Thursday, October 11, 2007

Revision after 6 hours -- because why have one idea when you can have a bajillion?

Yeah, I posted my main idea about my draft like... 6 hours ago.

This is what I'm doing instead:
Adam suggested I go all meta-fictiony on it and have one of my already-created characters do a thread in which she does some play-by-post roleplaying and creates a character that's actually me. This is SO Danielewski-esque, but I'm not giving anything away, I hope. I wasn't going to do this because it feels like it would be a LOT of writing, or at least a lot of EXTRA writing, but now I'm kind of pumped about it. It may not be entirely finished by the time Wednesday rolls around, but I'm hoping I can expand on it for a final project as well.

First, I'll post as Mac. She's a college-age girl living in New York (because that's where all this X-Men business is taking place. She had started out as a microwave manipulator but is now, after extensive invasive surgeries performed by Sinister, someone who can incinerate things with only a thought. The only problem with that whole thing is that now she's employed by Sinister. Yeah, she's getting a shit-ton of money, but she's getting it by hunting down mutants. There's really no choice in the matter, though. She needs the money to pay for her tuition and it beats the hell out of working long hours at a fast food joint. She's by far the geekiest of my characters and would be the most likely to do play-by-post roleplaying, if for no other reason than that she needs a form of escapism because she's pretty much being forced to kill other mutants for the sake of her college tuition. That, and when Sinister operated on her, he also implanted something in her brain that makes it so if she ever tries to betray him, she goes boom.

So she'll be posting on a board that's set in a "real world" environment. Those kinds of boards exist, they're usually college or high school settings where people just wanna get into drama and relationships and what not. I've been a member of a couple of those as well. Anyway, she'll be doing this, of course, because she wants to be able to play a normal person because she's not one. She'll create a character that's me (named Nik and everything) and that character will be taking a class called Narrative and Technology wherein she (Nik, Mac's character) is assigned this assignment.

Really, I'm looking forward to making Adam just another one of the characters being played on the board. :-P

But I've also gotten the cooperation of another person who plays on The Final Solution, who has a character who is also likely to be a member of a play-by-post forum (that character is called Matches). Matches's character will interact with Mac's character (Nik) and then Matches and Mac will also get to know each other through AIM and collaborate on what their characters will do (which will mirror, at least somewhat, the conversation I just had with the admins about doing this kind of project).

This creative project will hopefully exemplify and analyze all the points I brought up in my last blog post while remaining NOT an essay. Though it seems like it'll end up being ungodly long, so this might extend into a final project. ALSO the admins agreed to set up a separate part of the forum called "Mind Games" where the psychology and motivation behind roleplaying is analyzed and commented on by fellow roleplayers. I'm also hoping to put this into the project, which will give it good reason to extend to the final project.

Link to the opening thread will follow as soon as I post it, which will be before I go to bed tonight (so between now and 3am).

-->HERE'S THE LINK! <--

It's not near done yet, but let's just call it VERY VERY rough.
Any comments would be EXTRA helpful.

1 comment:

Adam Johns said...

Sounds awesome, and like lots of work. I'm glad I instigated this, and I'm looking forward (????) to seeing myself as a character...

Actually, remember the first essay assignment from my science fiction class, the one about the earth being destroyed? One guy in my current class had me be the narrator instead of himself. It was pretty funny.

I love the idea of a superhero fantasizing about being a real person. Not so different from a Spanish nobleman fantasizing about being a shepherd...