Someone mentioned on one of my Beyonders-related posts that Ghostwriter sounds similar to the summaries of Brandon Mull's Beyonders and honestly...
That's great lol.
Well, not that I'm trying to plagiarize. But Beyonders is my favourite series, and when I got to thinking about it, I realized that I would never have started Ghostwriter if not for Brandon Mull, so I got to thinking about the various inspirations for my story.
So sit down, this is gonna be a long one.
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I think the biggest inspiration from Brandon Mull was the tone of his books. Of course, not just him. I would put Cornelia Funke, Brian Jacques, and David Eddings in a similar category for "tone", but he's my favourite of that group.
The point is, their books can have action, torture, high stakes, major character deaths, but in the end the stories don't get so dark you become depressed when reading them (with the exception of Cornelia Funke. Inkdeath was pretty depressing).
They leave you with a good taste in your mouth and a good message. On top of that, they're readable by most ages.
And, they're all pretty light on romance.
The reason I can't read Young Adult books is because of all the romance. Half the time it's forced, distracting from the plot, happens way too fast, and let's be real, some of them really unhealthy.
I'm sure there are lots of books in the genre that don't do that, that's just the experience I've had with them.
As far as similarities of Ghostwriter to Beyonders in particular, one notable one is the idea of a character ending up in a world that isn't their own.
I don't know if I mentioned this before, but Kage was my first original character.
She just popped into my head, replacing a character in a video game cutscene.
From there, I imagined her in different movies/books, kind of like a lucid dreaming kind of thing?
Anyway, eventually I had a thought: why is this one character in all these different universes?
The obvious answer was "because it's in your imagination", but that was when I came up with the idea of Mythsians, historians who specate all the different worlds in the universe. In the beginning, Kage was more of a sassy rebel who went wherever and did whatever she wanted.
That has changed quite a bit, though it is somewhat true of her younger self.
Then there's the part of her backstory with Wile, which came from a nightmare and a need to explain why she has only one eye despite being (mostly) immortal, since I didn't want to change her original design.
Brandon Mull comes in again here though, because at some point during the creation of this universe, I read his Five Kingdoms series, in which a couple of characters from another of his books make an appearance.
When I read that, my mind was blown. I hadn't thought that kind of thing was possible in a book, and I think that cemented the idea of Mythsians even more.
One thing I haven't really mentioned here is my other main story idea, with the placeholder title Suburban Legends.
(Knowing me, that'll eventually be the actual title.)
Thanks to...something I can't talk about because of spoilers, this stort is going to be in the same universe as Ghostwriter!
In fact, because of this same spoiler-y reason, anything I write/draw is going to be in this universe.
As far as the other characters, I pretty much came up with all of them out of story-related necessity.
Wile was the first, since he was a part of Kage's backstory.
I didn't come up with his backstory or world until later, but his adult self has been in my head for the second longest.
Artlem was the next, he was originally quite a bit more sociopathic, but he kind of got smoothed out in the actual writing.
Artlem's story is one of overcoming your worse traits, especially the ones that are hereditary, and relying on the people around you when you need a compass.
That part is pretty similar to the original, except original Artlem's development was mostly "Fake it Till You Make It" in order to impress Sephria.
Yeah, that version was a bit more scummy, but he was going to turn out OK in the end. Part of the reason I scrapped that was because of the romance lol.
Shole is a necessary character in any story, the "good guy" or the "best friend". I feel a little bad for not making him as interesting as some of the others, but there's some other stuff in there that I'm going to get into that I think will make him more of a fleshed-out character.
Bard is a little standard as well, but I like him so I'm not gonna change it.
And Sephria and Halten I'm not going to talk about, since they haven't been introduced yet.
Anyway, sorry for dumping that on you all, but I've actually been wanting to write some of that down for a while.
It's a bit of a trip down memory lane to remember where all this stuff came from, I must have come up with Kage when I was 13 or 14? And I couldn't draw her properly until a couple years later.
Do you all have any weird origin stories for your ideas? If so, I'd love to hear them.
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