It all started when I was only 14 years old when I wrote my first story. I didn’t like it at first, but at least I was doing something constructive with my life. As time went on, I began to enjoy writing even more than playing sports. I’ve been very active for now was a child while playing baseball, basketball and football. I was never really good at sports but at least I was out and about while having my daily exercise.
The first concept of the series came to be back around 2003. Even then, I didn’t know what I wanted to do-- no scratch that. I did know exactly what I was doing, but it felt like it was a hodgepodge of ideas of vampires and feudal Japan. It didn’t really go anywhere, and I thought I was just spinning my wheels while doing so. Still, I took it upon myself to keep at it while taking my daily trips to the library.
In 2006, I wrote a story called Second Renaissance: Bitter Harvest. It was about what I’ve written earlier but with a simple twist of an old favorite. I was definitely into the house of Frankenstein lore and stumbled upon human evolution. How we as humans can alter our appearance and even better. I came up with this idea about using the human genome project by creating the perfect human being from scratch using such research.
Not long ago, around that time frame, China successfully genetically created 20 million babies who were male using the human genome project. I read that story a long time ago and it just stuck with me. I learned so much about the human genome project and about in vitro fertilization and just creating a baby in general. I even went through the whole entire religious route as well. I was proud of the work, but I didn’t like the characters that I wanted to use. I ended up rewriting the story about seven times before I was happy enough to deem it readable.
Around then, I’ve created many characters that I didn’t have the time to use because I was going through a lot of emotional problems with my family and stopped writing altogether after many people turned me down.
There was a concept that I wanted to use that became the foundation of the ‘Cross Roads’ series. At first, these groups of females were not called the Crucis Sentinels. They were called the Order of Light. Their leader was Lycka Benibara, but I named her something completely different like Blair Hayabusa. And yes, she looked exactly how I envisioned her from the very beginning. In fact, the character Blair Hayabusa was one of the few people that I have created first. Her codename was ‘the silver sight’ because of her silver hair and her silver eyes.
There’s even more to this because Cherie Konana has initially been a part of the Order of Light group as well. Her first name was Megumi Toyoguchi and she always wore schoolgirl outfits. Now both of them were in their late teens and were sexy vampire hybrids.
Yeah, I know… It was the early 2000s…
For many years, on and off, I started to build this group from scratch, I gave Blair a little sister named Yumi, to whom I would rename Chelsea Hayabusa later on. And yes, she acts exactly like she did long before Cross Roads.
And then, I just fell out of love with writing since nobody cared about me or my work. Even my own family. I went to a downward spiral, and I got back into it by writing fanfictions of other work. Trying to get my feet wet.
May remind you, I stopped writing entirely in 2009 and got back into it in 2015. To me, that is a very long time. But even then, I wasn’t really focused on the Cross Roads series. As I was-- now I can say this without feeling bad about it-- wasting my time with somebody else who never really saw anything in me as a fanboy.
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It was then I started to write my own work in 2016. I felt that Blair Hayabusa needed a complete makeover, so I rewrote her story and gave some of her mannerisms to Lycka Benibara and not entirely redo the entire Blair Hayabusa character while having her sister Chelsea as her yin to her yang.
At that time, I have finished the lore about the Order of Light. But I wanted to change the name since I didn’t really want them to be some goody-goody faction. I really enjoyed watching Japanese animation and I came across this series called Sailor Moon when I was younger, and I sincerely felt love with the characters and the story. I also loved the Dragon Ball Z series as well. And many Western animation shows like Batman: the animated series.
But what really got my whole entire inspiration going was Puella Magi Madoka Magica that offered a brand-new concept of the magical girl trope. That show was excellent, and it really reinvigorated the creativity inside me.
It was then I created more characters and flushed out the old ones. I created Selena Logan first because she reminded me of a lot of people when I was growing up. Now I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But how was raised in violence-ridden, low-income neighborhoods and I knew the struggle to at least be something in a world where people had already given up on you the moment you were born.
And I even created a character who is a tanuki kemonomimi named Erika Meridian. I purposely created her last and gave her so much mysterious anonymity that makes her so alluring and creepy at the same time. I mean, even the name Erika Meridian is so basic and made up. Like, what is he trying to hide?
As for the story arcs, at first, I wanted to do one-shot novels and use the six characters as they go all around the world saving others and working on investigations. And I felt why don’t I go ahead and pull back the curtain just a little bit and have them figure things out by doing ‘detective work’ while still being a magical girl? Trust me, it is tough getting the magical realism right and also getting a factual hypothesis together.
It’s really tedious, but this series thrives on tedium.
I chose a dark urban fantasy setting because it just fits better than being in this magical world. And besides, it’s better to take stories from real life and rework it a bit like fiction. I also went the mature route as in expect to see a lot of details of sexual content and violence. The reason why I chose this is that I want to be free with my creativity. All my life I was censoring my work out of fear, and it really hurt my creativity and the message I wanted to tell the audience.
Nowadays, many people are overly sensitive to such topics. With Cross Roads, I will do no such thing. Expect to be shocked and somewhat offended but not all the time. You have to realize that people in the situations that you are going to read about happens every single day, yet nobody wants to acknowledge it or talk about it. We live in our own little bubble and expect everything is fine. It’s not okay and I will take you on the journey of uncomfortableness if need be to tell my story. I just hope you have the stomach for it.
However, I will not insult anyone’s intelligence by giving you too much. As in, if it calls for it, then I will do it for the sake of the story because everything has a reason behind every action.
As of right now, I have written about nine novels so far in this story arc that will be deemed as the “Oleander Syndicate arc” because the Oleander Syndicate is heavily involved with what happened five years ago and we get to peek inside what happened to them as well as what happened in the past. Now, this act of terrorism affected everybody across the world, and it will be not only the vast focal point of the story arc but will be the constant throughout the entire series. It’s not going to go away even if the Crucis Sentinels and or the Aethereal queen survived this. Rightfully so, people are going to remember it and I want this to really hit home. We either ignore it or we acknowledge it and there is so much to those options as you may think.