Ceaseless✔️

AFTERWORD

Ceaseless was the first novel I ever actually wrote, as in finished.

The idea probably has its origins in the Friday the 13th movies. They made an early impression on me, and I really liked the idea of this unstoppable killing machine. And definitely some credit has to go to RoosterTeeth, of all people, for making the absolutely awesome villain The Meta in Red Vs. Blue.

Originally, I conceived of this as a machinima mini-series called Unstoppable. I'd been wanting to make machinima ever since seeing RVB and also basically everything done by DigitalPh33r (aka Jon Graham). And some time in 2007-2008, I actually got my hands on a very basic capture card and put together the first episode. It sucked, but what can you expect?

I never posted it, never uploaded it anywhere as far as I can remember, and it's gone forever now. Lost to time and dead harddrives.

However, the idea endured. And grew. And flourished. I have a distinct memory of visiting my then-girlfriend in college, being in her dorm room one day, and just getting FLOODED with ideas for how to expand Unstoppable into a full novel. I wrote it all down in an e-mail and sent it to myself.

And then November 2008 hit, and I was made aware of NaNoWriMo, aka National Novel Writing Month. In short, the concept is to write a novel in a month from scratch, reaching a goal of 50,000 words, or approximately 1,700 words per day every day of the month.

I was inspired and although it wasn't quite from scratch, I hopped on it...

And failed.

Twice.

Not only did I not finish the novel until December 24th (I have a very clear, distinct memory of sitting in my darkened living room and, as it hit midnight and became Christmas, finally writing the last few sentences of the novel), but it also only hit about 48,000 words.

But it was done. I had actually written my first ever original novel. While I had completed fan fictions before, some of them even longer than that, none of them were original. I had attempted one in 2006, but failed to finish it, and ultimately gave up on it.

But finally, Ceaseless was done.

And it sucked.

I gave it to my wife to read and edit mercilessly, as she is very smart and very well-read (I married a valedictorian librarian who got a masters in psychology), and she let me know that it wasn't very good. Though she admitted some of it was that she just wasn't into horror.

So I put it away for awhile and worked on other things, but I knew I liked the core of the idea. This notion of basically a reverse Friday the 13th film, where an unstoppable killing machine was not coming after you, but you were forced to go after it, and somehow stop it, I knew that was a cool idea and that I really wanted to take another stab at it.

Fast forward to 2014. I was four novels deep into The Shadow Wars and by then, I knew a reboot of Ceaseless was to come. Honestly, there isn't THAT much of a difference between the two versions. In fact, it absolutely blows my fucking mind to realize this, but this version is ALSO only 48,000 words long. I just now checked. I could've sworn it was longer, closer to 60,000, but no, basically the same length.

I guess I cut some scenes and added others in the rewrite. Ultimately, I think what really changed about this one is that it just flows a lot better. The original version was more repetitive, and also included an introduction part, I think, that showed the attack on the outpost before Allan arrived.

Bottom line, though, I'm more satisfied with this one, a lot more. Until Quarantine, it was my favorite story in The Shadow Wars, and then Quarantine was surpassed by Deathless, but Ceaseless definitely holds a special place in my heart.

Onward, to Syberian Sunrise.