Metal Rogue Progress Update: Chapter Two is complete, after a long stretch of distraction and disaster. I also managed to get more of the world internally consistent and more whole. Current word count is (cue meme) OVER NINE THOUSAND!!. Setup is over, now it’s time for the action to begin; so naturally I’m shifting back to the Senate scenes in the next chapter.

I’m also working on a short story (unrelated to MR) for a contest; I’ve no idea as to whether or not the tale will be any good, as I’m only about halfway through it right now, but I’m already far more confident about it than I was when I first wrote it back in 1999. It was seriously bad then. I’m talking awful, heartless, soulless, written-around-a-Billy-Joel-song bad here. I managed to strip out the lifted lyrics from the original version; what was left was about six sentences long and completely incoherent. Actually, what I’ve been rewriting now is pretty damn incoherent, too. But in an artsy kind of way. Sort of an “Uh?”-Nouveau approach to the tale. All right, yeah, that sucks too, but that’s what the drafts are for.

A lot of writing is about recognizing bad past work for what it is and having the courage to re-do it. I’ve literally thrown away older work just because it wasn’t good, and regretted it six months or even six years later because I found I had a couple good lines in there. I now know better than to discard anything, anything at all. I’ve been backing up my scrap files, I’ve been burning DVDs of the work… Every idea I have gets stored for later or for retooling, or even just so I can say “hey, I already thought of that”. 90% of the writing I’ve done has just been half-baked ideas without any real commitment to them, but they get saved just as much as a novel I’m pushing through.

Anyway, that’s that. I’ll probably slack off for another month before the next MR chapter gets finished, but meh.

Oh, incidentally, I did finish watching Ouran Host Club this weekend, and I have a bit to say about it… but later.

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.

First, though, the matter of my crippling lack of self-esteem. To be perfectly honest I don’t think it’s going to be terrible. There is going to be some amount of technical skill involved; it’s not going to read like really bad fan fiction. However, the outline I drew up yesterday (and I got a little more of it fleshed out last night, too) is in no way reminiscent of Tom Clancy or Robert Jordan. This story isn’t exactly treading any original waters, though the situation, characters, and scenario are all more or less from whole cloth (in the end, I only wound up cribbing two names from Inconsequential, one in a way I didn’t even anticipate). By self-publishing, I can have a finished book or two out there and “public” while I concentrate on other, more polished projects. Metal Rogue is more or less my ‘hobby’ book, and by removing the pressure of “will people like this?” I can actually enjoy the writing a bit more. Not to say I don’t enjoy writing to begin with– if I didn’t, do you think I’d do it more or less every day?– but it reduces the stress level significantly, which means I’m less likely to put it off, thinking “that’s too stressful for me to do right now, I’m going to go eat Ding Dongs and play Uno”.

The other reason is sort of a selfish one, and really sort of a shot in the dark. See, I have nothing published yet. Everything I do have published is on Netjak and bears little to no resemblance to my fiction. (I removed all of my fan fiction from the RPGamer archives, I think; that was something I needed to do, so that I didn’t go back and rely too much on that.) By self-publishing this ‘off-Broadway’ series, assuming, y’know, it sells at all, I can get a little bit of acclaim and build up a little momentum in getting Incon or another full novel published. The money certainly wouldn’t hurt, either, but mostly it’s just getting something out there. I have no idea whether or not even hinting that I’m going to self-publish Metal Rogue will hurt Incon in the long run (though I don’t believe it will).

In any event, what you’ve all been waiting for; in what I hope to be a very, very short series, I give you the first:
Metal Rogue Progress Update: Outlines for the first two books have been completed and underwent some slight metamorphosis already. The third book outline is sketched out in a brief synopsis; I’ll probably flesh that out closer to the end of the first book. Book One’s prologue has 1100 words to it so far and I hope to have that finished at some point today between all the other things I need to do. So, without further delay, I’ll get right back to that.

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.)