“Across Lives”, like many of my stories, began with a rough outline of the history and setting where the story would take place. I was intrigued by the idea of a world where people not only underwent a reincarnation cycle but also one in which they would remember those lives through their dreams. The ways in which that could influence society, science, and so on was a fun thought experiment to say the least. But then what if they stopped remembering? What if only a few could still remember or recognize their dreams for what they were? Thus began the story of Nis.

Knowledge is a powerful and, at times, divisive commodity. As has been seen in our own world history, knowledge of certain things has at times been suppressed for one reason or another. In most cases, such efforts to control knowledge lead to a diminishing of that society as they lose technological, medical, and other discoveries. Communities that have become isolated through such restrictions are often surprised by the advancements made in other places where such restrictions did not exist.

With any of the longer stories I write, I tend to have a vague sense of how long the story will go for. All the while I have the characters in my mind, running through scenes, telling me about their goals, conflicts, etc, and I translate that all into each new part of the story. As time goes on, the connection I feel with the characters begins to fade as their objectives and such are resolved and they have less and less to tell me. Usually this is fine but with “Across Lives” I found that I wasn’t sure I was reaching a satisfying conclusion to the story. I imagine any writer experiences this from time to time where they lose whatever inspiration they had for a story and it all peters out, leaving the story unfinished.

I don’t often go back over the stories I’ve written for Patreon but I do want to address at least two issues I had as I wrote “Across Lives”. First, the story got away from me in certain places. The initial group of merchant/kidnappers that Nis encountered were meant to be a larger, long term threat but the more I wrote the more I didn’t like that direction. Thus the royal trackers were brought in. It was not the most elegant switch and a common issue I find in most of my rough drafts.

The other main problem I ran into wasn’t noticed by me until I was nearing the end and that was how much Nis’ interactions with her past lives was being presented as a sort of Dissociative Identity Disorder, which was not what I intended at all. There are numerous reasons why I quickly became uncomfortable with that aspect of the story.

Normally I’d have time to play around and restructure things but the nature of how I manage my writing for Patreon means I am usually only a couple chapters ahead of the posting schedule and so have limited ability to fix these sorts of issue. I do also want to address some of the abruptness to the end of the story. Meric, in my estimation, never got fleshed out sufficiently and much of her part in the story was dropped in without the planning I’d normally want to do. Gorvis and Trow were similarly shortened within the scope of the story and I feel they disappeared and/or were dealt with too quickly and cleanly there at the end with First Respite simply capturing them and then no more is heard about them.

The characters, however, have all gone silent in my mind which means writing entirely new content for them may be more difficult and require more time than I have right now. I’m not sure how much time it will take to fix the two main issues I mentioned earlier and I do want to at least address those. If there’s still time after that, then I will see about tackling the other issues. I don’t want to interrupt my regular writing schedule too much though.

As soon as those edits are complete, I’ll be posting the entire story here in a single post.

I have thoroughly enjoyed writing this story and amazed it has gone on for as long as it has. Writing longer stories for the majority of this year has been a lot of fun and a nice break from the much shorter stories I was writing last year. What would you like to see next year?