Cripple-Mode: Some notes on its Birth

The Cripple-Mode Series was born somewhere in the early 1980's. It had been in my head for awhile before, just rattling around. It was somewhere near 1980 that I broke out the smith corona and started tapping away at sheet after sheet until I had the first two novels of a trilogy fleshed out. A lot of it was on the back of some scrap paper.

Then, as with many things, life sort of got in the way and took me on a wide left turn. But those two novels stayed tucked away in their briefcase through the ups and downs. All of the time I would have odd moments when I would dwell on the notion of getting back to them to whip them into shape.I mostly wrote snippets of poetry in those scattered years. And I read a large volume of science fiction.

By the mid 80s I had my first computer and was almost tempted . But, there was another left turn up ahead. It was not until the year 2000 that I got serious and looked at the old papers long enough to shake my head and decide I needed to have a back story for some of my ideas.

One of the main themes of my story involves the main characters struggle to adjust to specifically mind bending personal issues. A back story might leave that on the back burner. So I almost dropped the notion of  spending a lot of time or for that matter anytime on the back story. But, I still needed to be more secure about how we got to that spot in her life. The original story took the reader half way into it before these issues even arose. It was at that point that I decided to bring the issues into the story at the very beginning.I just wasn't clear yet that this was going to be the beginning of the back story. It was not until I chose the style of writing that things began to jell and the story began to tell itself. Mind you this is all still in my head the real on paper writing doesn't start till 2006.

Copyright 2012 J.L. Dobias