It’s #WriteFriday! It’s also the end of the month, and that means I need to post a story inspired by this month’s quote to Apocalypse Madness. Luckily I started a story earlier this week. That story became “A Bit of a Waste,” which deals with two of the three main NPC’s from the StoryNexus game I’m working on,Caden and Tzalmon. My original plan was that Caden would be a normal human, rather than the ghostly revenant. But when I had the idea for this story, it made sense that Caden would be a revenant instead. It’ll (I hope) add a lot more to the story branches that will center on her.
“A Bit of a Waste” is also the first time I’ve shown off one of the coolest (in my opinion anyway) things about City of the Dead: where zombies come from! The actual idea (which is from something like 6-12 months ago), is that a zombie and ghost, together are one. So when you pull the spirit out of someone, their body remains animated but mindless. Zombies eat brains in an effort to regain what was lost, even though they don’t consciously know what they’re missing. I renamed the ghosts to “revenants” because City of the Dead is a place where there are lots of spirits kicking around, and I wanted to differentiate these ones from the more natural ghosts that are people who naturally die (their spirits remain until they eventually fade away into nothing).
My plan was to made “A Bit of a Waste” another microfiction. But it ended up a bit too long for the definition I used last month. That was mainly because I had a hard time ending this story. Plus it has some details I really wanted to leave in. But it comes in at 274 words, which I thought was acceptable.
I’m still not sure what I think of the ending though. It’s a bit abrupt. But I didn’t want to spend too much time on it because this story, much like “When Sorry Isn’t Good Enough,” is more of an exploratory piece. It’s quite possible that details will change as I continue to work on both the setting and my StoryNexus game, so I didn’t want to get stuck agonizing over it.
So once that I posted my May Apocalypse Madness story, I turned my attention to my StoryNexus game. I’m now at a point where I need to be reading, rather than writing; to that end I read through the StoryNexus Quickstart and Creator Guidelines, before going to play some more with the tools. I’ll give the Reference Guide a read hopefully later this week
Oh, I also want to note that I made a mistake in terminology – the Always cards are the pinned cards, so they’re going to be the story cards in this game; the Sometimes cards are the ones that appear in the deck, and so they are going to be where the worldbuilding (and grinding, if necessary) will be.
Unfortunately, my internet connection doesn’t appear to be great and certain things in the tool set refused to load (like adding success results to storylets). So after playing for a bit, I decided to start really planning out some of the stories within my game (on paper, of course – that’s my preferred method for working on early drafts of things). To that effect, I got the Destiny soundtrack from iTunes, which is going to be my writing music for the rest of the night.
An Acquaintance with Letters 
I ended up roughly planning out the story that would follow one of my three main NPC’s. I chose to focus on Caden, the character who became a revenant in the Apocalypse Madness short story I finished today. This was the perfect time to take a better look at her story arc for the game because as I said, she wasn’t originally going to BE a revenant.
Of course, now that I’ve done this, I’ve identified more background things that I’ll need to get to soon (like more mapping, at least for myself). I’ll just have to decide on whether I’ll do those next, or plan out the other two main arcs first. But that’s a decision for another time!
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