There’s a line I keep circling back to: “The most we can do is dream the myth onwards and give it a modern dress.” (That’s Jung, if you’ve never taken a psych course.)

The first time I ever sat down to write seriously (read: worked on it for more than a day before abandoning it), I churned out the first half of a draft of The Malyon Gambit way back in the Spring and Summer of 2001. I know this because my background music then was Albert Pujols’ rookie year with my beloved Cardinals on the radio. He’s retired now, and I’ve only added a few chapters since. At the time, I thought I was writing a pulp sci-fi/space opera romp — the Star Wars or Star Trek movie I wanted but wasn’t getting. I’d read a couple of writing guides, taken some lit and film classes, so I figured: How hard can this be? Story structure is just Lego bricks with drama, right?

Pretty quickly, I realized my antagonist was a problem. Rik, my protagonist, needed something better than a cardboard gangster/corporate raider to push against. He needed a mirror, a shadow self. Thus, Bryn was added as falling hero in decline whose arc reverse-mirrored with Rik’s journey as a rising hero. They finally meet in act three with a surprise ironic climax that’s lived in my head for 25 years but has never been typed out. Suddenly, my fun pulp story was sprouting drama and characters, however. I am the sci-fi equivalent of Jack Higgins!  Tight story, cool characters, satisfying ending, and just in time for your plane to land after a 4-hour flight.

Then came the idea for a third character who could interact with both sides, provide commentary, and serve as a kind of reader surrogate, asking the worldbuilding questions, and letting me delve into some science and philosophy. Oh yeah, now we’re talking, Tom Clancy meets Flash Gordon! Now we’re writing the book you read over multiple lazy weekends one summer.  Okay, great, I think I can do this, in theory.  Boring in practice, though. Serah was flat, inert, and not as interesting as she could have been.

So I pivoted. I put Gambit aside and wrote a 20,000-word short story, The Halferne Incubus, to give her some backstory and help me find her personality. That’s where I stumbled into Carl Jung. Jung argued that archetypes are patterns buried in the collective unconscious — the hero, the trickster, the sage, the innocent. We don’t invent them; they bubble up on their own in stories, and even people sometimes, like personality whack-a-mole.

Easy then. Just draw a line from each character to a different archetype, and presto, everyone is different and deep. Problem solved. Of course, it’s me, and I immediately overdid it. I spent weeks trying to design a “Perichore of Twelve” before realizing that I can’t keep track of twelve main characters, and the reader certainly won’t. So, I doubled up archetypes, narrowed it to six, and sketched out rough arcs for each. Suddenly, I had a real cast of characters and the bones of an entire universe.

  • Serah Wyles — Innocent/Artist. A journalist chasing beauty even in fracture, refusing to let stories fade without a witness.
  • Rik Baddon — Everyman/Leader. Reluctant, uncertain, but still followed. Endures even when he questions why.
  • Ursza Venter — Hero/Rebel. Warrior monk with a sword, doesn’t fit either stereotype, tears down the systems that made and unmade her.
  • Jaysn Katsaros — Trickster/Lover. A scientist with jokes sharp enough to cut despair, obsessed with making fleeting moments last.
  • Katerin Rossi — Caregiver/Magician. Surgeon and innovator, can fix anything or can build something out of spare parts to do the job.
  • Vidas Sheng — Sage/Explorer. Former priest, clinging to faith in a world that denies purity.

Once those six were fleshed out, they wouldn’t shut up. Archetypes do that. You think you’re inventing them, but really you’re just giving names to party guests who’ve been waiting on the front porch of your subconscious with gift bags of wine.  Whole personalities, arguments, shared jokes, hopes, and fears pretty much wrote themselves. When I whipped out my character cue cards for a game of “Which character is most likely to…” there was no hesitation. I had the six nailed. After that, it was just a matter of putting them somewhere interesting. Ursza on a frontier world where honor is a foreign language. Serah hunting stories in bustling London. Rik sweating over a mechanic’s shop in a megalopolis, keeping the gears of civilization turning. Jaysn making memories on an alien expedition. Kat triaging patients in a warzone that makes MASH look like summer camp. Sheng wandering future Kaunas, looking for faith between Old Town’s crumbling stone and the sprawling new city. Okay, nobody can invent new colors, but I was determined to have a pallet with a few that didn’t normally go together.

Around the same time, as mentioned, I was deep into cyberculture, which didn’t start creeping into my writing until Incubus. Howard Rheingold said the Internet would be a “virtual community” for collaboration, connection, and meaning. Baudrillard crashed his party and pointed out that the community was detaching from reality under automation, monetization, and ideas repackaged so many times that they’ve become hashtags. Finally, William Gibson right around that time sort of put it all together for me: Don’t just notice fragments. Don’t just admire archetypes. Make patterns. Leave them for others to stumble across, like digital graffiti in a collapsing city.

Sure, most days I feel like the last guy at the party who should’ve gone home hours ago. Despite my best efforts to post regularly, the needle on this blog doesn’t move. Indy In-Tune? Faded into automated simulation. Local Is Our Genre? Quiet. MOR? Ideas and ambition collecting dust.

Meanwhile, I’ve got 16 half-written WIPs with mostly complete outlines stacked on my hard drive like unsent postcards, waiting for someone who’ll never read them. I know, nobody cares when I get up at 5 AM and offer up another 1,200 words on WordPress with a clever title and a new picture of Crisp before sunrise. The algorithm won’t even acknowledge I’m alive because I don’t have 1.5 million bot followers to “smash that like button” for me. I think it means I passed that particular Voight Kampff test, though.

So yes, my characters, like all your favorite ones, are derivative. Ursza, Serah, Sheng, Rik, Kat, and Jaysn aren’t “mine” so much as Jung’s. I renamed them, scrambled the archetypes, sprinkled in my own thoughts. They’re remix, not invention. Nobody beats the algorithm at its own game. If someone, someday, stumbles across my writing, then maybe they’ll see the pattern and recognize something real, something that isn’t just another simulation. (Please, don’t put me in a comparative lit class with Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Cheese,” though.) That’s all I’m really doing: moving the myth onwards and dressing up archetypes in new clothes, beaming the signal through the static, hoping enough fragments pile up to look like a pattern. It’s not fame. It’s not money. It’s devotion to the ghost in the signal.

So why keep at it? Why blog when nobody’s listening, write novels nobody’s reading, sketch universes that may never see the light of day? Because Rheingold was right about community, Baudrillard was right about simulation, Gibson was right about patterns, and Jung was right about archetypes. I don’t do this to win. I do it to make the ghosts in my brain shut up; they deserve that. Even buried under algorithms, someone might still stumble on these fragments and realize: It’s a weird take, but a human left this.