Terraverse, a companion reader to Terra

Story by srb

Terraverse, a companion to Terra

Author’s note, when I say the Terraverse, I mean to discuss the future universe which I have created that includes the events of Terra, Club Vanilla, Jamie and Phillip, Rose’s Baby, and Casey at Bat, among other future stories.

It’s been two years in the making and while this is an odd thing to write I wanted to create something special for the second anniversary of my story Terra. Today is the day I first posted the story at F3, plus an additional day thanks to the leap year. At first I had hoped to get a chapter done in time but unfortunately that was simply unrealistic due to time constraints and real life issues. I’m writing the next chapter but I would rather create something like this, a companion to the story, rather than rush a half baked chapter.

I still nevertheless wanted to create something that might help interest people and celebrate the second anniversary with more than a simple message saying “Two years, congrats”.

So I then thought to create a sort of behind the scenes look, and discuss some of the things about the characters, the major plot points, and some of the technology, and get into the places that I want to go within the next year, without spoiling too much. A companion reader to the story, and something that I hope will spur the interests of the readers, both new and old.

Thanks

The first thing I want to do is issue an honest and heartfelt thanks to anyone who has taken the time in their life, quite a long chunk of time all things considered, to read any of my stories. I’ve enjoyed writing it, and I’d like to hope that you’ve all enjoyed reading it. In a way these characters were all written from a piece of me, with emotions and reasoning that makes sense to me, and that maybe makes enough sense to you.

Beyond the small niceties of having someone read your story and lay on a couple of kind words, it’s somewhat validating to have someone look at something that you came up with and tell you that you that they think it’s good, that they like it and empathize with the characters and with the story that you come up with…it means something. And I want to make sure to take the time and effort to show my appreciation and thanks for it.

Perspective

I had come up with the idea of writing this story some time before I wrote it, but I was hesitant to post it. there’s something about coming up with a story that makes you pause to wonder if it’s worthwhile. While I have written many fanfics over the years, they were, well, fanfics. To be honest, I kind of felt that fan fiction was supposed to be a bit of bad, at least. Not all of it had to be terrible, but the expectations were just, well, much, much lower.

It was only after I wrote the first three chapters of the story in a single day that I had decided upon posting it. I had gotten the day off of work, and a friend of mine had given me a ride home, so I had the day to myself. I was in a mood, and I started up the old MS Word to start writing something. For some reason or another, my copy of Word, which was actually legit, wouldn’t work properly, at least the spelling and grammar checker would not. Thus much of the first three chapters of my story are littered with grammatical nightmares.

So I set myself down at my computer and had a few beers (it was back before I quit drinking) and started writing. The story just sort of poured out rather quickly and easily. To be honest one of my bigger regrets was taking the start of the story so lightly. I guess the story is what some might call a creation story, where I’m creating a whole universe that I myself write in, and am willing to let others to write in as well.

To be honest I had written some stories in the past but none were as ambitious as this was. Still, starting out I was more than rusty. I was plain, boring writing, rife with errors, run on sentences and sentence fragments. Everything was upfront with very little being spread out, little foreshadowing or details to be inferred.

With the following chapters more emphasis was put on revision and planning. What had initially been a simple and straightforward story started to grow into something more meaningful.

The biggest change of pace in the story was in chapter 8, where Nadia and Yoshi are both shot, and Kyle and Tom were abducted. I guess change of pace is too light of a story. I finally got past the simple exposition phase, and established the conflict. Ultimately it was a bigger scene than it seemed. Despite what some may think, I always intended for Yoshi to become a futanari, and for Nadia to be ok. A lot of people expected Nadia to be ok, but I recall some folks thinking that the ‘death’ of Yoshi was unimportant.

Perhaps most importantly, it was around that time when I started getting help in my story from Theromen and davidka1. Theromen in parti

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