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NEWS AND VIEWS - OCTOBER 2023
WRITING NEWS An unusually productive month. I finished writing the new Sam Fortune novel -- Sam Fortune and the Hazards of the Game -- outlined most of a visual novel called Grim's Company (a dark fantasy with a couple of different paths for the player to take), and got started on the outline for the tenth Signalverse book. The new Sam Fortune novel turned out really well, I think. There's not quite as much globetrotting as there was in the first book (it takes place mostly in California) but it's got some fun new characters and a lot of spicy 1920's slang. I plan to release it early next year, probably in March or April. Still hoping to get Galatea and the Dupe out by the end of the year, meanwhile. At the moment the release schedule for the Signalverse looks something like this: Galatea and the Dupe (2023), City of Strange Gods (late summer 2024), Special Squad E (early 2025), and the second edition of The Complete Guide to the Signalverse (probably late 2025). These dates are, of course, subject to change; I do have a tendency to get sidetracked by other projects. * * * * * * * * JUVENILIA I've been writing fiction since I was a kid, but pretty much everything I wrote before the Azuraan series (2010-2011) was very, very bad. Most of it was dumb, clichéd fantasy, full of plucky heroes, invincible knights, dark lords, and so on, but I also wrote a cyberpunk novel and a couple of short stories about a detective with psychic powers, which were equally bad. (And if I'm being honest, the Azuraan stories aren't all that great, either. They're not embarrassingly bad, and they remain available on Amazon, but unless you're determined to read everything I've written I don't really recommend checking them out, especially since I'm probably never going to finish the series.) I've mentioned this before, but one of the first stories I wrote was a (poor) novelization of the Sega Genesis classic Shining Force. I wrote it out longhand, on wide-ruled notebook paper, and at the end of each chapter I even wrote "Do you want to continue?" followed by drawings of the nodding head ("Yes") and the shaking head ("No") from Shining Force's menu interface. I got about five or six chapters into it. Eventually I decided that I'd rather write my own stories, but my first few attempts were all basically Shining Force rip-off's. The Chronicles of Simon the Light-Wielder was about a swordsman named Simon who gathers a team of wizards, centaur-knights, and soldiers, and goes off to fight the evil Darcane, the evil ruler of the evil Axacann Empire. So yeah, pretty derivative. I got about ten or twelve chapters into it before moving on to something else -- which was typical; it was rare for me to actually finish writing a story. I had lots of ideas, for stories and characters and scenes, but I never bothered with outlines (I just made stuff up as I went along) and I had no writerly discipline, so eventually I'd get bored with whatever I was working on and move on to some other project. 
I kept at it, though. In high school I got about halfway through a novel called The Broken Crystal, a fantasy about which I remember very little. I think there might have been elves in it. In my senior year I also wrote those short stories about the psychic detective; as I recall they mostly consisted of fight scenes. In college I wrote an entire 100,000-word novel called Last of the High-Born, which was another fantasy. This one was about a young "ghostknight" (sort of a Jedi, I guess) named Azen whose dying uncle's last request is for him to escort a mysterious little girl to a temple on the other side of the world. He's accompanied by a feisty princess and pursued by another ghostknight, who has his own agenda. The setting was probably the most interesting thing about this novel; it takes place in a world with literally hundreds of different humanoid races. Unfortunately it was also very bad, with a plot partly ripped off from Elfstones of Shannara. I submitted this one to Tor, but they rejected it, thank goodness. After that, inspired by the Sega CD game Snatcher, Lawrence Watt-Evans's Nightside City, and the anime Outlaw Star, I wrote a short cyberpunk detective novel called Ether. The story stinks, but I liked the characters in this book and I've occasionally toyed with idea of rewriting it, or of reworking it into a visual novel or something. It's probably not worth it, though. After Ether I tried writing a light-hearted fantasy called The Shadow Prince, but only got about halfway into it (about 40,000 words) before giving up. It was about a young man named Tay who rescues a slave girl on a whim, only to discover that she's actually a princess of a distant land. She promises him a huge reward if he can get her safely home...but in order to get there, they have to cross through this dangerous, demon-haunted region which has been totally devastated by bizarre magic spells. I struggled with The Shadow Prince for something like three years -- I just couldn't seem to get the story to go the way I wanted it. It was very frustrating. I eventually decided the whole thing was a lost cause and started writing the Azuraan novellas instead, although I did wind up repurposing some aspects of the story and setting for the later Chemical Empires series. Those were the major projects, but I also wrote several short fantasy stories, which I sent to some magazines, and a very weird story called More Real, which took place in the aftermath of a strange kind of apocalypse: something called "the Light" has killed billions of people, blinded most of the survivors, and "pushed" a handful of people's souls out of their bodies, turning them into these ghostlike entities. At the same instant, thousands of huge glass pyramids appear all over the world, and anyone who gets close to one experiences terrifying visions. It was very dark, especially for me. The Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy rejected it, but the editor wrote me a note saying he did like writing (just not the story), which was encouraging. So yeah, pretty much everything I wrote pre-Azuraan was bad, and even Azuraan isn't all that great. As a writer, I'm a very late bloomer; I don't think I started to get the hang of it until I was about thirty years old, and I still worry that my prose isn't quite what it could be. Ah, well. It is what it is. * * * * * * * * DEAD OF THE BRAIN To get myself into the Halloween spirit this year I played through a fan translation of Dead of the Brain, a horror-themed adventure game created by the Japanese developer FairyTale and released for the PC-98 line of computers in Japan in 1992. According to HG101's invaluable Japanese Video Game Obscurities, FairyTale was mostly known for making sleazy porn games, but after a kid shoplifted one of their games from a store and it turned into this big national scandal, they switched to making gory horror games instead, to try to take the heat off. The result of these efforts were the two Dead of the Brain games, which follow the adventures of protagonist Cole and his girlfriend Shela as they try to survive a Return of the Living Dead-style zombie outbreak, unwittingly unleashed by Cole's vaguely Emmett Brown-like friend Dr. Cooger. 
The story is pretty stupid, frankly -- it's full of paper-thin characters and ludicrous situations (one of the female characters inexplicably has sex with Cole five seconds after meeting him, for example). It had kind of an amusingly schlocky 80's horror movie vibe, however, which I appreciated, and it does manage to be somewhat moody and atmospheric at times, almost despite itself. Like most Japanese adventure games of this era, you're mostly just clicking "Look" and "Talk", so there's not that much actual gameplay (and there doesn't seem to be any branching paths at all), but the game does have these timed sections once in a while, where you have to think/act quickly to figure out what to do next, before the timer runs out. The fan translation I came across, meanwhile, was kind of blunt and matter-of-fact, but entirely adequate. The sequel doesn't seem to have received a fan translation yet. Hopefully soon. |