Alright, update time. Let’s do this.
Overall, this was another slow week. In fact, for most of the past week I didn’t write at all: I kept opening up Usi Book 1, but just couldn’t motivate myself to work on it. And so, with school getting busier as well, I decided to take a short break from working on writing fresh copy, and just get a few more short stories edited and sent off to publications.
I’ll get to those short stories in a second, but first let me just say the first Usi book has been way more challenging than I anticipated. I have the basic plot structure clear in my head – Zuza’s character arc is all laid out and ready to go – but the worldbuilding especially has slowed me down. Making sure the way magic works in this world and the way all the different races/societies interact with one another makes some semblance of sense is a big task. And plotting the first few chapters has been difficult, too: making sure the story doesn’t just stop dead after I introduce the main conflict in chapters 1 and 2. I’m still optimistic that I can get a first draft of this thing done by the end of June – once I reach the real meat of the plot, the writing will go faster, I think – but those first few chapters have been a slog so far.
Anyway, that brings me to the short stories. I’ve made more progress on short stories than I have novels recently; the first of these, of course, is Find and Exterminate, which I got sent off a few days ago. This story is just the first of a whole series I plan to write sooner or later, tentatively called the blueblood tales. Set in the mid-22nd century, they describe a world where strong AI capable of true independent thought has been created. A subset of these strong AI then eventually decided to create human forms for themselves to inhabit: this, essentially, creates a new race of humans (or human-like beings, depending on who you ask). These new people are indistinguishable from more “traditional” human beings (who’re referred to as redbloods) in most ways; one difference, though, as you may have guessed, is the colour of their blood (red for the redbloods, blue for the bluebloods).
The plan at the moment (although I reserve the right, as always, to change these plans) is to write a whole bunch of stories set in this universe: though them, I plan to ask the question: where do we draw the line between a person and a non-person? More than that, where do we draw the line between a human and a non-human? And how would a group of strong AI deciding to “become” human affect the wider world? Especially in the wake of the radical changes the introduction of strong AI would bring about in the first place? These are all fascinating questions, and I hope to explore them (among others) in, again, a whole bunch of short stories, the second of which I’m writing right now.
I also sent off another short story unrelated to the blueblood stories: this one’s called A Test of Doubt, and basically explores what would happen if God himself came down from the heavens and faced a non-believer in the flesh (or, at least, what I think might happen). I’ve got another story in the pipe, A Test of Faith, which will basically be the inverse of this question: the two stories would then act as a sort of mirror to one another…assuming, of course, that they actually get published.
And that, of course, is the rub.
With all these short story ideas raining down around me, and my school schedule ramping up, it’s made working on novels a bit more difficult. Usi Book 1 is still my top priority in that regard, but I’ve also still got the Kosan rewrite to think about…and I suppose I should actually finish The 2nd Realm at some point…and sooner or later I’ll need to edit The Ravage and Nightmares Inc. so I can show them off to beta readers.
Busy, busy, busy.
Thank goodness I have no life. That makes things a little easier.
Anyway, I should probably sign off for now. Until next time, have fun, stay safe, and keep reading.
