When I began this series, the idea was to build off a small piece of John Chandler’s POV in Where Shadows Are the Darkest.
It was an attempt to expand the world without dumping a bunch of exposition into the book. I wanted to mention something strange that had happened years earlier and leave the reader wondering what the hell it was.
This was the passage that started it:
He ran a finger along the Nazar amulet strung around his neck. His wife had given it to him, saying it’d protect him from evil. Her mama had been deep into voodoo down in Louisiana. Knew things John didn’t. Things he used to laugh at.
“A sharp eye and a sharp mind keeps you alive. Not some trinket on a string,” he used to say.
He laughed like that until the first crossing in ’66. Until he saw a man split in two without a blade, until the sky turned wrong over the woods and something crawled out of the water that didn’t cast a shadow. He hadn’t laughed since.
That mention of the first crossing in 1866 was supposed to suggest there was a much bigger history behind what was happening in WSAD. The video series became my way of going back and telling part of that story, centered around the first human encounters with the demonic incursions creeping into the world.
The Texas Piney Woods in 1866
The story required quite a bit of research into the Texas Piney Woods after the Civil War.
It was isolated country, although certainly not empty. Native groups still moved through parts of East Texas, while freedmen, rural farmers, trappers, fugitives, drifters, and people who simply wanted to disappear could all be found scattered through the region. For the story I wanted a place where somebody could go missing without the rest of the world noticing right away.
The Piney Woods already carried the right atmosphere. Thick timber, swampy ground, fog hanging low, and long stretches where a man could travel without seeing many other people. There is still something about that country that feels older than the towns carved into it.
Then there was the folklore.
Panthers made screams through the trees that could sound disturbingly human, and those cries became tied to stories about death and bad omens. Strange lights, people disappearing into the woods, buried bodies, and local stories that changed a little every time somebody repeated them all gave me material to work with.
Isolation also leaves plenty of room for secrets. A body could stay buried for a long time out there, and so could whatever put it in the ground. Some sins might only ever be known by the people who committed them, God, and the Devil.
That became the atmosphere I wanted behind the series:
“Deep in the piney woods where fog clung low and trees whispered things when the wind died.”
The Story Behind The First Crossing
The story follows an old fur trapper searching for his nephew after making a promise to his brother that he would protect and raise the boy if anything ever happened to him.
When the boy disappears, the trapper goes looking.
At first he expects the same Piney Woods he has known for most of his life. It has always been dangerous country, but it is a danger he understands. Animals, weather, bad men, getting lost, a broken leg twenty miles from anybody who could help you. Those are things a trapper knows how to deal with.
What he finds is different.
The woods have changed in ways he cannot explain, and things are moving through them that don’t belong there. Every bit of experience he has tells him to turn around and get the hell out.
The problem is that he gave his brother a promise.
For him, that matters more than being afraid.
Why I’m Pausing the Series
To those who have enjoyed the series, I apologize.
Between working on my second book, raising a family, working, and trying to keep up with everything else, I have run out of the time and money needed to keep producing the AI-assisted videos alongside a story that I am still writing by hand.
Something eventually had to give, and for now it is The First Crossing.
That does not mean I am throwing the idea away. I still have another video that made it into editing but was never released, so there is a chance that one eventually makes its way out. I have also thought quite a bit about turning The First Crossing into a novella.
The more I think about it, the more I suspect a novella might actually fit the story better. It would give me room to spend more time with the trapper, his nephew, the people living in the Piney Woods, and what those first encounters with the other side meant for the wider WSAD world.
For now, though, the series is on hold while I get my ducks in a row. If I start developing it again, my subscribers will hear about it.
In the meantime, keep your eyes on the Pines.
