Hello, everyone and welcome once again to theworldoferidan.com!
I guess if you have reached this page you already know it, but, just in case, I’ll present myself to newcomers. I’m Naomi Fernández, the (maleficent) mind behind this webpage and the stories told in them. Speaking (or, well, writing, in this case) about myself is not my strong point, but, since you are in this section, I guess you have curiosity and you want to know more about me; so, I hope this helps you to get to know me a bit better and understand the circumstances of The Legend of the Pygmalion’s creation.
THE LEGEND OF THE PYGMALION: ROOTS OF THE STORY
I’ve always been a bookworm. I read a lot, since I was very little, but, above all, I’m very imaginative and I have quite the overflowing imagination. If I stop to think about it, I’ve been inventing stories my whole life. So, if we mix all that with an ability to express myself through words, I guess it’s very possible that me ending being a writer was a bit of an inevitable thing.
Now, okay, how my path on this started? At twelve I started writing fanfics and short stories about my favourite fictional characters (tales that will never, ever, leave my laptop for being too embarrassing), but it was at fourteen, around 2011, when the first seed of this novel appeared in my head and, alongside it, came the first and a bit disastrous Word document of The Legend of the Pygmalion.
To me, it is very difficult to remember where exactly was the moment that seed appeared: it’s been almost ten years and now it’s very hard to imagine a point in my life in which Evelyn, Andy and all the squad did not exist. They have accompanied me during a whole bunch of sorrows and joys, so much that they are practically a part of me. I remember which was the first scene I thought of (I can’t reveal which one is because that would be a huge spoiler, but, when the time comes, I’ll do it and tell you a lot more about it), but I don’t really know how this story came to be.
It began to take shape and form during my teenage years, and, a year after that those fourteen that started it all, I began to write it, let’s say, “seriously”: I took an old notebook and did lists of characters, geological trees, developed key points of that tale that had started just as an image in my head. It wasn’t a bed of roses, and those first years I wasn’t pretty constant, I have to be honest: studies absorbed me, and so did personal problems, but the truth is that I never thought on giving it up. I had the project set aside for a few years, remodeling the story and the most important points, establishing its themes, changing dynamics between characters, giving them backstories, motivations and, finally, finding a style I was comfortable with. And, little by little, page by page and word after word, this story ended up acquiring quite…epic proportions for a novel, though my past-me didn’t knew that back then.
ABOUT WRITING, WORDS AND LETTERS
The truth it’s that it all started as a hobby, something I did to distract myself in my free-time just because I liked it; as I was thinking up and redacting, it became a whole passion, a lifestyle. I wrote in rough, old paper sheets of my notebooks during classes, in terraces of bars or cafés, until late in the night (or very early in the morning; it depends on how one looks at it). To summarize, anytime. I started and, since then, I had not been able to stop.
To me, writing is something cathartic, necessary, essential: practically everything I write has its origin or forms a parallelism with a situation I’ve seen or lived, or is a kind of metaphor about something that has happened to me and I haven’t known how to react, something I need to think about, something I need to understand. It’s my way of expressing what I believe is right and denouncing what I think it’s not, and, of course, it’s also my way to simply spend a good time, enjoying something I love to do, with my heart and soul.
And it was that love for writing what brought me to pursue a degree in Journalism, even I had thought, at first, to do something sanitary-related; actually, I even took my last two years of high school orienting them to Health Studies and there still are a lot of embers of that liking for them in everything I write.
And, finally, during the summer of my first year of college I ended the first draft of the Pygmalion (specifically, the 3 of August of 2016).
After that, came two years of corrections, doubts and fears…specially fears.
FROM THE FIRST DRAFT TO THE ERIDAN UNIVERSE
My first intention was sending it to a publishing when it was finished, revised and registered, but I have never been able to do it. And I haven’t been able…I don’t really know why, actually. Maybe it’s been because I’m a bit of a control freak and I’m afraid to lose it in which concerns my stories, my world and my characters; maybe because I’m too sensitive and I’m afraid to receive too many bad reviews, because I fear that somebody will tell me that I’m not made for this and I’m not as good as I thought. Or simply because the Pygmalion is very long, and I’d known from the very beginning that, in case of sending it to a publishing, I would have to divide it (with subsequent risk, like the first part not being liked enough and the other two ending hanging out, leaving the story uncomplete, a story that, as long as it may be, it’s still a whole sole book) or cutting off scenes, words and details that make the novel the story I wanted to tell: with romance (a lot; can’t help it, I’m a hopeless romantic), with fantasy, with characters’ development and introspection.
Whatever the matter might be, the main point of this is that I’ve always felt divided about my yearning to bring my stories into light and all those fears. And, while I battled them, I ended up creating a whole universe, with very deep roots, because I’m just unable to stay still. The result? The Legend of the Pygmalion, short stories about certain characters, about how they ended up being what they are in the novel, Eridan’s origins, lost moments and, finally, even a sequel that expands the lore.
During the worldwide crisis of the coronavirus outbreak, I went on and tried to recover a bit of the self-confidence I had lost during my college years, loving myself a bit more and demanding a bit less, and those reflexions got into what you see today in this page. I reached the conclusion that it was a shame that all this stayed forever in the data of my computer when what I really wanted was to share it. So, thanks to the support and the web knowledge of my boyfriend, Jose Daniel Campos (@jodacam in Twitter), because I’m a disaster with technology, this platform was born.
And so until today.
TO ALL OF YOU
Personally, I think that when we, as writers, as creators of content in general, show the world what we do, it ceases to be just ours and becomes something that belongs to our public, too. They make it theirs, create headcanons about the characters and the world, they get involved with them and, honestly, I think that’s something very beautiful. So, actually, this is my world, but now it’s yours, too. And I hope it helps and entertain you as much as it has been doing with me for the past long years; I hope you laugh, you cry and fall a bit in love with these characters, this universe and this story that mean the world to me.
So, in short, I hope you enjoy the reading and, as always, thanks for reading!
Naomi.