I’m Jakob Eneman (he/they) and I’m a Senior in GSAS in the Writing Concentration. I’m a huge lover of every narrative medium under the sun, and I’m particularly interested in the unique strengths and weaknesses that each medium has. I especially recently picked up an interest in analogue RPGs and how games can create stories through play – and not necessarily have to be completely bespoke all of the time. 

I’m also famously known for annoying people with my indie game recommendations, even among GSAS students, and I’m a really big fan of sci-fi and fantasy. I like cool worlds where there’s a lot to pick apart and see what it says about humanity and things like that. I’ve done creative work and skits for most of my life, but I really started to dedicate myself to writing specifically about halfway through high school. 

My mom was for a long time a librarian, so I naturally came up reading a lot of stuff. I was the kid who’d read in class and get in trouble for it. My sister’s gone into animation, so I’m interested in that side of things, too. And from a very young age, we made up a lot of games, like role-playing games, to play with each other – before we really even had a concept of what that was.

I think just naturally that wide variety of stuff I could access meant that I was able to start picking up the differences. There’s no real one side of things that I fell into entirely versus the others. 

The elevator pitch is that Veil is a web serial about a ragtag band of masked vigilantes caught between their ideals and their fantasies in a city where “superpowered mercenary” is actually a career path people can go down. 

It’s set in this near-future, cyberpunk-lite Earth about 200 years after this big calamity that forces people into these city-states to protect them from these monsters that emerge. More specifically, it focuses on this group of ten people called Impulse, whose members are called Veiled and get their superpowers from these proprietary corporate-produced masks. Impulse has a bunch of members that sidestep the normal, expensive education / approval process to use the masks for various reasons and they’re running up against being in a sort of legal gray area of a profession that is already a legal gray area. So, Veil follows their antics as they take on jobs, try to make a name for themselves, and try to reconcile their vigilante ideals with their ability to live out their fantasies. 

It is Earth. There are a lot of things that are different about it now. After the calamity, the continents were squished together – like Pangaea, basically – but it’s absolutely Earth. I had to do a lot of work because I’m setting it 200 years into the future, so I have to figure out… Is this a Tuesday? All of the things like the dates, the demographics, where people are based upon the ways the continents moved. There’s a lot of work that doesn’t really show up unless I did it wrong, but it’s definitely Earth. 

That’s an idea that came out when I first started thinking about the story. A lot of the nature of Psychons is a bit spoiler-y. But first of all, you have this idea of these external threats, these proto-typical monsters that you see in a lot of fantasy and stories where you need a faceless bad guy, and I think that plays into the world of Spark. 

The other big thing about Psychons is that they seem to be related to the minds of people around them, so they’ll manifest inside the walls of Spark. There’s this sort of reflection of humanity back at them that’s coalescing from them. 

There are also these cultural touchstones with them. The corpi are these giant swarming birds, so you have this idea of the scavenging crow as a symbol of fear or death. You have the lupi, these wolves that have this pack mentality. The animal choice has a lot to do with the element that they are representing, whether it’s fear or panic or mass anger or blind rage. 

I actually started uploading Veil in Summer 2021, but I started writing it back in my junior year of high school. That was around when I was figuring out what I wanted to do with my life. 

And the story is that I used to do cross-country and we used to have this award on the team for running 200 miles during the summer. I did that every year and, as you might expect, you have a lot of time to think. Once I had the idea of becoming a writer, the story came from this kernel that I had when I was running about post-apocalyptic stories. They never talk about supply runs for mundane things – it’s always medicine to save the sick person and never, you know, ladles. 

From there, I had this idea of the first two characters, the Runner and the Scout, fleeing from the Psychons with a payload of frying pans and toilet paper. Then it was a matter of worldbuilding, like if we have these walls, we have some stable society, but there are a bunch of ruins outside. How does that play out? So, I got to thinking about a calamity and people congregating, but these ruins from a past civilization being outside of it. Then the idea of a city-state makes sense – although there has to be a need for these supply runs, like resource instability that makes going outside easier. And since this is a job, there needs to be a job description with equipment people use, which led to Veils. 

You basically keep pushing this out and then writing and rewriting. That’s when, eventually during Summer 2021, I decided I had to get this stuff out and start releasing it. The pandemic definitely contributed on that front, too. 

Yeah, exactly, it’s a low barrier to entry and I can just publish on my own website. I don’t have to publish everything all at once. I can just go. 

And scope is another big one – the nice thing about episodic stuff is that you can give things to your readers bit by bit and you can sit in the world. I want a format that’s going to let me have a bit more time to sit and explore these things without immediately having to be like, “Here’s the point.” 

It’s one of the most terrifying things you can do as an author or a creative person, in general. I think it’s just a realization you have at some point that you can only get so good just writing by yourself. Who do you think is going to be more well-rounded? Someone who spends 100 hours on a single page, or someone who spends an hour each on 100 pages of work? 

You hit a point where you’re fed up with revising and you want to move on because each new piece of work is going to have its own challenges. Dialogue is going to be way different from action or introspective scenes, and you have to move on – and it’s so hard, but it’s absolutely something that you have to do. 

I think that’s the hardest part for me about writing Veil, and I think it’s one of the biggest challenges about writing in general. There’s a lot to it. I think that the biggest thing is that it’s almost impossible to actually do that if you try to get everything down as a single idea from concept. You have to break it up. 

For me, a major one is speech habits. How formal are they? Do they use slang? Do they ramble? I have a whole section for this in the character bibles for Veil because you forget. Whenever you’re writing, you’ll drift and it’s good to have another tab open to check along the way. 

The second one is patterns of thought. What does this character think about a lot? Does their mind start to wander? If it does, what do they think about? 

And finally, it’s figuring out the things each character pays attention to. What details do they notice that an “average Joe” wouldn’t notice? Or what would most people notice that they might completely gloss over? For example, Lily, the Deadeye, is really fashion-focused and there hasn’t been a chapter focused on her in Part 1, but when she meets someone new, it’s a lot of: “What’s this person wearing?” “What’s this say about them?” “What’s my opinion about them because of what they’re wearing?”

It might not surprise you to know that I have thought about this a lot. I think specifically with an interactive medium, you get a lot of additional “oomph” from the core gameplay loop. When I’m writing this as a web serial, the pacing is so tight. I have to make sure everything is worth saying. 

But with games, you have so much open space for that gameplay loop to fit into the everyday lives of your characters. You can have them go out on these normal missions and have that be it. Maybe there’s some characterization, but you can get yourself into their lives a lot more in that way. You would also probably want to make sure that there are bespoke things sprinkled in there – because you want to make sure there’s that extra bit, kind of like the new dialogue each run that Supergiant Games built into Hades. 

And there are even blends of the two with interactive fiction or hypertext fiction. A lot of it is your standard writing, but there’s this interesting creative control by the user in terms of the order you’re looking at things. Maybe some users won’t even see certain things. 

Yeah, epigraphs are my beloved. It’s like adding a collectible, these little tidbits that are directly in the world. So, the epigraphs in Veil are these little news clippings or advertisements that I use to introduce a concept without actually forcing the characters to turn to the camera, for example. They’re also very short, a bit of a palette cleanser after the standard narration from the preceding chapter. It’s just a way to offload from having lore dumps. 

The missability or ignorability of collectibles can be great for games, but I think that’s led to bad habits among games writers. Particularly when they’re like, “Only the people interested in the world are going to be interested in this” and make things paragraphs long. It’s not a palette cleanser anymore. 

But there are a lot of cool things you can do with them. In Dark Souls, for example, item descriptions might be only a sentence long and you can get through them quickly. In Pyre, you can click on proper nouns and pull up a little pop-up that changes over the course of the story. I think that all serves the same purpose as my epigraphs, and I think it’s a great example of why you have to stay connected to regular writing if you’re writing for games. The purpose isn’t to lore dump – it’s to have this cool, worldbuilding palette cleanser. 

I call myself a slow writer. That’s always going to be relative, so I think part of it is easing off – you can write when you want to write. But I think it certainly depends on the surroundings of my life at a given point. When I’m at school, Veil is only when I have energy after a school day and I’m not going to beat myself up about it. During the summer, I try to keep to 1000 words a day. Not to get too caught up in word counts, but when you’re putting out a lot of content, you have to think about it. 

Really, though, I think the biggest ritual is sitting down and opening the document. See if something comes out. If it doesn’t, close it. Don’t try to force something out. Close it, go for a walk, take a short break, talk with people, and then come back. Do this multiple times a day. I think a lot of people figure they’ll try again tomorrow, but don’t try tomorrow – try later in the day. 

One of the biggest things you learn about writing is that ninety percent of writing is not writing, it’s sitting there and not being able to write. That’s a good thing. It lets you know your brain doesn’t have any ideas and you need to figure out the knot, and the only way to do that is by loosening it. If you try to tighten a knot by pulling it, you have to loosen up. Go for a walk and let your mind wander back to the writing. 

Right now, I’m working on a bunch of little games for my Itch page. I do a lot of Twine stuff, story games, that sort of thing. And this winter, I’m looking to work with PeaceTech on a project about supporting long-term peace among Kosovo and the western Balkans. 

Specifically with Veil, I’m starting to publish twice weekly to Royal Road to get easier and wider access to people. Immediately after that’s done, I’m going to start publishing Part 2, which I have ready to go at this point. I’ll publish that to both my WordPress and Royal Road, so that’s something to look forward to if you’re interested in the work. 

And I don’t want to give too much away about the second part, but the first is a lot of an introduction to the world and the characters. The second is going to see Impulse start to rub against a lot of other Veiled squads and corporations and get into a little more of the drama.