Eight Days - Day 5
The fifth thing that makes me happy is writing. It's just some pretty soap-opera-ish fan fiction, based on the characters I control the lives of in a game called The Sims 2, and is posted on the storytelling forums of a sims-related website, The Sims Resource.
I started back in August 2005, when I decided to try my hand at writing a "legacy" story. A legacy is 10 generations of sims, played following a pretty simple set of rules. I decided to combine it with another challenge, called an "alphabet challenge" because you needed to play 26 generation of alphabetically named sims. I wasn't expecting to actually ever finish it... in fact, I didn't think I would last more then a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, before I'd tire of it and move on...
In October 2008, more then three years later, the Soup Legacy finally came to an end. Twenty-six generations, hundreds of sims, thousands upon thousands of screenshots, and well over a million words of text split between four different threads (The Soup Legacy, Melody's Memories, Rock Soup, and The Soup Legacy (R-Z)). The Soup Legacy was primarily a soap opera - it had epic story arcs, cliffhangers, twists and turns, villains and villainesses, aliens, vampires, werewolves, robots (called 'servos" in the sims), plantsims (imagine a human crossed with a houseplant and you'll just about have it), criminal masterminds, serial killers, cow plants (a bovine version of Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors), and moments that made me (and my readers) laugh or cry. It had a world war and the Spanish Influenza epidemic. It had time travel. It staggered from climax to climax like a drunken sailor in a whorehouse, and my GOD was it fun to write.
I've always wanted to be a real writer, but I never had the discipline to sit down and stick with writing something before the Soups. I don't delude myself that I'm a real writer yet, either... but I hope I've at least started wandering in the right general direction, and that one of these days (maybe the next time NaNoWriMo comes around) I'll manage to make the commitment and really write something worthy of publishing.
I've started a new story now, of course. It's called A Fisher's Tale, and is following the life of a single sim, Albacore Fisher. It's already spun off a second related story, Catla's Story, because one of his children climbed into the taxi in my head, dragging her future husband and insisted they had a really good story for me, that wouldn't fit within the storytelling ruleset of AFT (which can only contain things that Albacore has seen or been told about). AFT is a simpler, sweeter tale then the Soups were... I've pruned out all the supernatural stuff, and it's primarily a story about one man and his relationships through the course of his life. I'm trying to give it a nostalgic feel - something that isn't quite happening in the present day.
Albacore Fisher
The best part of writing on a forum? Getting to read my reader responses. Especially when I post something particularly action-packed, or twisty, or leave them with a cliffhanger, or introduce a new villain, or or or... and then get to sit back and wait to see what they say. Seeing my readers get into a debate about the motivations of my characters makes me feel good, and I love it when someone correctly devines the motivations of my characters; it tells me I'm doing it right!
I started back in August 2005, when I decided to try my hand at writing a "legacy" story. A legacy is 10 generations of sims, played following a pretty simple set of rules. I decided to combine it with another challenge, called an "alphabet challenge" because you needed to play 26 generation of alphabetically named sims. I wasn't expecting to actually ever finish it... in fact, I didn't think I would last more then a few weeks, maybe a couple of months, before I'd tire of it and move on...
In October 2008, more then three years later, the Soup Legacy finally came to an end. Twenty-six generations, hundreds of sims, thousands upon thousands of screenshots, and well over a million words of text split between four different threads (The Soup Legacy, Melody's Memories, Rock Soup, and The Soup Legacy (R-Z)). The Soup Legacy was primarily a soap opera - it had epic story arcs, cliffhangers, twists and turns, villains and villainesses, aliens, vampires, werewolves, robots (called 'servos" in the sims), plantsims (imagine a human crossed with a houseplant and you'll just about have it), criminal masterminds, serial killers, cow plants (a bovine version of Audrey from Little Shop of Horrors), and moments that made me (and my readers) laugh or cry. It had a world war and the Spanish Influenza epidemic. It had time travel. It staggered from climax to climax like a drunken sailor in a whorehouse, and my GOD was it fun to write.
I've always wanted to be a real writer, but I never had the discipline to sit down and stick with writing something before the Soups. I don't delude myself that I'm a real writer yet, either... but I hope I've at least started wandering in the right general direction, and that one of these days (maybe the next time NaNoWriMo comes around) I'll manage to make the commitment and really write something worthy of publishing.
I've started a new story now, of course. It's called A Fisher's Tale, and is following the life of a single sim, Albacore Fisher. It's already spun off a second related story, Catla's Story, because one of his children climbed into the taxi in my head, dragging her future husband and insisted they had a really good story for me, that wouldn't fit within the storytelling ruleset of AFT (which can only contain things that Albacore has seen or been told about). AFT is a simpler, sweeter tale then the Soups were... I've pruned out all the supernatural stuff, and it's primarily a story about one man and his relationships through the course of his life. I'm trying to give it a nostalgic feel - something that isn't quite happening in the present day.
Albacore Fisher
The best part of writing on a forum? Getting to read my reader responses. Especially when I post something particularly action-packed, or twisty, or leave them with a cliffhanger, or introduce a new villain, or or or... and then get to sit back and wait to see what they say. Seeing my readers get into a debate about the motivations of my characters makes me feel good, and I love it when someone correctly devines the motivations of my characters; it tells me I'm doing it right!