Believe it or not, the Average American Goddess saga started in the spring of 2011, in my 7th grade English class, or Language Arts, as it was called by kids who were not yet in high school, I guess. It began with an assignment in which we were asked to create a book, 25 pages long. We could create whatever story we wanted, provided it was school-appropriate (i.e., no over-the-top violence, no sexuality, no drugs, no nudity, no swearing, you know, that kind of stuff). It also had to be at least 5 chapters long. 25 pages, 5 chapters, so I made it with 5 pages a chapter. When I first wrote the story, it was called “Wall of Light” (it has been changed to “Bridge of Light” as of spring 2017). I don’t really remember why I named it Wall of Light, but I was 12 going on 13 at the time and the logic of a 12-13-year-old can seem foreign to a 19-year-old. Now if you were to ask me where the inspiration came from for the story: things like the tornado, the magical rift in the fabric of reality, the characters, etc. were inspired by my experiences before and at the time. The tornado was most likely inspired by the 2011 US tornado season, which was one of the strongest on record. The character of Lindsay was based largely on my own self. The magical rift, or Wall of Light, as it was called, was inspired by my love for the Stargate SG-1 show that Dad got me into. The idea of travelling large distances was an obsession of mine when I was in elementary and middle school. In the summer of 2020, I realized that with the passage of time, the Bridge was not truly the focus of the series, so I decided to change the title to Average American Goddess, to allude to Lindsay and her adventures being the focus of the story. Here is a breakdown of the evolution of the first seven books or seasons of the epic series.
Evolution of Book/Season 1: Dawn of Shadows
It started with the aforementioned class assignment. I did fairly well on it, something like a 90 or 95. The town the family lives in is not named in the original text, but from the tornado, one could assume that they lived somewhere in Tornado Alley, and they wouldn’t be foolish for thinking so.
In the original text, there were only seven named characters: Lindsay, her younger brother Thomas, their mother Sally, their father Roger, their grandmother Amelia, their grandfather Al, and an unknown being named TAWSP. The only mention of Lindsay and her family having magical abilities is that Lindsay could somehow produce electric shocks and survive the vacuum of space. When she goes through the Wall, she finds herself in an alternate universe and she rides on the back of a meteor to the surface of a terraformed moon. She lands in the backyard of a strange house and when she wakes up the next morning, she is greeted by her parents and she constantly hears the voice of her brother calling out for them and when they prepare to leave, Lindsay is introduced to TAWSP, or Time And Warped Space Producer, a little nod to Doctor Who. They then leave and return to their home dimension and reappear on the Moon where they reunite with Thomas, and they return to Earth where they live happily ever after.
That’s how it remained for the next two years or so and I pretty much didn’t pick it up again until I was a freshman in high school.
In the next iteration of the story, I made the plot longer and more complex. I specified the town they live in as Montpelier, VA and moved the beginning of the story to a few days before the tornado and it includes a new character named Lyral Llewelyn (though I created her for the second book) as the family’s guardian and rewrote the story to include her. I still kept most of the original story elements.
That’s how it stayed until fairly recently, when I made further modifications to the plot.
The current version of the first season now has a more expansive view of the world around them. It now has Lindsay’s friends (who I also originally created for the second book, like Lyral) named 龙美雷/Lóng Měi Léi (originally Melani Long), Henry Lancaster, Qatherine Sanchez, Ziva Pfeiffer, and Joshua DiBatista (originally DiCaccia). They go on a camping trip and a VA Beach vacation and Lindsay has a nightmare. In the first episode, we are introduced to a black mist and this entity becomes the main antagonist for the whole first season. Instead of travelling to another dimension, they simply travel to a planet billions of light years away. Lindsay has a series of dreams about different types of planets and she feels compelled to go to them and she gains a sentient golden book and while visiting the planets, they collect various items and learn secrets about the galaxy’s past and must rescue some people and items and after finding what’s been lost, Lindsay defeats the black mist in battle and reunites the lost people and items with their homes and they return home and the black mist vows revenge. TAWSP was retconned and her name changed to Bianca Rosa, the leader of the hidden Immortal community and TAWSP’s role of guiding Lindsay in the original text has been given to the Imperatrix, or Empress Regnant, of the Immortal Nation. The original version of the story off of which Season 1 is based also lacked a clear antagonist, until I rewrote it to fit in the Shadow Queen, who was created for later installments in the intervening years, now having her debut in her non-corporeal form in the very first episode, thus making her the long-term villain for the time being.
Further details will be added as the series progresses.
