My Skeptical Angel

Hi everyone,

Once again, thank you all for following my newsletter. Speaking of which, I must admit I’ve been struggling a bit. I don’t have any experience with newsletters and never thought I’d ever have one. As a result, I think I’ve been dropping the bal content wise. There’s just nothing too interesting there so far. Mostly character design reveals and a couple of giveaway announcements. Both are fine, I guess, but I wouldn’t call it riveting content or anything. Today, I decided it’s time I at least try to step up my game.

Now, a big question that posed itself was “Ok, but what will I write about?” Well, since this is the My Skeptical Angel Episodic Novel’s Newsletter (Now that just rolls off the tongue! And yes, I’m being sarcastic), it might make sense to talk about My Skeptical Angel and how it came to be. To start, I will explain how the original idea came to me. By the way, if you’d like to give me feedback about whether you’d like to see more of this type of content in the newsletter or not, it’s more than welcome! Simply reply, like with any email, and I will receive it. But I’ve been rambling off-topic for long enough, let’s start!

I’d like to tell you the origin of My Skeptical Angel is a tale involving explosions and ninjas and, uh, I don’t know, let’s say dinosaurs, but not at all. Quite the contrary, the seed of the idea was first planted during a normal, boring day. So boring that I can’t remember a thing about it except the moment when I was blessed with inspiration.

So, this goes back to the summer of 2006. That should give you an idea of how long it took me to develop the concept. Anyway, I was at my grandmother’s house with my mother. I don’t remember why we were there, but I do remember that my mom, my grandma and one of my aunts were talking about fairly spiritual subjects like religions and the afterlife. Me, I was in the room next to them and could hear, though I wasn’t paying too much attention. Despite this, I guess whatever they were saying got through to me to some degree because an image just popped in my mind: A red-haired winged woman wearing a white dress. Back then, she was nameless, but anyone who read through the My Skeptical Angel cast on the website will probably realize by themselves that she evolved into Rose Ricdeau.

I’m not sure why, but that image of that winged woman fascinated me, and right there on the spot I started trying to imagine who she was and what was her story. Probably because of the conversation I was overhearing, I came up with the idea of a guy dying and reaching the afterlife. There, he realizes that it’s quite different the heaven or the hell his priests taught him about, to the point where there is intense dissatisfaction about how the “place” is run and that led to war between multiple factions for control. The winged woman was the leader of one of those factions. When she stumbled on the newly deceased man, she helped him and offered him hospitably.

It didn’t take long before I tossed out the idea of the story happening in the afterlife. There were several reasons. I won’t enumerate all of them, but here are a few. I came to realize I wanted this to be the winged woman’s story, but a setting like the afterlife with several warring factions just took the focus off her. Also, it was too complex and large in scope, even more so than what My Skeptical Angel ended up being, I needed to simplify (though let me assure you My Skeptical Angel is still a large project). As a third reason, the concept of the afterlife is linked to real-life earth-based religions, and I didn’t want to write about real-life religion, which might have been tricky since the guy lived on earth when he was alive.

So, the afterlife went away, but despite this, the final product still retains a lot of the original idea. The very same man who initially died is still there, now named James Hunter. Instead of dying, he somehow appears in a different world out of nowhere. As planned, there he meets a winged woman who greets him and offers him hospitality. Instead of the bloody active war I originally imagined, there’s a cold war going on. The number of parties involved in this cold war was reduced to three, which made things more manageable. That doesn’t mean nothing changed other than the setting. Far from it. There are plenty of stories to be told about how various characters and elements of the world evolved. But I feel like this is more than long enough already, so I’ll keep them for future entries in this newsletter. Thank you for reading, and I hope you enjoyed it!