Dear Reader,
The universe of The Empty World fist began to take form in the year 1991, when two previous fictional worlds collided. Before that time, I had been making an effort to write something like a real novel for four or five years, and writing manuscripts literally by hand. I filled floppy vinyl binders and looseleaf pages with scrawlings detailing the lives of sentient robots, John Hughes-inspired boys from the wrong side of the suburbs, angsty girls from outer space, and angels. The soundtrack of my life at the time featured The Cure in high rotation. In September of 1991, I went to Los Angeles to attend Otis Art Insitute; I was home by Thanksgiving and did not go back. Yet, the experience had done its part in providing inspiration and setting me on my path. I was writing all the time and had a draft of The Devil's Shadow, the first novel-length work of The Empty World, completed before I moved to New York City, in the fall of 1992. The entire city seemed a muse.
I recall, in my earliest novel attempts of the late 1980s, the main characters were often the same people, whether they were humans, or aliens, or robots. My influences were mainly teen movies, cartoons and the badly edited and dubbed anime of the day. I read a lot of fantasy written and marketed to children and young adults. I wanted to write scenes set in spaceports and taverns, but I was not old enough to drink. The main character would be a young male from a poor, but honorable family who had a public reputation as a bad boy; he was the too-typical hero that would be revealed as good-hearted in the end. Another character would inevitably be the cute, popular, blonde girl who seemed too good for the bad boy and was perceived as cold or snobby by others, until it was revealed she also had pain in her life. Typical supporting characters would be the angsty, dark-haired girl who listened to depressing crooners and had a bad relationship with her mother; the older female many believed in a sexual relationship with the young hero; the wise older man that was someone's uncle or grandfather; and sometimes a too-talented female who showed up to help other characters.
Then, I read The Vampire Chronicles. I started reading a lot more adult books: Nabokov, Camus, Sartre, Hesse. I became the freak girl at my school. I discovered The Sandman comics. I watched a lot of old Universal and Hammer Studios horror movies. The way I was thinking about life, and characters, and writing was changing. Androgyny was the most interesting thing ever. Characters in this era were changed as well; they had jobs more often than schools. Sometimes the main character was a girl trying to decide if a boy was right for her, while she helped some relative deal with a death in the family. Sometimes the main character was a male that discovered that his family or people had been great in the past, and then oppressed by the older man he now served, and sought revenge, or upon gaining vengeance, struggled to learn what to do with his newly found power or status. Another character of this time was a strong, independant, female who was physically beautiful, something like a model, who cared little for males or romance and wanted most to protect weaker female friends. Several female characters had been abused in their past. There were no more robots and the aliens were gaining vampiric qualities (The alien race was known as Aurians by this time). The previous typical hero from years before was now a supporting character, often introduced as the former enemy of the current antihero, who would aid in the plot against their common enemy. Ultimately the antihero and the strong female would realize they were only able to surrender to each other, and the next generation would be fantastically beautiful and androgynous.
Toward the end of 1991, after I left Los Angeles, I worked on a 'zine called Opium Tripps Magazine. The magazine was mainly an outlet for my own art and writing and only two issues were made. Some of the content focused on my Aurian characters, but I was by then developing another group of characters and something of a series called Night Regions. In these stories, rather than vampires, angelic beings were the focus. There was the premise that there existed some alternate plane of reality where angels lived and, under certain circumstances, humans might visit. There was a story of a powerful being leaving his domain to his children and the sky being permanently twilight colored due to a conflict between Light and Shadow. There was the idea of intangible concepts being personified. There was a strong female named Angel. And there was Opium.
I then wrote Jewel and Shade. It is only about 3150 words, but it introduces a core group of The Empty World characters: Steven Jewel, the mysterious Shade, and his accomplices and relatives: his sister, his son, and his daughter-in-law. Steven Jewel had been the name of a minor character in a previous story and here he began to develop into something more. Shade had his roots in a string of characters with mysterious pasts and vampiric qualities: my former antihero. Shade's son was inspired by previous androgynous offspring. Shade's sister was something of a decendant of angsty girls who listened to The Smiths. Psyche, the daughter-in-law, apart from being associated with the Greek girl elevated to goddess, was as well a new version of an androgynous, vampiric alien character of the same name.
I began to read about ancient astronauts. I had brought my vampiric, alien characters down to Earth, but as of yet they had no interaction with The Night Regions and its mythology. I was intrigued by comparative mythology and transmission of knowledge through Myth. I was still interested in writing something with vampires and I had my lead vampiric character in Shade. I wanted to write something to reuinite my antihero with his strong female. I thought that even if many theories of alternate history and archaeology may not be true, they would make good fiction. The result of these ideas was The Devil's Shadow. In this novel manuscript, the first draft of which was completed in 1992, the previously separate plots and casts were united with the explanation that vampires are Nephillim Spawn and Angels genetically engineered the first Humans. I had my strong female back in the form of the characters Blade and Ariella, and developed some new characters of types I had not written before: the young gay male, and the girl who finds herself attracted to gay males knowing they are unavailable, because she cannot risk the particular pain of seeking to be close to a man and finding rejection or disappointment.
When I wrote the sequel to The Devil's Shadow, titled The Empty World, there was a series. Thus the name of the site and the fictional universe to which it is dedicated. It is now fifteen years since the universe took form and the number of works and characters has grown. I hope you will find the resources provided useful. Be aware that there are SPOILERS here.
Many of the works are yet unpublished, and though you will find some examples of my work here in form of excerpts, selected web-exclusives, or previously published works I have retained such right to display, many works are simply not publicly available at this time.
Thank you for reading,
September 2006
Poolesville, MD