I am friends with a lot of artists, and one thing that artists can do for their friends is to draw their characters - to take personal imaginations and bring them to life with pencil and paper. This is something I've always wanted to be able to do, but my art has never been quite good enough, I felt. I can produce decent amateur stuff, but it usually takes me an extremely long time to do so - a week for each piece you see here in my journal. I really get more points for effort than actual skill.

A few weeks back, I was reading an article about famous authors putting their friends into their works - a forest named after a high-school buddy, a queen named after an old flame, a villain named after a college friend. It occurred to me, suddenly, that I was a writer - instead of just putting the names of my friends into my works, I could theoretically write stories with the characters of my friends in them.

Now, I couldn't write a story for each of my friends, each in a different world. My creativity doesn't work that way - so I determined that instead, I would write a world in which most characters would 'fit', and then write a series of stories set in that world.

The challenge was in figuring out a world that suited this. I mean, some characters are sci-fi, some are medieval fantasy, some are modern-day, and some are urban fantasy. Some are human, some are furry, some are alien. How could I make a single world made up of all these different worlds? I came up with and discarded a few ideas involving dimensional travel and the like, and finally was inspired by the The Land of the Lost. Watching that trailer, I realized - worlds that you travel between, with different laws of physics, in a good old-fashioned pulp fantasy sort of way.

It would not be serious. It might have serious moments, to be sure, but it would be silly, it would be over-the-top, it would be larger than life. Everyone would be spectacular, small villages with ordinary people would live five feet away from the Rampaging Monsters that only bother the heroes. You could travel quickly from a desert land to a swamp land, because instead of distance separating them - it's reality itself throwing up a barrier and changing the rules between one step and the next.

My main inspirations would be Conan the Barbarian, Shandu the Magician, Perry Rhodan, and all those old dime-store novels and radio shows. I would use the adjectives and similes you never hear in serious fiction anymore. And I would have friends showing up all over the place for one purpose: to be awesome.