Library of Ancient Horrors: my proto-Noumena notes from grad school and beyond

I’ve spent the better part of the last two years moving (don’t believe HGTV when they tell you how easy buying a fixer upper is, it’s lies lies lies), and only now have gotten around to the business of unpacking. In doing so I stumbled upon my old notebooks from college and grad school, in which lie the very first brainstorming notes for the story elements that would eventually, distantly become the Noumena books, and reader, the results may shock you. Or if not shock you, you might find them interesting and/or helpful in your own writing journey. I won’t show any journals from college as they are not relevant but my God, my handwriting sure got worse between 2006 and 2009. 

First, I had totally memory holed that Cora was originally a boy! The story wasn’t originally conceived as a pastiche of Beauty and the Beast tropes but of A Boy and His X tropes, such that the character(s) that would eventually become Ampersand I just called “X”. The top line is, I think, me feeling out names and their sounds? ("O'Ceúrrbhúill" is pronounced "O'Carrol", "MacCumhal" = "McCool"), until settling on Errol. This is likely after Errol Morris the documentarian as I was studying documentary at the time, but subconsciously for it’s Nightcrawler-y connotations. 

In this original concept (for this was at least a year before I came up with the “what if Wikileaks wikileaked alien stuff?” pitch), present are the basic family structure - Dad is gone (no idea where), we have the single mom (a staple of the Boy and his X genre) and three kids. Some ten years later change Ceres to Demi and Virginia to Olive, as I felt their original names were too on the nose (especially once Cora was, well, Cora, IYKYK). This idea of the broken family structure seems front and center, which is interesting because Nils Ortega was not yet in the picture. There is also a character named Saul.

Interesting here in that even its babiest infancy, before I had done even a shred of worldbuilding and a full two years before "X" would get his name, the first thing we learn about him is he’s (zhe’s?) “manipulative” and wants to train the boy to be co-dependent.

In the following page, X gets renamed “Atticus”

Other takeaways:

• Some character named Millie

• Some character named Gary 

• “Casino”? 

• Goal!

• “Saul is our Snape” girl, if you only knew 

• Similars are here already

• Caste system also in place

• Anyone know a Greg Noll, who is a surfer with jailhouse striped pants?

Here’s where it gets real messy. 

I particularly like the “How many people in the universe would put up with your shit?” line. Clearly, the thing I came up with first was a character dynamic, and everything else followed.

So, Reader, naming aliens is hard. It just is, especially when there’s a bunch of them so you need, like, a system. Yeah, you can do a Transformers and name them after their one personality trait, like “Hi, I’m Springy, the spring sprite!” but this is Serious, Hard SciFi™ folks.  Apparently somewhere in the summer of 2009 I decided to go with a Catholic Saint based naming scheme (which would follow us to the final draft… sort of), which imo is way overthinking it. To my memory there was one version where they were named after streets in LA - I think Ampersand was Normandie so we could call him Norm, and Obelus was either Hyperion or Cahuenga or Sepulveda. Probably Sepulveda. 

Here I appear to be way overthinking it with the naming scheme, and Ampersand appears to be split into 3 (?) characters a la the alien ladies from A Wrinkle in Time, I think? Alban, Dymphna and Jude. Parts of two of these stuck; The letter A just feels correct for this character in a way that I don’t feel like articulating it just does okay, and he gets his legal name “Jude” in Truth of the Divine.

So when I say overthinking it, in my experience while you do need an internal logic to your scifi/fantasy universe and try to stick to it, these things are not absolute because reality is not absolute. More importantly, while themes in names help you find the character, not everything has to be laden with ~meaning~ that provides ~internal cohesion~ across ~every single fucking character my god~. Here you have all this stuff about Saint Alban and St. Alban’s cross and the madness of St. Dymphna and… yeah I think I just wanted to go to Scotland. 

In the end, the majority of the alien group got names that were just random Esperanto words, with the exception of Ampersand and Obelus; those names just felt right, and the logic of “CIA codenames are pretty random and arbitrary anyway” felt solid enough to me. Took me a few years to give myself permission to do what felt right for the characters.

But the most interesting thing to me here is this baseline of “Morlocks vs. Eloi” is already in place as the dynamic between our two alien species a long, long time before I would figure out what the alien race names were. So I had the background for Apostles of Mercy in place long before I would figure out, like, a plot for these alien civilizations to exist in.

Also, the first design thing I came up with was the hands, apparently!

Other takeaways:

• Who the fuck is JR? 

• “Drama group ShowsToppers” this was the name of the drama club at my high school which I was not a part of, but also, what?

• “Dad lives in LA” nothing to see here, I guess

• Ceres can’t be a lawyer because it’s too similar to Daria? What?

• “Mustapha Mond”? I guess he does have a cool name but we’re ripping of The Time Machine, sweaty, not Brave New World. 

Then there’s… whatever this is!

I honestly have no clue what I was going for here. Clearly, whatever it is is epic.

Some takeaways: 

• Oh no, not JR!!! RIP in Peace

• There's some character named Pandora? The SAME year Avatar came out? Girl...

• Apparently we go to Vegas at some point

• This must be from early 2010 because I remember that being when I decided to set it in 2007, as this page mentions “recession,” but it's also before Nils came into being.

• “Humanity -> paranoia -> rest of the world ticked at Americans” So that’s already there.

• Albi, the racist dragon

I have no clue if this was actually me mapping out a plot or just doing a brainstorming tree of character motivations. Aside from being able to pick out which characters would eventually make it to the final draft, it is gibberish.

I wrote another synopsis in May of 2010

I won’t post the whole thing because I don’t want to scan it and it’s honestly pretty tedious - several pages basically to get us up to the inciting incident of meteor-ish thing landing near the Hollywood sign (I swear this isn’t Deep Commentary, it was just a cool image in my head). Instead of Nils, there is a character named Carson, who was based on a classmate of mine who went by her last name and gave off big “ask me about my alien abduction” vibes. I think this character is a distant, distant ancestor of Luciana Ortega, as she is the connection to Tha Aliens and is kind of a moon child.

Flash forward another two years to the next notebook I found. I assume this one’s from 2012 (as there are notes for an upcoming trip to Ireland and we went in 2012) and to my great surprise Cora is still a boy! This must have been right before (s)he got genderflipped as the first mentions of “Cora” in my Google drive are from 2012.

Also, look who’s here!

There’s a Congressman named… Brody? Brady? I don’t know what happened to this guy but I don’t think he’s a distant ancestor of either Jano Miranda or Todd Julian, he either got assimilated into Nils or got cut altogether. 

Oh hey, and Nils finally exists, good for you.

  Also here:

• Ampersand finally found his name!

• Scene on Google campus

• We’ve finally settled on Esperanto (although we are calling them “Esperanto” and not “Fremda”)

• A character named Loma Prieta… I think this is an ancestor of Čefo? If so, I decided it best for this character to have died off screen before the story proper starts rather than have him being all up in Esperas’s business. 

• Esperas is here, too.

  
  

My physical notes stop around here as I decided to spare both myself and the world my handwriting and moved everything to Google Drive upon which the gender flippening did occur, but that we might explore another day…