What is Aperture?

I talk about Aperture a lot, and I've managed to go almost three years without ever really explaining what it is. (Aperture turns three this year. Holy crap.) Today would be Nate's 19th birthday, so I figured it would be a good day to post something like this.

(If you landed on this page because of a photography-related Google search, sorry. This isn't what you're looking for.)

Short version: Aperture is a story about four kids with magical abilities that get themselves into trouble.

Of course, that doesn't really cover much, so I'm gonna talk a little bit more in depth underneath the cut.




Aperture was initially two separate story ideas.

I started Inverted Afterglow in the spring of my sophomore year in my boredom during math class. I never got very far with it, to be honest. I had the beginning pretty set but never got much of a plot.

IA was about Fel, who breaks her sister's (unknowingly) enchanted camera and gains the ability to manipulate light. The little bits I wrote for IA were Fel and her friend Isolde getting into trouble as Fel tried to get used to her new power.

Due to a bad semester in Chemistry, I got myself grounded for most of the summer after sophomore year, and ended up creating Synergy. A lot of my ideas for it came from my marathon of Danny Phantom during that spring.

Synergy was about Quinn's first interactions with Nate, who she thinks strongly resembles a character from the cartoon Konami Code that she really likes. I flip-flopped with the story for a while, so there are a few pages of writing where Nate is treated as a fictional character made corporeal in their universe.

(I have no idea how I would have pulled that idea off.)

For whatever reason around the time of our Alaska trip I decided to see what would happen if I combined the stories. I tinkered with the idea for a while, and by November of junior year I decided I wanted to try using the story for NaNo that year.

And then Aperture became my life.

I've worked out a lot of the details and wrinkles that came up trying to join the two original stories (and all the other plot bunnies that got mixed in over time). It's definitely become a "sandbox" kind of story, and I consciously set it up to give myself a lot of freedom in what could be considered canon.

Aperture is now about Quinn's experience being surrounded by magic in a world that, for the most part, doesn't believe it exists. All the characters have their own experiences in balancing their magic and the image of being "normal", and Quinn tends to get stuck in the middle of the conflicts that arise from that.

I actually chose the title from some of the stuff I learned from IA and the photography courses I took in high school. A camera's aperture setting changes the focus of a picture, and I related that to how disclosing only certain information can change someone's perception of something or someone. The characters get themselves into trouble a lot because they aren't honest with each other.

Of course, I picked the name for Aperture when there was still a fairly big divide between the two stories, and I've gotten too attached to the name to pick a new one.

Aperture was the first story idea that I was able to take from a few pages of notes to something vaguely resembling a story. (I say that loosely, because even after almost three years I'm still tweaking major sections of the plot.) Working on Aperture has definitely opened up a lot of opportunities for me, from getting to experience a lot of things in the name of writing research to getting the courage to write Casanova.

Okay. I think I'll leave the post at this so I don't go off on a long-winded tangent. Hopefully I'll be able to talk more about Aperture soon! I should have some Casanova-related posts coming up soon as well.