hahaha, I'm not even sure where that box is.
Besides, I'd never let anyone into it. Those stories were...bad. Very bad. That's why I never finished 90% of them. Most of them were kinda like literary doodles. I'd just get this idea in my head of a single image or concept, and I'd try to build an entire story around it.
It never quite worked.
The Crystal Prison was my first real success, because after so many failures, I buckled down and REFUSED to just give up on it til it was done. It too was one of those literary doodles...I remember it well. I was sitting there after school watching Tom And Jerry and it just hit me: "what would it be like for an AD&D character to be in the real world?" I took that single concept and tried to build a plot around it...and The Crystal Prison unfolded. It unfolded slowly and very badly, but it did unfold. Writing that taught me a hell of a lot about this little thing called "planning." I wrote myself into a corner so many times doing that it wasn't funny.
That planning ability was worked out when I started playing AD&D and became the DM, but it was never quite...normal. When I DM'd our games, here was my entire plan.
"So, what are you guys going to do?"
I'd wing the ENTIRE thing. I'd make up characters on the spot, and just throw little bits and pieces at the group til they latched onto something, and then the adventure just kinda unfolded from there. I'd build dungeons and castles in my head once the plot evolved to the "let's go kill things" phase, literally sketching out the map at the same time as the group was. The only saving grace I had was that, to be honest here, I'm somewhat nasty when it comes to tactics. I was tactically better than the group, so I could basicly outplay them when the dice started rolling, which gave them the illusion that I had everything all "set up" for them to make it challenging.
My maps and dungeons were never that good or well designed, nor were my adventures detailed, but hell, we had fun. And a few memorable characters that were invented on the spot in those games are honored in what you've seen of my writing. But I'll never tell which ones.
That's really where I learned how to write. I figured if I could make up a whole campaign on the spot, linking adventure after adventure together in a loose coalition that actually began to take shape into a systematic plotline when I introduced an arch-villain into the adventure, why the hell couldn't I actually FINISH a damned story?
And that's how I still write. I don't write chapters independently of each other...and that's actually somewhat rare as far as authors go, from what I'm told. I write in a linear fashion, each chapter building on the last and written in order, and honestly, 75% of it is just made up as I go along. I have certain "milestone" plot points that guide the story in a general direction, but how I get to those points is all just whatever crosses my mind as I'm sitting at the keyboard.
It's a writing style that's fraught with all kinds of dangers, since I have to pay much more attention to what I'm doing, I have to backpedal and rewrite more often than I'd like, and sometimes I lose track of names and characters (such as the infamy of Sarraya's three husbands, hehehe), and I'd weep for any editor that wanted to try to edit my work, but eh, it works for me.
And sometimes it even surprises me. Hell, half the time, I'm not entirely sure if I'm the one writing the story, or if the story's writing itself, and just physically forcing me at gunpoint to sit there and type it out.
