06.01.07
Building A Travesty
Let’s start with the most obvious element:
Metal Rogue Progress Update: Chapter One is complete, with a word count just over four thousand (five and a half for the full book so far). I spent the majority of the past few days doing world-building for my own benefit and fleshing out a few more of the details of the plot and pseudo-science. Ten more chapters to go before the end of Book One.
That’s a funny phrase for me to be using, “world-building”. I’ve never really done too much overanalysis of the stories that I work on, preferring to just go ahead and make up the flavored bits as I go along. However, with MR, I’ve found that I do need to go into a very high level of detail before I even start doing the real writing simply because the plot and style demand it. I told some friends that the series is going to be an almost-pastiche of the whole giant robot genre, in that it’s going to take itself extremely seriously even when the idea is ludicrous. That may actually wind up being a lie… among other things.
See, I’m not getting into as many cliches as I thought I would be. And that, oddly enough, is the exact opposite of what I want to do. When I went over the plot with my friend, he paused and said, “That actually sounds really interesting.” Naturally, in the shower this morning, I came up with a half-dozen more bits to add on, and scribbled them down on a notepad for later typing. Over lunch, I refined the notes and fleshed out the Rogue’s capabilities (along with a few other technical things). I re-organized the outline so that the Rogue is more impressive, more unique (to get mecha-geeky, I found a way to make it a Super Robot while still being in a Real Robot universe). The end result, strangely enough, is that my notes file– a plain-text document– is just slightly larger than the OpenOffice manuscript right now.
The more I think about how Metal Rogue is shaping up and is actually becoming a “good” concept, the more I want to think about switching how I do things. I may want to throw Inconsequential at Lulu and pursue MR as the real deal. I know it’s not what would be the best course of action– after all, I’ve been encouraged by the few rejections I’ve had– but this is turning out to be a giant-robot anime that I want to watch. Ultimately, though, that’s a decision that I should put off for right now until I complete Book 1. I also ought to consider, y’know, sending out more query letters for Incon now that I have the cash to do so.