Unreal Realms of My Own
Aug. 3rd, 2005 12:01 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
frustratedpilotHey.
I caught the tail-end of POV tonight...
http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/intherealms
...about the life of Henry Darger, who spend the vast majority of his life creating a huge allegorical supernovel--which only one man got a chance to read in Henry's lifetime.
My dad saw the whole program and the first word he used to describe it was "weird". But from what I had seen of the program and from my own experiences, I fear becoming another Darger.
You see, I had been working on something of a similar vein...a science-fiction story named after its heroine: Rayome. She came to me about the time my younger brother went off to college (1988) and the story became a pet project of mine thoughout the Nineties. On the surface, I gave up working on it a few years ago, but her stories are often the ones my mind tells itself when I'm trying to sleep. So let me introduce her.
This story is set many generations from now, when interstellar travel has become commonplace and dozens of planets across the Milky Way Galaxy have either been colonized or are being explored. Rayome herself was orphaned in a brief war on the planet Tropos, and was found in an abandoned settlement by a peacekeeper from Earth who protected her till she was placed in a shelter. She lived in the shelter for years before being befriended by three very important people...in order, a worker at a zoo; a college studentess, and a starship engineer--the last of whom adopted her. Rayome's main strength as a character was her innate ability to bring people to love one another...to arrange good things to happen...and to bring the divine out from all things.
The engineer brought her aboard the good ship Cormorant...a quasi-pirate ship led by the youthful, enigmatic and outlaw-by-circumstance Plusma, who ultimately became a mother figure for Rayome. The ship's crew often brought their families along on the voyages and so Rayome had plenty of playmates...and, in due course, her love of her life: Camr. Camr stars in a pair of short stories on the website linked from this blog: "To Tempt Arjuna" and "Chocolate Bloom".
And so, I set Rayome in adventure after adventure...encountering ghosts and breaking their curses...restoring a goddess to her former glory...giving galactic criminals a dose of playfully humiliating trouble...and on and on. My aim was to try to make something in the spirit of Leiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 and Captain Harlock and his other sagas but at the same time go in new directions with the theme, in the same manner that Star Trek did starting with The Next Generation...and the wave of space-opera follow-ons (like Babylon 5 and others of today) have persisted.
Still, I don't have an outlet, and that's my main problem. Harry Potter's success aside, I don't think the media cares to make "serious" stories for young readers these days, for fear of offending somebody. The closest I came to publishing Rayome was back around 1993 when I was attempting to get a paying job out of Pete Caravette's "Samson" label comics...but even then, I doubt I could have made a success from it. (Heck, I doubt any of the artists working on the Samson projects even knew how to draw pre-teenage girls!)
And so, while Rayome is celebrating her latest success (locating the lost gene banks on the ancestral planet of her friend, the enormous alien ship captain Buslaika) and voyaging for home in the depths of my imagination, Rayome is in suspended animation, awaiting the rise of an opportunity for her whole story to be told.
I hope I don't have to wait the rest of my own life...or die before she lives.
FP
I caught the tail-end of POV tonight...
http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/intherealms
...about the life of Henry Darger, who spend the vast majority of his life creating a huge allegorical supernovel--which only one man got a chance to read in Henry's lifetime.
My dad saw the whole program and the first word he used to describe it was "weird". But from what I had seen of the program and from my own experiences, I fear becoming another Darger.
You see, I had been working on something of a similar vein...a science-fiction story named after its heroine: Rayome. She came to me about the time my younger brother went off to college (1988) and the story became a pet project of mine thoughout the Nineties. On the surface, I gave up working on it a few years ago, but her stories are often the ones my mind tells itself when I'm trying to sleep. So let me introduce her.
This story is set many generations from now, when interstellar travel has become commonplace and dozens of planets across the Milky Way Galaxy have either been colonized or are being explored. Rayome herself was orphaned in a brief war on the planet Tropos, and was found in an abandoned settlement by a peacekeeper from Earth who protected her till she was placed in a shelter. She lived in the shelter for years before being befriended by three very important people...in order, a worker at a zoo; a college studentess, and a starship engineer--the last of whom adopted her. Rayome's main strength as a character was her innate ability to bring people to love one another...to arrange good things to happen...and to bring the divine out from all things.
The engineer brought her aboard the good ship Cormorant...a quasi-pirate ship led by the youthful, enigmatic and outlaw-by-circumstance Plusma, who ultimately became a mother figure for Rayome. The ship's crew often brought their families along on the voyages and so Rayome had plenty of playmates...and, in due course, her love of her life: Camr. Camr stars in a pair of short stories on the website linked from this blog: "To Tempt Arjuna" and "Chocolate Bloom".
And so, I set Rayome in adventure after adventure...encountering ghosts and breaking their curses...restoring a goddess to her former glory...giving galactic criminals a dose of playfully humiliating trouble...and on and on. My aim was to try to make something in the spirit of Leiji Matsumoto's Galaxy Express 999 and Captain Harlock and his other sagas but at the same time go in new directions with the theme, in the same manner that Star Trek did starting with The Next Generation...and the wave of space-opera follow-ons (like Babylon 5 and others of today) have persisted.
Still, I don't have an outlet, and that's my main problem. Harry Potter's success aside, I don't think the media cares to make "serious" stories for young readers these days, for fear of offending somebody. The closest I came to publishing Rayome was back around 1993 when I was attempting to get a paying job out of Pete Caravette's "Samson" label comics...but even then, I doubt I could have made a success from it. (Heck, I doubt any of the artists working on the Samson projects even knew how to draw pre-teenage girls!)
And so, while Rayome is celebrating her latest success (locating the lost gene banks on the ancestral planet of her friend, the enormous alien ship captain Buslaika) and voyaging for home in the depths of my imagination, Rayome is in suspended animation, awaiting the rise of an opportunity for her whole story to be told.
I hope I don't have to wait the rest of my own life...or die before she lives.
FP
