Recently two sketchbooks were stolen from my car. 

It was a pretty hard hit.

One was a dream journal, the other a world building sketchbook. The dream journal had four years of daily/weekly handwritten journal entries stashed in one of its folds, along with dream inspired level design drawings. The Sketchbook had drawings made for a world I’ve been building for over ten years.

There was a lot of work put into these sketchbooks….

Some of the drawing were old.

Yeah…Some of the drawings were very old.

Very, very, very old…

With a memory as terrible as mine, to call this a loss would be an understatement. Though I am thankful for the few scanned pages and digital work I still have, the massive chunk of drawing and world building Iv’e lost is seemingly irreplaceable. That being said, the more I think about the loss, the more I feel like this was more of a favor than anything else.

Iv’e grown a lot as a person since the time I started building this world. From the time I only had MS Paint….

 

….and the time in which I still used my initials as a signature…..

…to the time I embraced a persona, and adopted a new medium….

Iv’e built a world of my own.

At times I’ve lost myself in this world…..

But it has always been therapeutic, a form of self exploration. I’m a better person for the places and people I wrote about. It’s like medicine.

In the time that Iv’e built this world, Iv’e made great friends!

Iv’e also lost some great friends along the way…

In the months leading up to the sketchbooks being stolen, I had been putting together a design document for a new project. The issues I ran into the most frequently were symptomatic of a poorly built foundation. 

Latching onto a concept you thought up when you were a child is difficult, but hard to let go of. You tell yourself that you’re being loyal and authentic, when you’re really harming the final product.  

Iv’e always entertained the idea of wiping everything away and starting over. Just scrapping every old idea that conflicted newer concepts. 

To burn away all the old ideas to let new ones grow.

In fact, I almost made a game about that very struggle one time, but it turned into a suicide note.

I could never go through with the idea of starting over. I had already done too much work. Too much writing, too much drawing, too much time spent creating this place. I had too many memories tied to these ideas, too many contributions from close friends who I may never be able to speak to again.

I’m 22 years old. Half of my life has been spent on this one thing. Starting over is a scary idea.

It seemed impossible, until now. 

Now those things are out of my hands whether I like it or not. There are still photographs and digital works, sure, but the time has already been spent and the fine print is lost.

If I’m ever going to start over and make this happen, the time is now; so rather than looking at this as a loss, I’m going to embrace it as an opportunity. 

Despite the inarguable loss, I can admit a certain amount of relief.

No one will ever see the world I built up all those years, I’ll never tell that particular story again. That world was never for anyone else though, it had always been for myself, which was its biggest flaw.

I’m starting over, building a new world from the ground up.

Aspects of that world will live on in something new. People, places, and loose ideas will feel familiar and consistent with what Ive already shown. But many of those places will stay between my ears, beneath the lids of my eyes.

This is quite literally the end of a world.

“As art is one’s reaction to the world around them, it is even more so a reflection of the many worlds within.”

Here’s to moving on, and building many more of those worlds.

-Carrion