The Watchers
My Writing Journey Vol. 9
Welcome to this week’s writing journey post. Here’s the rest of this series for those of you looking to catch up or refresh. Last week was a fun one, exploring the the few times I met one of my readers at my school - and catching up with the other times I’ve met the inspiration for all my self-published stories in the first place. We’ve come now to the Summer of 2018, and this week I’m talking about my first wholly original series.
I say wholly original, but it was continuing the threads of The Watchers, an order of wraiths that watch and record everything across the many dimensions from their hall between worlds. The first (and only) mention of a Watcher in Dan’s Diamond Dimensions series is a note he placed underground in Episode 5. Since then, in my stories, I’d given that mysterious watching figure a role in my story, a name, a whole book dedicated to her origins, created this whole idea of a multiverse and six other Watchers. At this point in the story two had retired and been succeeded, and now Dan’s Watcher, Mara, was being banished. As I talked about last week, eight new human recruits were brought into the Order in one of my Volume 4.5 short stories.
After releasing Volume 6 of The Diamond Dimensions, it was time to tell their story, to deal with the fallout of the event at the end of Volume 5 of The Diamond Dimensions, to see how it would affect these new recruits. I won’t spoil anything or go too much into the story, but this is when the overlapping and interweaving part of my storytelling kicked in. The Watchers series, five volumes in all, was concurrent with The Diamond Dimensions, witnessing and participating in the same events from different points of view. And there were many points of view.
The first volume is ten short chapters, each from a different point of view. It was reading Rick Riordan’s Kane Chronicles series that inspired, and informed, my inclusion of Ancient Egyptian mythology in The Watchers backstory, that I’d fully fleshed out in a short story from Pharaoh Ramesses VIII’s POV. So it was fitting it was his next series, Heroes of Olympus, that inspired the continuation of The Watchers story. In that series, we switch between character’s POVs every few chapters, with their names and Roman numeral letting you know whose head you’re going to be in. I did the same thing, but with spelled-out numbers. So each chapter moved the story forwards whilst giving us a little about each character. This was something new to me and I really enjoyed writing this way.
Another inspiration, as I moved up from YA books and to adult Star Wars novels in my reading that Summer, was Chuck Wendig’s Aftermath trilogy, books I’d highly recommend for any Star Wars fan. He included interludes between the main story, each one a different character’s POV on some distant planet, little snippets of a massive galaxy that loosely tied to the book’s events. He also wrote in present tense, perhaps the first time I’d encountered this fully. While I wrote the main chapters in past tense, I wrote the epilogue, from the point of view of the character Joshua, in the present. I liked the way it read, with some urgency and a new feel to my descriptions.
The first ‘Chapter’ (as I called each book) of The Watchers, came out in July. It had elements of mystery - an Earth-based detective in a prologue section dealing with a burglary at the British Museum. I’d had an early plan of what the series could be, the villains being a modern-day Ancient Egyptian Watcher cult on Earth wanting to reclaim the Order and make it as it was in those ancient times. But the writing just flowed, the characters formed their lives, and the series took its own path. I think when it came time to write the second book everything was planned out. Or at least, I had the new end in mind, although I was writing as I went, with the overarching plot and each character’s journey. In a way, this first book was like a pilot episode of a show. For the rest of the series, taking place days after the first book, new locations and characters became mainstays.
I have fond memories writing the second ‘Chapter’. It was the summer between GCSE years. I had a little homework to do, but we went on holiday somewhere with no Wi-Fi and I spent a lot of time writing. From one screenshot of the temple Medinet Habu on my phone, I wrote a section at that site, and then poured into the main narrative. I was already well-versed in the worlds of the story from writing about them based on Dan’s videos, that I had it all to mind. And I could describe what I’d written about at age 12/13 in much better detail. Inspired by Aftermath, I included more interludes in this second Watchers book, and wrote them in present tense.
Now I write everything in present tense. I just prefer it somehow. Maybe its all the screenplay writing as well. And my books have alternating POVs. So, writing these Watchers books did change the trajectory of my storytelling. It also helped make my whole self-published Diamond Dimensions Universe a cohesive whole.
In September of 2018, after I’d just turned 16, I released Chapter Two of The Watchers, plus a collection of both One and Two together, a book more the length of a usual Diamond Dimensions book, with a bonus short story filling in a moment from my Origins book, a little something for fans like the one I’d met that had read everything. At the same time I was writing the beginning chapters of The Diamond Dimensions Volume 7. But The Watchers felt more fun and easy.
And I love the original characters and the story I told across the five books. In 2018, I had no idea I’d choose the story, strip any Minecraft or DanTDM-based elements and mould it into my third screenplay, the pilot script I wrote earlier this year on my course at MetFilm school, the pilot script I’m so proud of that I submitted to two competitions last week. It’s a story with many layers, characters, themes, locations, ancient history, fantasy, sci-fi, a mythology multiverse. If anything ever comes of that script, I’ll be so grateful to Dan and the fans of my work that kept me writing, to pursue new ways of storytelling and find new stories to tell. It’s also lead to my fascination with the site of Medinet Habu, something I will talk about in a post somewhere down the line. And I’m grateful to you, dear reader of this Substack post. Let me know if there’s anything more you’d like to know about this series.
Next time I’ll be talking about the last two books in my main Diamond Dimensions series, Volumes 7 and 8, and the books in between. The Watchers was a definite change in my storytelling, and the loss of CreateSpace’s cover creator led to me seeking out some new art for covers…
Thank you so much for reading! Once again I’ll link the omnibus volumes that collect all 22 books in the universe that sprouted from Dan’s videos, if you fancy checking them out in any form. (Most of The Watchers series happens over a short timeframe in the third omnibus volume.)
Cheers,
Harvey