The Hero Effect

Authors' Note

Hey guys!

We felt that this story warranted a lengthy explanation. Gosh. There is so much we could say. We don't even know where to start. (We sounds like Gollum, precious XD --TMC (FlyOn – Haha! You guys should start reading our author's notes in Gollum voices.))

About six years ago, maybe seven, one day after church the two of us wandered around to the back. Behind the church is a swing set and that is where we went to sit and talk while the adults talked about adult things. We talked about kid things. Lots of random stuff. But a common theme was stories. Back then we were both avid readers and slowly developing writers. (FlyOn – Ha, I still remember TMC showing me her little love stories that she would write on blank sheets of printer paper, fully illustrated, and usually with a princess falling in love with somebody. (Meh, I'm a girl. Whaddid you expect? --TMC)) It came up one day that I (FlyOn) had started a new story. TMC was excited to hear this and, upon hearing my epiec tale, told me they she had an uncannily similar story.

They were about superheroes. We spent the next couple weeks explaining traits of characters and superpowers and places that they lived. It wasn't until maybe a week or two later than we came up with the idea to combine our two teams into one big superhero team. The result left us with ten superheroes in a single team and later we added an eleventh.

At the time it didn't matter even a tiny little bit. It was fun having so many options. ("Ah! There are so many options!" --TMC) I guess what I (FlyOn) didn't realize was how attached I had become to these characters. I loved all of them. (You weren't alone, Buddy.--TMC) They were all so unique and special.

My (FlyOn) first attempt at writing The Hero Effect was a disaster. It featured five of the characters in an orphanage. One of them tripped and grabbed a branch and it opened into a secret lab in a tree. This brought rise to a whole mess of problems. How did they become superheroes if they already knew about the secret lab? Where did the other heroes come in? Why do they get kidnapped later and not now? (I want to make it clear that I had no part in this version. --TMC (FlyOn – Yeah, yeah.))

Nope. That didn't work. So we started on a new rewrite later. That ended up being rewritten and expanded to include a prologue that featured each character with a couple pages of character background. It worked for a while, except that it was incredibly long. We finally worked up to a kidnapping and a the change from human to hero, but it was badly written and I (FlyOn) knew it. It was worse than trash. It sounded cheesy and unbelievable. Plus, I (FlyOn) was still attached to the whole "first we have five characters and then five more show up and then we tack on one at the end". It wasn't working. It was frustrating not being able to write about the characters we loved in a way that did them justice.

It stayed this was for at least a year or two. I (FlyOn) stopped writing entirely, frustrated with the whole thing.

Finally, I (FlyOn) had an epiphany. By the time two years had passed by, the characters had undergone significant changes. Several were much more developed and many of them had gained complicated backstories. We had a whole new arsenal of inside jokes we knew of at least two new villains and had rid ourselves of one of them entirely. (Granted, most of the villains were still yet-to-be-named. --TMC) Still, no writing had been done and it was a mess.

So my (FlyOn) epiphany was that much greater when we realized just what it meant for the story. See, I (FlyOn) had been writing then entire book from one character's perspective. He was telling the story in first person and he explained things as they happened. But I finally realized something. It wasn't his story. He was a player in the story. A key player, in fact. But it wasn't his story. It was their story. All eleven of them. Each of them had gained an almost-equal role in the plot in one way or another.

So we made the decision to start over again, but this time we would write from all eleven perspectives, giving each character a voice in the story.

And that's where we are now.

We tell you this stuff to justify some things. We've had six years to become greatly attached to all of our characters. Cutting one of them out would be like cutting off a limb.

We know we have too many characters. We know that their powers are just short of silly. We know that evil scientists and superheroes have been done before. We know that needle injections of the kind that we describe in this book would probably just kill you. We know that our villain is stereotypical, our romances are expected, and that our plot follows basically a single logical path.

But what we've lacked in creativity and self-control we want to make up in writing. Some of it is funny, some of it is stupid, some of it is sad, and some of it is downright sickening. All that really counts to us is writing real characters.

Hopefully we will succeed.

With Flying Digital Sugar Cookies,

FlyOnChild

P.S. A formal and much needed thank you directed at Firebender_Zeke for the fantastic cover. We love it and and super grateful for her help! Stay cool, Zeke!