The quarantine finally got to me a couple of days ago and I had to go out for a drive to get some dinner at a place about 90 minutes away. On that drive, I had a CD by The Good Rats and a song came on, Victory In Space. This song is somewhat about NASA buying hookers for astronauts, but it’s also the germ of an idea I had for a NaNoWriMo novel. The story idea – all I had – was about an intergalactic hooker in an erotic comedy genre. That’s open to just about anything I could think up. So when I heard that song come on, it got me thinking about the story again.
NaNoWriMo is still 6 months away, so I have plenty of time to commit and begin planning, or just let the idea waste away for another year. Last night as I was falling asleep, I gave some consideration to the idea. NaNo doesn’t care what format you write in, as long at it has a word count. So I started thinking out of the box. First I considered something like a series of blog entries. There’s lots of ways I could present that. First person, like a journal of the hooker; or third person, writing about her. But blog entries always have this "newer is first" problem that makes reading a story difficult.
While thinking about the navigation aspect of such a story, it led me in a different direction. Maybe I could write a choose-your-own-adventure story. Hypertext and links are the perfect medium for presenting a story like that. However, a story like that could be a massive undertaking and while it’s literally unlimited in scope and plot, that’s also its downfall as many paths would be unfulfilling.
Considering those issues rekindled yet another memory of mine, where I would imagine I was a movie director. My magnum opus would be one movie with at least 4 different plot lines in it and each had different endings based on the result of a climax in the second half. The first half would reuse most of the scenes in each of the plots, but there would be some differences between them, like being shot from a different perspective or in a different place at the same time, showing extra info about the other potential plots. The goal of the movie would be to cause a bunch of confusion at release time with different reviewers writing about the story and their reviews all conflict with each other as to what happened.
With that in mind, what if I did something similar with my adventure story where as you progress, you might end up in a different plotline depending on when you navigated to the next page? But who would ever notice something like that? You’d have to make it known at the beginning to watch out for it, which would just spoil the whole concept.
And all this is just thinking right now. I’m not even sure I want to commit to another month of writing non-stop. And if I did, it would be a planned story instead of my usual figure-it-out-as-you-fuck-it-all-up style. So that could slow me down anyway. We’ll see…
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