One More Detour on the Writing Road

When I start building a world and the plot of a book, things don’t always go quickly. In some cases I can visualize a whole world and start writing right away. But those instances tend to be rare, simply because these days what I’m working on are often notions that I’ve been thinking about and poking at for a couple of decades or so.

That’s the case for Vortex Worlds. I’ve approached it from several angles and been thinking about it for a very long time. The notion of a time/multiverse refuge in a quasi-Western, nineteenth-kinda century setting has been niggling at me ever since the early twenty-teens, when we were driving through the southern Willamette Valley. I got a flash of native elders confronting a white settler using a forbidden mechanical sickle bar mower—and turning into wicker/wooden forms in that field when the settler refused to comply.

Only then I wasn’t thinking about the time-travel multiverse elements. Those crawled slowly into my story notions as I worked on what eventually became the novella Bearing Witness. And even then, the concept really hasn’t gained flesh until recently.

What happened between now and then?

A lot of research. I also had a notion for an alternate history version of Pacific Northwest settlement by white Europeans that was loosely based on a proposal by Dr. John McLoughlin toward the end of his tenure as the Chief Factor for Fort Vancouver. McLoughlin approached the first US settlers with an idea of establishing an “Oregon Country,” independent from both the US and Great Britain.

Well, we know how that turned out.

However, I kept throwing magic and unicorns and other stuff into the mix, and gave up on it after a few short stories in that world. I…still might do something with it, unconnected to Vortex Worlds, but that makes it maybe next up on the list (we’ll see if Vision of Alliance’s sluggish sales perk up, that might be enough for me to turn to Book Two of that trilogy).

Anyway. Back to Vortex Worlds. One of the theories teasing at my brain has been this “what if Alice Clarissa Whitman had not drowned at age two?” notion. She was the daughter of early missionaries Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, born early in their time at Waíilatpu near what later became the city of Walla Walla. Her parents withdrew significantly from their mission after her death, and turned instead to helping US settlers instead of missionizing the local peoples for Christianity. It’s a possible turning point in history because Alice Clarissa was friendly with the Cayuse peoples; loved as the first white child born in their land. She spoke their language as well as English. Would she have suffered the same fate as her parents? Would she have died of measles? Or would she have ended up like a couple of orphaned girls who were adopted by the Whitmans, then orphaned a second time by their deaths, doomed to bouncing between so-called “adoptive” parents who basically treated them like indentured servants, up until they married?

Not that Alice Clarissa became a part of this world until recently. Before then, when I was drafting Bearing Witness, I was thinking more about a different path, where horrific nasty supernatural stuff tied to a multiverse and a battle for the control of the multiverse made the leadup to the US Civil War even bloodier and more awful. I visualized a group of escapees from the mid-nineteenth century bouncing from universe to universe, trying to escape the Soulers who not only killed the body but devoured the soul. Of course, not all of them were in political accord, which led to the opening that provided the foundation for the story of Bearing Witness, which I ended up serializing on Kindle Vella, then releasing as a novella a few years ago.

Even then, though, I buried seeds of a bigger world in Witness. Jesse Pruitt and his wife Tianawis—and Tianawis is head of the Kalosin Council of Women, the native people who control and protect the Kalosin refuge. Jesse is a Wild Colonist, a magician with the ability to manipulate the portals that transport people through the multiverse. Wild Colonists operate separately from the other two sources of magic—Federal Magicians and Preacher Magicians. Wild Colonists are independent wild cards—along with the Kalosin people.

Buried even deeper in Witness is the story of Jesse’s mother Abigail Caine Pruitt, who operates a null site within Kalosin. I don’t delve further into that part of the world in Witness, but I knew that Abigail’s story was significant.

Well, now it’s time for that piece. However, at the same time, I also had Alice Clarissa. I wrote a short story where a clone is substituted for her two-year-old drowned self, and she is raised by aliens and trained to be a Time Corps interpreter. Oh, I sent the story out to a couple of markets, but…it wasn’t that well-received, probably in part because I was still struggling with what this would turn Alice Clarissa into.

I’ve figured that piece out, and am revising that short story into something that’s much better than the original piece. This appears to be one of those books where the worldbuilding foundation ends up resting on assorted short stories, so writing these stories is part of that overall revision. Not sure yet whether these backstory short pieces will become a part of the book or if I’ll end up putting them out as related short stories as teasers/reader magnets.

Interestingly, instead of what I’ve done for worldbuilding in the past, I’m exploring this world through related short stories/outtakes. It’s something I started doing with the Martinieres and—well, for me it’s a sign that the world is starting to come to life. It’s a much slower process than sitting down with an easel and scribbling out notes to myself but—life is chaotic at the moment, so this slower process seems to fit what I’m doing.

Kalosin is a fascinating world, and I have oh-so-much to learn about it yet. Especially given its solitary status in the multiverse of Vortex Worlds. I’m nowhere near ready to start writing a chapter synopsis yet, but…it will happen. Eventually. After over thirty-two books to my credit, I’ve learned to trust the process. Sometimes it comes fast, other times it comes slow.

But the story eventually arrives. And I’m fascinated by this journey.

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