Inspiration Goes Underground

When your story idea dictates that the bad guys live inside Earth

Olivia/O. J. Barré🪄🌎

Jan 21, 2026

brown tree trunk on brown rock — Photo by Ronny Navarro on Unsplash

Part III: Gathering Story Ideas for a 1,250-Page Trilogy

💡When the ideas stop flowing, the story is done. ~ O. J. Barré✔️

Read Part I: When Inspiration Strikes 👈

Read Part II: Inspiration Strikes - Now What? 👈

Summary from Parts I and II:

Now, we have an initiating idea — something wants to escape Inner Earth and will do that by hitchhiking up the heroine’s (or someone’s) energetic roots during a meditation session.
We have a protagonist — modern-day magical druids [the good guys/gals]
And a setting — their headquarters in Druid Hills, GA, US.

Now to come up with an origin story for the druids. And an antagonist that needs fighting. Or a problem that needs solving. Or both.

~ la fin

Today, we’re talking antagonists. And origin stories.

The antagonist is the character or force that opposes the protagonist. The bad guy. Villain. The one we all love to hate.

Every story has one. You need one for yours. In this case, the initiating idea dictates that the antagonist lives inside Earth. Not on the surface. Not in the ocean or sky. Inside Earth. And since we have a plural protagonist, the Druids, our story’s antagonist will be plural, too. Meaning, a designated group. (Of course, it doesn’t have to be. But for this story, it is.)

More on whittling this down to one main protagonist and antagonist in a later article.

See how that worked?

So, we’ll search for that online. Inner Earth. Hollow Earth. Creatures living inside Earth… every crazy combo you can come up with to find your target. Then you search on any interesting ideas you find, and keep digging until you reach the motherload.

I immediately ran across a site or two talking about Reptilian aliens that live inside Earth. HUH. We might be onto something.

So, I searched and searched. There wasn’t much. And what was there had been relegated to conspiracy theory. Of course, that only piqued my interest further.

Don’t forget, this was 2010ish. There’s more on the web now, though much is simply regurgitation.

What I saw was that no one was writing about this.

Well, not many. Think Helen Blavatsky, 1888. Then, Conan’s Robert E. Howard’s* Shadow Kingdom, 1929. Then, Cthulu. The Emerald Tablets. David Icke.

*From Wikipedia (circa 2026):

Howard's "serpent men" were described as humanoids (with human bodies and snake heads) who were able to imitate humans at will, and who lived in underground passages and used their shapechanging and mind-control abilities to infiltrate humanity

I don’t know about you, but these sound like the perfect antagonists. Ones that haven’t been written about a million times. Reptilian humanoids. Living in underground passages. Can change shapes and imitate humans at will. Yeah. I’m all over that.

So, we now have our antagonists — Reptilian aliens living inside Earth.

But what do they look like? Are they all the same? Is there a hierarchy of Reptilians? What are they known for besides being evil? How did they get here? All these questions would be answered later with further research and a healthy imagination.

If you’re curious, we can discuss that in a later article.

Now, let’s talk about our Druids’ origin story.

I don’t remember exactly how this came about. I could search through old journals, but that is time-consuming and often counter-productive. So here’s what I DO remember.

A year or two earlier, I had learned that I am directly descended from William the Conqueror — aka William the Great, William the Deliverer, William the Bastard, William of Normandy — on my daddy’s side. Fascinated, I’d gone down a rabbit hole researching him.

So, hey. Why not make use of that?

Btw, this is in my book bio: “Her daddy's mother was a Willoughby, making O.J. a direct descendant of William the Conqueror. Her Awen series is a love letter to that distant past.”

So, our origin story begins one thousand years ago, 1042CE.

A young William is rescued by the last Druid priestess. One who managed to survive by hiding in the north of France long after the clans had fallen. In researching Druid names, I came across Awen. Awen, not Arwen. Or Eowyn. Or Anwen. Awen. Meaning inspiration. The word. And other wonderful things. Like the downward light rays that pierce the clouds, which will also become part of the story.

So, before we bring it into the twenty-first century, we start with William and Awen in 1042CE. Here’s an excerpt from their first scene:

…how had he managed to cheat Death of its rightful quarry? No man survived such a mortal wound, not even William, Duke of Normandy. Yet here he lay, on a pallet of soft feathers with naught but a fur covering his loins.
A glance told William he was in a one-room hut that felt oddly familiar. And he wasn’t alone. A woman huddled by a lowing fire. A great wolfhound lay at her feet and a wildcat curled in her lap. The cat’s yellow eyes were trained on William, alert and on guard.
He examined the room without moving his head. There was a door and two windows. Should the need arise, he could escape.
But why was he here? Why was he not dead? And who was this mysterious woman?
Pushing himself upright took great effort. William slowly maneuvered his legs over the edge of the bed, dragging the pelt with him. The room swayed, and he felt slightly nauseous.
The wolfhound, a beast of some heft with bared teeth, scrambled up and planted its body between William and the maiden. She had the reddest hair he had ever seen. It coiled in riotous masses of curls tipped in pure gold.

Where did that come from? The ideas we have discussed over the last couple of weeks. And that is just a taste. Before that comes Awen’s flight from the battle, carrying William to safety. After that comes a beautiful coupling that begins their long line, unbroken still in 2042. Then…

It was an unlikely union. Awen was a witness to the obliteration of both her realm and people. William was a product of the ones to blame, the bastard destined to bring the veneer of civilization to an unruly kingdom.
Rain sprang from the mushrooming clouds. Eager grasses ripened on autumn’s sharp tongue welcomed the benediction. The expectant sky exploded in a thunderous display of pyrotechnics, and a bolt of lightning struck the oak beneath which the lovers lay. Ripped asunder, the monarch of the forest shrieked, and thunderclaps shook the vault of the heavens before rolling across the land.
Faraway in Falaise, nobles bolted upright in privileged beds, and peasants rose from rick and cot to wonder if judgment day was upon them. How close to the truth their suspicions lay, not one amongst them would guess.
For that night in September 1042, a noble seed was planted in fertile druid soil and blessed by elemental divine. The blending of ancient energies was wrought.
Humankind’s hope would survive.

That’s the Druids’ origin story. But the story story will take place a thousand years later. Seventeen years from our now.

To summarize, we now have:

An initiating idea: something (our Reptilian antagonists) wants to escape Inner Earth and will do that by hitchhiking up the heroine’s (or someone’s) energetic roots during a meditation session.
A protagonist: modern-day magical druids (the good guys/gals).
An overall setting: their headquarters in Druid Hills, GA, US.
An antagonist: evil Reptilian aliens that live inside Earth.
And an origin story for the Druids.

Y’all, I try to keep these short, but this ran a little long. Is there anything you would like to talk about next week? Or should we continue down the road of character and world-building using the Awen Trilogy as an example?

Now, it’s your turn:

I know that at some time in the past, you have been struck by a story idea. Or maybe an idea that inspired a career, a poem, a song, a new business, a hobby, a love, or some other fabulous life-affirming experience. Afterward, you had to come up with other ideas to put your vision into action. Please share in the comments. We’d love to hear about it.