Guest Blog: C. E. L. Welsh
It's not Friday, but C. E. L. Welsh couldn't wait -- his Kickstarter, which features friends of the blog Jeremy Mohler, Emily Hall, and Scott Colby -- has left than a week left to fund! I asked him to talk a little bit about the world behind the project, Seven Stones, and I hope you'll be intrigued enough to go over to the Kickstarter an check it out!
Without further ado: C. E. L. Welsh!
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The World of The Wrecked Earth
In the summer of 2010 I saw a world where civilization was all-but-gone, where hordes of mutated animals roamed the wilds, and where shooting stars filled the sky, day and night, in a never-ending display of deadly celestial majesty. This world was, of course, all in my head, and there it remained until I managed to move a small part of it to paper, where it became CLUTCH: Book One of The Wrecked Earth. Now it is the summer of 2013 and I am trying to bring more of that world into existence, but this time I’ve enlisted the help of thirteen others to lend me a hand.
The project is Seven Stones, a collaborative short story & graphic novel effort with fourteen talented writers and artists. The idea: each of seven writers create a short story that centers around a meteorite (thus the title) in The Wrecked Earth. Then those seven tales are converted to comic scripts and seven artists bring their post-apoc vision to the table and create comics based on the stories.
We are at the short end of a crowd-funding run to pay for all this amazing work, and the logistics of coordinating so many moving parts form a complex and sometimes maddening spiderweb of tasks and roles-many of which I’ve had to learn how to fulfill on the fly. At the heart of it all is the world of the Wrecked Earth, a deliberately open playground that I created to give myself as much freedom as possible and, luckily, that worked out just right when it came to inviting others to the game.
Back in 2010 I wrote a three page comic script called “No One Escapes The Wizard”, with the idea that Danny Cruz would draw it and then we would pitch it to Mark Millar’s CLiNT magazine, which was having an open call at the time. The comic didn’t get made, but during the course of writing the script I had to answer quite a few questions, the answers to which later became the foundation for my world. It was to be a post-apocalyptic comic, short and sweet in the manner of the old Judge Dredd comics. Something filled with big ideas and over-the-top action, a pulpy-feel that didn’t require a great deal of scientific explanation behind why things were the way they were. Just some short-hand, thinly veiled reasoning and then we could get on with the action. As I developed the world I deliberately made choices that would give me maximum freedom for future stories (at this point I knew, regardless if this comic got made, that I wanted to do a lot of work in the world I was creating).
I didn’t want to be too tied down to the facts. If I wanted to tell a story where the hero fought his way through a ravine filled with mutated cows, but there was no ravine in that location in the real world, I didn’t want that to stop me! So I set to work creating the world my way.
What was the apocalypse? Meteor strikes! LOTS of them, all over the planet, for thirty days straight. Add the impacts to triggered earthquakes and screwed up weather systems and I could re-shape the landscape however I wanted. Keep the meteors falling, but make them sporadic and unpredictable to keep everything on a constant edge.
Where did the monsters come from? Radiation! Strange radiation that SOME of the meteors leaked, creating unpredictable mutations. (There are other reasons for the monsters I can’t go into yet… )
With these two elements in play, I could really come up with a ‘logical’ explanation for whatever I wanted/needed to inject into the world. From there other aspects of The Wrecked Earth started to take shape on their own, and I found myself discovering as much as I was creating.
With the re-sculpted (and still changing!) landscape, those that survived Rockfall (the initial meteoric destruction) were cut off from one-another. This meant that two towns only a few miles apart might evolve very differently over the years, creating perhaps radically different societies. Yet another advantage when it comes to storytelling.
There is a meta-plot involved in the arc of The Wrecked Earth’s creation and history. I am taking things in a specific direction. But along the way there are so many stories to be told… and not just by me. I have my way of writing, my voice, as it were. Even when I choose to tell different kinds of stories in this setting, they are still my stories. The setting is bigger than I am, and I just knew there were things that could be done with it that I wouldn’t be able to do, because I’m just one writer.
So I invited a few others to come and play.
I did my best to give them the rules; I wrote a Writers Guide to The Wrecked Earth, and I laid out the parameters of this specific project. Inside that framework, however, I not only gave them the freedom to write whatever kind of story they wanted, I encouraged them to do so. I wanted to see The Wrecked Earth through their eyes, and I have been delighted with the results.
I get to become a reader in the world I created, and that is an amazing thing.
Without further ado: C. E. L. Welsh!
--
The World of The Wrecked Earth
In the summer of 2010 I saw a world where civilization was all-but-gone, where hordes of mutated animals roamed the wilds, and where shooting stars filled the sky, day and night, in a never-ending display of deadly celestial majesty. This world was, of course, all in my head, and there it remained until I managed to move a small part of it to paper, where it became CLUTCH: Book One of The Wrecked Earth. Now it is the summer of 2013 and I am trying to bring more of that world into existence, but this time I’ve enlisted the help of thirteen others to lend me a hand.
The project is Seven Stones, a collaborative short story & graphic novel effort with fourteen talented writers and artists. The idea: each of seven writers create a short story that centers around a meteorite (thus the title) in The Wrecked Earth. Then those seven tales are converted to comic scripts and seven artists bring their post-apoc vision to the table and create comics based on the stories.
We are at the short end of a crowd-funding run to pay for all this amazing work, and the logistics of coordinating so many moving parts form a complex and sometimes maddening spiderweb of tasks and roles-many of which I’ve had to learn how to fulfill on the fly. At the heart of it all is the world of the Wrecked Earth, a deliberately open playground that I created to give myself as much freedom as possible and, luckily, that worked out just right when it came to inviting others to the game.
Back in 2010 I wrote a three page comic script called “No One Escapes The Wizard”, with the idea that Danny Cruz would draw it and then we would pitch it to Mark Millar’s CLiNT magazine, which was having an open call at the time. The comic didn’t get made, but during the course of writing the script I had to answer quite a few questions, the answers to which later became the foundation for my world. It was to be a post-apocalyptic comic, short and sweet in the manner of the old Judge Dredd comics. Something filled with big ideas and over-the-top action, a pulpy-feel that didn’t require a great deal of scientific explanation behind why things were the way they were. Just some short-hand, thinly veiled reasoning and then we could get on with the action. As I developed the world I deliberately made choices that would give me maximum freedom for future stories (at this point I knew, regardless if this comic got made, that I wanted to do a lot of work in the world I was creating).
I didn’t want to be too tied down to the facts. If I wanted to tell a story where the hero fought his way through a ravine filled with mutated cows, but there was no ravine in that location in the real world, I didn’t want that to stop me! So I set to work creating the world my way.
What was the apocalypse? Meteor strikes! LOTS of them, all over the planet, for thirty days straight. Add the impacts to triggered earthquakes and screwed up weather systems and I could re-shape the landscape however I wanted. Keep the meteors falling, but make them sporadic and unpredictable to keep everything on a constant edge.
Where did the monsters come from? Radiation! Strange radiation that SOME of the meteors leaked, creating unpredictable mutations. (There are other reasons for the monsters I can’t go into yet… )
With these two elements in play, I could really come up with a ‘logical’ explanation for whatever I wanted/needed to inject into the world. From there other aspects of The Wrecked Earth started to take shape on their own, and I found myself discovering as much as I was creating.
With the re-sculpted (and still changing!) landscape, those that survived Rockfall (the initial meteoric destruction) were cut off from one-another. This meant that two towns only a few miles apart might evolve very differently over the years, creating perhaps radically different societies. Yet another advantage when it comes to storytelling.
There is a meta-plot involved in the arc of The Wrecked Earth’s creation and history. I am taking things in a specific direction. But along the way there are so many stories to be told… and not just by me. I have my way of writing, my voice, as it were. Even when I choose to tell different kinds of stories in this setting, they are still my stories. The setting is bigger than I am, and I just knew there were things that could be done with it that I wouldn’t be able to do, because I’m just one writer.
So I invited a few others to come and play.
I did my best to give them the rules; I wrote a Writers Guide to The Wrecked Earth, and I laid out the parameters of this specific project. Inside that framework, however, I not only gave them the freedom to write whatever kind of story they wanted, I encouraged them to do so. I wanted to see The Wrecked Earth through their eyes, and I have been delighted with the results.
I get to become a reader in the world I created, and that is an amazing thing.