Jake was a cucked and long housed husband. I think the new one (working name Perdy) is going to be a lost boy, and play with the thug/simp thing from black amerian men raised by single moms dynamic (I’ll not elaborate till I decide)
I think I have a basic bitch idea. Gonna run with it and see what happens.
So I know that since I write for mostly male sensibilities, I’ll probably alienate guys, but I have an idea and I want to play with it. I wanted to have a kick ass start, but everything I came up with looks like a Van Halen reunion tour. I think about how movies do that heartwarming entrance of the main character in the sequels and I never like it. I want to have the same pop to the jaw that I did in the first one.
A junkie cuckhold scoring some drugs from a techno pimp, scared to death of an interaction. how do you top that?
I’m thinking a trans dude… or chick. I can’t remember if trans dude means MTF or FTM. If I screw up the character though I may as well kiss any future book sales goodbye. If I Republican the execution it’ll look like some anti-trans manifesto and that gimmick died when Joe Rogan and his buddies killed it with their shitty NETFLIX specials. But if I Mark Maron it, then it’ll look like I’m some lesbo in 2015 yelling at trump.
I figure I’ll take it into the RP angle. If I can take a cucked and longhouse husband and turn it into a hero, I can do the same here. Parents pick their kids gender in the Wireless, so why not play with that route? Some kind of super Karen who demanded a girl, and a husband who does the ‘happy wife happy life’ thing.
Add in some young adult angst, and a quest to get TRT, which gives him a reason to sneak off to Kowloon. A lot of game devs lately are trans, so I can make him an Amazon dev, selling tech to get a fix like a junkie. I’m still figuring it out as I go, so it’s a work in progress, but having the parents being vax zealots getting killed by the first round of jabs in the first book would be a good way for the dude to finally try to detrans. like a lost boy from Rollos work.
Throw in a Fem-Law APB because of the stolen tech for a little stakes, then Jake could be hired by UKU for an exfil to New Kowloon?
So then I can follow up the action and inciting incident with the character introductions. Jake, Nancy, the new Amazon temple they were building, and some of the repercussions of the Retro4 vax. So far I’m thinkin cabs get automated, the Jeets get laid off and form the junkie dregs of society, like a scamming group of … assaulters. Since the scavs are already predatory in the wireless, it gives a bunch of threats at once. The temple is the white flight for the progressives and Kowloon is security enforced at the barrel of a gun.
I’m basically making a cyberpunk dystopia into Baltimore/Washington. I should look into that some more see if any ideas of policies or news or social trends pan out. Because having a cyberpunk The Wire might be cool.
I’m 1500 words in so far, and I’ve got most the things introduced that I want introduced.. Once I get the first act in place I’ll swap to the 6th act and write out a rough finale… then I can slowly fill in the space between the start and end so it all flows well.
I mean, it’s not a book yet, it’s me describing a book to people with a little bit of dialogue thrown in, but the first pass is always jank.
One thing I’m trying, and I don’t know if it works or annoys the reader, is Perdy, the trans kid. I’m using X in front of the pronouns, Xe, Xhe, Xim, Xer etc. Once I get some TRT injections it switches over to him and he. I’ll have to let it simmer then come back and read it, see if it annoys me or if I can use it as a gimmick to show the Injections putting the man back in.
Then it gives me a second chapter or act to do some time skipping backwards. similar to what I did in the Dog walker. At that point I’d really want to drive the characterization of Perdy, make a compelling need and want and arc.
Big question is, I kind of want to make this one either a tragic arc, or a villain arc. I also want to tie it into the Temple as a main set piece, and play around with some ideas I got for Ghost… some kind of Astartes level tech god shit.
Basically what I did the first time. Add in all the cool shit that strikes me as relevant, then cull the stuff that doesn’t help drive the character or the story, and then alter as needed to keep everything working in the same direction.