How a Disappointed Virgin Helped Me Find My Muse

Inspiration in Unexpected Places

On a winding road through the Pennines, halfway between Sheffield and Manchester, there’s a tavern rather originally called the Halfway Inn. In the face of such razor wit, the locals have taken to calling it the Disappointed Virgin.

computer graphic of a Skyrim game mod
The Halfway Inn as constructed in the Skyrim Creation Kit

It’s a stupid joke but I still love it. And it wormed its way into the game I designed for my dissertation. It also became a mod I wanted to design for Skyrim once my dissertation was finished.

Those who’ve read my blog on the post-project slump know how gloriously that plan ended up in the dumpster fire.

As the space between me and the end of my academic writing has increased, and as I’ve forced myself into the habit of week blogs even when I have nothing to report, I’ve felt the creative spark tingling again. It’s always been there, nagging at me to take it out and forget all this academic nonsense, and then decided to play silly buggers when I got some free time on my hands.

Well the Muse has struck! He strapped on his fairy wings and fishnet stockings and picked up his horsewhip to come knocking at my brainpan.

So what am I finally writing?

I already sketched the outline of my Halfway Inn mod ages ago when I couldn’t take academia anymore and needed to rebel. I even started building the area in the Creation Kit (pictured at the top of this post). Penned a few lines of dialogue. That’s as far as I got before the dissertation panic sucked me back in and the Muse was shackled again (not that he minds a bit of shackling).

But I’ve had a block on a major plot point that’s had me stymied every time I try to approach the subject. I was poking around the mod the other day, trying to revivify the Muse (I know I said it’s okay to need time, but I need a project!), but couldn’t get myself interested.

Then I started thinking of the tavern’s patrons. Warm bodies to give it some ambience, to make it more engaging. Empty heads that need filling with stories. For a while I’ve wanted to put in sisters on the opposite sides of the civil war using the Inn as a safe place to meet.

Boom. A heartbreaking story in four short overheard scenes. It’s just an incidental—it has nothing to do with the rest of the story. There is nothing about it that is required to complete the main quest. It’s just something I felt compelled to write. And writing incidentals is one of my favorite parts of game writing. It really flexes the muscles because, in many cases, you have to get maximum story and emotion across in very few words. Of course, I won’t know how effective I’ve been until I get some play testers.

In the meantime I need some voice actors.

Up Next: Dovahkiin and the Holy Grail

Since the mod was originally intended as a creative application of my academic work, I applied the Mythic Method in working out the plot of the main quest. It started with creating yet another captain in Sunless Skies (because they tend to be so short lived). For the background I built I figured I’d name her after a Grail Maiden and settled on Sigune. Thus began the obsession with the name. I wanted to use it in the mod, and ended up building the basics of the plot around her role in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.

The details of this process I’ll leave for an upcoming post. It’ll probably be a more technical write-up on using the Mythic Method in writing. So stay tuned for that. In the meantime, I’m off to argue with collision surfaces and navmeshing.