Opalverse: A Meta History

Or: A stream of consciousness retelling of how we got here.

I created Opalken in high school, at the tail end of 2019. I was preparing for my first NaNoWriMo, as well as my first real attempt at a novel, and so I needed a solid story idea. One of the suggestions I ran across was to make a list of my favorite media and pick out things that made me like them. At the time, I was completely obsessed with Leigh Bardugo's Six of Crows duology (and it is still dear to me), so I set out to make a story like that one.

Step one was to assemble my main characters—six of them, to be precise. In a document that has, unfortunately, been lost to time, I created the skeletons of the crew. I knew immediately that I wanted to break a gender ratio pattern I'd been seeing in books for years, even in my beloved SOC, so the makeup of three girls, two boys, and one nonbinary character was one of the first things I decided upon. The main line I remember from that document is describing Ollie (then unnamed) as "looks like a cinnamon roll, could actually kill you, and has a sword because sword" or something to that effect. That has, in fact, remained a core of Ollie. Then I picked some powers that were cool, aiming to go beyond some of the basic ones I'd used in many stories before without getting too crazy, and just sort of started writing character profiles, looking at lists of character questions and making things up at random. I'm very loyal to my ideas, so honestly most of them are still accurate, to my memory, with mainly personalities developing and changing.

All of the names were gathered from fantasy name lists and generators, though a couple years later when I started taking it seriously I did use them to help me worldbuild different languages and cultures. Eira, for example, is an Irish name, and Ach Rhean, coincidentally, is sort of Irish-sounding despite being nonsense ("ach" is actually "but" in Irish, and "rhean" means nothing in any language as far as I can tell). Thus, Ach Rhean became an Irish-inspired nation. Similar stories followed for Daciana (Romanian) and Inari (Japanese and Finnish, though I leaned more towards Finnish due to the climate/geography, and also being nervous about my ability to write an Asian-inspired fantasy country). I also frequently mixed in other cultures as I saw fit later on, in an attempt to steer away from Leigh Bardugo's worldbuilding style and create something more my own.

Steering away from Six of Crows is a battle I continue to fight. It's still one of my favorite fantasy books, and I think it is still pretty obvious to anyone familiar with the series that that's where my inspiration stems from. The Cas/Kaz name thing wasn't even intentional, I swear! I picked Cassian because it sounds nice and means "hollow," and I thought that was an intriguing word for my brooding, lone-wolf protagonist. Cas was originally a lot more like Kaz, all edge and ruthless competence, but the more I wrote him, the more I peeled back his layers and saw that he was really just a kid with no idea what he's doing and a big, soft, mushy heart. Funny, since that's the same journey all of his friends go on as they get to know him, too.

Okay, okay, so I've talked a lot about developing the countries and characters featured in Other Lost Things, but I haven't even mentioned anything from All the Little Pieces yet. ATLP began in early 2021, and actually was not intended to be a serious project at all. I had a lot of projects going on, writing and otherwise, and I wanted to try "pantsing" or writing without a plan. I also wanted a silly, low-stakes project packed with all my favorite tropes, slightly overdone or not, that I could tap away at when I got bored or stuck on other things. This is where ATLP's sarcastic, somewhat comedic narration comes from. It was supposed to be a fun romp about assassins and princesses, truly.

What I actually wrote was a story about cycles of abuse, trauma, and class struggles....still packed with all my favorite, slightly overdone tropes. I did next to no worldbuilding, which is saying something when the worldbuilding I initially did for OLT was barely anything, and mostly disregarded logic, continuity, arcs...it was messy. But it was emotional, fun to write, and had a lot of good, solid character moments. Nearly the moment I finished I was ready to start over and really take it seriously, make a proper book out of it.

I immediately abandoned it for two and a half years.

This past spring of 2024, I decided it was well past time to take a crack at ATLP again. I let it simmer in my head for months, making notes, filling plot holes, developing characters, all the things I probably should have done three years earlier. One glaring problem continued to come up: aside from the fact that the story took place definitely not on Earth, there was nothing to define it as a fantasy, and I wasn't interested in doing something like making up odd animals in the background just to fix that. I was also running into the smaller problem of never having properly defined the time period the world was in. Then, randomly while driving home from work, I was struck with the thought that I could just make Pieces take place in the same world OLT did, since I had already laid the groundwork there for other, unexplored countries and further books. It would solve both of the above problems, and some of my characters now having superpowers wouldn't drastically change their situation. Some of the ideas in ATLP even folded in nicely with some sequel ideas I'd been toying with in OLT! I was a genius.

This, of course, is when a friend suggested that it was probably time to make a story bible. I had to admit she was right, and began looking for a good way to build and host my own wiki, rather than relying on a long document that would be harder to navigate and edit, especially as it grew. I didn't like any of the sites. Most of them weren't free, or didn't allow enough customization, or seemed to require too much computer knowledge. The best was Miraheze, which I actually had tried out before, but they delete wikis after too long a period of inactivity. Fair, but I can't risk that. Even with my own backups, I wanted the wiki to be accessible to others. So, back to my good old pal Neocities it was. I won't have quite the same functionality as a regular wiki, but I can make my peace with that, in exchange for everything else.

Finally, with a site picked out, there was only one more major decision to be made. I had long called the separate settings of these worlds by their books' titles: OLT-verse and ATLP-verse. I had already been wanting better names for years, but never got around to one. Now that they were combined, I definitely needed something to encapsulate both. Mixing up the letters from their acronyms gave me OPAL, which I liked more for the mouthfeel of the word than any meaning or symbolism. Thus, the world of Opal was born and my story bible was under way.