#lirian;marine

[lmkobsessedmoth]

I have this tradition on twitter where I show my to lesbians(marine and my unnamed octopus siren) being cute. This they’re enjoying each other’s presents

[korenlesthe]

Writing & stuff (Part 1)

So, I think it's time i use this blog for what it is : a blog ! Note : all french terms will be translated in parenthesis.

Writing : how it all started I'm a french writer, almost 40yo, gay, soon to be "Pacsé" (PACS) to my lovely Marine boyfriend (French Navy). Since I was a child I wanter to tell stories but at the time, i couldn't even try, too affraid and never had enough motivation.

Like a lot of people, videogames played a big part in my inspirations. One of the very first game that made me think about how deep a story could be was The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening for the Nintendo GameBoy. I was around 10 years old when I got the game and, as a kid, it blew me away (the ending still brings tears to my eyes 29 years later).

It was so different to everything I played so far on the Amstrad CPC & Amiga. And the first one to make me cry at the end. Not long after that, my brother got a Super Nintendo and I got The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past for my birthday and it unlocked something in me : medieval setting, magic, swords, secrets, exploration... basically everything I loved.

And a few years after that, my brother brought what probably motivated me the most to start telling stories : Secret of Mana (Seiken Densetsu 2 in Japan). I vividly remember when my brother started the game, a loud yet distant cry of a monster is heard while the "Nintendo" & "Squaresoft" logos appears. I said "Wow". My sister said "Why do you 'wow' ? There's nothing !" but then the title screen appeared with the amazing theme song "Fear of the Heavens" by Hiroki Kikuta. I knew there was something more than just the roar of a powerful creature on a black screen.

This game even made me fall in love with dragons ; I loved calling "Flammy" the dragon to fly all around the massive world, always felt sad to kill a dragon to advance the story and even the final one. I didn't knew back then "why" I loved dragons ; I just loved their design, how majestic they looked, and wondered what their stories was, why were they attacking the heroes while Flammy was helping us etc.

Off course, other games added their stone like Breath of Fire III from Capcom, Illusion of Time (Illusion of Gaia in the US), Terranigma, Secret of Evermore and so many more... even games like Metroid and Turrican, two of my most beloved franchises.

I finally started working on my first book : "Denaris I : Le Mot Oublié" (Denaris I: The Forgotten Word) -Note : The title of the first volume was originally "Les Seigneur d'Yseïr" (Lords of Yseir)- in August 2003 (the 08/06/2003 to be exact). It went throught publishing for the first time on the 6th of February 2010 but after my publisher lied to me (no corrections, never read the manuscrit, published the unfinished version instead of the one I completed) and tried to keep selling the books after I ordered their destruction, I got my rights back and took a break. I came back to work on it in January 2011 but I was never satisfied and I left the first volume in a corner to work on the second and third volumes. Then, between 2015 and 2019, I managed to fix the whole first volume.

It was exhausting and massively crushed my motivation. Feeling that I would never write again if I kept working on the first or even the other three volumes, I started another story, more or less linked to Denaris, in a different setting.

Another world, another story

I felt the urge to write something that was NOT about Denaris but yet, always wanted to link both stories, just with a few characters and never, ever force anyone to have read a story to understand the other. Denaris was medieval fantasy, so the next story would be its exact opposite : science fiction with a little bit of cyberpunk.

Thus, Soleil Lirien : Contrôle Total (Lirian Sun: Full Control) was born... but I couldn't even start the damn thing ! I was always fumbling around with the main character : A man ? Ok, another one. Probably gay. What's his story ? Linked to one of the characters from Denaris ? But if I do so, I'll have to tell everything to get to the point where it makes sense in both Denaris and Lirian Sun...

It went like that for a long time until I started watching "The Jimquisition" by James Stephanie Sterling. While I loved the show (and still do), the opening song of their show clicked right away with me. "I love the style and the lyrics", I thought. I searched for the artist, "DrillQueen" and looked at the cover art of her album and "voilà". I instantly knew what I wanted to do. Who would become the main character of Lirian Sun.

Jenneth McGuire was born this day and my brain became filled with lots of ideas. Working on Lirian Sun helped me so much, it made me like writing again. It made me cry, smile and laugh and care so much about the characters. This is also during this moment that I became much more aware of a lot of things I was very late to, like supporting Trans people (and I would like to thanks again James Stephanie Sterling and Laura Kate Dale for everything).

Thank God for them.

End of part 1. Coming soon : what went wrong, how not to write a book (aka : every mistake I did), motivation, troubles, characters, stories... I think I'll use this blog to talk about Lirian Sun & Denaris in the near future. If I'm confident enough, I might talk more about me but that's clearly something I'm not ready yet.

[lmkobsessedmoth]

I should really start drawing these lads