Winter vacation, day 7

I did some writing today, and although it wasn’t on the ongoing short story — and although it wasn’t necessarily any good — I did feel good to get back into it.

“In this life, there are winners and losers,” Saul said. “There are the people who find true love, and then there are the people who wind up playing second fiddle at the lonely hearts club’s Christmas party. There are the people who make it in this business, and then the people who history gladly forgets.”

This was just one week after Patchwork Media had gone public; it had been an impressive opening, and the company’s stock was performing well, but Todd thought it was a little early to be making grand pronouncements about winners and losers, much less which half of that divide history would place them on. Deep Earth Zombie Bugs had been their only new game released this last quarter, and the sales were still a little below projections. Reviews of the first-person shooter had been mixed. Todd wasn’t going to panic until all of the global numbers were in, and there probably wasn’t going to be anything to panic about, but he also wasn’t going to start celebrating just yet.

But that’s what made Saul the idea man, Todd guessed, and what made him the less interesting money guy. He managed expectations, massaged them if necessary, while Saul laughed in their face. It’s why Saul could make an impromptu speech like this to the troops — half bombast, half pep talk — while Todd just wanted to get back to his office and find out if yesterday’s sales numbers from Taiwan had filtered through yet.

The game had been a risk, a year of development on which they’d staked their IPO and maybe the company’s future. Todd had only played it twice himself, once in prototype and once at the floor of the trade show where they’d debuted the game. DEZB was fun, and novel in that you could play it from the zombie bugs’ perspective, but it wasn’t the revolutionary experience he felt Saul had promised — and had kept promising. Gamers liked, but didn’t love, it, and it hadn’t sparked the kind of sales the company had wanted. It hadn’t been the must-but Christmas present everybody at Patchwork had been banking on.

And there were the rumors that the underlying design had been stolen. Todd wasn’t even going to try talking to Saul about that. He had more important things to do.

The writing prompts here, chosen by the three of us at random from three different magazines, kind of got away from me. I think in my haste to keep Deep Earth Zombie Bugs from straying along maybe too obvious lines, I also avoided anything like an interesting plot. But forty minutes of blah writing is still writing, so I’ll take it.

Afterward, I went to see Captain Phillips, which is very good, though it owes most of that to Tom Hanks. It would still be a modestly gripping story without his performance steering the ship, but he’s definitely what elevates it, particularly in its amazing final moments. (Spoiler warning for that link, obviously.)

Then I read a little this evening. I am laughably behind on my 2013 reading challenge, and being on vacation never seems to help with that, so it was nice to get involved in someone else’s writing for a while.