The current writing plans.
Sep. 10th, 2003 02:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elfsNow, that's the music I should have had for my post about my encounters with the Cogs In The Machine. Good old Zevon. He'll be missed.
Warning: If you are a fan of the Journal Entries or any of my fiction, and do not want spoilers, do not read any further. Seriously.
The Journal Entries
In the next coming weeks, up until November, I shall be releasing the last ten episodes of The Ritacha War, and then I shall be taking a break for November. In December, provided everything goes according to plan, I shall be releasing the four episodes of The llerkin Moment, a short serial in which the future path of the government of the Pendor-Terra-llerkin will more or less be established.
Next year, a pair of story arcs are launched in the next episode, right now with a working title of Gabrielle. This series introduces one new major character, Catena, an alien slave freed by Pendorians and adopted by the Shardiks, and her story arc runs about fourteen years and six episodes. It also covers the period of time when Ken & company move into new digs, having long ago outgrown The Cube. Although Gabrielle and The Kemper Assignment are larger in scope (the latter is more of a technothriller anyway), the Catena episodes are meant to be intimate, to show the Shardik household at home and illustrate how they're adapting to a new reality, one in which their relevance is very much diminished. This series includes some of my more curious ideas, including two ghost stories and what has to be my favorite title yet, Nudes Defending a Staircase.
Once Catena's story is done, there's a non-Shardik series called The Lost Crew of the Palantir. I always wanted to write Victoriana steampunk. By crashing the crew on a world very much like that and giving them a quest, I can play with all sorts of ideas. It's seven episodes or so, with a three-episode side-series when one of the characters is left for dead... but isn't.
After this, I have a return to Shardik Castle, only to find it... abandoned! The Century of Solitude is a little serial, only seven episodes or so, which find our little crew on vacation, having children, and then coming home to a universe they barely recognize. New species! New modifications! The Fall!
Then we're back to the Castle for an AI generated conspiracy called The Dreamteam Calamaties This is something I spent a lot of time on last year and have finally started to feel good about. At first, the idea was simple: I'd been writing a lot of story and not a lot of erotica, so I wanted an excuse for writing more smut. Little did I know that the characters would become interesting enough that they would demand their tales be told. The result is pretty good, all things considered.
After that, a final episode in the Maykir/Cot saga, a sort-of sequel to Dreamteam Calamaties, and then two stories that are totally in the "outline" stage: Apple and Serpent and After Effects. The first is about what happens when you meet a robot species that, despite all apparent consciousness, cannot circumvent the programming that makes them miserable: the species they were built to care for has expired, but they are forbidden from resurrecting them when the opportunity is provided. The second is about The Shipfen, a "species" of spacefaring cyborgs spawned from the Pendorian tradition, and what happens when one of them encounters a new inhabited world.
The Jan and Rory story continues, this time with two other characters, Lute and Sze-Meng, who are encouraged to follow in Jan and Rory's footsteps, with mixed results.
The Misuko and Linia series has gotten very complicated. After Desires, there's Response and Question, in which Misuko's commitment to Linia is tested, a small sub-arc of AIs-in-love is shown with their friends Nozumi and DeEtte, and the Elvangorean Pact is introduced-- a five-world colony attempt to create humans without sex or gender. Fragility introduced Belle, a character from the 21st Century, which gives me a chance to show the world from her point of view, and then Madships begins. It's a war. A big, complicated, hairy one I'm poorly equipped to write about, but it's what the plot gives me. It ends with Castaways and leads to Misuko dealing with her cyberphobic parents, Cthulhoid creatures, and her own guilt at starting the war.
Also as fragmentary as After Effects is Realms, a kind-of Matrix-y story about an AI who wants to shut down her cybernetically generated world, but the people who live in it won't let her. Generally, this wouldn't be a problem, but the humans also won't let others who want to leave, leave.
Then there are The Reservationist Stories, a (thus-far) three-episode series about colonies that went off and did their own thing with the human species, resulting in results that are weird, unpleasant, or downright immoral. One is a riff on Brave New World. In one case, the "reservation" doesn't know it's a reservation, but a beacon tells folks to stay away; in another, the reservation does know and is actively trying to shut down or overcome the beacon and invite people to come in. The theme is "tradition is the vote the dead try to have over the living."
Finally, there's the New Millenium stories: extending an idea at the end of The llerkin Moment, these are set around the year 37,000 and feature Ken and Aaden and P'nyssa 1.5 learning to live in a new millenium, a non-Shardik serial about a war with a crappy little Reservationist Empire, and then a new Shardik serial about aliens, falling in love, and free will overcoming one's inclinations, natural or otherwise.
The Aimee' Series
There are five novels remaining in the Aimee series. A Visit To Purik is, pure and simple, an excuse to get Aimee into bed with several different people and see how she reacts. It does set up some background about the last great War of Elves and Dragons, and leaves some data for the last novel. It's five or six chapters, each about ten thousand words.
The Imperial City is a little more complicated, and getting worse all of the time. Darynn and Aimee travel back to the home country, where Darynn is asked to do the impossible: arrange that the Emperor meet with the Satyrs. They become embroiled in a conspiracy, deal with dragons, the undead, Elves, and mysterious sorceresses. Aimee discovers that she is, essentially, monogamous and only a little bisexual, and that her chosen husband makes for a pretty good detective.
The Fall of Ircsentai covers the Second Elf And Dragon War. We discover where the Elves went and why there are so few around now, learn where the Dark Elves have holed up and why, and generally have lots of big, nasty explosions, leaving a "hole the size of Nebraska" in the end. It also causes The Great Plague, a spoilsport of sorts should the Dark Elves lose the war.
Miri's Service is a novel set about three hundred years later. Miri doesn't believe in magic, despite having Darynn's father for an ancestor. Of course, her mother knows better and soon enough Miri is being packed off to Barraminum, against her will, to become a mage. What she finds is a city deep in decadence, feeding off the capital created when one-third of the population died off and is only now recovering. She winds up assigned to the eromancer not because she has any skill at it but because the eromancer "needs" an apprentice to pimp out under the guise of "teaching." It's very ugly, and Miri ends up a wreck. How she gets out of it is anyone's guess... mine included, at this point. Miri's Service is likely to be my NaNoWriMo project.
Darrynwhore is set 150 years after that. It's the disaster I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo project, that I hope to get something useful out of it. Unlike Miri, Virginia is a great eromancer and a great mage... she's also addicted to magic. And the kind of magic she's addicted to is also the kind she's best at. Throw in a lost relic of Purik, the bones of a dead Evil Dragon, and a naive Magic Use Law Enforcement trainee... and it should be one hell of a story, but it's just mush. Ah, well. I'll try again.
I've been tinkering with a different kind of fantasy series, kinda like what Kay did with his Sarantine Mosaic series, only making a mutant Romanesque-with-magic fantasy. It is scheduled to be a 50-episode series: 5 internal arcs, each covering about a year, each with 10 episodes. It's about a slaveowner mage with some rather nasty kinks who, over time, comes to realize just how twisted the Republic has become and sets in motion a plan to turn the merchantilist, slave-powered Republic into one in which every man is free to trade his worth for his daily bread. Along the way, he repents of his own evil needs-- only to learn that even the best of intentions can have unintended consequences.
It's funny how stories grow. This whole idea was born when the following couplet sprang into my head one morning in the shower.
In other stories, I have bits of silliness: a Tron slash and a Candyland slash.
I have no plans at this time to write a sequel to Bloody Beth. If I ever find interest in 17th century India or China, I may find an excuse for putting Beth back on the water, but nothing current.
I also don't have much to say about Sarah's Reason at this point. It was supposed to be a young adult novel about coming of age at a time when your species' main raison d'etre has been eliminated, but I've never been able to get a story to gel around the idea, especially not one that would appeal to people who don't read lit'ra'chur, doncha' know.
Warning: If you are a fan of the Journal Entries or any of my fiction, and do not want spoilers, do not read any further. Seriously.
The Journal Entries
In the next coming weeks, up until November, I shall be releasing the last ten episodes of The Ritacha War, and then I shall be taking a break for November. In December, provided everything goes according to plan, I shall be releasing the four episodes of The llerkin Moment, a short serial in which the future path of the government of the Pendor-Terra-llerkin will more or less be established.
Next year, a pair of story arcs are launched in the next episode, right now with a working title of Gabrielle. This series introduces one new major character, Catena, an alien slave freed by Pendorians and adopted by the Shardiks, and her story arc runs about fourteen years and six episodes. It also covers the period of time when Ken & company move into new digs, having long ago outgrown The Cube. Although Gabrielle and The Kemper Assignment are larger in scope (the latter is more of a technothriller anyway), the Catena episodes are meant to be intimate, to show the Shardik household at home and illustrate how they're adapting to a new reality, one in which their relevance is very much diminished. This series includes some of my more curious ideas, including two ghost stories and what has to be my favorite title yet, Nudes Defending a Staircase.
Once Catena's story is done, there's a non-Shardik series called The Lost Crew of the Palantir. I always wanted to write Victoriana steampunk. By crashing the crew on a world very much like that and giving them a quest, I can play with all sorts of ideas. It's seven episodes or so, with a three-episode side-series when one of the characters is left for dead... but isn't.
After this, I have a return to Shardik Castle, only to find it... abandoned! The Century of Solitude is a little serial, only seven episodes or so, which find our little crew on vacation, having children, and then coming home to a universe they barely recognize. New species! New modifications! The Fall!
Then we're back to the Castle for an AI generated conspiracy called The Dreamteam Calamaties This is something I spent a lot of time on last year and have finally started to feel good about. At first, the idea was simple: I'd been writing a lot of story and not a lot of erotica, so I wanted an excuse for writing more smut. Little did I know that the characters would become interesting enough that they would demand their tales be told. The result is pretty good, all things considered.
After that, a final episode in the Maykir/Cot saga, a sort-of sequel to Dreamteam Calamaties, and then two stories that are totally in the "outline" stage: Apple and Serpent and After Effects. The first is about what happens when you meet a robot species that, despite all apparent consciousness, cannot circumvent the programming that makes them miserable: the species they were built to care for has expired, but they are forbidden from resurrecting them when the opportunity is provided. The second is about The Shipfen, a "species" of spacefaring cyborgs spawned from the Pendorian tradition, and what happens when one of them encounters a new inhabited world.
The Jan and Rory story continues, this time with two other characters, Lute and Sze-Meng, who are encouraged to follow in Jan and Rory's footsteps, with mixed results.
The Misuko and Linia series has gotten very complicated. After Desires, there's Response and Question, in which Misuko's commitment to Linia is tested, a small sub-arc of AIs-in-love is shown with their friends Nozumi and DeEtte, and the Elvangorean Pact is introduced-- a five-world colony attempt to create humans without sex or gender. Fragility introduced Belle, a character from the 21st Century, which gives me a chance to show the world from her point of view, and then Madships begins. It's a war. A big, complicated, hairy one I'm poorly equipped to write about, but it's what the plot gives me. It ends with Castaways and leads to Misuko dealing with her cyberphobic parents, Cthulhoid creatures, and her own guilt at starting the war.
Also as fragmentary as After Effects is Realms, a kind-of Matrix-y story about an AI who wants to shut down her cybernetically generated world, but the people who live in it won't let her. Generally, this wouldn't be a problem, but the humans also won't let others who want to leave, leave.
Then there are The Reservationist Stories, a (thus-far) three-episode series about colonies that went off and did their own thing with the human species, resulting in results that are weird, unpleasant, or downright immoral. One is a riff on Brave New World. In one case, the "reservation" doesn't know it's a reservation, but a beacon tells folks to stay away; in another, the reservation does know and is actively trying to shut down or overcome the beacon and invite people to come in. The theme is "tradition is the vote the dead try to have over the living."
Finally, there's the New Millenium stories: extending an idea at the end of The llerkin Moment, these are set around the year 37,000 and feature Ken and Aaden and P'nyssa 1.5 learning to live in a new millenium, a non-Shardik serial about a war with a crappy little Reservationist Empire, and then a new Shardik serial about aliens, falling in love, and free will overcoming one's inclinations, natural or otherwise.
The Aimee' Series
There are five novels remaining in the Aimee series. A Visit To Purik is, pure and simple, an excuse to get Aimee into bed with several different people and see how she reacts. It does set up some background about the last great War of Elves and Dragons, and leaves some data for the last novel. It's five or six chapters, each about ten thousand words.
The Imperial City is a little more complicated, and getting worse all of the time. Darynn and Aimee travel back to the home country, where Darynn is asked to do the impossible: arrange that the Emperor meet with the Satyrs. They become embroiled in a conspiracy, deal with dragons, the undead, Elves, and mysterious sorceresses. Aimee discovers that she is, essentially, monogamous and only a little bisexual, and that her chosen husband makes for a pretty good detective.
The Fall of Ircsentai covers the Second Elf And Dragon War. We discover where the Elves went and why there are so few around now, learn where the Dark Elves have holed up and why, and generally have lots of big, nasty explosions, leaving a "hole the size of Nebraska" in the end. It also causes The Great Plague, a spoilsport of sorts should the Dark Elves lose the war.
Miri's Service is a novel set about three hundred years later. Miri doesn't believe in magic, despite having Darynn's father for an ancestor. Of course, her mother knows better and soon enough Miri is being packed off to Barraminum, against her will, to become a mage. What she finds is a city deep in decadence, feeding off the capital created when one-third of the population died off and is only now recovering. She winds up assigned to the eromancer not because she has any skill at it but because the eromancer "needs" an apprentice to pimp out under the guise of "teaching." It's very ugly, and Miri ends up a wreck. How she gets out of it is anyone's guess... mine included, at this point. Miri's Service is likely to be my NaNoWriMo project.
Darrynwhore is set 150 years after that. It's the disaster I wrote for last year's NaNoWriMo project, that I hope to get something useful out of it. Unlike Miri, Virginia is a great eromancer and a great mage... she's also addicted to magic. And the kind of magic she's addicted to is also the kind she's best at. Throw in a lost relic of Purik, the bones of a dead Evil Dragon, and a naive Magic Use Law Enforcement trainee... and it should be one hell of a story, but it's just mush. Ah, well. I'll try again.
I've been tinkering with a different kind of fantasy series, kinda like what Kay did with his Sarantine Mosaic series, only making a mutant Romanesque-with-magic fantasy. It is scheduled to be a 50-episode series: 5 internal arcs, each covering about a year, each with 10 episodes. It's about a slaveowner mage with some rather nasty kinks who, over time, comes to realize just how twisted the Republic has become and sets in motion a plan to turn the merchantilist, slave-powered Republic into one in which every man is free to trade his worth for his daily bread. Along the way, he repents of his own evil needs-- only to learn that even the best of intentions can have unintended consequences.
It's funny how stories grow. This whole idea was born when the following couplet sprang into my head one morning in the shower.
Veta turned on him, eyes narrowed and hot. "If you cast this spell, I shall hate you!"
He nodded. He knew that she didn't mean it. She couldn't mean it. Not with the loyalty geas on her. In her eyes, she didn't mean it. She could never mean it. She loved him.
"Yes," he said, loss gripping his chest with fingers of ice. "You probably will."
In other stories, I have bits of silliness: a Tron slash and a Candyland slash.
I have no plans at this time to write a sequel to Bloody Beth. If I ever find interest in 17th century India or China, I may find an excuse for putting Beth back on the water, but nothing current.
I also don't have much to say about Sarah's Reason at this point. It was supposed to be a young adult novel about coming of age at a time when your species' main raison d'etre has been eliminated, but I've never been able to get a story to gel around the idea, especially not one that would appeal to people who don't read lit'ra'chur, doncha' know.
no subject
Date: 2003-09-13 11:00 am (UTC)