So I am going to start posting, from time to time, some of my many (and I really do have many) incomplete stories, to this blog. Most of them are very short, no more than a few paragraphs, and generally they just sit as text files on my Hard Drive and I don't bother to even look at them once I lose interest...so I figure why not post them here and, who knows, maybe breathe some new life into them, if this blog is to ever actually get views?
For some reason this blog does not seem to be getting any, even though my previous blog on WordPress (which I wound up deleting, because I hated the layout) seemed to get a lot after only a short period. Well, not necessarily a lot ,but at least a decent amount of traffic to the point where it seemed I was writing to someone. Now it just seems like I am writing to no one; and yet I just keep posting all the same =).
For the first little incomplete story I'll post I thought I would start with something rather appropriate for an internet blog, since this tale here was something I started working on during December, 2016 when I had been --after many years absence -- revisiting the game EverQuest for a few weeks. I started to think about the original designer of the Game, Brad McQuaid, who actually passes through my mind more often than one would believe, and it started to dawn on me that, hey, what the hell, maybe this guy would be a decent character to try and base a story off of. I started writing it in the car on my iPhone one evening, driving through a city in the backseat.... and I remember enjoying it quite a bit ...but then of course the next day I woke up and had lost interest and now last night i was looking at it again and ... meh...I dunno! So like I said I will just post it here and maybe someone will enjoy it or not, somewhere down the line. Ciao ciao ... (and maybe, now that I think of it, I will even re-motivate myself to go back into it, now that it is posted!)
When Bradley Slate had first set out to make a game he had not set out to just make something "typical". Typical was the last thing he wanted. Typical to Bradley slate was like a sin.
He was a man who , as a kid, had been raised on what his mother had always personally called "extremist art" , and he had glimpsed & been surrounded by this so called extremist art for basically the entirety of his childhood. Back then neither the mother nor the father really had any idea where surrounding a young kid with all of this sort of thing could lead.
They just figured he would wind up a painter like his mother, Susannah, or if not a painter , then a sculptor, like his father. Much less likely they thought he might wind up as a scribbler outside of the visual arts realm, working on things like poems or stories as did his grandfather Noel Slate. But Bradley's childhood had taken place in the 70s, at a period in time when folks had not realized that a new industry was en route & about to be born. An industry that would, In one way or another, gradually mix and mash all of the art forms and pull them together as one. Folks hadn't seen it coming. It would have been impossible at the time to have even so muc as slightly predicted it. To even so much as suggest that something called "virtual reality" could one day be possible would have had you laughed out of the room .. Alas it was in this industry where Bradley slate was to eventually find himself, and also in this industry where all of his early childhood experiences , knowledge, and creativity would come together as one massive behemoth project . His fathers sculptures , his grandfathers written tales, his mothers intense watercolor & oil paintings ...it all blended together in Bradley...coming piece by piece as a virtual world that he named "The Call of Tinuviel".
In the beginning- with the earliest pieces Bradley had put together- it had really all just revolved around a rather long 250 p age story his grandfather had written down in a notebook, combined with Bradley's 9 year old ability to write seriously intense Perler code on his IBM computer. He told his mother Susannah one evening that he was going to "upload" his grandfathers story onto the computer and turn it into something you could actually live if you wanted. Susannah had been perplexed as to what her 9 year old son was sayjng and ignored it. But Bradley went home later that evening and began to gradually -- piece by piece --upload the story his grandfather had written about elves & wizards onto the computer, and within about 5 months time , by that years Chrisrmas Eve night, he had basically had a full on "game" for his visiting family members to toy around with. One by one they sat down at the illuminative IBM computer that sat parked in the north corner of the Slate dining room and tried their hand at the game. They were all of course very familiar with the story line the grandfather had written in the notebook...as they had read it too when they were just children like Bradley. But now they weren't just reading it. They were also playing it . When they turned around to ask Bradley what he was calling his creation he said he called it a "code dungeon". He then told them that in a few weeks time when they went home to their separate computers they would be able , if they wanted, go all meet up inside the grandfathers fictional world. At this point in time everything Bradley had crated was completely text based; there were no graphics. It was like being inside a book and you could make the choices....
/end
See? I told you. I start the stories and then they just...BLOOOP! End just as quickly as they began. But what do you think? Does it bother you? Drive you mad? I think it drives me a little mad (sorry to be writing again) but I think it drives me a little mad especially when it is one like this that, you may see (or mayn ot see?) just kind of ends abruptly like this. In fact it is really strange because sometimes I will end a story in a manner that I think is just as abrupt as that one there about "Bradley Slate" , and yet i will go back to it and, when I re-read it, it will seem as though the abrupt ending suddenly actually works, and I'll feel a sense of achievement, as though, you know, "Look! I actually got to the end! I'm not such a hack after all!" but then of course I always have a slew of stories like this one where I look back, and I re-read it, and I get to the end and I think....gah! NO! You really did just start something , yet again, and then never finish it, you lousy little croaker....
But what can I do? Win some, lose some. My philosophy as a writer in the past three years or so has basically become: Start as many as you can, just to see what comes, and then let the chips fall where they may. Personally, I would advise any truly curious writer to follow this same advice, because I can't even begin to describe just how fun it is, even if you do wind up with a bunch of incomplete tales on your hands....
-- Kim "Genji San"
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