Holly Faye Dixon
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Inspiration
I was inspired to write this piece after playing the harrowing video game ‘My Lovely Daughter’ (developed by GameChanger Studio) earlier this year. Players are dropped into the mind of a grieving father who is trying to resurrect his dead daughter. The game play involves repeatedly using dark magic to create new ‘daughters’ that the father maintains until he can kill them, harvest their souls and fuse the souls to his daughter’s body. Playing the game was chilling, almost masochistic - with the creation of each new daughter came a new attachment, and more and more horror when the time came to harvest the souls. Similarly to how the game ‘Undertale’ discourages players from mindlessly destroying monsters, ‘My Lovely Daughter’ warns players to not become blind or apathetic and avoid seeing people as products that you use for a purpose, a message which is important in a world where social media and the pressure to succeed can make you feel like a commodity.
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Edited Extracts:
"My eyelids are stuck together like an old letter with a wax seal. When I have the strength to prize my eyelids apart, he, Father, is the first and only thing I see."
"He is so close to my face that I smack my head against something cold and solid behind me to distance myself from him. His eyes are terribly cold and looking into them makes me tear up - not out of sympathy for him, but out of an innate fear that just by being in his presence I will eventually feel all of the dreadful, endless pain inside him that is trembling to be released. Did he bring me into this world specifically to share it?"
"A bucket is useful and helps make things clean. Bones are necessary and very important to keeping a person on their feet. Even filth has its place in the world even if its place is just to be disposed of. I wonder which purpose I will serve."
Future of the Work
This piece is very much in its early stages and is currently the length of a short story. I have written the first few pages but nothing further as of yet. I intend to spend a great deal of time plotting out the rest of the piece before proceeding - I think it is paramount that I determine what themes and messages I want to convey with this body of work and how I can differentiate it from the places where I sourced my inspiration and from other stories within the fantasy genre. The story has the potential to veer off into a myriad of possibilities - I will need to decide what the dominant theme should be and examine how choosing that theme will influence the story’s ending. Depending on the number of additional characters and the level of detail of the plot, I expect this piece will increase its word count by at least 5,000 words if not more when it is completed. To enquire further about this piece or to read a full draft, please contact me here.
