A number of years ago I had started a small fan fiction project I had for an old favorite SNES game, Illusion of Gaia, called Legends. It first started as a single fic then I had decided to expand on it, in what I had hoped would be a number of stories surrounding original characters and characters from the game itself. The first fic, the one I now have titled Beginnings, was and is set in what the end of the game would consider the "New World" so to speak but not exactly the same time frame as the game had ended. I never really gave an actual set date on the story and still have not, for the most part I won't unless there is a need for it.

Beginnings is what the title is: a beginning of some sort. It's first goal is to introduce the main original character, Katherine Porter; it's second goal is to set the stage for the rest of the project that I hope to get underway. Beginnings is not intended to be neck-deep in rich storytelling, I don't believe that was ever the intention of it being as such. It simply tells of a place where Katherine's father, Michael Porter, lives and has found permission to explore a place that, previously, was off limits because of old superstitions and legends. All this fic is, is a placeholder to introduce original characters and to put forth a few things that, hopefully, will make sense later on.

Legends never really made it past the first half of the second fan fic, because I found myself at a point where I just could not push myself past a road block that I needed to get past. I let it stew on the back burner for quite some time and years passed before I took down the second story without backing it up, unlike I had with the majority of Beginnings. It had been around the end of 2008, maybe sometime around the beginning of 2009, before I started touching on this project again, having found the energy to pick up where I had left off only to find a big gaping hole where there should have been something. I literally had a big gap of about two chapters that was, for all I know, missing/was lost/was never backed up years ago for some reason. I think I really didn't like how I made the second story but because it was a number of years ago, I just forgot the reason.

I had thought that the entirety of Beginnings had been saved but I had been wrong. Again I stopped where I was at, having only put up the prologue and first chapter, mostly because if I were to continue with the re-write I also would have to find the best way to cover that gap. It was another four and a half years or so before I found the print-outs for Beginnings and began to shift through them. I figure because of the two-chapter gap, I would have a hard time coming up with a plausible reason as to why Event X happened to lead to Event Y and that it would all work out in the end.

Then I did something I should have done when I first started this whole project: I wrote things out. I pretty much wrote out a back story of some sorts on things that should have been done before and fleshed out a couple of things. I realize now that this should have happened much sooner and actually has helped in closing that huge gap. I also realized how much I needed to re-write some of the later chapters in Beginnings and how to properly explain a couple of other things that may not have been so clear before. These things still are not 100 percent clear, maybe more along the lines of 60 percent, but to me they seem more plausible. Maybe, I'm not sure yet. I am still gradually writing things out, making tweaks here and there.

I'm still not quite at the point in the Legends project where I can take a step back, take a break from it to write something else out, and come back later. I have some ideas for a novelization of some favorite games, a couple of them NES favorites, things that I'm aware others have already touched upon. In the meantime, I'll continue to try and at least get some of this insane project done. It may not have the most views, but I do want to see this through as much as possible.