Packing It In and Moving On

Despite being the only thing I purport to care about doing with my life, I have struggled enormously with writing and story production, to a level that is frankly soul-crushing at this point. Despite brief periods of productivity that seem to hit me from truly nowhere, my inability to produce has steadily gotten worse, in multiple regards. I have whined endlessly about my many problems, to the point I am far long sick of hearing myself go on about it, so I won’t go down the list here. If you’ve had to put up with me talking about it, then you already know at least some of the deal.
 
The last few years, I have been attempting to process these toxic feelings through various metafiction stories. At one point, I thought I had gotten through it, but apparently, I wasn’t done. With the writing and posting of Imaginator – The Final Story of Sharkerbob, I truly hope to be so now. To that end, I am going to do something I think has been long overdue.
 
I am announcing my “retirement” as Sharkerbob.
 
Fortunately, this is not going to be any great loss. I am a genuine nobody on the internet. Barely a handful of people have ever even looked at this blog. I have no followers. And that’s fine. I didn’t start this platform to become famous. I was, however, hoping to have done a lot more under this penname up to this point. As much as I struggled before, starting this blog was supposed to be part of the push to take my craft seriously, knuckle down on my focus, and starting making things on the regular. When I wrote Graven back in 2018, I really thought I’d done it. That I’d busted through the mountain, proven I could write a big, meaningful story, and I could finally start producing my genre fiction in earnest.
 
Turns out Graven was a complete fluke. Looking back, I have no idea how I managed to do it at all, and I know I couldn’t do it again now. Right place, right time, right motivations, right amount of energy, I guess. It was a lightning strike. It turned out it was also too little, too late. I’d already burned up so much of my creative gumption and confidence and capability in the years prior, that Graven ended up decidedly not being a new flagship to lead a new fleet from port. Instead, it was the last lifeboat escaping a long-sinking cruiser.
 
Obviously, I wrote a few other things since Graven, but the majority of it has all been related to the metafictional writing therapy. Sharkerbob has unfortunately become defined, at least to me, as a writer who can’t write. The absolutely pitiful amount of content I have published under that name doesn’t even represent 1% of the ideas I had hoped to produce works from. At some point, Sharkerbob became more driven to write, not because he wanted to write, but because he resented himself for not writing. And that is a lamentable and misplaced motivation, one highly prone to self-sabotage.
 
I’d like to not be that kind of writer anymore. To this end, I am closing the book on this chapter of my creativity. There is, however, a reason for the quotes around “retirement”. I am not giving up creating things. I want to keep writing and drawing, with the eventual goal of doing comics again, or at least some medium where I can make use of both skills.
 
However, my intention going forward is to start fresh with a new penname and a new direction, with no connections to my previous works. In part, this is to wipe the slate clean, so I can feel free to explore ideas without feeling beholden in various ways to the interconnected canons of my past works. It is also to break free from the baggage of past associations, namely my incredibly short-sighted sloppiness in referencing connections to other pennames. If you know, you know, and I wish you didn’t, but it’s too late to do anything about it now. Suffice to say, if my future endeavors are to go anywhere, I’d prefer to not have a dump truck full of literary skeletons always trailing behind me.
 
Having said that, there are still things from Sharkerbob, from the AEP Multiverse, from those other pennames, that I still think are worth salvaging. Character ideas and worldbuilding concepts I’m not completely ready to give up on yet. I’ll have to reforge them, of course, and I am aware it’s risky to indulge in the bad old habits of reworking failed ideas yet again. But this time around, I hope to do so without all the needless baggage and negativity tainting the process. Easier said than done, of course, but hey, if nothing else, it’ll force me to get more creative with what I got.
 
So, that’s pretty much all there is to say on the matter. I’m know I’m mostly speaking into a void with this post, but for me, it’s part of the ritual of moving on. Here’s to another couple of decades before the next metafictional crisis story inevitably gets written!
 
For those of you who have followed my work, I appreciate your support. So long, and take care of yourselves!

Imaginator - The Final Story of Sharkerbob

Author's Note: This is a significant rewrite of The Final Story of Salvador Roberts, which I wrote in a single day back in 2017. This rewrite also incorporates reinterpretations of a few key moments from SalQuest, which was the first draft of an intended sequel adventure, which ultimately proved impossible for me to work out. My intention was to redo the entire thing as a web serial called Imaginator, but in the end, I realized everything I really wanted to say in that story I basically hit in this one-shot.

Spirits of Civilization - On The Stormy Streets

The group assembled at the intersection of Gravois and Lindbergh, near I-270. It figured that Gravois wasn’t even here, off to meet with Des Peres, much to Lindbergh’s chagrin.
 
Slicking back his hair, Kirkwood gave his usual cocky smirk as he approached the assemblage of his fellow spirits. Lindbergh gave his usual trademark scowl at his “little brother”, which Kirkwood just ignored.
 
It was a bit of a motley crew tonight. Big Bend, the twins Laclede and Hanley, Lindbergh, Kirkwood himself, and to his surprise, Sunset Hills stood among them. The town spirit, standing taller than all of them, looked grim, unusual for his normally high spirits. He kept glancing upwards, to where the dark clouds roiled. Even Kirkwood could admit there was a restless energy in the air, unusual for this time of year. Probably just an early tornado, surely.
 
“Took your time, little brother,” said Lindbergh.
 
“I always arrive when I mean to arrive,” said Kirkwood.
 
“Fashionably late,” quipped Hanley.
 
“Fashionably lame,” quipped Laclede.
 
“Fashionably blamed,” said Hanley.
 
“Fashionably shamed,” said Laclede.
 
“Yes, yes,” Kirkwood waved them off. If he didn’t nip the twins in the bud, they’d be going all night. “So what are we looking at at?”
 
“We think it’s a hurricane,” said Sunset Hills. He looked off into the distance somberly.

Digital Dragons, Book Three

Digital Dragons proceeds along! Bobbi continues to build up her resources, acquiring stronger armors and equipment in rapid succession, just in time to meet another powerful enemy! It's clear the world isn't going to wait for her to keep "getting prepared" before she goes on her Quest. After this latest harrowing encounter, it's time to get a move on!

I really hadn't expected to pop this out so soon after the last one, and I can tell the drag is really hitting me now, so it's time to pull back and let this one recharge a bit. Thanks for reading thus far!

As before, you can read the PDF from here: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1T8Tn0lOfDuqXUjXyjhFx3kxqkUsV7bt5/view?usp=share_link

Digital Dragons, Book Two

Digital Dragons continues with the further adventures of Bobbi, Miner And Crafter Extraordinaire(ish)! As she slowly builds up her resources, she encounters a potential new ally, runs afoul of a powerful foe, and takes her first step into another dimension! Things are looking rather hectic, but hey, she's got nothing if not time on her side, conveniently divided into twenty-minute chunks at that!

Made with modded Minecraft and Comic Life 3. I didn't think I'd get another book out right away, but the muse stuck around for a while longer this time! After this, though, I'm taking a break before I give my wrists, and my brain, carpal tunnel.

You can download the PDF here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1NeNkS3ojHyUC_uUJz9TolxyK_NcN708_/view?usp=share_link

Digital Dragons, Book One

Digital Dragons is a comic book project created with Minecraft (including several mods) and Comic Life 3. Born from a half-joke/half-desperation move to break me out of another prolonged bout of writer's block, as well as conveniently justify continuing my Minecraft addiction, the comic tells of the first few days of "Sharkerbob" seemingly awakening into his Minecraft avatar, whereupon he becomes stuck in the world of the game! Yes, it's just about the most cliché premise you could think of for a Minecraft "fan fic", but it fits the conceit of the game well enough, and made for an easy jumping off point for wacky early-game shenanigans. As improvised dialogue and characters, I also did not set up anything about the environment ahead of time (aside from one plot-relevant detail), so Sharkerbob's responses are real-time reactions to my own exploration of the area, making for some great organic writing.

This was a really fun project, and I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed making it!

The comic has been saved as a PDF format, which you can download here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1pJRZMOpaYo56VDtdX2YZUQwuVuQq9UaE/view?usp=share_link

Fractured Eras (The Time Walkers)

This was a write-up for a faux-MMO concept I was challenged to make by a friend. His proposal was to "make an MMO where every server was in a different time period of the world, and major events happening in one server would have a ripple effect in others."

This was the second of three concepts I came up with, and while he said I way missed the mark with this one, I still think it was by far the best of the ideas. In hindsight, this would work much better as a Table Top RPG. In fact, I recall I took some influenced from Mage: The Ascension for the magic mechanics and the idea of Paradoxi.

FRACTURED ERAS

Some theorize that time is ultimately just another dimension, akin to distance, depth, and length, that humans interpret as an irreversible linear progression. However, if it were possible to shift one’s perception and see time as merely another measurement of distance, one could theoretically “walk” from one second to the next. Each moment of time would essentially be its own separate reality; in order to time travel, one need only “step” into another dimension. In short: time is an illusion.