them to perhaps find a cure for the curse. (This human is more afraid of them, as they’ve also forgotten what it means to live in the wilderness.)
• Chapters 5-10: a new human enters, but this one is smarter and immediately becomes aggressive. They intent to cut all the trees and mow down this sloth paradise. The sloths make the mistake of trusting this one too, while this one is not good.
  • In the climax, they basically have to repurpose their machinery to protect the paradise, while trying to get the humans to touch the curse too.

The story is kind of split into two chunks. The first time the human barely fails to make something happen. The second time actually succeeds and requires a big fight to overcome.

Crucially, our Goddess of Time (Ismaraldah) helps in both cases.

• The first time is very “early” and she is alone. She carefully researches why their relationships seem to “burn out” and manages to get out of there without suffering the same infliction.
• The second time she comes back with Didrik, her lover. She is not alone anymore … but during the fight they now both get touched by this curse.
  • Her final chapters end with deciding to execute on their plan to “stay together forever”, which they alluded to numerous times. (So far, Didrik can’t travel with her to times outside his own lifetime, and even then it makes him sick.)

Through all of this, our protagonist is a very restless sloth. They have these big dreams and wishes (or “desires”), they feel restless and uncomfortable in their body, but they don’t know what to do with it. In sloth culture, there’s this huge taboo on feeling “tired” or being “out of breath” :p

This ensures the story still has momentum and pace, even though it’s all about lazy sloths. It also allows revealing the central lesson of the story: “no rest without work”. The only way to really feel at ease and sleep well, is if you spent the day working and playing until you’re exhausted. As they learn this lesson by the end, they finally activate the sloths (during the final fight), and then sleep well.

(I love the fact that the Saga of Life can end stories with “and then the animals slept well” and it feels fitting.)

To bring it all together, I wanted to add one more idea. (Now we have just a very vague overview, which isn’t enough to actually turn it into 15,000 words of story.)

I mentioned “desires” before. I introduced this idea earlier in the cycle, such as with Buddhism that says all suffering comes from desire. So let’s double down on it here.

• The desire of the first human to help is what eventually causes her to burn out too quickly. (I think we can make this Mindy, to have her come back from her earlier story.)
• The second human(s) have employed a special device/being that can grant desires (like granting wishes). People come to them to explain their desire, and it comes true!
• It turns out, however, that this isn’t the case. Instead, when you visit them, your real desire is removed and replaced with a fake one. Namely, one that suits this company and their goals. So “I want to become a great musician!” is just replaced by “I want to own 100 products from company X!” and, sure, they make it come true :p

The main thread connecting it all, therefore, is their search for this “wish granter”.

A little more specific now

I was tempted to just start writing with that vague plan, but I’ve learned it helps to already reorganize the thoughts into some order. It removes writer’s block later and helps make decisions more easily.

• Chapter 1: introduction sloth paradise and protagonist, new human arrives, tension
• Chapter 2: as she researches them, they try to get her to touch the Flamefeaster and be gone. Only our protagonist trusts her and they make a plan to find this “wish granter” together
• Chapter 3: they search through paradise, talking a bit more and explaining a bit more, but only stumble upon Ismaraldah. Meanwhile, the other sloths have overcome their struggles to meet up and decide what to do with this human. They decide they don’t trust her and she has to go.
• Chapter 4: Ismaraldah helps them with more information about wish granter. The human claims that she has realized the reason for their curse and a possible cure! She eagerly starts to work on it, with the sloths trying to help, but they come too late and she walks away forgetful.
• Chapter 5: A new human arrives. This time, they all trust her immediately, and start explaining their paradise and keeping her away from the curse. Until the human does get into trouble … and it’s revealed that they have their own protection against it.
• Chapter 6: The protagonist calls upon Ismaraldah. They spy on the new humans and discover their secret plans to destroy the whole thing AND their access to the wish granter. They get found out, and in the resulting scuffle/fight Ismaraldah and Didrik both get caught in the curse.
• Chapter 7: They rapidly go through ways to solve it, while trying to gain access to the wish granter. The humans make progress on their plans, destroying the first few trees. The other sloths still refuse to do anything or even talk with the protagonist, for fear of burning out their relationship.
• Chapter 8: They find and use the wish granter. But it reveals itself to be the fake I explained before.
• Chapter 9: big climax as the humans destroy the trees, the protagonist tries to rally everyone and have them do something about it, and Ismaraldah+Didrik help but also try to fix themselves before they forget each other.
• Chapter 10: in the end, many sloths (and humans) have forgotten each other, but the paradise is saved. One instance of that “protection” the humans had against the curse is saved and given to the protagonist. (They decide to keep the Flamefeaster as protection for themselves?) Ismaraldah + Didrik flee to execute their plan. Many sloths still decide to tell their wish to the fake wish granter, because getting rid of it still makes them happier. (“Desire is the cause of all suffering.”)

Yeaaaah something like that. This is more than enough planning ahead, let’s write this.

The end result

Oops, I forgot to write this part of the diary just as I finished writing the story. So I’ll have to write about this part from memory.

For the most part, I followed the outline. A few events shifted around (one chapter later or earlier), but that always happens.

Some events changed entirely. For example, one instance of the protection against the Flamefeaster is not given to the protagonist, but belongs to another character I invented as I went and which needed a nicer conclusion to their arc. (At least, that’s how I felt.)

The biggest challenge here was simple expanding on this very concise, vague outline. It’s easy to say “oh, for two chapters, the humans and sloths fight it out over their territory”. But then you actually have to write the chapters, and it’s incredibly boring or pointless to just describe some blow-by-blow action.

Instead—I think I also wrote a blog article about this back then—most of the action is summarized or happens off-screen. The chapters try to be more creative than that, focus on clever actions or important revelations, as that makes it more meaningful and unique.

My biggest worry was the fact that the buildup is perhaps slightly slow. But on rereading, it’s absolutely fine. We have this very odd civilization (with sloths not wanting to meet their best friend and such), and a new human arriving (always interesting and curious), which creates enough mystery and open questions to have forward momentum.

During revisions, I mostly removed some paragraphs of meaningless action and really tried to focus on the odd culture and machinery of Slumberland.

The Dwellers of Holed

This is the “brainteaser” or “philosophical” story of this cycle. (I usually do one or two. Often the hardest to write, but end up being my favorite.)

It’s based on a very simple idea.

• We start on a new planet, with a tiny tribe of cavemen. They live in slightly harsh conditions, but it’s doable. More interestingly, they find all these objects lying around that they don’t understand. Until another one falls from the sky that warrants closer inspection: a huge lightbulb that never goes out.
• As they research this lightbulb, they discover the thing contains memories and an energy source. They also discover the other “alien objects” have similar attributes.
• Until they discover that these things aren’t alien—they’re theirs. They crash landed on this planet long ago, which sent them back to cavemen times.
• Slowly they discover more and more (why they fled, what their life was like before), until the final conclusion: this cycle has happened many times before. (I want to make the reader think about the possibility of humans not actually being from Earth, for example.) They keep building civilizations and life, only for something to destroy it and for them to have to do it all over again.
• The main protagonist has struggled with this fear the whole story. What’s the point of any of it? Why keep doing anything if every empire has a downfall? Until they finally find the strength to do it all the same, which prompts the narrator to call them “an absurd hero”, which closes the story.

In a way, the entire story is just a thought experiment. Could Earth have had other civilizations before. Could humans have appeared because we crash landed here, instead of evolving here? Could this be true for other planets?

The falling down of the light bulb is mostly there to create actual story.

• It comes from the Goddess of the Moon (from story #7). She has made tons of these lightbulbs, saving her happiest memories (e.g. with her lover, Goddess of the Sun), which can run for so long that they basically “never go out”.
• These memories and pictures help unravel the mystery …
• But they also help reach the final conclusion, because these memories are just so happy and uplifting, that they decide to keep trying and keep living their lives every day.

A more specific outline

As before, we need a little more specificity than that. How does this turn into story?

• Chapter 1: explanation life and weird mysteries, protagonist feels unhappy and wonders what’s the point, then lightbulb falls down.
  • Perhaps the best mystery would be a message scribbled into some cave wall. Something they don’t understand. Something of which they don’t know the author.
  • The protagonist has a few stories in his head which he keeps telling his kids. They love to hear it, but they do wonder “how do you KNOW all that, dad?”
• Chapter 2: examination lightbulb, we meet our second protagonist: she is unhappy with her current marriage and doesn’t even know why their culture has this marriage law.
• Chapter 3: they get the lightbulb to play a memory, they discover its apparatus matches the weird objects, our second protagonist pines for someone else but stops herself because she has to stay with her husband.
• Chapter 4: another lightbulb falls down (maybe 2), and they play the memories. The second protagonist feels really happy with that other person, but keeps stopping herself to stay with her husband.
• Chapter 5: a spaceship crashes into the planet. (This is the entire scene: they notice the danger, try to understand it, flee from it, then barely survive the crash.) The spaceship itself does NOT survive the crash at all => this is to mark the fact that crash landing so hard on a planet might make you lose a lot.
  • Also, they find no body and assume the pilot got out.
• Chapter 6: so they search for that pilot, stumbling upon even more lightbulbs, more memories and more information about the past.
• Chapter 7: our first protagonist gives up, too demotivated to even get up anymore. The second protagonist finally decides to tell her husband she wants to end it, but then chickens out at the last moment.
  • All this time, there’s this “tension” about this escaped pilot that might attack them at any time.
• Chapter 8: they arrange all the lightbulbs to light up the cave. They use them to hold a nice party together, which both protagonists miss because of their woes.
  • They also, with trouble, realize the spaceship was unpiloted. As that’s a thing those “machines” can do, apparently.
• Chapter 9: until those lights reveal other spaceship parts in some corners they could never visit. This helps them connect the dots about their own arrival: some of the memories they saw, of people being unhappy and a spaceship crashing, that was about them. This also helps them finally decode the scribblings on the wall.
• Chapter 10: it reveals their last decades were horrible and their life here is actually quite nice.
  • Which convinces our first protagonist to get up again and play with his kids
  • And our second protagonist to finally tell the truth and end her marriage.because the main lesson of this story is “no new beginnings without endings”.
  • In general, those lightbulbs are used by kids for games and seen as wondrous, while our protagonist is annoyed by them and studies them too seriously. (Maybe even breaking one, causing the light to go out.)

I feel like we need a little more action or climax here.

Maybe there is an escaped pilot that comes back in the end, threatening them all, and our protagonist comes back to defend everyone. (They launched themselves as their vehicle started to crash. They still have their laser gun. Would still need to find a reason as to why they’d attack the others on sight though. The simplest reason is: they’re a different species and a carnivore, so they just want to eat the humans and that’s that.)

But for the most part, this is fine to start with.

Let’s write that

Well, the final story deviated a lot from this outline. But that’s absolutely fine, because I wrote the whole thing in two days, and it happened more effortlessly than it ever did.

• That crashed spaceship happens in chapter 2, so the tense arc of “oh it had a pilot -> find the pilot -> be attacked by the pilot” is spread across the entire story.
• I realized a neat way to combine the two main threads => the main protagonist has a son who’s acting mysteriously and leaving his life, while the other protagonist is unhappy with her current husband and wants to leave him. Well … she wants to leave her man for the other character’s son! Streamlines all of it, done.
• I realized why they were actually chased, driven away, crashed here. This neatly filled in what those “memories” inside the lightbulbs had to show, which helped a lot in structuring every chapter.
• The protagonist already “gives up” at the beginning (and there are hints he’s been this way all his life), so that the rest of the story can just make it even worse. He picks himself up again, then some other terrible thing happens, so he gives up even more. This is far stronger than a character who is okay at the start and only gives up at the end, because we just don’t have the time for such a transition in a short story.

This is why I love adding such specific “overall structures” to stories. If I know that almost every chapter has to have a lightbulb that reveals an important memory, it is far easier to write the whole thing. Because it’s easier to make decisions, and you can spread your mystery across 5 or 6 “steps” to take.

The details can still be creatively filled in, even invented on the spot, as I write the story. But the overarching structure makes it easy to approach the blank page and lock down what the next chapter should do.

And yes, it was always the plan that those lightbulbs were left behind as “memories” of important events. Only while creating the outline, I realized I could obviously connect this to story #7, with the gods of the Sun and Moon. Then, as I wrote the story, I decided this was cool enough to use and explain right now (instead of leaving it for some later cycle). So that’s how Jassia received her pet bear who helps her, and that’s how a lightbulb falls down that never goes out and means something special to that bear, who is later revealed to be a (very old) Enra.

All in all, these ideas just meshed together really well, which helped write the story so quickly. It was also just the right number of ideas for a story of this length (15,000 words). That’s the thing I struggle with the most now: having too many or too few ideas for a story, which makes it impossible to meet the word count.

To the next cycle and beyond!

Whenever I end a cycle—and often far earlier—I already try to make the next cycle specific enough to immediately get started next year.

Writing 10 new stories usually gives a lot of new ideas, while also constraining the world in useful ways. (I now know exactly when certain events took place, or which character was king of some country in that time period, etcetera. This reduces the number of possibilities for future stories, making it easier to pick which ones to execute.)

Figuring out the Time Traveler

At first, I had a vague storyline for Ismaraldah (the Time Traveler; Goddess of Time). I knew her background and some things she would do, but nothing more specific. This meant that I had lots of notes in my overview of cycles saying stuff like “This needs 2 more time traveler stories!” or “Don’t forget to include Ismaraldah here and there!”

Fortunately, I had now figured out her exact path, background, final destination, etcetera. This meant I could chart a path of ~10 stories concerning her and spread them across the planned cycles in the future. It made the planning much more solid and interesting; and easier to read.

Better cycle order

When I invented the Saga of Life, I ordered cycles based on the best metric I had: certainty.

Some cycles already had 7 or 8 time periods filled in, others only 1 or 2. It made sense to me to simply rank them from high to low, starting with the cycles that were least empty or “risky”.

After writing this cycle, however, I realized most of the upcoming cycles are all about the same thing: empires, wars, great leaders, the traditional “highlights” of human history. (Those quotation marks doing some heavy lifting here.)

That doesn’t feel great. It’s repetitive, it ignores many other interesting things the Saga of Life should mention, it didn’t make me “excited” to write even more stories in roughly the same setting.

I spent an entire day shuffling cycles around, re-reading old story ideas, filling in a few new ones, and overall trying to get a better structure.

Cycle 2 (“The Chain of Food”) was very much about biology and science.

Cycle 3 (this one) was all about human civilization, about “history”.

It feels fair to alternate between these approaches with the cycles. So cycle 4 should mostly focus on sciences again, with cycle 5 focusing more on (human) history again.

I was tempted to slot a cycle called “The Inventions of Great Weight” into cycle 4, making the next cycle all about great inventions. However, I only had 3 story ideas for it so far. Many inventions or scientific topics are already part of other cycles with a more specific theme.

I tried, and tried, but just couldn’t make the cycle work at this specific time.

Instead, I found a cycle called “The Flames of Fear” (not the definitive title) that already had 9 of the 10 stories. Its original intent was to talk about the invention of fire, which is very important yes, but not enough to sustain an entire cycle. I realized I could add the crucial concepts of “energy”, “mitochondria”, “force”, etcetera onto this general theme of fire and action.

Combining those two ideas, this cycle would be filled with lots of “science” (just like I wanted), while having enough human history to make for good stories. As such, the decision was made!

The cycle after that just had to be about faith and religion. That was originally in slot 7, but I bumped it to cycle 5, because it’s so darn important to human history. And, thanks to all the myths from the major religions, the story ideas basically write themselves, so we already have 10 out of 10 ideas here.

General Remarks

As expected, simply working on the Saga of Life makes me better at planning and executing the idea.

My stories get better each time. (Not so strange, considering we’re writing 150,000 words a year for this.)

I realize you can’t get strong stories when focusing an entire cycle (or time period) on one specific thing. We really need a good blend of topics, approaches, perspectives, etcetera.

I realize that my younger self was a bit … ambitious by assuming we can tackle every major topic and event in the history of life. (I wrote down the first ideas and timeline when I was 11 years old. I only started serious work on this project when I was 24.) I realize now that we can only do a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of what life represents. And that’s fine, we’re just going to make it the most interesting and action-packed fraction we can.

Life isn’t clean and focused. It shows in the stories I discover through research, and the stories that come out of me as a result.

At the same time, this “everything is connected to everything” is very overwhelming (for both me and the reader), so with each story I learn how to execute this in a more streamlined way. The stories from this cycle have strong connections between them, but those never overshadow the story itself.

As said, I could finally plan some overarching threads for major characters, because now I realize how you do that.

I hope the cycles get better and better each time. The Saga of Life is already filled with many stories and interesting concepts, so imagine what this project would represent once we reach cycle 10 … or cycle 20 … or beyond. (And yes, I do have “major stories” planned at the end of cycle 10, 20, and 30, that hopefully tie a lot of story arcs at once. In a hopefully satisfying way.)

Changes to the website

As always, when I push a new cycle, I try to fix some minor annoyances or add new functionality to the website.

• Print: you can now click a button and it loads the entire story as one file, so you can print it yourself and read it physically if you want.
• Bookshelf: the old bookshelf system required manual updating, which meant that both Dutch and English bookshelves didn’t have all books (and the English one was slightly bugged). I wrote a much smarter system that auto-loads all books available on the website and works in all languages.
• Outlines are gone: when I started, I wrote a summary/outline of each story and added it with the notes at the end. I thought this would prove invaluable over time, to easily check what I’d already claimed (or didn’t claim) in earlier stories. I was wrong. I’ve never used one of those outlines. They are a pain to write / translate for each story and they don’t add anything, so they’re all gone now.
  • If I really need to know something from a previous story, I can just search through the entire folder (in my text/code editor) for keywords, or read back the actual related paragraphs. Much faster and easier.
  • If I really need a summary, I can throw the chapter into one of those AIs and it can instantly summarize it—and probably better than I could.
• Small fixes to old stories: fixing some typos, adding a line here or there to better reference another story, etcetera. I do this all the time and it’s a major advantage of having all stories easily accessible in website/digital format.
• Dutch domain is gone: it’s just thesagaoflife.com now, which houses both Dutch and English versions. (You can easily switch with a button at the top/bottom.)
  • The Dutch domain stopped making sense now, paying for a duplicate version of my website that also threw off Google big time.
  • This also allowed me to connect the project to an auto-builder, which means any time I make an update it automatically builds and updates the live website. I can never forget to do this manually myself ever again!

Conclusion

Another cycle done!

This time I experimented with the following approach.

• Write / release the stories in batches of 2
• After writing them in Dutch (well in advance), leave them be for a few months.
• Then come back and to the revision while translating to English (which forces me to really look at the story and the words and if they need to be there)
• And spread this out across the entire year

This meant there’s no “huge round of revisions” at the end of the cycle, which is a big plus. (And also why that section is missing from this diary. I revised the stories in batches of 2, while translating, on random weekends.)

This is a good pace both myself and readers can keep up with. It means the translations do not lag behind, and I truly believe I catch way more errors or improvements due to revising this way. (After translating to English, I usually have a loooong file of all the changes to “propagate back” to the Dutch version. It usually means removing entire sentences or paragraphs which I realize are redundant, or otherwise restructuring a sentence to be far more clear.)

This cycle is better than the previous two, if you ask me, but came about much more easily thanks to this approach.

The only downside is that there is no … downtime between cycles. By spreading the stories this thin, across an entire year, I basically have to start cycle 4 immediately after finishing cycle 3. (The first two stories were released early February, and the last two stories late November!)

That’s why, for next year, I’ll probably try even more improvements to this approach. Perhaps batches of 3 and a huge break between the cycles. Perhaps I started working ahead more than I already do, finishing Cycle 4 entirely before its first story even releases.

Until then, keep reading,

Tiamo Pastoor