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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Piratecat" data-source="post: 5869384" data-attributes="member: 2">3800 words, give or take. A few thoughts:[sblock]This is story #2. Story #1 was extremely creepy, a free-running monologue from a serial killer as he took his latest victim out to the desert. But you know what doesn't work with that kind of a story? A cute seal, that's what. Creepy stories usually have a paucity of seals.Soooo, that got shelved.Instead, I decided to bite the bullet and put the seal front and center. The candle picture would have been really easy to just use for candles, but I'm fascinated by the female shape in the back left. Icon? Art? Person? Her headdress reminded me of a showgirl's, so the story was suddenly set in Vegas with a hot ersatz nun who hands off the job and returns later to reap the rewards. "Hot ersatz nun" is now the name of my first album.Las Vegas worked well for the desert photo, too. That yucca is a Joshua tree, and they don't have a very big range. I've been thinking about con men a lot lately; perhaps a Leverage-style game would be the right tone here, a bunch of (mostly) good-hearted repo men who steal from the wrong guy? I liked it, but based on an old RPG game from Qualidar I made them sleazy Repo men. I figured I'd send them in to repo the seal, and hilarity would ensue.That led me to the photo of the head. If the story had magical realism it would be an oracle, but I wanted something more realistic and less predictable. What if they're sent in for the head instead, and repossessing the seal is incidental? That works much better. What kind of statue is it? Could be Roman. But it could also be native American, especially with those plants acting as a headdress... once I saw that, I couldn't unsee it.And after that, it was just a matter of writing folks who would fit in well having drunk smack-talk at any neighborhood bar. I'm not using to writing in dialect, but the banter was a blast to write. I have amused myself, at least, and that makes me happy, even if I wince a tiny bit every time I use improper grammar.Pre-feedback, there's only one thing I would change. Sheila calls Tony "Tommy" near the end, not wanting to use his real name in front of certainly-not-an-evil-Wayne-Newton-at-all-why-do-you-ask?, and Jimmy picks it up. Problem is, this could also be taken as a name glitch. I should have spelled it out specifically, but I'm okay with whichever way the judges choose to read it.Thank you guys for letting me write this. I'm glad I did.[/sblock]</blockquote>

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