I couldn’t think of a less corny title for my first post. I know. Terrible look for a writer, but that’s what I got.
To be fair, I wasn’t always a writer. At least, it was only recently (very recently) that I even allowed myself to consider myself a writer. That said, I’ve always been a creator.
When I was in 5th grade, I created a walking, talking, cucumber named Arnie. Arnie Cucumber, in full. Little creative genius I was, no? I drew this guy in class, along with dozens of his friends and neighbors. There was Ralph Turkey, his best friend and partner in all of his silly antics. Mayor Dodo, the last of his kind and the grumpy (sometimes evil) mayor of Dodo Land (let me repeat: creative genius). Eva, the fairy princess who stole Arnie’s affection… I can go on and on discussing characters and stories from the thirteen stories I wrote that chronicled Arnie’s adventures (but, if I’m being honest, I think I’ll leave those for some future posts here).
By the time I reached middle school, Arnie Cucumber made way for ‘Larry & Phil’, a comic strip series about a boy and his bird causing havoc across their town. In retrospect, this was also about the time that I discovered Calvin & Hobbes. Likely not a coincidence, but we’ll brush past that. Eventually, Larry’s story was repurposed into a graphic novel called ‘The Core Chronicles.’
TCC was wacky and ambitious, and took the titular teen out of the comfort zone of his hometown and spat him out into a sci-fi saga that served as an amalgamation of the dozens, truly dozens of characters and stories that my hyperactive brain had been conjuring up over the years. Phil the bird stayed at home, instead replaced Larry’s twin sister Tilla. From pirate adventures, to alien invasions, and all the way back to Arnie and his pals in Dodo Land; Larry and Tilla saw it all. Alas, at this time I lacked any true focus or ambition to see this project to completion. That’s not to say that it wasn’t a blast of a project, one I return to often to see if I can make something of it.
Then came video games. I had been studying game design in NYC and the time came to craft my thesis project; the culmination of all I’d been studying and practicing. Easy peasy, Benson, I thought to myself. I’d use my extensively crafted TCC world and write a branching, text-based adventure game set within that narrative. The graphic novel never really clicked, so surely this was it… Well, nope. It didn’t work. Rather, it didn’t feel right. But, the idea of two twins on a sci-fi adventure did, in fact, feel right. I thought it over, and switched gears: I’d create a narrative adventure within a world where everybody was a twin. The ‘twist’? The story had nothing to do with that. At least, not on the surface.
And thus, Overlap was born.
And… Overlap died. The story was crap, the characters unlikable, and, most blasphemous of all, the game wasn’t even remotely entertaining. I gave up on the narrative experience and instead made a card game, called ‘Dastardly’, which admittedly I am extremely proud of, but I digress.
I’m gonna speed this story up now, because we’re at the part that I really wanted to get to: I became obsessed with the overall idea behind Overlap. What is individuality in a world where everyone is one-of-two? How and why are there these twins? What is everyday life like? How would that world’s history differ from ours? I became obsessed. From here, I crafted a detailed outline of what I envisioned as the first story arc of an ongoing Overlap graphic novel… and nothing happened with it. Because, well, nothing had changed. I wasn’t committed or focused enough to both write and draw a whole story. Overlap remained nothing more than hypothetical, constantly changing and growing, but never truly amounting to anything more than a beastly passion project in my mind.
Fast forward a few years, and I’m working in education. I’d recently moved states with my wife, was almost done with my masters program, and got a job in a middle school. The job sucked. There’s no sugar coating it. It was an awful assignment, and I was moments away from quitting, for reasons I won’t dive into. One day, ripping hairs from my head (I’m bald. It’s a bald joke), I needed something to calm me down and distract me from the hellish situation I’d found myself in. I couldn’t draw, I couldn’t work on a game, but I did have a laptop. I opened a Google doc, and without thinking much I wrote the sentence:
“Milo hit the floor.”
I remember staring at those words like they’d been written by somebody else. They meant nothing, I had no story in mind. Milo was a name I defaulted to when I couldn’t think of a name right away for a new character (that name has now become Bradley, as Milo has since been assigned permanently to an Overlap character). Yet, for some reason, those words opened up my blocked creative floodgates, and I began writing the first Overlap book. The outline I’d crafted for my failed graphic novel venture would come to be Part I, and from there I just kept going. From October, 2021 to October, 2022, I wrote.
Currently, I’m editing Overlap and writing its follow-up, tentatively titled Tangents. I have 4 additional storied in mind, and no reason to stop there. Creatively, I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more satisfied.
I don’t know if anyone will ever read Overlap. If they do, who knows if they’ll like it. Hell, I don’t know if anyone will ever read this silly, too-long post. But, regardless, Overlap is something I’m unbelievably proud of, and I can’t wait to see where this adventure goes.
See y’all out in the Overlap!
-a. t. benson
written by benson 