A Haven From the Storm - Introduction
This is the story that started it all. I first conceived of it in late 2002 after reading flame mage's Wine Red no Kokoro (which has served as a great inspiration for me.) Thus inspired to inflict my idea of a Harvest Moon epic on an already tortured world, I wrote three chapters. After some false starts as to how to publish it, I discovered fanfiction.net, put it up there starting in mid-2003, and the rest is history.
The story is fairly canonical for a Harvest Moon: Back to Nature fiction: A boy inherits a decrepit farm in a small town from his grandfather, and works to make it productive. Along the way, he discovers the charms of one (or more) of the young ladies of the village, and the usual romantic drama ensues.
In putting a little context to the usual story, I made the setting way down-east Maine in the year 2020 (this is not explicitly stated in the story.) The main character and narrator, Jack (the name is a convention in Harvest Moon fan fictions, deriving from the fact that in the game Harvest Moon 64, your character's name will be Jack if you don't explicitly give him one,) had been an engineer working on the first Mars shot before taking on farming. He's a little bit of a clueless nerd when it comes to interpersonal relations and this gets him into jams over and over. That he's terminally nice helps to pull him out of his difficulties.
There is a lot about this story that embarasses me, starting with the writing style. It's overwritten in places, there are still some surviving grammatical and punctuation errors, and the point of view - first person present - doesn't really work very well. It changes to first person reminiscent later on, which I found better.
The story is pretty much sweetness and light; there are dramatic complications, of course, but things tend to work out OK in the end. And it is fit for young people - nothing gross or nasty is written. It has served me as an imaginative world from which, using the same characters and base story, I have spun out other fictions which have a more mature style and content.
With all of A Haven From the Storm's shortcomings, it has found some favor on fanfiction.net, and several authors there have claimed that it has inspired them to write their own Harvest Moon fictions. If so, then I am pleased to pass on to them the torch that flame mage (unknowingly) passed to me.
A Haven From the Storm is very much an ongoing project. New chapters will appear here and on fanfiction.net from time to time. Stay tuned.
Disclaimer: Harvest Moon - Back to Nature, its characters, plot and setting are the intellectual property of Natsume. The song Cape Cod Girls in Chapter 3 is traditional and presumably in the public domain. The song Conversation in chapter 15 is the property of Joni Mitchell. I am grateful to all of them for their creativity and for the fact that they haven't sicced hordes of feral, rabid lawyers on me.
