Why the story has to come first, and why that isn't an accusation.

She was a mantid. An insectoid. My protagonist. Her one impossible goal was to defeat entropy itself, armed with nothing but mercy.

That is where it started. Not a world. Not a cosmology. Not a race of beings. One character with a job she couldn't possibly do.

If I can write a hero who overcomes through active, relentless mercy; mercy that isn't passive, mercy that costs her something every time she extends it, then I'm doing something very hard. Maybe impossible. I wanted to see if I could.

It's worth saying why that's hard, because it isn't obvious from the outside. Mercy is usually where a story ends. It's the reward we hand a character in the third act, after the violence has done the structural work, and it functions as a kind of exhale. Nobody has to sustain it. Nobody has to build on it. But a protagonist who leads with mercy has to keep paying for it, scene after scene, against an antagonist that doesn't negotiate. Entropy doesn't want anything. It can't be reasoned with, bargained down, or moved. It just continues. Point relentless mercy at a force like that, and you find out very quickly whether you have a story or a sentiment.

Then a second question showed up underneath the first, and I should have recognized how much trouble it was.

Literature has always redeemed predators. Wolves, lions, dragons, the whole bestiary of things that eat people. We inherit a creature's reputation and then spend a story enlarging it, and by the end the audience has agreed to a version of the animal it would have rejected on page one. That trade is one of the oldest ones we make.

Nobody had done it for the praying mantis.

So I wondered what it would take. What would you have to build to redeem a creature most people know for exactly one thing? Could I make readers love something they instinctively pull away from? Could I make mercy believable in a form like that — not tolerable, not interesting, but believable?

I had given myself two impossible problems instead of one, which is how I know I wasn't being strategic.

Somewhere inside that crucible, she was born.

In the first book, another character says to her:

"You should pray, prey."

And that became her name.

PRAYPREY.

Once she existed, the world had no choice but to follow. I found a way — and in finding it I had to build an entire world, Mantidoa, and eventually a whole cosmology, simply to make her fit.

But I never named the work after the world. I named it after her. That wasn't a branding decision. It was the order things happened in. She came first, and everything else grew because she needed somewhere to stand.

That first story became three books and three screenplays before the word transmedia ever crossed my mind, and long before anyone asked me what came next.

It Kept Needing More Room

I can see it clearly now, though I couldn't then. What overwhelmed me wasn't the world. It was the scope of what the story kept asking for.

I didn't set out to build an empire. I set out to tell one story, and it kept needing more room. The lore grew to explain her backstory, then settled at an angle I hadn't planned, one that left a door standing open onto something much larger.

But the door came second. The door always comes second.

And I want to be careful here, because I'm about to give advice I didn't need. I got the sequence right. The story was there from the first page, one character with a job she couldn't do. The world arrived because she needed a floor to stand on. The cosmology arrived because the world needed a sky. Every layer was load-bearing for the layer above it, which is exactly how people say it's supposed to go.

I still nearly went under.

So sequence isn't the whole lesson, and anyone who tells you it is has left something out. Getting the order right buys you a story that holds together. It does not buy you a career, an audience, or a single honest opinion. I had the first thing and none of the others, and it took me years to understand those were separable.

Which brings me to the part I do think is true about starting with a world.

A lot of creators begin there, and I think it fails for a plainer reason than the sneering suggests. The worldbuilder falls in love with what he's made, the beauty of it, the intricacy, the way every piece locks into every other piece, and assumes we'll feel it too. We might. But there's nothing in there for us to do yet. You can carve a door, sand it, polish it, learn the grain of the wood by heart, and it will still never move, because a door with no story behind it has no hinges. The story is the hinge. Without one, there is nothing for a stranger's hand to push against.

That's what finishing actually buys you. Not the beauty; you had the beauty in year one, alone, and you'll have it in year ten whether anyone comes or not. Finishing buys you the moment someone else pushes the door open and steps through, and you get to stand at the threshold and say welcome.

Where It's Allowed to Grow

I don't think transmedia should be engineered from a cynical place. That sounds obvious written down, and it isn't, because the cynical version is easier to pitch. Where's the product? Where's the second revenue line? What's the game, the series, the app? Those are answerable questions, which is precisely what makes them dangerous. A world should expand where the narrative requires it to, and into a medium that can do something the previous one couldn't.

Not a translation. Not a recap in a new format.

If the comic exists because comics can hold a silence that prose can't, that's a reason. If the screenplay exists because something in this story only works at twenty-four frames a second, that's a reason. "We already own the IP" is not a reason. It's an inventory note.

Two rules I'd hold anyone to, including myself.

It shouldn't repeat itself.

If someone can consume the new piece and learn nothing they couldn't get from the old one, you've made merchandise.

It shouldn't assign homework.

Anyone should be able to walk in cold, appreciate what they find, and receive something fully satisfying that still belongs to the larger whole.

That is very hard to do on purpose.

Mine didn't happen on purpose, and I don't want to make a virtue out of that. It grew in one direction because one character kept needing more room, and the scope of it nearly buried me.

Someone who plans it pays up front. I paid late, and I paid more.

What Someone Finally Said

You don't have to prove anything in order to make the thing. Write the book. Write the script. Write the comic. Nobody's permission is required for that, and nobody can withhold it; that's the one part of this that's genuinely free, and it's worth knowing it's free.

But if you want the industry to help you build something larger than you can build by yourself, and eventually that is exactly what this becomes: other people's money, other people's labor, other people's faith, then you have to prove it once.

One finished, self-contained piece. Put in front of someone who isn't you.

Not a bible. Not a pitch deck with a five-phase rollout. Not a slate. One thing, complete, in front of one person who has no reason to be kind about it.

I didn't do that, and I want to be precise about why, because "fear of rejection" is too flattering. It wasn't that I thought it would fail. It's that while nobody had seen it, every version of its reception was still live. Untested work exists in a superposition where it might be the thing that changes everything. Show it to one person, and it collapses into whatever it actually is. I understood that trade better than I admitted, and I kept choosing the superposition.

Then it came back the way it did, and I had two explanations available.

That nobody could see the beauty in what I'd made.

Or that a mantid protagonist who wields mercy as a weapon was always going to be an extraordinarily difficult sell, and I had spent years without asking a single person.

The second explanation was more useful.

It was also more expensive.

Two Rooms

The story has to come first, and the world has to be necessitated by the story. Otherwise you can spend years somewhere no one else can reach. That's the real cost, and I'd rather say it about myself than about anyone else.

Mine was made in isolation.

I won't pretend otherwise, and I won't pretend it was a mistake. I dreamt her alive during a stretch when there wasn't much else in the room, and I'm clear-eyed about this part: she would not exist if I had been busier. Whatever that decade cost me, it's also the only reason there's anything to talk about. I'm not going to stand here and disown the conditions that made her.

But solitude with a story in it and solitude with only a world in it are two different rooms, and they look identical from the inside. That's the whole problem. Both are quiet. Both are yours. Both feel like devotion. You cannot tell them apart by how the work feels while you're doing it, which is why the feeling is useless as instrumentation.

The first one is making something.

The second one only feels like it is.

A world with no story in it asks nothing of you, and it never tells you no.

That's the one that can quietly take your years.

Redeeming the Time

I spent a decade asking whether you can love a creature everyone has already decided about.

It took me longer to notice I was being asked the same question about people.

The creator lost in an empty world gets sorted fast. Vain. Pretentious. A fake who hasn't done the work. And the sorting isn't entirely wrong — the story does have to come first, and no amount of grace changes that it has to. I'm not arguing for lowering the bar. The bar is the only thing that makes finishing mean anything.

But I know what that room looks like from the inside, and almost nobody in there is cheating.

They're in there alone. Usually they were never told. Nobody sat them down and explained that the world is the second thing, and they built the beautiful part first because the beautiful part is the part you can do by yourself.

I recognize the recoil. I've spent years trying to earn a second look for something that provokes it.

So we don't throw talented people away for getting the steps out of order, or for having had no one to tell them.

We tell them.

We show them, mercifully, when it's allowed and when it's wanted.

Maybe that's what my little mantid was trying to teach me all along.

Mercy isn't only the thing that saves worlds. Sometimes it's what saves a creator from another decade alone in one.

Mercy against entropy.

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