A report from your challenger on a moment (or several) before finally stepping into the kitchen…
Friday evening, late: Three challenge ingredients are presented. Option 3 is an obvious-to-me frontrunner, but I want to give the others a chance. I start to get the inklings of an idea for Option 1… and 13 minutes later, the bold and decisive Iron ChIF I7 has eliminated it. OK, then! Could I do something with option 2? And if I could, would it be better than 3? I banter a bit with my son about some ideas, and he comes up with a pretty good rough premise… but I’m not sure it resonates enough with me as-is. I could tweak it? And if I do indeed go with option 3, is the obvious enough? What’s my ‘in’ to the story?
I have time, and despite the precedent of taking only 13 minutes to make a decision, I’m doing this on my own schedule: I go to bed.
This is an excellent idea. As I drift off, I latch on to the core intriguing-to-me contradiction at the heart of my first impression of option 3: “A scroll that alters the world around it”: a magic item that affects its surroundings. But it’s a scroll. The affordance of a scroll is to read it. And tradition tells us that reading a scroll discharges its power, meaning that its initial passive effect comes to an end. A backstory begins to form in my mind as sleep arrives for real.
When I wake up Saturday, I fire off my response: option 2 is out, we’re using scrolls.
I’ve committed to not write a single thing down until 4:00 AM my time on Sunday, even if it’s not code. So the ideas marinate in my head a while, and early afternoon, after baking cookies with my daughter, I head out on a walk with my son: our traditional space to brainstorm with each other about ideas (stories, RPG campaigns, game mechanics, moral dilemmas, whatever). And, you know, spoilers, but to let you in on everything, I recorded it (at least until my phone ran out of battery):
Saturday night, as I’m drifting off again, my vague, “I dunno, maybe bird people” suddenly morphs into much more concrete images in my head. “Some sort of castle, maybe?” turns into a living aerie, towering above a forest canopy. Connections are forming and my brain is buzzing so hard that it’s difficult to go to sleep. I finally do, only to wake up again at 3:45 AM, 15 minutes before the competition officially starts. I consider finding my computer to post something, but… I really should sleep. And sleep does eventually return, layered on top of excitement.
Sunday, I’m in charge of things: stuff at church, getting my daughter off to work, singing. But by noon, I’m home. And we’ve reached the present. These words are the first concrete things I’ve produced for this competition based on the ingredient. I have six hours before I have to send off something to my Day 1 betatester. I know my opening scene, I have my closing scene. I have verbs to implement, introductory text to write, even a possible title. Everything will go live on Github as it happens; I’ve committed myself to updating regularly; we’ll see how that pans out as we go.
Wish me luck!