05.27.07

The Hammer Of Inspiration

Posted in Anime, Metal Rogue, Writing at 8:46 am

The biggest thing that bothered me about writing Inconsequential was that I had to make references to a whole mess of ‘fictional’ series. I only really created three out of whole cloth: “Nebulords”, which was only a title and a character name, but was intended to be a cheesy syndicated science-fiction yarn along the lines of “Andromeda”, “Lexx”, or a far-less-classy “Star Trek”; “By Love Alone”, a title I cribbed from a Brian Setzer song and was going to be a sweet romantic comedy with elements of schizophrenia (don’t ask me how it was going to work– that literally is all the development it ever got); and “Final Century Metal Rogue”, which wound up being the most developed of the metafictions simply because I had to fill space with a dream sequence. It was the most-referenced of the ‘original’ scenarios; the other ’series’ was “A Game Of Lords” (my first abandoned novel, which I am going to go back to someday, I swear), and the MMO referenced in the book (”Empire of the Sun”) was basically a name slapped onto what I envisioned as ‘World of Romance of the Three Kingdoms’.

Of all of those, the one that I hated most of all– “Metal Rogue”– wound up occupying most of my attention. As most of you know, I don’t really follow giant-robot anime all that much. It was a struggle to get me interested in Gundam SeeD, though that paid off (and as soon as Bandai smartens up and releases boxed sets of SeeD and Destiny, I am so all over those); I could not get into RahXephon, no matter how much people tried, and Eva’s only saving grace was that it wasn’t really a giant-robot show so much as it was “let’s screw with the idea of the ’self’ so much that even WE don’t know what the hell is going on”. In the end, I found myself thinking about the Metal Rogue and its battles far too much for my liking. Like I said, it inadvertantly became the most-developed of the metafictional series.

Why waste all that effort?

So, I suppose now is the best time to announce it. I am starting a side-project that will be a “semi-professional” effort: the Metal Rogue Trilogy. I’m not going to expand it into a full novel all at once; rather, it’s going to be a short set of “light novels” (to steal the Japanese euphemism; the best analogy in the English-speaking world would be “longer chap-books”, as in “what Stephen King’s The Green Mile would have been if he had written it in three volumes instead of six”) that are going to be self-published through Lulu. The first one… well, we’ll see how long it takes to write the first one. I fully expect it to take a while but I suppose if I commit myself to it (as I did in the final week of writing Incon) I could get it done soon enough. I certainly won’t be writing it all at once, either– this first one is just going to be a stopgap until November and my next NaNo idea comes to me. Besides, my real roots are in crappy science-fiction; I figure that if my stuff could at least earn me a few extra bucks, it’s all good, right?

First things first, though– an outline. So, I’ll catch you folks later.

(Incidentally, and for those of you thinking about it– yes, finishing Crest of the Stars did give me the idea, though indirectly. I have to be careful not to actually rip off Crest, though, which is not going to be hard because most of MR’s development happened before I had seen or read much of Crest. Also: Pez, next time I see you, I’m going to pester you to read Crest. It’s that good.)

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