Although for us, given all that’s going on, this comes closer to expressing how we feel about the season:
Nonetheless, we still count ourselves as blessed. Off now to visit my wife in the hospital. Cheers!
Month: December 2015
“Combination Play: Jamie’s Goal”
Finally finished flogging the story for that contest I mentioned in the post just below. Had to add a little more story in Scene 2. After that, I had to format the text into what they wanted for submission; anyone who’s ever programmed a visual novel with instantly recognize the style. For whomever they pick as a winner, Voltage’s staff will just have to slap some “scene” and “show” commands in and they’re finished.
Anyway, I sent off my entry a bit ago. If you’d like to read it, the story’s below the fold. I definitely do ‘cute’ better than ‘political terror.’
Write Right
Had a conversation with a day-job co-worker yesterday. She’d asked if I’d finished my fourth novel, Crosses & Doublecrosses, in time for NaNoWriMo. Nope, I replied: that whole “wife diagnosed with cancer” thing was a bit of a spanner in my plans.
However, after some reflexion, I wondered if I would have finished in time if that had not happened. Outside of a handful of Robert Ludlum books as a late teenager, I really have no experience with espionage and political fiction. There were many times I stared at the monitor, unable to see anything of a story to write down. Was I losing the ability to make up stories?
A week ago, completely out of left field, came this: a writing and drawing contest from a Japanese/American company called Voltage. It wasn’t the US$5000 prize that caught my eye – no, really – but the facts that, one, this is for a visual novel (something I do know something about), two, they give you the characters and scenes (all I need to do is create dialog; breath life into the characters, as it were), and three, it’s a cute little story.
Cute. I can do cute.
So, last Tuesday, while my wife was getting a port installed in her chest for her chemotherapy (which started in-patient on Thursday), in the two hours or so I was waiting, I hand-wrote about 2200 words for the three scenes. Just like that. So easy! Apparently I didn’t lose the ability to see stories.
I’ve since typed it up and done some basic editing. I was concerned that what I wrote for Scene 3 was not in-line for romance stories directed at women; I read part of the scene to my wife last night at the hospital. “You’re suspiciously good at writing make-out scenes,” she quipped with a slight glare in her eyes. Hey: I grew up a geek and later became an engineer; people like me never had many girlfriends, but that didn’t mean we didn’t think about it… A LOT.
And, me being me, all of what I do hangs together in one way or another. You might catch a glimpse of that in the teaser below the fold.
machciv 