Horrible fanfic.
—Beyonder
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Good morning. This is Lionel C. Suggs. You can Facebook me or email me for verification. I thought I would come on here and personally tell you how it all began.
I used to create stories all of the time. It wasn't until I watched YuYu Hakusho that I wanted to really write my own book. This was in middle school. I wanted to open up people's minds with my own creativity. It was called Prophecy. My writing style was inspired by K. A. Applegate (Animorphs author). After writing 6 books to this series (some chapters were in school newspaper articles), I decided to write a book in which I would publish. It was called the Limits of Power. While I loved the idea of tournament fighting, I also became entranced with the almighty. So I created a story (very different from how I write now) in where there are similar concepts to what I have now. Around this time, I started watching more Anime and getting into Manga. After watching Get Backers, I did some research and this eventually got me into the debating forums.
I am infamous for the Get Backers deception scenario, but that's another story. Before this, I was lurking and then started to really debate. The posters on the forum tore me down at first, and I deserved it. I had no basis for my debates. I was merely going off of wordplay and wasn't a big researcher. After about 2 weeks on this, I started to really research pretty much every fiction I could. I started seeing different scopes of power and realities. At this point, I was in classes for philosophy and metaphysics and stages of the mind, which in effect, helped me out even more. Now, this whole GB Deception thing actually forced me to literally tear down venues and look either too deep into it or to connect the dots. I didn't like the fact that I was being called a liar despite the fact that before I came to them with any feats, I showed them and asked them if it was legit, and only debated with it once it was clarified. But I was shown what overhyped was. I was shown what no-limits fallacies were. I was shown the value of technical terms. I was shown the value of research.
Now, it wasn't because of this that I started to write because by this time (late 2009), I already had Heir to the Stars I, II, JOKER, Chris Spades, Skylar, and Praé written. They just weren't published or anything. It was because of the forums itself and a few classes that I was taking that I realized that I needed to change a few things. Actually, this explains why I am so feat heavy in my stories. When I tell you what a character is and what they do, I literally show it to you so there is no debate if it's hype or not. But there is a literal turning point in which I started to rethink on my stories and it was during a Jean Grey debate. Thus, I needed to do more research on Marvel and their cosmic structure and power scales. This guided me to other venues and to see what other authors were doing. I started comparing Gods of different cultures to Higher entities in fiction. I started researching many metaphysical topics, tearing apart many, many books to learn what I needed to learn in order to advance my work.
I wanted to write a story like Limits of Power, but very different. In order to write on the realm in which actual Supreme Beings walked on, I needed to encompass my life in literature cosmic development.
Then it came to light when I was reading the Daniel X manga by James Patterson, and I was telling my mom about it, and she asked me why I wasn't published yet? She basically drilled me and told me that I had no excuse to not be published yet, and then I took the initiative to get published.
I didn't want anyone to have creative control over my work in any way. I didn't want my stories to look the same as so many other stories. And I didn't want my characters to be the same as your everyday characters. I wanted to become my own franchise and to be my own work.
Soon, I started to see where my work was, and started to see the lack of imagination in it. Sure, there are influences you can recognize in some stories. However, I cannot show you greater echelons, if I don't tear down the ones that have been established first. I wanted to keep pushing higher, to really be pushing out original content, to center the stories around stuff that isn't mainstream. At the same time, since I was little, I just wanted to open up people's minds, and now I am at the point in where I really can do that.
But that nonsense about me having a character lose or losing a debate and then wanting to write a story is nothing but bull. I am open on the center stage with you. You can contact me on my email, author facebook or book facebook or website or wikia or even goodreads and I will answer whatever you want. I will chat, debate, whatever. While I would enjoy seeing some of my characters in a debate, I did not write because I didn't want to lose. I was writing long before that and I had many factors attribute in the development of my writing.
—Lionel Suggs regarding the origins of Suggsverse
