You might say I was a bad boy yesterday. I didn’t do anything with my story. Nope, not one word.
But that’s not the bad part, oh no. The bad part is I didn’t care. I didn’t worry. I didn’t get bothered one bit.
That doesn’t mean I have given up on the story. It’s just that yesterday was something of a story holiday. I was off on different tangents all day yesterday, and my mind was all over the place.
You can blame gaming for that.
When I speak of gaming, I don’t mean the video stuff. I’m just not good enough for that. My daughter will sit and play Left 4 Dead all day, blowing up zombies left and right. I can’t do that; I just don’t have the hand-eye coordination for that stuff, not the stamina. (I also think zombies are really, really stupid. But that’s me.)
On the other hand I love driving simulations, but that’s because I love driving and going fast, and spinning out some asshole who is trying to get around you. So I can do video, but I usually don’t.
I’m talking table top games, where you have books and dice and you sit around and BS half the night while a story is told. I’ve done those for a very long time–just over 25 years–and I hope to keep going for a while longer.
So I’ve been roped into a game that you play online–Play by Post, as we say–and I’ve created a character. I love character creation; it’s the writer in me to make something and turn her into a believable person. Yes, a “her” again, because I love creating female characters.
Believe it or not, this has a lot to do with writing, though. How, do you ask? Because there is always something that comes into play with a character: a character history.
Like the nut I am–or maybe it’s because I’m a writer?–I started getting into the character history in my head a few days ago. Actually, I didn’t have a choice; I’d finished stating out the character, getting all her skills and abilities and putting a numeric value to them, and I’d finally finished buying all her gear. So now . . . why is she the way she is?
History time!
The thing I have to watch is that I’m a wordy bastard, and I can’t spend 15,000 words describing her. Otherwise I’m screwed, because I’m spending all my time writing about her and not writing about the character in Couples Dance. Yes, when I wasn’t working it was a much easier time, because my work was my writing.
At the moment, though, I’m stuck in the drudgery of looking through hundreds of lines of code trying to figure out why a file isn’t getting data (yep, that’s my day yesterday), so it’s really hard to find a couple of hours to sit and explain why my gaming character was kidnapped and held in a secret facility for 4 years; why she’s now on the semi-run; why she’s into BDSM (oh, yeah) and female domination of others (and even bigger yeah!), and that she’s something of a freak sexually; and most of all, why she had killer instincts coupled with superpowers.
I’m already three pages into the “Why” of her, and it’s a nice diversion. It’s a different sort of writing, just like this blog is a different sort of writing. It allows me to go off in a different direction, get away from something that is very heavy and have a little fun. Not to say that Tammara, my character for this game, isn’t going to get into some heavy stuff. Nope. She’ll be up to be up to her rather pear-shaped butt in it.
But it’s a different sort of heavy. And it’s going to be fun–I hope. I’ve started out with high expectations for things like this before, only to see them crash and burn in short order. But the good thing this time around: if she gets thrown into a game that isn’t going to last very long, I can throw her into another story.
Because when you meet a girl this good, you never let her go.
