Legacy Stories: An Explainer

I tend to call some of my works “legacy stories”. Here is why:

A “legacy story” is a story that has been boppling in my head since I was a teenager. It has been in my head for so long that it has earned “legacy” status. That means it’s been in my head for roughly 20 years. It doesn’t mean I had not written the story down, either as a scene or an attempt to write the whole thing (key phrase: attempt), but that it had not been in full form, from start to finish. I certainly have old journals and typed version from typewriters (yes, I still have a typewriter from when I was a teenager) and floppy disks (I’m born in ’87, duh). I even have my old journals from when I was a teen and I wrote in various colored gel pens, some of which that were scented (and still have their scents! Open a journal and, boom, hit in the face with saccharine strawberry scent. Amazing.). The stories were simply scattered between all these different mediums in bits and bobs.   

Titles that are “Legacy Story” status (Italics mean “soon to go into the publishing process/is fully written and typed”, bold means “still needs to be written”, plain lettering means “already published, about to be published”):

Dreamer

Kinetics

The Glassman

The Harlequin

Butterfly

Darkness, Light and Time

Snow Angel/Cold Angel

I had many, many stories in my head growing up but, to be honest, I melded a lot of stories together, so I could A) reduce my “to write” pile effectively (so I can free it up for newer works) and B) make a better, more cohesive story that I couldn’t as a teenager simply because I didn’t have enough life experiences and skill to do so C) I noticed a lot of reoccuring themes that I could just P-P-A-P them together and call it a day

As you can see, I have a smol list. It’s from a list of almost 30-40 as a teen to about 7. Bits and bobs of legacy works will show up in future works (Such in a future sci-fi roman a clef called Galaxia and its offshoot/connected book titled The Kill Crew Chronicles) but those 7 are the stories that stuck out in my head the most growing up. Be it due to a scene (like the knife/closet scene in Kinetics), an entire story line (like The Glassman), something jarred at me to get the story written throughout the years.

My current “to write” pile is about 15-20 titles. New books pop up all the time. For example, there is an omake (Japanese for “Extra”, for those who don’t read mangas or watch anime) that follows behind The Glassman and Dreamer together. That story itself is probably less than a year old at this current moment – I know because it’s one of the first long works I have written in fountain pen, my new writing process. So, there’s that. In Search of Amika is a massively young story, roughly a year old by the time it got published. So is “Null (Void)”, less than a year old by the time it got published also.

I tried really, really hard to get my works published traditionally but I’m putting them out myself now. I’m actually glad because I have more control over my works, from the cover to the narration. And, most importantly, they’re coming out, period. I wanted to see these books in bookstores and published and they are. I went from zero to seven books slated. No, I’m not traditionally published (which is, frankly, losing a lot of its glossy gleam at this point as an attractive option) but, hey, these works are also not simply lonely files on my computer or only live in my writing drawer as handbound written journals. Someone can go out and read them, wherever they want, however they want.

And it isn’t that I only started attempting to get published traditionally back in 2018 or so, try “longer than that”. Might as well come out now, or they probably, most likely never would have, given how traditional publishing is.

I feel like once I get the legacy stories out the way (and Soaring, which is a quasi-legacy but not quite, I got the idea for that title back when I was an adult working at the Library of Congress), I can focus on other works that have been building up since then, like The Story of Anarcha.