Blame it on Plundered Hearts

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.