Introduction
Black Shadows
In secondary school during the late 90's I had written some short stories, mainly in a horror theme, surrounding some teenagers playing a game and ended up trapped in their own nightmares, it felt a bit like A Nightmare On Elm Street. This later morphed into an idea involving a book which put them in an alternate dimension and then felt a bit closer to Nightmare - meets Evil Dead.
By the early noughties I was studying Artificial Intelligence at University and I wanted to inject more science into my writing. By 2003-2004 I was playing video games such as Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 and the idea then came to involve more science experiments and more of a body horror direction.
I transitioned the story from the supernatural to science-fiction and some of the more fantastical ideas were ditched so that it was grounded in more reality than before - but I still had this fascination of dimensions and interested in a way of making science and especially A.I. scary.
So one night I woke up and had this brainwave. Supposing we entered a virtual world as ourselves, could we trust a computer to bring us back to the real world in one piece? This became the antithesis, or the germ for what would inspire the rest of my story ideas. The story would be more science-fiction than horror but it would still have some horror elements.
I then added a post-apocalyptic setting and also some heroes wearing cybernetic suits (wearable technology for the uninitiated) and all the rest of the threads seemed to then branch very quickly and easily off of this. I then found I could then bring back my previous ideas and introduce them back into the story in clever ways and if I could not bring them back in a direct fashion I would be able to change them up a little. I just wanted to make sure nothing I had created over the twenty plus years went to waste.
What was originally known with a vague placeholder title: "National Society" then was taking a different shape. In 2010 I met what would be my future wife on an online dating site known as Match.com and then we were talking (on the now defunct MSN Messenger) and she was helping me with some ideas for the book, she came up with the names for some of the characters. Then it came to the title. I said I wanted a title that felt like a video game, but also a fantasy story, something large and epic, but also modern and intriguing. And perhaps the most interesting thing about the title was that it inspired more ideas for the book.
The past ten years have been a struggle for me, dealing with bereavements in my family to depression, from money problems to family struggles, I needed time and space, to come off my long five year battle of anti-depressants and get my head into gear before I could continue writing. But since coming off my 'happy pills' around Xmas time 2023 I found that while the floodgates have opened for me emotionally, they have also opened up for my creativity.
I had to make this one of most exciting and nail biting stories ever told, from my love of Sci-Fi, horror films and action films from the 70's onwards, to video games since as far back as Doom and Quake from the 90's, Silent Hill and Final Fantasy from the 00's, Manga such as Akira and Ghost in the Shell, and a wider range of Asian Cinema such as films by Takashi Miike, the film Ringu by Hideo Nakata, and the legendary Battle Royale by Tatsuya Fujiwara. I present you a project which will probably take a while to complete but you are in for a ride...
This is Shadowless Warriors!
