Concluding “The Heiress of Apocalypse” arc, I published a reflection piece exploring my personal history writing Eri, the Monster Sealer over the last 25 years, and its influence on my personal life as a queer kid growing up in a small conservative Catholic town.
I’ve taken a few weeks off now to settle back into life as it is: catching up on movies, reading, gaming a little bit, and going out for walks now that the weather is starting to improve. There’s nothing quite like binging the original run of Trailer Park Boys and living vicariously through livestreamers’ jaw-dropping playthroughs of the new Tomadachi Life to reset the mind and soul, lol.
It’s hard to believe we’re already in the final stretch of April. Spring is on the way, I’m in the throes of being slapped across the face with a cold that’s been passed around at my day job, and Eri’s upcoming adventures with her Star Warriors are about to resume.
The “Twilight of the Dark Apostle” arc begins next week—leading with a prologue and the first three episodes for folks to dive into right away, with subsequent episodes releasing every Wednesday at noon.
I’m really excited to start sharing this arc. “Twilight of the Dark Apostle” takes off immediately after “The Heiress of the Apocalypse” and doesn’t let go.
A Monster of a Story…
“Twilight of the Dark Apostle” is a sequel five years in the making.
I started writing it in 2020, pretty much immediately after I finished drafting THoA. There was so much I wanted to include, but had no idea where to start, or even how to get started. There were many starts and stops. I really struggled to nail down the first cour (first 13 episodes) of TotDA, because I knew their arrangement and the plot points within those chapters would define how the rest of the story went.
Then life happened: I started dating again, experienced a drug overdose, went through another messy breakup, adopted a rescue kitty who has become the light of my life, was reno-victed TWICE, and was clinging by the skin of my teeth to a career change handed to me on a silver platter that wound up worse for my mental health than I could ever imagine.
Through it all, I kept writing this new arc in Eri’s journey. But with it came stress. A lot of stress—about pacing, about choices in story beats, how to include everything I wanted to, and even worse: how the hell I was going to wrap everything up in a cohesive way.
The story went through multiple versions of multiple drafts. There were rewrites that started from scratch, there were manuscripts pulled apart and stapled back together.
Months passed. Then years. I bled, cried, and screamed over trying to get TotDA into a form that I was both happy with, and would appease the inner critic inside my thoughts that kept reminding me that I pounded out the first arc in only six months.
What I was dealing with here was a Frankenstein’s creature of a story—something that started out simple and calculated, but found new life on its own, becoming massive and destructive, complicated and nuanced, rejected time and time again by its own master in a state of unfinished pulp, fuelled by unbridled frustration. As time marched on, Twilight of the Dark Apostle became much too big for me.
I nearly gave up writing this sequel multiple times.
I nearly gave up writing, period.
A Story Birthed by Resistance…
In his 2002 book The War of Art, Steven Pressfield writes frankly about the influence fear has on creative ability through its manifestation of Resistance.
In one entry he writes, “Resistance will tell you anything to keep you from doing your work. … If you take Resistance at its word, you deserve everything you get. Resistance is always lying and always full of shit.”
What I was up against was resistence in the form perfectionism. The story had to be perfect, because it needed to tick arbitrary boxes in my head that would make the story just as good, if not better than its predecesor.
But art, by definition isn’t perfect. It can’t be. Art is what it is, and it is only the witnesses of art in its public form who can define the value such art plays upon their heart.
The beauty in writing serialized fiction comes from the fact that there are no walls, no restraints, no resistance to creative flow. A story that is published weekly, a chapter at a time, can go on for as long and winding as it needs to, because all there is on the horizion is limitless possibility that the love of being creative ultimately trumps the need to be perfect.
It is a mindset shift that, in the final months of TotDA’s editing phase, allowed this story to flourish. What’s been birthed from the last five years of creative hardship is something truly meaningful, in my opinion.
I’m really proud of what Twilight of the Dark Apostle has evolved into, come its completion. It is a story that may not be perfect, but one that is bold in its message, strong in its characters’ journeys, and deep in its attempt to connect with readers’ hearts.
Come next Wednesday, I hope that you’ll enjoy it, too.
Late to the party and want to catch up?