Opening a long closed door.

I graduated high school in 1987. At that time, I didn't really want to go right into more school and hadn't even made the usual overtures toward doing that like taking the SAT and ACT etc. because I knew my family couldn't afford for me to go to college anyway. In retrospect, I was also burned out. I just wanted to be able to sleep in and not have anything to do for a while.

This resulted in a gap year where I just spent time being creative and following Def Leppard around on the Hysteria tour (I ended up getting to see them five times in total). During said year, two different universes began to take shape in my head: One that didn't have a name and had been evolving since I was around 10 and started writing what I didn't realize then was fanfic about rock stars, and one that was more or less inspired by The Chronicles of Narnia and the movie The Last Unicorn.

The latter is the one this post is about (I do have plans to discuss the other one another time). It basically had its roots in an assignment in my senior year of high school, in a vocational commercial art class. We were supposed to design a dust jacket for a hardcover book, and mine was called Song of the Unicorn. It had a chess board with a hand reaching down to pick up a pawn that, instead of a horse as per usual, was the head of a unicorn. I never did anything with it until that gap year between high school and eventually getting into a vocational college, the story of which is told in the forward of SOTU by way of AO3 author's notes here. I honestly don't remember how all the characters and story came to be, other than that originally, the physical appearance of the character named Tempest was bounced off of Joey Tempest, the singer of Europe.

The universe expanded substantially over the decades to follow, with the biggest character expansion happening when a friend who was relatively new at the time but now is a longtime one introduced me to the graphic novel series ElfQuest. Up until that time I had only had my humanoid unicorn species and humans in the world I had named Mythologica, but after this I began to add elves into the mix that were bounced off of the EQ model. Also within the writings of Wendy and Richard Pini, I found explanations for a few of the concepts I had in my story but hadn't really found a way to make them work. In earlier versions there were parts that were 1:1 copies, but eventually I expanded on those concepts and made them my own as best I could.

The main thing that I found inspiration to explain was how the humanoid unicorn species came to be. In ElfQuest, the elf Winnowill, who is a healer, is able to shape a living being into something different. It doesn't change who they are within, but it's basically magical body modification for lack of a better description. The first of the species, Tempest, was created accidentally by magical intervention similar to Amalthea in The Last Unicorn, but as far as the expansion of the species I ended up using a variation on the Winnowill concept as something a "traditional" four-legged unicorn with shapeshifting abilities discovered he could do. Once all that was sorted out, what eventually became the definitive version of SOTU finally began to take shape.

It took far longer to come to fruition than I expected it to, however, because of the loss of my main cheerleader as far as my creativity. My mother passed away in 2002 after a few years of dealing with various health issues, and after a couple more years of cruising along on using my universe to cushion my grieving, it all collapsed when I started dealing with health issues of my own related to the disability I'd been born with. It was the first time in my life I'd had to handle things related to it without my mother there; she'd always been there for anything related to it to the point of sleeping in my hospital rooms with me when I was a child. She fostered my creativity as a way of giving me the sense that I could still be good at something while not being able to do "normal things", and dealing with all of this made it hit home that she was really gone.

And just like that, the door to the fantasy world that had gotten me through what was then close to half of my life slammed shut. It became difficult to even think about it as I began to move forward once I had the hip that had been ravaged by congenital dysplasia replaced, effectively changing my life and also serving as its own separate grief as I wished my mother could have seen it happen; she'd passed about a year and a half prior.

Other than the periodic impulse to re-read and continually revamp SOTU until I managed to complete the final re-write in 2016, the universe stayed locked away. Brain fog from fibromyalgia I'd developed not long after that hip replacement, job burnout and a traumatic end to said job stole a lot of the lore from me. I have a lot written down from a website I had for it in the late 90s, but I also know a lot of of that lore changed with the rewrites of SOTU. I honestly thought I'd lost my love of the world forever due to its associations with various trauma and illness, which made me sad. I'd been connected to all of those characters very intensely, for better or worse, and I felt like I lost a part of myself. I was also immersed in other interests and fandoms in those intervening years, which also took me away from trying to revisit my "second home".

But somehow, a few months ago, I started finding sparks of interest leading me back to the world. I designed a character named Orion for a different universe created by an artist I follow. I had wanted to make him unique, a hybrid of a faun and a unicorn. But once he was done, I realized that he could actually fit into Mythologica as well, as an evolved version of those original shapeshifting unicorns.

In retrospect, it was that spark that unlocked the chain on the door. I decided, almost randomly, to redesign a character, and managed to draw him fairly well. And then, while digging through the old drawings from my long dead website, decided to refine the face of the one who started it all, Tempest. It took 39 years, but I finally was able to put down on -- well, at one time it would have been paper, but now, in digital form -- the face that I had seen for him in my head once I had moved away from his original Joey Tempest homage version.

Maybe it's just taken all this time to heal and circle back to my beloved cast of characters. The vibe on Bluesky helps a lot, as from the beginning the art I've seen here has been primarily centered on OCs; it actually took quite a while for fan art to become as equally showcased as OC art as it had been on Twitter. I do suppose that encouragement has finally caught up to me, that knowing people will actually be interested in the world you've created is a thing. That was something I did not have growing up for the greater part, outside of my mom who once helped me create a fictional rock band by telling me what she thought each member should look like based on what I'd named them. I still have the drawings somewhere even though that universe was scrapped a long time ago.

But whatever it is, I'm trying to get back to it all. I need to sit down and read SOTU again, and the draft of the second story in what was meant to be a trilogy. There are several new characters that I've never drawn, and others I want to do updates for. It feels both amazing and overwhelming. It took a long time to get through the massive wall of artblock reinforced by writer's block, but I'm hoping I've finally got the right key for that chain on the door and this time, I'll do my best not to lose it.