My Writing History, Part 1

I like to say I started creating the Pentagonal Dominion on August 20th, 1999. Yes, I know the exact day. Even at that age (without saying how old I was in 1999, but let’s say I was fairly young), I knew this was going to be a big part of my life. At that moment, my world wasn’t as big or spectacular as it is now, but I knew. I knew one day it would be important to me. So how did it start? I watched a few episodes of the Pokemon and Digimon anime and decided it would be fun to design my own such monsters. I don’t remember many of those old designs, just the centaur with a Pikachu tail, crazy-sharp teeth, rockets attached to the side, and another person on its hand. It’s, uh, not quite as wacky anymore. Still has the extra entity attached to the hand.

Centaur of the Pentagonal Dominion, drawn by Bear Pettigrew

The VERY earliest stories I remember writing were portal fantasy. They were about humans who wound up in Aloutia in a variety of ways, usually by literally walking through a portal. The idea of the water portals didn’t come until later. For that matter, the idea of the fantasy world being six planes didn’t come until later. In those earliest days, the monsters were called Aloutians and the only fantasy world in my head was Aloutia. For a loooong time, I thought my first book was going to be titled Aloutia and my series would be something like The World of Aloutia or The Aloutian Chronicles. Now Aloutia is just one of the six planes, and doesn’t even play a big role in my first published book!

I don’t remember where I came up with the name ‘Aloutia’ but that has been its name since I created it. My best guess relates to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. I was obsessed with geography as a kid, by which I mean I was obsessed with a globe I had. At some point, I’m sure I came across the Aleutian Islands and thought they were pronounced “A-low-shun.” The spelling of Aloutia changed a few times in the first year. I finally settled on ‘Aloutia’ when I began typing my stories into Word. Or maybe it was Notepad. I’m not sure. It would have been around 2001 and I don’t recall what writing software was on my computer. I wanted to distance the name Aloutia from the Aleutians.

I devised my own elemental system using the ‘types’ found in Pokemon and other video games I was into at the time. I didn’t entirely like Pokemon’s system, so I changed many things as I deemed necessary. The idea of a Normal type seemed lazy, and why wasn’t Flying just Wind? Why was there a Rock, Ground, and later a Steel type when that could all be encompassed by a single element incorporating all solids? Did Ghost and Psychic need to be separated? The TCG combined them, and that felt right to me. What may strike you as an unusual choice was that I kept the Bug types separate from the Grass types. Grass got changed to Plant in my world because I wanted a word that included flowers and trees. At the time, I thought it would also include mushrooms. It wasn’t until I got a bit older that I realized fungi were in a different kingdom, at which point I just changed my world’s definition of ‘Plant’ to also include fungi. But the Bug type? Oh, I had a hyperfixation on insects as a kid and I wanted them to be the Life element. I actually did call it the Insect element for about a year, and the Death element was “Needle,” though from their inception, they represented Life and Death. This is why all my Life elementals are based on insects and why the Life God’s name is Entomothy; he was originally the God of the “Insect” element. I considered changing his name a few times as I went away from the 'insect’ aspect and leaned more into the ‘life’ aspect, but by that point, I just really liked the name Entomothy. It was his name. It was who he was.

Entomothy, drawn by Alppy

The characters who are now the Gods of the Pentagonal Dominion were originally my equivalent of Legendary Pokemon or the higher-leveled Digivolved Digimon. I even called them “Megaloutians” which makes me cringe now, so please never remind me of THAT ever again.

The world of the Pentagonal Dominion started as just Aloutia, and Aloutia was only one continent/landmass. Again, I was taking inspiration from Pokemon, which at the time featured only the Kanto region. When Gen 2 came out and introduced Johto, suddenly Aloutia had another continent! (I even named them Johto and Kanto. God, I’m cringing again). But why stop at two? Digimon had an arc about a continent ‘across the sea’ called Server and I wanted to do that, too, so I created a third continent on Aloutia far to the south of the other two called… Slevango. Even kid-Erika didn’t want to call that one Server, lol. I at least had the decency to come up with something else. I later changed “Johto” and “Kanto” to Tsagwa and Kamblu, respectively, which are their current names.