This March, I will release the variant versions of one story I have yet to finish. I’m calling it: “The Ides of March: Variants of ‘The End’”. You may have already seen the social media promos about it. Your mind was fluttering with curiosity as to what it could be about, wasn’t it? And yes the subtitle, “Variants of ‘The End’”, was a subtle clue. 

“The End” is a sci-fi, fantasy story I started working on in high school during my freshman year. Since then, I’ve come up with variant concepts to tell one story. This created a multiverse of my own plots and subplots for the same set of characters, whose origins never really change, but the journey of how they connect with one another always does.

It started out with me thinking about a little boy, whose entire world shifts drastically when aliens invade Earth, causing him to never see his family again. As an orphaned boy, he is taken in by another family. This family all belong to aliens that are nice to humans. Though the humans aren’t free, they’re not imprisoned and experimented on like the other humans that live amongst the other alien factions in dome cities. He grows into a teen and starts liberating the imprisoned humans, bringing them to the safety of human havens, which are like wildlife preservations, but for people. When he saves a teen girl named Sophia, everything changes. Together the teens lead a huge uprising against both factions of warring aliens (that occupied Earth) and save humanity. Not knowing what to call the story, I gave it the title: “The End”. 

Originally, Book One was going to start out years after the alien invasion. Book Two, called “The Middle”, was going to take place during the alien invasion, and Book Three, known as “The Beginning”, was going to be about the aliens and why they invaded Earth. Each book was going to have new main characters to follow that would be introduced in the previous book.

However, in high school, I didn’t do organization. I didn’t do outlines. I just did whatever came to mind, and so the story developed as I wrote it and became a whole other animal, something far more complex than I first intended.

Believe it or not, the story concept has far more intricacies now than it ever did, but I like where it is going. However, the final version I am working on now  will become a book, well several books, and you won’t get access to that for free. Most of the characters will be kept, and more information about characters will be revealed in the final novel series that isn’t revealed in these variants on the blog. Some things are just getting scrapped altogether due to the idea being used by someone else before I could use it. I know there is nothing new under the sun, but each story has to be a little unique, right?

Why keep reworking the same idea? If you haven’t completed a single version, maybe just give up on it all together?

If you asked Stephen King these questions, he would agree. A friend once told me, when he gave advice to up and coming writers, that if he couldn’t finish a story in 3 months, he threw it in the trash. Seeing that he is a highly successful author, such advice would probably be wise to take, if one was in it for the money alone.

James Cameron had his concept for Avatar in his head since he was a child, but he needed to wait for technology to catch up to bring his vision to life. Avatar was the highest grossing film ever until the Avengers: Endgame beat it.

This  further proves my point, because the Avengers franchise, and even all the Marvel movies, are new variants and fresh takes on many comic book series that were never afraid to press the reset button and make a new version or an extension of what the creators did beforehand. Time incubates genius. 

Stephen King comes up with wildly creative ideas, but they all feel rushed, and clearly the product of one creative mind, as opposed to several working together for the same goal.

Granted, I haven’t worked with anyone on this story or its variants you’re about to read since high school (my friends gave me some suggestions I abandoned long ago), but coming up with ideas at different stages of my life is like having another creative on the project. People go through phases, especially from the teen years into their late 20s.

If you’re anything a little like me, and you want to know why an author chooses a title, I selected the “The Ides of March: Variants of ‘The End’” for three reasons: 

1. I really like to say the phrase “the Ides of March.” It rolls off the tongue quite nicely.
2. The “Ides of March” is the middle or the 15th of March, and I am doing this series in March, the longest version of this story I am sharing will be released in the middle of the month.
3. I am a theatre geek and Shakespeare wrote that famous line in his play Julius Caesar, saying “Beware the Ides of March!”.

For history buffs, they know Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides of March, in 44 BCE. Here are two links where I got info about Julius Caesar and the meaning of the “Ides of March”:

Thought Co:

Britannica:

I guess, for the Roman Calendar, Ides was always the middle of the month. To reference days of the month, they phrase things using these three primary words: Kalends, which meant the 1st, Nones which meant the 7th, and Ides which meant the 15th. After the Ides of every month, they would say “Before the Kalends” which meant before the first. After the Kalends, they would say, “Before the Nones” for the 2nd through the 6th. And after the Nones, they would say, “Before the Ides”, for the days leading up to the Ides of the month.

The “Ides of March” is essentially tied to bad luck, given the history around Julius Caesar, but the beauty of believing in Jesus Christ is that one has no need in believing in luck or lack of it.

Just like at the beginning of  today’s introduction, I’ll be using Roman Calendar references to announce the rest of this work; the summaries of the variants of the story will be shared on “the Kalends”, “the Nones”, and “the Ides”, while the different versions of the story content will be released as “Before the Nones”, “Before the Ides”, and “Before the Kalends”.

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Bring on the Spring, and look out for “The Ides of March: Variants of ‘The End’”!

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*Edited by Aly Fry