It seems the promise of a new world labelled only as Dark Purple UFOs has stayed with me more persistently than I might have imagined it would.  Though I seem to aimlessly wander around my mental laboratory, looking for new elemental substances to throw together in the hopes of concocting something original but never giving any one experiment time to sufficiently flourish, I do indeed occassionally become infatuated with just one basic idea.  I had not thought this particular one would end up as such but I am starting to suspect it may yet be so.  In fact, I think the novel I’ve written and the concept for this site could even belong to the same world and could each be elements connected together by the same silly strings.  Perhaps all of it for as long as I have been trying to find something to create has been connected to this same alternate universe that it seems now I am inevitably going to plunge into feet first and holding my nose while holding my hopes.

Here is what I’ve been working on lately, as a tangible way of demonstrating my progress.  First, I seem to have settled on a site layout:

The characters depicted at the top are rounding into my five central characters who appear in all the stories.  A few of them have appeared in other posts, in similar form, while two others have been added. The alien one in the middle is not going to be a major character, just there for some comical moments, at least that is my thinking at this point.  The one I had not really been expecting to show up was the new female character on the right, who I think is going to be a programmer/hacker who helps the research team navigate around Earth systems and aids them in developing various programs for thier experiments.  One idea there is that she has developed and runs some kind of futuristic version of an MMORPG game, but in fact the game world is meant to be an intricate study of human behavior to benefit the research team’s goals.  Her name is going to be Vyx, which comes from one of the short stories I submitted to a contest last year.  I do not plan to develop any kind of convenient romantic relationship between her and Martin (I’ve renamed Phillip to Martin, for now, just to keep this character from overlapping with one of the characters I put in my novel, which is a really useless piece of information for you because you cannot read my novel and this site isn’t operational and so begs the question as to why you’re even reading this right now).

The other piece that seems to be falling into place is that I will be using Flash content, but likely not creating long movies.  Instead pages of the story will contain very short clips that show some action or express some moment with just a few movements or event depicted.  This way I can keep the Flash portion of the content simple and quick to create.  The approach of creating long and detailed movies was clearly slowing me down, yet this seems to have potential. For now.  For example:

This little clip would be part of one page with the text of this part of the story displayed next to it.  The stories will be written out, I think, in first person as though they are journal entries, while these clips and images will visually provide details of what was really happening at the time.  I might go the route of putting the dialog into these clips and images as well, though I’m undecided on that part.  I have a feeling it will end up all mixed and mashed up as it goes along.  The secret really is to do whatever my imagination happens to find convenient at that particular phase of the lunar cycle.

One of the next items on my to do list is to update the “under construction” page on the actual DarkPurpleUFOs.com site, just to let anyone wandering by know that yes something is actually going on there, but to come back next year.  Someday.  Theoretically.

-Josh