What to Write

The lull between writing on the site always makes me anxious. I have often heard older folks tell me that the key to living longer is staying active. They always tell doom and gloom stories of falling down or slowing down and never recovering fully.

I worry about that with my writing.

I fear that one day I’ll put away my creative thoughts for a few nights and before I know it thirty years will have passed and I never got around to writing that thing I wanted to write.

Township is a story I really enjoy. The characters are some of the best I’ve ever created, and the larger universe and background of the lore is engaging and deep. Ever since I published the first episode on January 15, 2019, I have been excited to flesh out the series and create a story that I could share with everyone. The conclusion of the online series, and the compilation of that into the Township eBook in June of 2023 was an exciting time.

I’ve been working for a while now on the next story in the series; a new adventure called Worldship.

I’m not quite ready to share what that story is going to be about, but I am excited to be working on it again when time allows. That wasn’t always the case, however.

Recently I started watching a series on Apple TV+ called Silo. The series is amazing, as is the book series it’s based on (Silo Series). I found myself questioning my own creativity. This show, like Township, takes place in a vessel.

Sure, the Township is a massive interstellar vehicle with a habitable environment, larger and more friendly than anything in the silo, but we find ourselves with similar story elements, such a mayors, resource management, and mysterious plots.

No, they aren’t the same. I shy away from political intrigue, and it’s clear the Silo series doesn’t have any Yunai or dark mechanical creatures lurking in the shadows.

Still, my mind wandered, and I worried that maybe my story just wasn’t original enough.

My writing stalled.

Today, while I was sending a link to Township for someone when I accidentally found The Township by Bryson Hirai-Hadley over on Amazon Kindle Unlimited.

I read through the synopsis and realized that this story appears to be right down the middle of my own work and the Silo series. A futuristic group of human, inside a vessel, hoping to survive.

I realized that the ideas we have and share are all interconnected by our humanity. My own world and lore isn’t nearly as dystopian, and it doesn’t even take place on a planet, much less Earth! At the end of the day, stories are almost always going to carry some similar threads, and yeah sometimes it might even make you say to yourself, this seems like that one story I read, and that’s okay. Hopefully, folks who have read and enjoyed the Silo series can also read and enjoy the both my own work Township, and Bryson Hirai-Hadley’s The Township, and these creative works can stand on their own while also sharing in concepts and ideas that revolve around community, isolation, and hope.

I’ll have more updates about the direction of my story and what we’re going to see in Worldship, and I’m very very excited!