More than ten years ago, I decided with my future wife that she and I should do a collaboration project together. I felt that she had the capability of making incredible imagery, and throughout my life I've been told that I have some sort of competence in writing.
Many things have happened in my life from then until now, and there have been stretches of several years where we have had the main domain online and renewed, but nothing ever done with the page. We started out with some strong ideas and got them to the site, and there it has sat since, unaltered and unseen. This is a venture which was not specifically conceived or entered into for the purpose of profit, and as such, we had larger priorities to address throughout the time, chief among them finding ways to pay for our food and shelter. As such, after the initial outburst, we had little time to devote to this project, and it has stagnated ever since.
But the stagnation was only on the surface. I have read historic records of city life and development throughout the years - I cannot recall the last time I read a purely fictional novel. I have carried this story in my head from then until now, and I never have reached a state where I considered Everstreets to be "unfeasible" or that I have "quit" in writing it.
A main issue is the scope of what I have envisioned. I want to tell the story of a city, of how it began and came to life through the course of years and generations. The reason that I want to do this is the reason which I came to form the basis of the story concept itself - I look at street names and wonder who those people were. Similarly, I look at cities and wonder how they still all hold together, and how they choose what to let go. The main character of Everstreets is not Cook, the first leader of the Runners, nor is it his children, nor any singular person or group of persons - it is the city itself. In order to do this, I need to establish the city; I need to identify the places where the people performed the memorable events. When I think of certain fictional stories or movies - like, for instance, the Gotham City of Batman - I find myself more interested in the background city than I am in the central characters. What truly resonates within me about everything I perceive in life, fictional or not, is how the setting and environment reflects on the events. Therefore it is my desire to make Daron, the city of Everstreets, feel as authentic and tangible as anything you can know about any major city. This requires a tremendous amount of research and world building to arrive at anything worthwhile.
As I sit writing this in a 1950s funeral home folding chair within my comfortable American suburban house, I hypocritically wonder if the concept of suburbia is a main element of poison within our culture and country. There have been suburbs before Leavittown, there have been cars before the Interstate, there was urban inhumanity on a far greater scale a century ago more so than anything known here now, so the point is not that I believe that a romanticized past is a preferable ideal. Despite all of those ills, the exponential growth of the cities within the last century or longer and the tremendous advances to humanity which did in fact come forth from them leads me to believe that we all should venerate them as the catalysts for our modern evolution.
Earlier today, I worked my wage-earning job and got to spectate the endless stream of consumers driving in from all distances away, spend money, and drive off through congested roads for another untold number of miles and time. This ritual is little different than what is done on other days of the week, except that the travel is to go somewhere to earn money rather than spend it. My mother endures a 90 minute one-way trip to get to her job. My father has 30 minutes to get to a train station to spend another hour on rail. Is this kind of lifestyle, multiplied millions of families over across the country, what really should be sought after? Is this the kind of environment from which our greatest capabilities have been put to use and shared with the most of humanity? Is Woodfield Mall truly more spectacular and due of worship than the Hancock Building?
So that is the ultimate point I have with Everstreets. That is the intended theme. That is what I am taking so long to research, that is what I am having the most difficulty in answering, that is what makes this whole project as complex as it is important to me. I want to shape a world in a way that makes us all appreciate what we do have and what we have lost, with the intent for us to want to make the future better.
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The reason why I had to write that today is because there are days like this where I sit with limited time and reach another block of stalling for what to write. It's different to me from mere Writer's Block. I have the points, the key moments, set in place, and I have ways that I want to connect those dots, but every time I take a step forward I get lost on the path and come to a standstill.
So this is why I started to write daily draft entries for the story some time ago - to get me to finally put something in motion and just simply get in a habit of starting to move, so that I can be willing to get the points established and become comfortable with fixing my errors as I progress even further.
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