January-2012 was the start of CDS Media. It started with an idea. That idea was to push my love of writing out into the world. With not a lot of planning, I crafted the start of two stories, having posted them each day on my Facebook feed. Those two stories were Pokémon: Shadow Boom and Star Wars: Darth Maul. I had planned to continue pushing them out to Facebook, but then Jaz – a friend from Halesowen College and co-creator of the Doctor Who: The Star Wars Chronicles audio series – suggested that it might be better to host the stories on a free-to-create website, then post the links to Facebook.
Thus, this website was created. It looked a lot different back then, with the logo continuously changing – including one created by Jaz, and a banner that tied into the stories being worked on at the time. But with a month of additions having been posted with a place to put them, I wanted to expand. That expansion came with the written fiction of Doctor Who: The Star Wars Chronicles – that looked into the origins of the story and aimed to build up to the events of the audio series, and an original story – TV and Film Residential Camp.
The end of March saw a temporary end to Pokémon: Shadow Boom uploads, as even with my enjoyment of writing, handling four stories at once – along with college work – was starting to prove a bit much. The two newest stories had become priorities, with Star Wars: Darth Maul – the fan-created story looking at events within the Star Wars universe had The Phantom Menace played out differently – feeling more and more as though it was something being worked on because I had to, which wasn’t helped much by the arrival of another original in May – Zincite Storm Cup.
While TV and Film Residential Camp aimed to create a story of intrigue, Zincite Storm Cup went for action. But it was action that was short-lived. The setting provided little room to explore what I wanted, so I cut it short and finished it up, bringing it around to finish where it had started. TV and Film I admit went in the other direction, where it seemed I had too many ideas I wanted to try out, and put plenty of them into it without any ideas of how to resolve them.
In June-2012, there was something else to be working on. A blog. A second Weebly site had been set up to keep the blog and stories separate, and since it was June, the first few posts were obvious. It was E3 time, and I wanted to talk about it. After E3, I continued to post, talking about any random thing I felt like, but it mostly centred on games. To tie the two sites together, I also talked a bit about the stories I was working on, with an Origin of Pokémon: Shadow Boom post, as well as marking the end of Zincite Storm Cup.
But also featuring was a post talking about the start of a new story at the start of January-2013. One based on Animal Crossing. This story was never to really be, however, as I struggled to get the concept fully off the ground and understood it to be an absurd ask. Tell the story of how each Animal Crossing is linked together? It seemed doomed to fail before it had really begun, but I had a decent attempt. Two chapters were added to across five months, where I then made an attempt at continuing the story with a third before calling it quits.
There were some short stories posted during this era, with the start of them being with Thundercapped – a story featuring the friends I had at Halesowen College. It was an attempt at a disaster story, where a storm blew in while everyone was at college and wreaked havoc. Following that was Arcade Plunder and Golf Gash. The former being a story where Angry Bird toys within a grabber machine would capture and transport anyone into their machine who displayed anger at not winning one of the toys. The latter being a very short account of one person’s time at a fantastical golf course.
These are the ones that I know of, and have the exact details of. They can be found on the Wayback Machine, though the page has no formatting. All three were released in 2012, and while I have no idea when this next one started, I know it ended at the end of February-2013. Droid Takeover Town was a crossover of sorts, where the Battle Droids from the Doctor Who: The Star Wars Chronicles universe come to Earth looking for the creators of the series to end their suffering at the hands of the Daleks.
The two original stories were finished with in 2013. Pokémon: Shadow Boom having been the beginning of the year, with Star Wars: Darth Maul halfway through it. The stories that were going into Darth Maul made it feel less as though it was related to the concept that the story was originally meant to be, since I now had a commando squad of my own and had spent a lot of time with them. I ended the story with no attempt to even close off the current arc.
The only other noteworthy thing that happened within this original era of DarkRula Media was a desire to push my writing further. To get it seen by more people. To that end, I had stopped adding to TV and Film Residential Camp in October-2013, with the intention to change names and tidy things up with it to make it the best it could be. As you’ll find out when getting to era 3, that did eventually happen – spawning an entire alternate world for me to mess around in.