Celestaels

Jonny Lee Altair

mY Jouney: creating the world of celestaels

Growing up in Colorado, I discovered my love of stories and creativity at a young age, playing dress up, coloring, painting, running around the cul-de-sac with the neighbor’s kids. Both my parents were athletes, and I grew up playing all kinds of sports, but in my heart, I felt most alive when I was creating. After seeing my sister in dance class, I couldn’t stay in my chair. At thirteen, despite it being complete social suicide, I started lessons. Dance was the meeting of those worlds of athletics, competition, and creativity and gave me a space to express myself as I struggled with my sexuality and identity. It became my passion.

In my free time, I was obsessed with the wave of Anime and video games like Final Fantasy emerging in the U.S. during a spike in popularity of superhero franchises and classic fantasy. I began to craft my own world from the character’s I’d drawn in my teenage years. I loved sketching characters, desgining outfits and armor, with cool weapons. It showed me who they were and gave me ideas for the world and story. With one of my friends we started designing a simple RPG system that made me think about the world more systematically and think about how things worked. I read voraciously, and tried to learn about the craft of writing, and plotting out a story while beta reading online for other authors and getting feedback on early drafts.

Thus the earliest foundations of Celestaels was formed. Coming at as gay when I was 17, I knew the rural Colorado town I grew up in was not where I wanted to be. I graduated High School a year early, worked for a year before moving to Los Angeles at 18. I had an amazing career in entertainment before eventually taking my frist international contract in Tokyo, Japan and then Paris, France, before permanently relocating to Orlando, Florida.

The stories and characters followed me over the years, a constant place where I could escape, and create no matter where I was. Lots of art, many drafts and outlines were made, but something was missing until I had an epiphany: the stories I was trying to tell were trying to be something they weren’t, they were trying to be like the stories I grew up with. I hadn’t infused who I was, my queer experience and the parallels that were missing in the mediums I loved. I saw a space emerging for queer and diverse voices across mediums, and during the summer of 2020, I asked myself, “What would you regret not doing when you’re old and looking back at life?”

The answer: Share the world of Celestaels.

Everything started to click with this new mindset; the story, the characters, and the world for the first time in twenty years felt right. I wrote a very chunky first draft that would form the basis of the series, and with the help of an incredible critique partners, attending workshops, and lots of editing and being unafraid to make big changes with big impacts, the story I always knew I had to share was finally becoming real on the page.

Currently, the first adapted Celestaels project is published with DriveThruRpg.com and seeking representation for publishing the series and related works. I look forward to creating a safe space for artists, gamers, readers, and creatives, to explore the myriad stories waiting to be told in this world.

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