Introducing ... Me ... (Part 2 of 3)

I was pretty adamant when I started, that Rudy would not be doing any love scenes.  In fact, I even had a note on my page that said basically, if that was what you were looking for, better look elsewhere.  But it didn’t take long to get over that hurdle, as the character was kind of yelling at me to follow that natural progression with the writing partner I was working with at the time.  And so yet another discovery, I could write that stuff, and it was actually palatable.  Well, maybe a little better than that.

Patricia was the second person I met online, that I didn’t already know personally.  She had been in the group for a few months, and we did hit it off immediately as friends, even though she wasn’t my first writing partner.  We became writing partners when the group was planning an alternate future story.  At the time, Rudy was single, and so I started thinking where would he be in this alternate future?  And I decided it would be fun to surprise the group and not tell anyone what that future would be, and approached Patricia and said basically, “Hey wouldn’t it be cool if our characters were married in this future?”  She jumped on board and we planned everything in secret, and I got to do the kickoff thread of the storyline and we did the big reveal, and the reaction was tremendous.  That all-group storyline which was supposed to last just about a month ended up lasting SIX MONTHS to tell the entire story we ended up wanting to tell, involving more than 60 characters, and it was voted Storyline of the Year amongst all the Dark Hunter role play groups we were associated with.  That’s when I knew we could write some damn good stuff together, and during that we decided, let’s make that alternate future happen and simultaneously wrote the story of how they got together in the present day.

That was the second incarnation of Rudy and the genesis of Rudy and Trish in two different times.  Just as an aside, during this time I picked up other characters as well, and widened my ability to write different types of characters … heroes, villains, both comical and dramatic.

In role play, a vast majority of players select a model or actor to use as an avatar for their character.  I had decided early on to use Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Chuck) as an avatar for Rudy, because I saw Rudy as an ex-soldier type with a sarcastic sense of humor.  When Trish and Rudy finally got together, Patricia switched her avatar for Trish to Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck) because she fit the description of the character, and there are of course lots of action shots of them together, like this one from Chuck (NBC).  It is hard for me now to watch an episode of the show without having in the back of my mind, "wow there's a shot I can use" ... LOL :)

So ok, this was all well and good.  I can write.  We have a following.  It’s for fun, for us and the fans.  Still don’t have the bridge to the publication right?  Well, hold on, if you’ve made it this far, we’re getting there.

One of our brilliant writers, who I’ll call Drake cause that’s the character he plays, came up with an idea to do something a little different, and created a special “Pirates” page, and challenged us to write stories in the Golden Age of Pirates.  We could use the same profiles, but no special powers, make the characters different, etc.  Well Patricia LOVES pirates, and mermaids, and we jumped all over it, completely rebooting the characters for this storyline and having them meet and fall in love all over again, through an entirely different type of adventure.  It was tons of fun to rediscover the characters again, and we were really developing a good story.

This was the third incarnation of Rudy and Trish.

The Pirates story required a different feel ... one of our great fans is also a fan of the old pirate movies and suggested we use Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland (Captain Blood) as avatars for that story.