Currently going through all of the toys, vehicles, and action figures I’ve made for this world and adding an introduction to their imagined stories, as well as some of the build processes of things. Before building anything, I make a point to imagine its story to better help place the toy’s existence within the greater world. I have written notes about each figure, how they inhabit this place, and the vehicles they drive. Every animatronic action figure, each RC vehicle, all of the WASTEWORLD toys exist in my imagination before becoming a reality. Their story helps to guide how I will bring them into being. I’m not a great god, but I am deliberate one.
Imagining each story—figures and vehicles—helps to justify their placement within WASTEWORLD. Though, admittedly, a lot of the characters and their imagined development could be considered a poor replacement for a qualified therapist. I tend to use their stories to help me figure out and process my own emotions about stuff, something I find difficult to do, and it helps me navigate things better in my real life. It may not be a one-to-one trade-off (imagining an all-or-nothing world of characters contending with calamity, conscience, and collective actions) when compared to the mundanity of my own life, but I feel like I can better grasp those mundane elements I grapple with after I amp them up to 11, write about it happening in WASTEWORLD, and figuratively zoom out to see a more contrasted version of what I may be going through, then proceed to better understand it all. And while the tales I tell may be the grandiose, post-apocalyptic stories of WASTEWORLD, they do mirror a lot of the less grand/more complicated processing of what I’ve dealt with personally over the last 5 years or so. The funny part? I didn’t even realize I was doing this shabby job of attempting my own therapy because I never shared the stories or regaled anyone with the lore. So, yeah, that’s why I’m changing things; why I am making a concentrated effort to get it all out there now.
Anyway, there’s a lot more to be said about WASTEWORLD, and even more to be written. And some of the stuff that has been written isn’t even trustworthy. I’m no historian, I’m just the storyteller telling you the story of their history. The real story may be hidden even deeper. And I look forward to sharing those stories with anyone willing to read them, too. And even if no one does, well, I’ll probably still end up writing them, if only as a poor replacement for therapy.