A Game Generated Story and Cover Draft

Last week I did a test run on The Story Game, and I have been fiddling with a story entirely generated by it.

It looks like it's going to be a novella.  It's hard to tell because I've been writing awfully bare bones prose. (When I rewrite it gets longer.)  I'm probably going to publish it under a pen name -- not a secret name, just one for this particular genre.  I'll talk about that later.

Tonight, I did the first work on a cover.  I like where it's going. The main work I'll do yet is on the figures -- which I'd like to make more abstract and "graphics" style, and less cartoony. I don't know if they will match the texture of the cliff or or be flat and dark. (Maybe the texture but with color saturation dropped down so they look blacker.)

Also, I don't know if "Vera Avrila" will be my pen name.  I am fond of the typographical possibilities of As and Vs.  (I will undoubtedly play with the typography a lot more, too.  I might use a casual font rather than the good old "move poster font" Trajan.)

I don't have a simple logline yet. Here is the blathery version of the pitch:

When she was seven years old, Lee Lee (Lily) White shoved her father over a cliff.  She didn't meant to hurt him. She was only protecting her step-mother from his erratic anger.

That night, she and her step-mother fled, shutting out the past and establishing a new life.

Twenty years later, Lee Lee has become Angela, a young woman with a life and job she likes, her past catches up with her as a relative walks in the door at work.  She prepares to flee again, to protect her beloved step-mother, the woman who loved and raised her who will be charged with kidnapping at the very least if caught.

But she can't help but want to know more about the family she can't remember, and why her step-mother really fled that night, and why the official story of her father's death is so very different from what she remembers that night.

Pursued by her own demons and mysterious figures, as well as by her good-looking and persistent boss (who may or may not want to fire her) she realizes she has to go home and face that cliff, and the truth of what happened that night.

I'll tell you more about how I used the game to come up with this story later.  Tomorrow, we'll get to generating titles and themes and subjects for the game story.  Though that is often the most important part of the generation for me, I have already abandoned my original title words for this.  The original title words were "Secret" and "Journey."  These did contribute to the generation of the idea, but I decided that "In Flight" was a better title.  I'm not sure the theme is going to survive either. (Though it might -- it's there under the surface. It's about generosity.)

Anyway, I'll talk about that stuff later.

See you in the funny papers.