S O U L M A T E S (SasuNaruSasu Magazine) Soulmates Magazine Nº2 | Page 17

something that would fit a script, and that
script needed to fit into an hour-long CD?
Luckily, the producer (Wanda Ruiz) was so
amazing, she knew my process and basi-
cally let me do what I wanted. However,
she did give me a “theme” of sorts that I had
to adhere to. I don’t know how much detail
I can go into about this, so I’ll just say that
she wanted it to end on a Christmas-y note
as that’s when it was originally set to be re-
leased. It also needed to represent that fa-
milies could be made up of all kinds (uh, ba-
sically… kinda… anti-ending). No hetero-
normative stuff if possible.
WAS THE WHOLE PROCESS DIFFI-
CULT FOR YOU?
I’d never say it was difficult. It was a lot of
work, and during this process, I also had a
death in the family. But it took me maybe a
little over a month to finish the draft of the
story. Pretty good considering its length,
but I worked on it a lot, and I had a lot of
creative freedoms. I did make up character
bios at the very beginning and Wanda and
I discussed the plot at length and she had
access to the google doc I was writing it all
in. Since Break Free was based in Tokyo,
she’d correct me on cultural or geographic
things. I also felt like it was difficult to
walk that fine line of clearly wanting it to
be a (SNS) story, but… because of some is-
sues of (likeness) and, well… it couldn’t co-
me across as being obvious BL, so I sort of
had to bring a lot of subtext in and hope
for the best. I wanted it to be romantic, but
I couldn’t show it as romantic… however…
subtext is fun and just as exciting as
anything physical.
Now, turning it into a script… then cutting
that script. That was the most challenging
bit of work I’ve ever done. There was a
scriptwriter who did an initial draft based
on my story, but she was told to try to
keep everything intact, difficult task for
her. But, she basically was pushed out of
the process (for good reason), and it was
mostly myself and Wanda editing the
script down from 80/90 pages to… 30 or
40? It took 3 or 4 long attempts of us cut-
ting it down (going line by line and deci-
ding what had to go and what needed to