So as soon as I finished Season Island a couple years ago, I adored what I had, characters I had made, plots I created. I knew my potential was there, and when I was older I would rewrite it and publish it. The entire first book was the thing I'm most proud of, but sadly it was all written before my writing style fully developed to its current style.
It's officially been Season Island/ArstiO Eyja's 2nd Anniversary, my art and writing has changed so much and I love to look back on this book that truly started it all. The whole first book started right before I moved to my current home, the first concept of the series started as inspiration from a Bruce Coville book series called Unicorn Chronicles (Fun fact, my mom's dad was best friend's with him, no joke, he signed some books of his for me). There was a dimension they had where literally everything was green, and I thought, "Oh man this is so cool, what if there was a whole island that was split into color sections like this." That idea floated around in my head for maybe a week or two, and it just so happened I got a certain Chicken Smoothie pet around the same time that I had wanted for a long time. I thought of a name for this new beloved pet, which was, Kinamari.
About a week later, I found her again when I was organizing my pet folders. Something in my head changed this Color Island to, "Hey, what if it was seasons, instead?" And as my brain thought that I was staring at this golden dog, everything flashed through my head. The entire first book. I had to write, RIGHT then, and draw. So I drew out this Season Island I thought of, that sparked even more inspiration, I drew Kinamari next, struggled majorly because I didn't know how to draw her on traditional, still kind of don't. I showed it to my mom, who, haha, I sort of blame for Kina ending up depressed.
My mom goes, "Oh she looks cute and happy and fluffy." And whenever she would say that I had this unmovable drive to make that thing dark and angsty.
Later that day or next day, my boyfriend at the time broke up with me the day before I moved, day before I gave away Nim, and h o l y c r a p, you have no clue how depressed, stressed, and anxious I was. Such a horrible time that was for me. And that's what fueled my new drive of, "Hey let's kill off the most cinnamon roll character that we all know and love and make the protagonist extremely depressed."
Writing that book was such a fun experience. I wrote about seasons, and it just so happened as I wrote about them I went through them, meaning it took like a year, lol.
There's a few things I want to change about the first book now that I look back on it. Such as I want to show Kina's true personality (like you see in Dreaming Of Nightmares) instead of accidentally letting her be a Mary Sue. When I wrote it originally, I hadn't gotten all of my current life experience, and so it is seriously, completely, NOT OK anymore that Kina was suicidal. Kina represents me, and I would never do that, especially now. I cannot describe how much it pains me extremely to think that I thought it was ok to let her do that.
So I think, "Hey I could just rewrite that part of the story." But the problem with that would be the fact that you would be able to clearly tell that there was something there that I didn't want anymore and got an experienced writer to fix for me (Yeah I'm proud of my current skills).
I knew I was going to rewrite it in my later life, but this has been itching in the back of my mind a lot lately. I don't want to abandon these characters yet, but Dreaming Of Nightmares is such a pain in the neck, and there's so many things I could've done better.
I knew that it had come to its second anniversary recently and wanted to draw something for it, but as usual was lazy and didn't do it : )))
So here's the big announcement and thing I'm doing for its second anniversary, which you probably already knew as soon as this little journal thing started, is I am going to rewrite Season Island. Heeeck no not Dreaming Of Nightmares, too, just the first book. I am very excited to do this, but also super stressed because I know how long it's going to take. And no, I'm not abandoning Arnea's Children, I'm just waiting for that flash of inspiration for it instead of trying to force it to come and have it be panic attack inducing like Dreaming Of Nightmares.
With rewriting this now, I'm going to make new refs for the characters, maybe do a little design tweaking here and there, stuff like that. So here's to a fresh start.
