In Part 1 (which you should totally read first), I talked about how Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers began as a point-and-click PC adventure game I worked on with my best friend and fellow adventure game fan Mike Rushia. The novel version comes out July 22nd, and I’m currently taking pre-orders for the book and bonus postcard set through my webstore. Here’s the second half of the story.
As the years went on, and especially when I moved to Nebraska for grad school and started working more heavily on my first novel about Japan, the Carcrash Parker adventure game just kind of….fell by the wayside.
This is really common for creative projects, I think, and it happens for a variety of reasons. In our case, Mike and I being busy adults with jobs was definitely a factor, but a bigger reason was that the project itself was incredibly large, intimidating, and went beyond our skill set, especially when it came to the art.
Had we been friends with an art person, or been more savvy about finding illustrators online, this hurdle would have been less formidable. However, for us, at that time, the whole project just felt really insurmountable.
But What If Carcrash Parker Didn’t Have to Be a Game?
At various times throughout the early 2010s, I found myself asking myself an interesting question: Since the adventure game might never be finished, what if I tried writing Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers as a novel?
This seemed like a cool idea (especially as I tossed around concepts for novels to work on after I finished my Japan novel), but I had no idea how to go about doing it. The Carcrash Parker story was too simple: it was designed to be a game, with puzzles and a straightforward plot where the protagonist had to get his Commodore 64 back from larpers in the New Hampshire woods. The concept felt like it could maybe be a novel, but there wasn’t enough plot or character development to add heft to the story, and I didn’t have the slightest clue how to set it up.
As such, the idea never seemed to go anywhere, and faded into the background each time I thought about it.
Cervantes and the Pillars
One day, though, all that changed.
It was the summer of 2015 after I’d finished grad school and was still living in Lincoln, Nebraska. I felt burned out and at a definite crossroads: Where was my life going? What did I want to be doing with my writing? I’d been offered a job working in the greenhouse with the agricultural research team that had given me my first editing job, and in my spare time I was finishing up my Japan novel and researching literary agents to send it to.
Around this time, I started taking more walks around Lincoln to explore and get out of my three-room apartment. The city has a bunch of cool, old neighborhoods in it, as well as a lot of open spaces, so there are plenty of places to check out.
One of those places is Pioneers Park, an enormous park south of the city with ponds, trails, and some pretty beautiful scenery. I don’t think I even knew it was there when I set out on my walk, but when I reached it after four miles of walking, I found a quiet spot and sat down with the book I was reading at the time—Don Quixote.
The spot I’d chosen was across the pond from the huge, old pillars shown in the image above. The accompanying plaque explained that they were the original sandstone pillars on the Treasury Building in Washington DC in the 1800s, but when they began to deteriorate, they were taken down in 1908, put into storage, and replaced with sturdier granite. They sat in storage until 1916, when a DC politician paid to have a few of them moved to Lincoln, where they were eventually placed in the park as a cool anachronism.
The pillars got me thinking about things that don’t belong, or the effect of having two very different things brought together in an unexpected way: in this case, Greco-Roman pillars in a wide open midwestern park.
At the same time, I was reading Don Quixote, which is often called the first European novel (from 1605). if you’re not familiar with the story, it’s about a old man from the middle-class who reads too many medieval chivalry stories and sets out to have ridiculous adventures that are only real to him, with others commenting on his bizarre mannerisms and way of speaking. I was having a great time reading it and enjoying the humor, much of which takes place between Don Quixote, who talks like a highfalutin knight-errant from the days of yore, and Sancho Panzo, who’s just a regular farm hand:
“All this is well,” said Don Quixote; “but tell me, what jewel did she present thee with at thy departure, in return for the tidings thou hast brought her; for it is an ancient and universal custom among knights and ladies-errant to bestow some rich jewel on the squires, damsels, or dwarfs who bring them news of their mistresses or knights as a reward or acknowledgement of their welcome intelligence.”
“Very likely,” quoth Sancho,” and a good custom it was; but it must have been in days of yore, for now-a-days the custom is to give only a piece of bread and cheese.”
This back and forth between the two was incredibly funny to me, as was Miguel de Cervantes’s use of humor as a political weapon to mock the crooked and stupid in society (with people who attempted to pirate his Don Quixote stories being a prime target).
Sitting in front of the pillars on that hot summer day reading Don Quixote, I suddenly thought of the Carcrash Parker script, and the back and forth between the larper characters (who talk in a kind of medieval fantasy speak) and Carcrash (who talks like a real person and makes a lot of movie references).
That’s when it came to me: What if Carcrash Parker the novel was narrated by one of the larpers, and the book itself took the form of an old-timey adventure story, even though it clearly took place in a modern day world of electricity, cars, and video games?
Making the Choice
I liked this idea a lot—like, a LOT. Finally, I knew how I could turn our stalled adventure game into a novel I could work on and actually finish!
Part of me wanted to start Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers as my next big project once I’d finished polishing my Japan novel because the concept felt so exciting and had been stirring for so long, but another part of me still felt intimidated by what would certainly be a VERY complicated project. Writing a parody of an epic fantasy novel meant worldbuilding and research, plus making a whole lot of decisions about how the story would sound, feel, and function. I also still didn’t have much of a plot, and the details of how the story could work in book form still felt hazy, even if the voice and framework felt clear.
In the end, I ended up putting the Carcrash Parker novel on hold to work on MFA Thesis Novel instead—an idea that not only felt more developed in terms of its plot, but one that also felt more urgent, since I was still reeling from the mental tumult of grad school and how it had made me feel. It also felt like a simpler story that I was better prepared to tackle after the bigger and more sprawling nature of my Japan novel, and I know that starting MFA Thesis Novel was 100% the right choice for me at the time.
Starting and Reorganizing
Five and a half years went by after that day at Pioneers Park before I ended up starting the Carcrash Parker novel in January of 2021. I was teaching in Japan at the time, and I’d finally signed MFA Thesis Novel to a publisher and taken a break. Things were hectic, but I felt ready to write again.
Starting a new novel was hard, and starting a complicated novel like this one was even harder. I started writing Chapter 1 without having a firm grounding of the plot or characters—all I really had was a brief, two-page outline I’d jotted down to organize my scattered thoughts. While the beginning, ending, and major story beats were basically there, the story still had large gaps, particularly in the middle section, where I had no idea what kind of adventures the characters might get into in the woods. Glimrick Therrinbottom, the main larper narrator, also didn’t have a name yet, and I’d imagined another female character (later cut) would come along for the trek with Carson, Glimrick, Ruby, and Nick. I’d also jotted down notes for themes I wanted to explore, including Carcrash’s fight with his parents over finding employment, the effects of Sameness (an early version of the Twisting), and how politics show up in fantasy novels.
As I shared in my Novel Updates series, I wrote the first draft over about a year and a half (with breaks). Much of the drafting process was trial and error: getting the ideas down on paper even if they were mildly off the mark so I could figure out how to fix them later. I’m a big believer in Anne Lamott’s Shitty First Drafts method as a way of starting the writing process, and the first Carcrash Parker draft was particularly shitty: the larping conventions didn’t make sense, Glimrick didn’t have enough to do, Carcrash came across as an irresponsible ass, and the whole novel just felt too mean-spirited. I clearly had a lot of work to do.
Some parts of that first draft, though, really surprised me. The Twisting emerged as a sinister force embodying the ways politicians and manipulators alter the truth to convince people to follow them—an aftereffect of both the first Trump presidency and my dealings with my old crooked boss. Whereas the adventure game script portrayed Ruby as a sort-of romantic interest whose relationship with Carcrash was left open at the end, early on, I decided it made more sense for Ruby to be Carcrash’s cool lesbian friend, both because I wanted to develop the character in a different way, and because I wanted to eliminate any possibility of romance between them. The Granitaria/real-world New Hampshire connection also grew pretty organically out of the need to create a fantasy world for Glimrick to refer to that readers could also somewhat recognize.
Much of the writing process consisted of finding what worked, fixing what didn’t, and endlessly experimenting to find exactly the right voice and feel. This created the need for vast, vast amounts of revision as sentences and entire scenes needed to be rewritten over and over, and my scribbled-up printed drafts definitely attest to this.
Working on Carcrash wasn’t quite like working on either of my previous novels, and a more efficient plan probably would have gotten me to the finish line sooner. In the end, though, I was really happy with the result.
Takeaway: Some Ideas Are Worth Coming Back To
I wanted to share the story of how Carcrash Parker and the Haven of Larpers came to be because it shows the different forms that creative ideas can take over a longer period of time. The core concept started out as a crappy undergrad screenplay that didn’t include larping at all, then crystalized into an adventure game with a much simpler story. These steps helped me develop the idea over a longer period of time while I was also developing as a writer.
Working in three different mediums (screenplay, adventure game script, and novel) also helped me grow more versatile as a writer who can adjust to different conventions. Even though that screenplay from my sophomore year was downright terrible, it was still great writing practice, and the first longer fiction work I ever wrote.
Finally, I think working on the same story over a (sort of) twenty-year period teaches you a lot about follow-through and story development—the idea that if a particular story is really important to you, you’ll find a way to hone your craft well enough to finish it so you can share it with the world.
And of course, I’m definitely looking forward to sharing this story with you—I’ll add another plug at the end for the sake of convenience so you can pre-order the novel if you haven’t already, and I really hope you enjoy it.
