Zetar

The story of Zetar is too big for the short stuff. To properly tell it, a look at the whole picture is needed.

Nascence

I’ve always preferred imagination to reality. Stories of fantastical otherworlds staked their claim on me as a kid, where I chose the lasers and aliens of Star Wars over gritty crime dramas and real-world characters. Let me wander the forests of Falkreath, or fly on Voyager as a Starfleet tactical officer. They were (and remain) my true happy place.

Zetar‘s earliest roots were in my childhood, watching things like Star Wars and Star Trek and Stargate. I’d make up my own characters, sending them on their own adventures in the theater of my mind. My brother and I used Beanie Babies and Legos and stuffed animals to draw up heroes and villains and pit them against each other on adventures.

Some of those characters have survived the decades… with a few tweaks. Nearly an entire Starfleet command crew has made it into Zetar in some capacity, led by such names as Arthur Ronnos, John Trent and Marla Gilman (Marla Gilmore, in the lawsuit-free bliss of childhood) – the valiant crew of the U.S.S. Endurance. Lana Knight was an F.B.I. agent. Butch Jaegar led an SG team for Stargate Command. Jenna Aberdeen fought Zerg in the world of Starcraft.

As a middle-and-high-schooler, I wrote short stories about some of those characters. Star Trek alone got a 40-part series that I completed a decent chunk on. Starcraft got some stories I published in the long-ago days of Battle.net fan fiction, though they’re now sadly lost to time. It was the start, in its simplest form, of my forays into writing.

The Roleplayer

Zetar first drew breath on April 23rd, 2012, in a farmhouse in Pine Island, Minnesota.

I was a fresh high school homeschool graduate. I was over at the house of a longtime family friend, whose older sister had graduated too. After the usual socialization I wandered upstairs to my pal’s room, where he and another friend were sitting around roleplaying. The lights were out, it was still and quiet, and they were up to some adventure in a faraway world. No character sheets, no roll systems, just pure experience. They invited me to join them, and to make my own character.

Five minutes later, Jed and Arryl were born.

You know what’s funny? I never did end up roleplaying Jed and Arryl that much. We moved on to other characters as me, my friend and his sister really got into our escapades. I put up folks like Molfeian Kethram, or Reyen, or Silvey Kubiak, and the two Zetars never quite took off like I’d hoped.

However, I held onto their story. I started exploring Jed and Arryl myself in writing, and it’s from there that the books came to be. I built the world of Zetar around those two and their dynamic, and two years later the first book was done. A second came in another year.

Then I went to college and decided both books sucked. To be fair, they kinda did. I sat down throughout my time at Northwestern and dissected Books One and Two, conducting extensive rebuilds from the things I learned at school about writing. The work was done by about mid-2019 and at last, I could move forward.

That’s when I decided to move across the country.

Book 3

Oh, boy. I could write a whole damn book on just this book.

Into Oblivion is when Zetar finally found its legs. It was my first completely new project in seven years, after an eternity of tinkering with Books One and Two. There was a newness and excitement to it, of beginning to pay off things I’d set up close to a decade prior (and setting up even more for the future).

It was also a time of massive change in my life. Over three years I moved from Minnesota to Tennessee, cycled between several jobs, lived through the Covid pandemic, and so much more. The books took a backseat through much of this period as new responsibilities and new interests took hold of me – there were many points at which, legitimately, Book Three almost never happened.

I moved to a new roleplaying scene, this time in the MMORPG Star Wars: The Old Republic. I’d played it plenty over the years (Shekh was born there in 2015, and ultimately became a roleplay main), but it wasn’t until 2019 when I really got into the RP side of the game. The pandemic only made this easier – with the whole world shut down and so many stuck at home, playership in TOR skyrocketed. This meant more players, more guilds, and more stories.

More Zetar characters came to be in those days, some you’ve met and some not yet. Kayri Norolos was one of my TOR roleplay mains (I have, in fact, RPed as all of her siblings at some point). So was Clyde. Willow Janos was another character I played. So many stories came from those three years, and the books wouldn’t be what they are today without them.

But there was one other thing that brought Into Oblivion, at last, to pass. It was a particularly awful job I held for ten months, at a shipping yard that shall remain nameless. We worked 12 to 14-hour days, under frustrating conditions and endless stress, and it wore me down to a shell of myself. I was always tired, always burned out. I realized something at that job, something that drew me back to stay to my writing:

If I didn’t seize the dream, it would never come.

I got back to writing. Five words a day, every day – that was my rule. Get something on the board, no matter how small. Five words turned to five paragraphs. Then, five pages. In time I left the shipping yard and, in the next three months, wrote two thirds of Into Oblivion in a frenetic spiral of obsession.

The Present

And so Zetar exists today, in its current form. I work retail to pay the bills, write my books, and make videos for the channel. There’ve been many twists and turns to this journey, but every one of them was needed. What you see now wouldn’t exist without them.

Thanks for sticking around! Hope you like what you see – tell a friend! I appreciate your interest and your time, however much you’re able to spare. There’s a lot more where this came from, and I’ll keep at it as long as I’m able. May Zetar leave you as happy as it does me.