You don’t remember Plundered Hearts? It was the first Romantic Text Adventure Game. And while I’m not all that crazy about games, this was more like a story you could interact with.Plundered Hearts put ideas in my head. No, not fantasies of a handsome man carrying me off for wild passion. It made me dream of finding a book you could read over and over and it would tell you a different story every time.
I haven’t found one yet, but I think that is the reason I feel so driven to play with what I write. I spent the last week buried in the final stage of a project I started working on a year ago. I only meant to blog a few erotic poems and learn a bit about blogging when I got started. I got lots of encouraging feedback from readers. One thing morphed into another and before I knew it I had the makings of the first flash romance novel: Owned
I debated quite awhile as to whether I would enter it in Romance Divas’ E-book Challenge. It’s not interactive. It is not a game. It’s just not the usual way to tell a story.
I reread this interview with Amy Briggs on her experience writing Plundered hearts and what inspired her. It gaves me hope that one day I will figure out a way to write a never-ending story, or at least a story that doesn’t end after the first read. I think the answer lies in piecing together small stories that tell a larger story and then taking those larger stories and piecing them into a bigger story than that. It’ll be like a Russian nesting doll, only you read it from the inside out.
If I’m going to read the Babushka style story I envision, I’ll probably have to write it. If I want to discover a different way to tell a story, I have to take the risks, color outside the lines, and see what happens. So I put Owned together, converted it to a pdf ebook, and submitted it to the Romance Diva challenge. It’s a free read and you are welcome to share as many copies as you wish.
I don’t know how this project will land in the mind of readers, but I hadn’t really understood what form I was aiming for until I put this together. I’ve been writing, building a body of work around a Babushka style without realizing this was the direction I was headed. This little e-book romance crystalized the ideas, provided a scale modle, and gave my goal a name.
