Demonic Angelicism

You can judge a person by their sidebar?

Don’t laugh at me!

By now about half of you know that I’m writing a story. About a quarter of you know it’s called Ripple. About an eighth of you know what it’s about.

That is not what my post is about.

In the summer of 2008, I went to Italy and Greece. On my travels to Italy, I stopped by a city named Rome. Here, we stayed at the Hotel Pineta Palace. On one of these rather interesting days, I decided that I was angry at the rest of my delegation and went straight to my hotel room after a long day of sightseeing. I took a quick shower, and lay down on my bed.
And my mind started calculating.
I thought about the various games I’ve played thus far… and thought about what it would be like to make a FPS game mod. I had tried to make a map for Portal called Seriously Now earlier that year, and it did not turn out very well. I thought about Seriously Now, and suddenly the idea began to evolve.
Seriously Now begins with the player traveling in a stasis bed, somehow accidentally jolted awake by a little accident. This stasis bed was traveling by way of rail to a test chamber.
I decided, what if instead of the test chamber it traveled outside the facility instead? What if there was more than one? What if they carried weapons?
What if it was a game about a contracted assassin?
The ideas twirled around my head a little more, until I had reached the idea of an entire organization where an angry individual walks up to some virtual interface, pays a huge fee, then our player is sent out into a giant city map to hunt down and find a person and kill them.
That’s kinda boring. And repetitive. What would make someone want to play this?
I needed a storyline. What if… along the way you met someone… who helped you…
And then suddenly you had to kill them?
And then the game ended when you killed them, maybe you had a few more missions if you didn’t kill them.
Wait, why would the organization accept you again after you fail a mission?
No. You would have to start a revolt. Gather a few squad members… (Hey, the Half-Life 2 engine does support squads, not too hard to put them in a map…), and then suddenly you’re deep inside the organization, and you bring it down, and just like the end of Seriously Now, the entire facility explodes into a brilliant (laggy) display as you fly away in a little airplane.
Who’s going to do the models for me? And how would I find time to do this map?
Sean walked into the room.
This idea is stupid. I threw it into a mental recycling bin.
And never thought of it again.

August 2008. I had just been shipped off to Stanford to take a Leadership Summit program. Yippee.
I met a girl named Rhonda. She claimed to be good at writing. Aww… she’s so smart… I’ll never be friends with this person. I shouldn’t even bother.
I met a girl named Lauren. She was carrying a giant book around on a few days. (Yeah, yeah, I can hear you Twilight fans cheering.) I finally got tired of the cover and asked her to tell me what it was about. She shoved the back of the book at me. (Actually, I think it was an inside flap.)
I was like “oh cool” and made her tell me more. I remember the words Twilight and “Oh its a girl book don’t bother” mentioned.
Then as we walked back to our dorms I suddenly remembered something and pulled a crumpled thought from my mental recycling bin. My story.
Maybe it would work as a short story.
A few days later I managed to catch Rhonda. (Not physically, just managed to get her attention.) I’m usually really bad at making friends with people I don’t know that well, but for some strange miraculous reason Rhonda and I got along fairly well. Then I said that I wanted to write a story.
She had only encouragement.
The next day I brought my computer with me to the bus. We had a 3 hour long bus ride ahead of us. My facilitator, April, asked me what it was for, and I said I was writing a story.
Well, I guess I have to now
So I did. I wrote five pages during the remainder of the trip.

I deleted four the day I got home. Then I found Twilight and read it for the next four days. (But that’s not part of this story.)
And then I started writing my story. I recently named it Ripple.

Name subject to change, but I doubt it will. I already have a tag named after it.