How do you transfer things you do in your mind game to your stories?
Although it may seem complex, it's easy, but time-consuming. Let's say I was writing a story about a magnificant trip to Hawaii. Of course, when I play my mind game, I could be just about anywhere. Let's say that the story goes as follows:
"Character A wins a trip to Hawaii for 5 days 6 nights and could bring up to 2 friends. In this winning, they each get 500 dollars spending cash. On the flight to Hawaii, a big storm develops out of nowhere." This is where I left off in the story and I decide to call on my mind game to get some plans on what to do.
This is where one of my primary uses of my mind game comes in handy. Because I could be anywhere on the world map, before casting a teleport spell to warp to the plane, I have to use the menu screens to set up an event. In the event menu, I have so many options, far more than what could be done in 5 megs' worth of programming! Right away, I'd set up the events so that there is a bunch of contest winners on an airplane but with a gigantic storm up ahead that makes the flight have to go right through it. I then set up anything else I may need like time of day, date, etc.. After finishing this, I'm ready to use my mind game to get ideas for what'll come next. I play through my mind game and in it, while writing notes down, do what would naturally happen. Knowing stories, they have conflicts, sometimes conflicts inside other conflicts. The storm is the primary conflict, however, I can add more. When the plane enters the storm, lightning is going off like crazy. After numerous near-hits the plane finally makes it's way through but then encounters a fire on the plane. This is what would be a triggered effect or something that happens because something else happened before it. In my general story writing, I'd cast a normalize spell* to get rid of the fire then a cure spell to restore lost hit points**. Instead, to make this much more difficult, the fire can't be put out by spells. Instead, someone, maybe one of the characters takes out a fire extinguisher and puts out the fire that way. Upon arriving in Hawaii, the plane's landing gear doesn't go down all the way and refuses to go back up. With this, a rough landing was in store. Everyone makes it safely out of the plane. This is typically 1 writing episode. Back in 2000, I could do as many as four to ten of these in one go before I quit writing! 1 writing episode is typically about 1 to 4 pages. My record is 23.6 pages without a single stop. That's about 16 small writing episodes!
Because some things in my mind game occur that don't really belong, such as the main character running at 20 mph inside the plane, I have to edit those out. If the situation with the fire on the plane was much worse to a point in which the plane will crash, then I'd retry the events, or start over from a certain point. After all, my mind game obeys the laws of physics with 90% accuracy. There are some exceptions though like falling. In my mind game, falling has a constant acceleration rate of 20 mph per second. The real acceleration rate is 21.9 mph per second assuming no drag. In my mind game, there is no drag for your character, so falling would result in speeds passing 999 when you're up at least 5.5 miles before you hit the ground, and in my mind game, a landing that hard does no damage whereas it would cause the character to take 40,827,314 hit points of damage assuming he hit at exactly 999 mph and weighs exactly 180 pounds. Humans have about 20,000 hit points, and this is more than 2000 times that amount. That means certain death. To counter that, I edit the notes so that it makes sense with the laws of physics.
After the notes are checked and editted for obeying the laws of science, I then transfer those notes and what all happened in my mind game to the stories.
To continue the report, see the following links:
1st page of report
History of my mind game
The looks of my mind game explained in detail
The complex menu screens involved
How mind game events are transferred to my stories
The many uses of my mind game
The funny things I do in my mind game
Videos of things I do in my mind game in AVI format
Footnotes:
* Spells are commonly mentioned in my stories I write. For more details relating to the physics of the spells and each spell series' individual effects and info, read this report.
** Hit points are the life force of a living thing [definition 2]. For more info, read section 3 here.
