The Time Keepers and Team Guinea Pig

“It’s just fan fiction about my friends”

In my last post, I talked a lot about the evolution of my writing and a bit about where it currently stands.  I talked about how I went from telling stories about Harry Potter and Scooby-Doo to writing absurdist comedic theater and Castlevania with more meat-people.  But I didn’t really go into any specifics about my projects, and for the most part that’s because I want to keep everything under lock and key until I’m ready to publish it for real.  But in other cases, that’s because I wouldn’t be doing my old works the proper justice by grazing over them.  This is about those works.

While most of what I write now is either some literary short fiction that I turn in for college credit or a personal project of mine that I hope to publish, at one point I wrote whatever I wanted, in whatever incarnation it came to me. Even if it wasn’t thematically appropriate or logically coherent.  I still do write like that sometimes, usually when I have nothing else to do or I’ve painted myself into a corner, but I wrote entire novels like this.  Or, I guess, one entire novel and a children’s picture book.

There were two specific pieces that I wanted to talk about, the two early projects of mine that laid the foundation for my current writing.  As I talked about in the previous post (hopefully that link works), these two pieces were Team Guinea Pig and The Time Keepers.  They aren’t like Dragon Storm or those other pieces I talked about where they’re complete and utter garbage. They’re more the product of a child; there’s potential, sure, but it would have to be heavily refined.  Especially The Time Keepers, because woah boy that’s a whole crockpot of insanity.

Let’s start with Team Guinea Pig.  While it wasn’t the first thing I wrote, it was the first text that I took seriously.  Whenever I had free time in 2^nd grade class, which was most of the time, I would write in this purple notebook that I kept in my backpack.  I’d write during quiet reading time, I’d write after I finished tests, and I’d write whenever we had to stay inside for recess because of the rain.  I got away with this because my 2^nd grade teacher was one of the most encouraging women I’ve ever met.  She was the kind of teacher who really understood the kids, and she saw that this writing was something I cared about.  So I got to write.

She was the kind of teacher that let us bring hammers to school so that we could break open the rocks in the playground to look for geodes.  That doesn’t sound too safe, but it was perfectly safe.  We had goggles, and there’s quite a lot to be said for constructive play.  She also let me read my work to the class, when I had finished it.  I got to sit at the front of the class for quiet reading one day and recite my little story to everyone.  Out of my battered purple notebook, filled with my atrocious handwriting and shitty pencil drawings, I got to read my book out loud.  Which, now that I think about it, was probably the most important thing to happen to my writing career in 2nd grade.

What was this book, though, this magnum opus of mine?  Team Guinea Pig, of course.  The story was simple, more or less; a team of zoo animals, granted super powers by a magic gemstone that fell into their enclosure, have to save the Amazon rainforest from an evil Harpy Eagle.  The team was composed of four guinea pigs, four macaws, and four penguins, and each had their own unique powers.  I don’t remember all of their names or all of their powers, but I know some of them were kind of weird.

Looking back on the text, I found that one of the guinea pigs could turn into a submarine.  No, wait, that was one of the penguins.  Here, let me take a full inventory; Several of the guinea pigs could now fly.  One could “have an enormous mouth and eat bricks.”  Another guinea pig could dig.  There’s a telekinetic Macaw, an airbender macaw, a shapeshifting macaw, and a macaw that can fucking raise the dead.  Then there’s that submarine penguin, an invisible penguin, a penguin that can jump really high, and a penguin that swims really well.  I think the penguins kind of got shafted on powers.

But the story followed this team as they traveled to the Amazon after hearing about strange happenings via the most unbelievable part of the story; newsprint.   They travel there, work their way up the layers of the rainforest, and find Mr. Harpy, the eagle who’s been brainwashing everyone.  There’s a climactic final battle, they save the day, and go home and all go to sleep.  Simple kids stuff for kids.  I think I could still make it into a real kid’s book.

But the more I wrote, the weirder it got.  After the first Team Guinea Pig, I wrote three others and had plans for a fifth, final book.  The second one was about a giant squid or something that was plugging up undersea vents with giant sea snow balls, which is fucking brutal and I love it.  The third one was basically a rip-off of an episode of the Pokémon TV show, about a giant metal bird trapped in a city.  The fourth one was about the team traveling to the Mongolian desert to fight Dune-style sand worms and a sentient cactus.  And then the fifth one was about wormholes, the spacetime continuum, negative energy, tablets representing the elements, betrayal, Mr. Harpy’s revenge, and an eldritch, immortal magic flame man.  Yeah, it got strange.

I don’t know why I wrote in the wormhole stuff and esoteric overarching metastory.  By that point I was in 5^th grade and had moved beyond the simplicities of whatever I had written in 2^nd grade.  I was ready to transcend the picture book and move into the realm of chapter books.  And then, when I got to junior high, I was ready to tackle something much larger; The Time Keepers.

Looking back now, I guess the madness that was the Time Keepers is a logical step up from the pseudo-science fantasy of Team Guinea Pig.  The time-travel stones were already in place in my mind.  The concept of a dark overlord, of a Chancellor Palpatine pulling the strings from the shadows, was there, too.  And those themes both ended up being pretty integral to the Time Keepers.  Oh, and the presence of penguins, too.

The Time Keepers, I suppose, is my first novel.  It was a sprawling epic, close to 200,000 words in length, that covered different worlds, time periods, perspectives, and even toyed with the idea of multiple endings.  It followed a team of four Time Keepers, agents of a pan-universal risk management agency.  They were basically like time cops.  The characters were based on my closest friends at that time, and their personalities were more or less analogous to the real people.  We had Ryan, Bryce, Cole, and myself, with guest appearances by other friends of mine, like Kyle, Devin, Bobby, and Destany, who became an orphaned elf from Camelot.  It really was kind of fan fiction.

There were also two original characters that were pretty central to the plot; Magister Tempus, an all-seeing time god, and Gunther, a flying, purple penguin from an alternate world where fish can fly in the air and humans coexist with sentient giant penguins.  Magister Tempus was an unstable gender-shifting being of infinite power, and Gunther was a sassy-yet-lovable sidekick for Ryan.  They went to an alternate Soviet Russia together to fight the commies.

There was a lot going on in this book, and I wrote it over the course of about a year or two.  The thing was, every time I’d have a good idea or a scene that I thought would be cool, I’d throw it into the book.  I’d also take suggestions for scenes to add from all my friends, so by the time I was done with it, it had become a conglomerate mess of ideas all stuck together from different times, places, and people.  There wasn’t really a plot, more of a series of events with a loose narrative thread that gave them all reason to exist.  And, honestly, I kind of still love it.

There’s the madman named after single-celled algae who wants to destroy the world.  There’s the horrid cat-spider monstrosity that predicted the coming of Our Lord and Consumer of Lasagna, Garfield.  There’s a scene where the gang blows up Nazis with a future-tank.  There’s the part where they go to University of Illinois and accidentally meet alternate-reality versions of themselves in the Altgeld bell tower.  Even in junior high I was an Illini at heart, I guess.

The story’s convoluted and a mish-mash of ideas and doesn’t make almost any sense at all, but I’ll be damned if it wasn’t fun to write.  I remember being so excited to write The Time Keepers.  I’d get home from school some days and just immediately start writing it, and I was so happy.  I’d get to school the next day and tell my friends about the scenes I had created.  We’d draw doodles in our notebooks about what we thought characters looked like.  We joked about painting my future car purple and turning the horn into a penguin honk.  I loved it all.

One of my favorite parts of writing it, I think, was that I could throw in random little jokes and references to popular culture whenever I felt like it.  I devised a mechanic for the story that had the express purpose of letting me briefly and distantly include the worlds of Portal, Minecraft, and the like.  Slenderman was in there somewhere.  The Beatles make a couple of lyrical appearances.  I remember there being something about Death Note.  It was all over the place.

I’d kind of forgotten until now how much fun I had writing both The Time Keepers and Team Guinea Pig.  I’ve now forgotten the moments of stress and doubt, of those times when I had writers block or doubted my own ability to continue.  They were assuredly there, but now what I remember is just how much I loved writing these things.  And I guess that kind of set the tone for how I continue to write.  A maxim I try to live by is that if it isn’t fun to write, it isn’t fun to read.  I don’t know how true that is, but I try to live by that.

I still have fun writing.  When I really get invested in a story or a blog post, I get wrapped up in it and can just crank it out in a whirlwind of keys and letters.  It isn’t always like that, though.  Sometimes I’d have to drag myself through writing portions of Spectral Crown, completely going against my semi-motto, but plenty of authors talk about how the grind is as much a part of writing as the inspiration. It isn’t always easy to post a blog every week.

I guess the only thing to do, like I said before, is to keep writing.  I guess that’s true of any art form, or anything at all; if you love it, if you want to get better at it, if you want to keep doing it, all you can do is keep doing it.  There’s no alternative to practicing something, I guess.  It’s been said a million times over, but there’s no easy way to get good at something.  And as batshit as my early writing is, it’s good for something.  It’s practice.

My creative writing professor told me there are no useless drafts in writing.  A story draft is never wasted as long as you’ve learned something from it, either about how to go forward with the story or about yourself.  And that’s pretty true of what my early writing was like.  It told me what I needed to work on, and how I could best make these stories something really special.

I still hope one day to publish both Team Guinea Pig and The Time Keepers.  And if/when I do, I’ll have a lot of different people to thank for making it possible, just as much as the writing process itself.  I suppose the evolution of my writing is just as intertwined with who I wrote for as what I wrote.  So, I guess as a post-script to this post, keep writing.  And know who you’re writing for.  Because one day, you’ll want to thank them.