Since I last wrote, Cis and I spent some more time working on the encyclopedia (we’ve made it through the R’s), and I was so happily ready to start writing a story. It’s been such a long time since I felt that I was ready to write actual story that I could hardly wait.

I looked at where in the timeline the story took place, and what the population was that I had calculated existed at that time, and began to create the names and personalities of the characters who would be starring in this adventure. That’s when I realized (with what I thought was a very small population), I really needed to know who was related to whom, and how. I then sat down and began, from the beginning of our ‘immortal’ population, to create a breeding program that would allow for maximum diversity. It took nearly 15 hours to create twelve generations.

Once I had finished this time-consuming, and informative task, I realized that our population numbers were inaccurate. This was a real problem since I had calculated the populations for a twelve thousand year spread, which includes all their migrations, discoveries, inventions, etc., and now the numbers had changed.

I spent another 5 hours recalculating numbers so that everything still worked the way I needed it to in the timeline; which means that I wasn’t only changing the population numbers for the first thousand years, but after that I had to figure out the new percentages of growth so that the numbers weren’t altered. I needed to the numbers to stay the same so that I didn’t have to change my migration patterns, discoveries, inventions, etc., throughout this critical part of their history.

Whenever I spend a huge amount of time doing something that isn’t going to be seen by the readers (at least not until we someday decide to publish the timeline), I think I must be insane to go to such elaborate efforts. I mean really, can’t I just make up a story? Then I look at the goal of what we want to accomplish, and realize that all the insane work to develop this world with exactness and ridiculous details, is part of what’s going to make everything work together so smoothly.

Thus, I take a deep breath, enjoy my insanity, and now I can finally get back to writing a story that takes place 105,071 years ago with a larger population than I had first thought. All this so that eventually our readers will understand why the things that are taking place in present time, are the way they are.

Our full immersion into this world, will make it so that our readers and fans will get to experience the fantastic joy of full immersion as well.

M.A.B.