My novel wasn’t a novel at first.  It began as a video game.

Seriously.

Since the mid 90’s I have always wanted to make my own Role Playing Game (RPG) in the style of my old-school SNES favorite Final Fantasy II (IV if we’re being true to Japanese numbering).   I still do.  Making games takes time, though.  I worked on learning programming over the course of many years, and only gave a little bit of thought to the story line.

A few years ago I discovered RPG Maker XP, and then the easier-to-use RPG Maker VX.  Wonderful tools, just a little too expensive and too short of a trial period.  But I started making something I really liked without the hassle of coding.  It was fun.  And lo and behold, a story emerged.

The demo ran out of time, but I kept writing the outline for the story.  That was fun too.

Then life happened. Depression happened.  Life ambitions fizzled, and with it my life’s focus.  A dark page.

I can’t remember why I started thinking about the old game, but it was around the summer of 2010.  I guess I just wanted to be creative again.  I looked over my notes.  It was pretty good.  Complex story.  A bit cliche, but standard fare for the RPG genre.  I remember thinking about the first task the game required: go to the temple cellar and kill all the rats (a deliberate cliche).  I remember picturing the lead character, Adain, swatting away rats with a pole, the weakest weapon in the game.  In my mind it looked like a movie.  Wait, what if I wrote it down like a story?  I hadn’t written fiction in 10 years or so.  But sure, why not?  I wrote a paragraph.  Wow, pretty good again.   Not bad for a depressed guy. But it sat for a while.

And then in October of 2010 I saw something that would change my life:  National Novel Writing Month.

…Continued in part two…