In Which Medic Writes Stories
Oh no. It’s me again. aabicus did an amazing job giving me a break and allowing me to build a bit of a backlog of articles, so I wasn’t desperately writing and publishing things. But aabicus has things to do as well, so we’re back to little old Medic pumping out content with no end in sight. So yay, I guess?
That’s kinda belittling to me though. I do so much writing, all in part of an insane bid to write 500 words every day until the day I die. As I am typing this sentence, I have this article open, one other article just started AND a Libre Office document open, with the start of a story. You see, my writing is, 99% of the time, split between two things: the Daily SPUF and the Phoviverse.
The Phoviverse has been an insane, confusing, ongoing project for years. It’s currently on its 4th official iteration, MK4, although the material for MK3 is all still available to read.
The MK2 and MK1 Phoviverses, we don’t talk about them. The MK1 universe I don’t think was even called the Phoviverse, and it was full of copyrighted characters. Basically, the MK1 universe was what every single teenager creates. A world filled with all the things they like, plus a few characters based on themselves, which they insert into said world in order to be with the cool things they like and go on adventures with them. MK2 was my first attempt at making something wholly original and it… was a mess.
MK3 also turned into a mess, but that was mostly on me not wanting to give up on characters and create new ones in a more persistent universe. More importantly though, I broke my original rules of how much influence the deities of said universe had, and how much power they had. MK4 changed that by creating additional deities with more specific tasks, while the divine beings REALLY in charge kept to themselves. There’s four young gods that deal with smaller things like life, death, time and space, but everything is really kept together by an almighty being sitting atop a golden yet hidden throne.
The Phoviverse does take up a lot of my writing. Actually, thinking about it, it takes up about 50% of my writing time. I either write a Daily SPUF article for my 500 words a day, I write a Phoviverse short story for my 500 words a day or I do both. Sometimes I’ll do more.
The thing is, despite all this writing, none of this is… marketable. You see, for years, I’ve been told I should market my stuff, brand it, find a way to make money off it. But I can’t. It’s all too much of a mess. There is a huge amount of lore in my Phoviverses, so many twisting paths, backstories, characters, story arcs, all sorts. But it’s not particularly appealing and it’s all so dense and hard to get into.
For example, at the time of writing, the current story arc is called “Dead for Four Seconds”. In this story arc, Kairos, the god of time, has a heart attack and is dead for 4 seconds. Kairos freaks out and doesn’t know what caused him to have a heart attack, the gods all band together to work out what happened and suddenly an extrauniversal being attacks, traps Kairos in a special universe and in doing so forces parts of the universe to be stuck in a four second loop, all the while severely damaging two of the other gods and disrupting the universe to the point that it might collapse. Did any of that make sense? Probably not.
But that’s most of my stories in a nutshell. They don’t make much sense to anyone but me. And it really doesn’t help that there are no human or human-like (i.e. elves, orcs, things like that) characters in the Phoviverse at all. There are races with humanoid traits but no actual humans. This makes marketing the Phoviverse very tricky and narrows my audience down to “barely a niche” levels.
I also don’t really want to monetize any of it though. The same way I don’t want to monetize the Daily SPUF. The Phoviverse and the Daily SPUF are hobbies, things that I do and mostly enjoy. If I monetize it, it all becomes work. And I don’t want extra work.
I do this because I enjoy it and I don’t want to ruin that…