Creation

By Frederick Kazar Evans

I have had this idea for what seems like forever. I have developed it over the past fifteen years while laying in bed at night. Working out the problems for this idea while laying in bed at night has always helped me to fall asleep, it always put my mind at ease and allowed me to forget about the problems of that day. The first sparks of this idea that I have been working on began when I was a child, around the age of six or five years old. My older brother and I would play this game where we would draw a battle scene on a piece of paper and use our pencils as weapons fire by standing them up on the sharpened points steadying them at the erasers end with our finger tips. Trying to aim them in the direction of the opposing force, pushing down on the eraser sending the pencil tip, drawing a line of fire at the enemy. We would do this for hours at time entertaining ourselves before and after dinner, we did this for years changing and elaborating the ship designs that first started off as simple triangle fighter with windows and stick figure men piloting them to massive Star Ships and destroyers in varying space scenes. I would design these new ships in bed at night and trying to figure out new tactics to destroyer my brothers fleet.

Time went by, we both got older and did not play this game as often, then soon not at all. In nineteen-eighty-nine my brother graduated high school and joined the Army. At night I would lull myself to sleep by continuing the game in my head but after a few years it began to become much more than a just a game. It grew into an entire parallel universe that I had devised, a path that humanity would follow in this world be it exploration, colonization, resource management and the continuation of the human species.

The development of this world kept me sane while I finished school. I joined the military just as my brother had, but I was deployed to war. While over there I continued to developed my ideas, I took great care as to not create anything too similar as to what has already been created by others, even though I'm a fan of the work of two others. I never told anyone of what I was creating not even my wife, for fear of someone stealing my ideas. It terrifies me to think that any idea of mine might be used by someone else. Even in the many writing classes that I have taken since I returned from the war in the Middle East, I will not even share any ideas that I consider to be great, because I want them all for myself. I don't even say them out-loud for fear of the thought drifting into the ether and being sucked into the creative Chi of a stranger who then uses my creations that I let fly, because I said it out loud.

I began to write my ideas down with the fervor of a hallucinating scribe. Night after night spent pounding away at the keyboard wishing that I could type as fast as the thoughts flowed from my mind. I would sit for hours in front of the screen trying to find the words that best conveyed what I wanted to say and what I wanted said, but sometimes thought it would easier to illustrate the thought rather than have it spoken. So I began to draw again. Writing and drawing the universe made it flow much better; the ideas would swirl and coalesce into a more refined construct and all I had to do was to figure out the technical aspects of my vision. I sat back in my chair at home on a rainy day in March at ease with the engineering problems of creation. For trying to figure out and resolve the problems would undoubtedly be fun.