Dark Bear Productions

I'd like to tell you how I started Hunting Darkness, the transmedia project I'm working on. You might find a cool new piece of media, you might find a bit of personal motivation, and you might find a fun new blog to follow, but you'll certainly find an insight into the creation of the project I am dedicating my life to.

First: if you're unfamiliar with the term transmedia and are hoping it's media by and for trans people, I'm sorry to disappoint you: that's trans media. No, transmedia is when you combine stories told through different media to create a larger whole. (Although I'm happy to say Hunting Darkness features characters who are trans, non-binary, gay, bi, ace, and more, as well as many characters whose gender identity or sexual orientation never comes up and can be freely interpreted).

With that bit clear, let's get this story going.

It began in 2016, after I played The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and -- inspired by my parents' love for Victorian and SteamPunk aesthetics during a visit to their house -- wrote a rain-sodden, blood-soaked, action-packed story about a team of five slightly SteamPunk Victorian Monster Hunters fighting a massive pseudo-vampire that had mysteriously appeared in a warehouse.

I intended to expand the story into a debut novel called Hunting Darkness -- yes, the name stuck -- but ultmately failed to turn it into something that satisfied me and tried moving on. Unfortunately for my mental health, I kept coming back to that idea of Victorian Monster Hunters, my beating Bloodborne in 2019 adding fuel to the growing fire.

From time to time, some story idea would excite me and I'd begin writing once more only to inevitably think "This would be great for Hunting Darkness." I'd then open my old files, go over my notes and ideas, and try once more to get something out of it. I'd rearrange concepts, tweak my ideas, adjust my themes, and eventually realise it was a much too big and unwieldy a project, I'd never fit it into a novel, and I had better give up.

On it went. I wrote thousands of words and never finishing a story. Eventually, I pretty much gave up and stopped writing altogether.

Then, in late 2022, I listened to The Magnus Archives while doing some (very dull) data management at my new job. I had never really listened to an audio drama before -- unless you count the time I accidentally listened to an old radio drama on shuffle while temporarily blind -- but I really liked this format of stand-alone stories lasting about 20 minutes each. Of course, I then thought of some scene I had cooked up for my Monster Hunters and wondered at how much fun it would be to write a series of stand-alone monster hunts for my very own audio drama.

And then it finally clicked.

My partner Luca studied transmedia storytelling in college and had excitedly told me about it many times, but I'd never considered that Hunting Darkness might be a prime subject for it. Now, however, I wondered if it wouldn't be nice to create an audio drama solely for the writing of monster hunts.

I began working on From the Bay of Fangs, playing on the idea of reports written by Hunters being used as advertising for their services. When I fleshed out my world building and it became clear the Hunters would be government agents, I decided to change the tone from advertorial to propagandistic.

This then sparked the idea that not everyone would just accept this propaganda, leading to The Dark Truth, a series of in-world posters objecting to the stories told in From the Bay of Fangs, accompanied by a story about a government agent trying to find the people behind those posters in order to save her career.

At this point my creativity went into full swing. I officially created a (one-person) company called Dark Bear Productions, created a website, shared some of my worldbuilding, and am now publishing both From the Bay of Fangs and The Dark Truth independently while writing more Hunting Darkness stories and coming up with more still.

It's been stressful, I won't lie. I quit my job in order to work on this and I'm hoping I can find those people who'll find Hunting Darkness as cool as I do -- although I'm sure they're out there.

But it's also been fun and exhilarating and inspiring and it just feels like what I should be doing. So if you have something you really want to write but can't figure out how: consider transmedia! Or just explore some more stories when you can and see if anything clicks. If you share the results with me, I'll check it out. I can't promise I'll like it, but I can promise I'll like you for having created what you had to create, no matter the self-doubt along the way.

Take care!

I mean, here rice is pretty much dominant off, but off your post I get the sense that it's various forms of potato? For some reason I used to think people just ate large amounts of bread

Bread is definitely the staple carb in The Netherlands!

Potatoes are part of traditional dinners, but eating bread for breakfast and/or lunch is the standard, and having a sandwich or something like burgers on a bun for dinner isn't unheard of either.

Alright, let’s go over a few quintessentially Dutch dishes. I got this question when I mentioned hutspot, so let's start there. Hutspot has its own Wikipedia page, featuring this pic:

It's boiled potato, carrot, and onion mashed together. Wikipedia tells me its served with klapstuk, which is apparently a cut of beef from the ribs. To my knowledge I've never had that, but my parents used to serve their hutspot with hachée, which is a thick beef, onion (and apparently apple?), and herb stew, so that's pretty close I think. Hachée looks like this:

Keeping in line with this tradition of smashing potatoes and boiled vegetables together, our national dish is boerenkoolstamppot (like German, Dutch enjoys stitching words together; it means kale mash, basically). This looks thus:

As you can tell, the real star of the dish is the sausage. It's rookworst -- smoke sausage --; meat, spices and salt smoked in a horse shoe-shaped casing. I just learned that these were traditionally made in November, the Slaughter Month, which happens to be when kale is harvested, leading to this classic combo.

(By the way: keep in mind The Netherlands didn't have potatoes until the 16th Century. I'm not sure what we did with boerenkool, but hutspot was made with parsnips instead of potatoes.)

On the subject of making interesting sausages: the Dutch looove their fries (usually the thick kind, with mayo), and the best way to eat those is with either a frikandel or a kroket. A frikandel is mincemeat with spices, looking like this:

A kroket is essentially a thick ragout rolled in breading, looking like this (both sausages are popular on bread, too):

While we're talking about food from the snackbar, let’s talk about my favourite junkfood: frietje oorlog (literally war fries, but it means messy fries). These are fries served with mayo, raw onions, and saté, an Indonesian peanut sauce:

Note that having this is fully a result of colonialism. Indeed, the Indonesian rice table is official Dutch cultural heritage. But that's insane to me, so instead I'll use the raw onions to talk about Hollandse Nieuwe (Hollandish New One):

This is herring caught and sold at a specific time of year, eaten gutted, deboned, and decapitated but otherwise raw, with raw onions.

Now, as a final mention before I need to get up, let’s talk sweets. We Dutch love our pastries and cookies, and there's an absolute mass of local and regional cakes and waffles and what have you, but one sweet that actually serves as dinner is the Dutch pancakes:

They're thicker than crepes (and in a restaurant much bigger and thicker than the ones in this picture I got online), but they really are just flour, milk, and eggs fried in a frying pan. They're traditionally eaten with a very dark sugar syrup and powdered sugar, but people put on lots of stuff. A very popular variation has raisins and/or apple slices added in the pan before the batter to have them sit *in* the pancake. Another adds young cow's cheese and folds the pancake like a calzone, yet another fries bacon and pours batter over top. But the main take is that a sweet dinner isn't unusual in The Netherlands.

Hello Hunters, Darkhearts, and Beasts!

I promised myself to write this blog every single Friday, as well as do my best to write a blog every Monday and Wednesday, in an attempt to find my audience for Hunting Darkness.

So far it hasn't had too much effect.

And that's alright! I know there are a lot of stories out there, and I know I don't have any more rights to be heard than anyone else, and I know that I've only just begun. I'm going to keep going, too.

But I've been tired and stressed this week, due to a variety of factors, and so I haven't really had the kind of experience or train of thought I usually find worth sharing on these Friday blogs.

So I figured I'd just share that, get it out of my system, and try again next week.

Stay safe out there.

Plus look at this character art:

I absolutely love it; I keep wanting to look at it. The fact that the cast is also diverse -- with people of color, non-binary people, impressively buff women, scrawny men, etc., etc. -- really makes me happy.

It's just very fun to play and I'm really enjoying the (free!) expansion right now and I wanted to share that even before I've actually finished the game.

So I now not only have to invent a functional currency, I have to invent how it is introduced and what that means to communities who until recently were paid through access to food, medicine, homes, etc.

Hello Hunters, Darkhearts, and Beasts!

I've been doing quite a bit of research this week. Some for the worldbuilding for Season 2 of From the Bay of Fangs, but most to give myself a timeline on the development of the Hunters' gear through the years. I like using historic weapons and I like those weapons to be used in roughly accurate order.

But what I've noticed this week is that 19th century gunsmithing was really quite messy. The smoothbore Brown Bess musket was used until 1867, well after rifling became common. The Chassepot initially used paper cartridges in 1866, even though metal cartridges had been around for years. Revolvers produced in 1836 were used alongside revolvers produced in 1861. Sometimes guns were designed and produced in the same year, sometimes there were years -- even a decade -- between the two steps.

It got me thinking how we -- or at least, to my knowledge, most people -- tend to see history as a straight line. I think in recent years we've gotten to the point where we no longer speak of linear progress because, well, some things are getting worse, or just bad in different ways. But I also think we still speak in terms of linear development and although I think that's more accurate I still don't think it's fully accurate.

History is a mess. Historians like to point out anachronisms in people's perceptions of history, but history is often anachronistic. The world is large and humanity is diverse. Ideas don't naturally go from one step to the next, like some deterministic walk along a single logical path. Ideas clash and jostle and mingle and merge and fall in and out of favour in different places and communities.

The modern world -- shaped so heavily by globalisation and colonialism -- sometimes seems to be turning homogenous. Many people think the patriarchy is and has been a global given. Same with heteronormativity. Old and problematic stati quo that have to be overcome by new thinking. And maybe in some ways that's true, but people also seem to keep rediscovering ways in which the precolonial, pre-Christian-Missionary'd world was often not quite as patriarchal and not nearly as heteronormative as we now take for granted.

That's fascinating to me. I'm thinking of reading some more books delving into that subject matter, maybe use it for Hunting Darkness beyond what I've already done to question patriarchy and heteronormativity in my worldbuilding.

But first, I'm going to see Jesus Christ Superstar.

Kinda ironic, that.

Now, obviously, that *heavily* depends on what Fantasy your reading, and even then it depends on how narrowly you look (Westeros, for instance, is patriarchal and feudal, but many places in Essos have entirely other forms of government). But it *did* motivate me to question certain things I subconsciously assumed as standard and really look at where they might stem from and if I actually wanted to include them.

So now Hunting Darkness is working towards Gothic Revival aesthetic combined with gender-role-free meritocracy-turned-oligarchy where polygamous and non-hetero relationships are fully accepted and utterly normal and everyone dresses like (partially crossdressing) Victorians.

But the signs are there.

You need but look around in the Wijnstraat (Wine Street), a historic street featuring over 60 houses with national monument status, to see this:

This is an honestly beautiful historic detail, featuring the head of Hermes, god of merchants; a very apt detail on a merchant's house. It also features, however, a loaf of sugar wrapped in blue packing paper. Dordrecht traded in sugar, and sugar stands at the foundation of its historic wealth and lasting beauty.

And sugar, of course, meant slavery.

Refining sugar was extremely hard, dangerous, and even deadly labour performed by enslaved people. And the wealth gained from that exploitation made possible the Netherlands' current wealth, fueling centuries of investments that continue to pay off.

And yet most people have no idea of this, even though the signs are literally on the walls.

It's a painful injustice. Thankfully, Dutch activists and academics (many of them POCs) are working hard to set the record straight, but it's an uphill battle against the willfully ignorant, the blatantly racist, and the leaders of our government, who often manage to be both.

But whenever someone wonders if the struggle is truly necessary, well...

Hello Hunters, Darkhearts, and Beasts!

I'm going to be bold and tell you that Season 2 of From the Bay of Fangs features someone getting hit in the chest hard enough to collapse their lung. Moreover, a Hunter then treats it as best he can while still in the field.

I went down a bit of a rabbit hole for that this week. The type of collapsed lung I was going for is known as pneumothorax. Essentially: something damages the lung, allowing your breath to escape into your chest. The built up pressure then forces your lung to constrict, leaving you unable to fill it and thus unable to use it.

Medically, this is known as a "Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Time". (Also as a possible lead up to "obstructive shock", which means your blood isn't flowing the way it should, which means... Well you can guess what that means.)

There's a bunch of known causes and also some unknown ones, but for this episode the cause was blunt force trauma that didn't rupture the flesh of the chest, leading to a "closed traumatic pneomothorax". Basically: the ribs get cracked and the damaged bones tear the lung, but there's no open wound.

The treatment for this is creating a small hole in the chest at a safe spot between the ribs and placing a tube or valve to allow the air built up within the chest to exit. Having done so, the lung can once again fill with air.

The issue is: Hunting Darkness is inspired by the 18th and 19th century. In terms of inspiration, this episode would take place roughly around 1800. But pneomothorax was only described by French doctors in 1803 and given a clinical procedure in 1819. Worse, the main cause was believed to be tuberculosis, with other causes only becoming treatable by British doctors in 1941. I don't mind playing with time a little -- this is a Fantasy world, after all -- but that was way too much for me.

But then I saw the name Şerafeddin Sabuncuoğlu.

It turns out that a solid five centuries before those West-Europeans figured out how a collapsed lung worked, a Turkish surgeon and physician had already done so. Living from 1385 to 1470, Sabuncuoğlu described how to treat a collapsed lung by making an incision, placing a glass vessel over the wound, and burning off the air within it to create a vacuum and draw out the air caught in the chest.

Absolutely genius stuff. And perfect, because the world of Hunting Darkness features extensive exchange of knowledge and skill, with Fenblith drawing in enormous quantities of both in exchange for Starsteel and other resources and aid in order to train their Hunters better than any other fighting force in the global network. (Neocolonialism, hurray!)

Thus, a Hunter of Fenblith could certainly know how to recognise and treat a collapsed lung in the field and the episode worked perfectly.

I'm excited for you to hear it come Spring!