Let’s see, where did it all begin?
Of the Old Worlds
It started with... a little plastic dinosaur named Sealii. What can I say - I loved dinosaurs as a kid. This dinosaur was the star of many of my daydreams, journeying through dozens of adventures. Sealii was from the world Lizardlon (hey, I was a kid), and developed from a magical dinosaur to a space pilot. This was mid-80’s, and there was a cartoon about space dinosaurs that I watched that probably influenced me.
Then one day a race of cat-people started intruding on my daydreams (mind, this was LONG before I knew anything about anime). I pondered this, and decided that a world of dinosaur-people had already been done, and it was time to “graduate” to a different world. So I blew up Lizardlon.
No, really. I pictured the world in my mind, and burned it in an apocalyptic fire, casting aside Lizardlon and all the stories attached to it. Sealii returned to a magical dinosaur (this was roughly the same time I started using a different dino toy to represent her) and her stories changed.
Lizardlon was reborn as Khatron, the home of the Khatronians (again, I was young), the afore-mentioned race of cat-people. Sealii the space pilot was replaced by Diana Khatou (and her twin brother), two ace starfighter pilots. Here the heavy influence was Star Wars, as I developed a fleet and interstellar naval characters. The setting was roughly two thousand years into the future. This new world sustained me into my teens, and even made inroads into my English homework.
The Crows
I don’t recall exactly what caused me to decide to go back 1500-ish years in my timeline. I know one of those deciding factors was born of a movie called Jurassic Park. My 13-year-old self was TOTALLY taken with the male lead. And thus, Alan Miller was born.
The original Alan Miller was a terrorist that had been imprisoned, but escaped. That story didn’t get far off the ground, which is good, because it was UTTER CRAP. Alan Miller needed some revisions. Somewhere in through here I discovered a couple of movies - Predator and Aliens. These two share something in common, namely a squad of soldiers fighting together. An idea began to form.
And then I discovered Sting. Yes, the singer. Specifically the album that was released the same year Jurassic Park came out - Ten Summoner’s Tales. There was one song in particular, "Something the Boy Said", that particularly stuck in my mind.
Here are the lyrics - song and everything is copyright of Sting blah blah blah.
When we set out on this journey
There were no doubts in our minds
We set our eyes to the distance
We would find what we would find
We took courage from our numbers
What we sought we did not fear
Sometimes we'd glimpse a shadow falling
The shadow would disappear
But our thoughts kept returning
To something the boy said
As we turned to go
He said you'll never see our faces again
You'll be food for a carrion crow
Every step we took today
Our thoughts would always stray
From the wind on the moor so wild
To the words of the captain's child
Something the boy said
In the circles we made with our fires
We talked of the pale afternoon
The clouds were like dark riders
Flying on the face of the moon
We spoke our fears to the captain
And asked what his son could know
For we would never have marched so far
To be food for a crow
Every step we took today
Our thoughts would always stray
From the wind on the moor so wild
To the words of the captain's child
Something the boy said
When I awoke this morning
The sun's eye was red as blood
The stench of burning corpses
Faces in the mud
Am I dead or am I living?
I'm too afraid to care, I'm too afraid to know
I'm too afraid to look behind me
At the feast of the crow
We spoke our fears to the captain
And asked what his son could know
For we would never have marched so far
To be food for a crow
Something the boy said
The speaking voice to me was a soldier from a squad that had been ambushed by a superior force. A force consisting of elite mercenaries (here we have influence from The Substitute). A group of mercenaries called the Crows, and led by Alan Miller, the Crowleader. Thus the foundation of the Crow Universe and the background of the Clawblade stories was truly laid.
I took Alan’s story about being a prisoner and changed it. Originally he had been paired with a fellow prisoner and there was some story about alien forces that I don’t quite remember now. I changed the fellow prisoner to a member of an elite security force known as the Gray Guard. From there the Earth Alliance Territories (yes, the E.A.T.) began to develop.
Here’s where influence from playing with the neighbor kids comes into play. Many of the races that had not already been created (through the afore-mentioned English homework) were born, including the T’hnn Vkk (a race that is very important to the Clawblade stories). More and more star systems were named, including important hub worlds such as Nagi 4 and Chi’mi’se.
The Clawblades
One day I had the thought - what if there was someone good enough to challenge the entire team of Crows? What could this person be? She would be an assassin, and her name would be Bastet. Here shows my love of ancient Egypt, something that had been with me for as long as I’d been looking at the pictures in the book on Tutankhamen my parents owned. During this time my interest REALLY took off, including reading E. A. Wallis Budge’s translation of the Book of the Dead.
Bastet was very much a Mary Sue character, but at the time (late teens) I had no clue what that was or how reviled it was. (Recently I’ve been working on killing the Mary Sue-itis Bastet is afflicted with.) She kicked ass and that was what mattered. Soon she got a companion, again influenced heavily by Egyptology (namely, Anubis). This companion was Wepawet, a genetically engineered jackal-dog. What’s so special about him? He’s a jackal-were, meaning he shifted from a canid form to a humanoid one using alien DNA. Note: I had no clue about furries yet either. This was also before I had any access to the internet.
Once I went to college, I DID gain access to the internet. Also about this time Cartoon Network started airing a show that has grown notorious - Dragonball Z. Admittedly, at first I thought it was ridiculous. Then I started to like it, and it became my guilty pleasure. Keep this in mind for later.
I started staying with my sister a lot, and would work for her over the summer breaks. We started up a ton of writing projects together in this time period, which included a story I wrote using characters based off of all the animals our family owned at the time. Moreover, this story involved the escapee Alan Miller during his run from the authorities while trying to rejoin his Crows. Two of these characters, the brothers Tici and Pierre, would come back in another story in which the younger brother (Pierre) was kidnapped by pirates. I needed rescue groups, and I decided to involve Bastet.
Then I decided she needed a team.
Remember DBZ? Yeah, this is where it comes into play. I decided she needed two team members: thus Kryll Bosca and Vega Tahann came into being. If you are familiar at all with DBZ, you can probably guess the characters these two are based off of from their names (which is pretty much the only thing left after much writing and development, other than Vega’s signature scar and Kryll’s shaved head). These two took off, and thus the Clawblades (named for Bastet’s Khatronian ship) was born.
It Continues....
The Crow Universe continues to grow and develop as I grow and develop as a writer. Real world experience and tons of research help here, as well as reading (ex: the Thrawn trilogy by Timothy Zahn, and the books by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child) and watching well-written TV shows (ex: Babylon 5 and Deep Space 9).
In short, this is my world, my universe, locked inside 3 pounds of gray matter.
