Some people may have wondered why I and my brother often reference to the whole matter having taken ten years. That’s why because the story behind The S.T.E.A.L. Saga is quite long. In this post I will give some insight on the subject.
It all started in August 1997, during a summer night. My brother mentioned an idea on which he had been working for a long time. He wanted to make a story featuring licantropy with some particular features, but he never got the right ideas to form something complete. And at the time I made a rather stupid comment, like “Why don’t you put zombies in?“. I don’t know why, but that was the missing piece in the puzzle. My brother spent a good deal of the night telling me all the plot. I liked it for the most part, so I thought I could write something.
Now, I need to make a few notes. First of all, the plot was very different than what it is now, Jim didn’t even exist and the story was much shorter. Also, I had just started writing seriously (in Italian) and my skills were a little rough. In any case, on the following day my brother wrote everything down and work began.
I think I spent around two months writing chapter 1, and another month revising. Back then I was busy with university, so I didn’t have much time or will to write save in rare occasions. Things went on at a snail’s pace till 1999, when I created this site’s sister, dennogumi.org. Due to feedback, I entered in contact with a promising artist from the Philippines, nicknamed “Rian”. After a few emails, my brother suggested we could have made the “story” illustrated.
Rian drew a few images, some of which quite nice (I lost many due to a harddrive crash in 2002, but perhaps one day I’ll put some online). I opened a site using my ISP’s free web space but interest was limited. Occasional visitors asked me to provide a translation in English, but at the time it was an impossible task. In the end I took the site down. Things didn’t get better as Rian disappeared without a word in May 2001.
The project fell into inertia, basically. I didn’t have enough motivation to write a lot. Interest was stirred up again in 2002, when I contacted a Dutch artist, nicknamed Stingray. I liked his art, and by some of his sketches I even redefined some characters (such as Satsuki). However, even this collaboration was short-lived as the person decided to give up on art.
In 2003 I finally found an electronic Italian-English dictionary, and by chance I resumed work on the novel. Over the course of a summer, the first two chapters had been translated and rewritten, and chapter 3 started. At the time I decided I wanted to write a book, so I adopted LaTeX as the means to write.
Due to work and other commitments, I found myself able to write only during the summer. That again slowed down progress. Another contact with an artist nicknamed “Lio” failed miserably: she never drew what I asked her to. Still, I endured and managed to complete chapter 3 and start chapter 4 around 2003-2004.
Chapter 4 proved to be a monster to manage, as me and my brother changed the original story layout quite a bit. I wrote about half of it before feeling completely unsatisfied.
Then, in January 2006 my brother found a few possible contacts on deviantART. One of them was Too, who agreed to draw a good deal of scenes from the book. It took almost eight months but it was worth it. Extremely satisfied with the results, I commissioned the cover and asked him to join the project. That gave me an incredible boost: I wrote at a much faster rate than before, and that’s why Chapter 4 and 5 were completed so quickly.
By then I had already decided to self-publish the book, using the services from Lulu.com. The rest, as they say, is history.
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