How did you come up with the ideas for your main series?

C.B. Archer Hi Calvin! Thanks for the question! I shall go overboard and explain far too much!

When I started The Anders' Quest Series it was smaller in scale than it is today. I had an idea in my head about a character that did exactly what was asked of him by a village elder, and then was banished from his village because of it. (Village Elders are always banishing people, it is basically their job.) I wrote a list of things for this character to battle to regain access to their old life, a list of fantasy monsters.

In my mind I had a flash of blush inducing gigglyness - what if that character needed to have sex with all those monsters to get back to their village? A silly idea, but those monsters did have unusual anatomies! He would need a magical butt to handle all of that, for sure! The list stayed the same, but I drew a bum heart on it. Then I put it aside, and promptly forgot about it.

Some weeks later I decided to write a book to prove to someone who I was arguing with that you can start writing a novel and finish it. (It was his life goal, but he never wrote anything.) I got myself all good and ready to start writing a book!

I looked in my ideas folder. I had two. One was an idea from High School that was completely obvious and kept only for sentimental reasons. The other was an idea I had been working on slowly for years! I had characters, maps, plot outlines, a three part trilogy arc of emotional relevance, and every single detail worked out. I opened a word document and typed the title!

Then I noticed on my coffee table something I had forgotten to throw away. A scrap of paper with a list of monsters and a bum heart drawn on it.

I don't really know why, but I deleted the word document for the story I had planned for years, and started to write about the character in this list. I had no plan, I had nothing but this list. It wasn't even set inside a video game until I wrote the first word (Zing!), and then it was. (I did stare at that flashing type icon for half an hour before I typed in the first naughty word, blushing all the while!) The village elder idea was lost, but the list still stood. It is still in the book, and the list is still in the original order, but was completely changed from its original intent.

The idea evolved as I wrote it. It started as a small novel about one character whose name I had miss-typed as Anders and expanded to a three part series with companion Tales. Many of the characters and ideas came to be out of necessity for the plot, some were spur of the moment, and others were one one time jokes that came back because I liked the joke.

It really was a process! I wrote the draft for all three books before I published the first book, which did help for gathering ideas. Friends helped brainstorm, I did 'research', I designed the core ideas of the game they were playing to help keep things organized, I had dreams, anything and everything I could do to help it, I did.

That is my little story. I wish I kept that list with the bum heart on it, but I lost it long ago. I still remember the list from memory, and can share it.

CB's List that became naughty later:
1. Slime (the first creature any adventurer faces)
2. Chimera
3. Ogre
4. Golem
5. Hydra
6. Giant
7. Minotaur
8. Treant
9. Dragon (because, hello. Dragon!)

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