Yes, I just added fiction to the neverending series of projects that float mostly unimpeded in my brain. Well, that’s not exactly true. It’s always been up there; it’s just been sitting on a back burner.
As I wrote on Facebook, for those of you who are my friends there, I got into writing fiction some time in the naughts and I had a great time. The feedback was very good, almost a narcotic really. The more positive feedback I received, the more I produced and the more people really seemed to enjoy my stories. As I also stated on my Facebook post, when I was most prolific, I had considered a career in writing. One of the Barscapers was a published author and I reached out to her for tips on how to get started in the trade and her advice was warmly given and received. I’ll say it again, in the days before corporatized socialization, aka social media, we had a very good social group of varied backgrounds and our members spanned the globe. Nothing provided by the corporate world boffins has approached this experience since.
Unfortunately, therein lay our downfall. We were the mom & pop shop of the Internet and I was doing all of the admin work behind the scenes. While the core software was phpBB, I had tweaked the hell out of it, adding features and filters behind the scenes. But our audience was too low and our visibility was nonexistent. I also had that pesky day job and a first marriage that was limping along and an autistic child to raise. When MySpace came onto the scene with its initial promise of connectivity and socialization, the Great Exodus from Barscape began, only to be completed once Facebook came onto the scene. Throw in a major phpBB software upgrade that broke most of the customizations that I had added to the platform and the writing was on the wall. I finally pulled the plug when only 3 of us were still logging on with any sense of regularity. At our height, our conversation threads, which contained 20 posts per page, would run several pages each night. When the page count hit 200 (or 4000 posts), we would start a new conversation thread, each based on a new sci-fi/fantasy-themed “bar” complete with some graphic we’d pull off the Internet. And we would start anew. Again, at our height, we would spin up a new bar every other day. At the end, the last bar lasted over a year, with each post consisting of the type of talk that people say when they haven’t seen each other in a while. “You’re still here? What have you been up to?”
Which leads me to the primary point of this post. While I think I wrote a good hook to continue a long-running story from this platform, it’s actually the fifth story in a series that has only seen 2½ stories “published”. When the Great Exodus began, I was in the middle of writing a third story in what was known as the FeldChronicles, loosely based on my artificial role-playing persona from the forum. With people showing up less and less, and some personal life things going on in the background, the third story in the series was left hanging and never published. I know where it’s going, but it was never written.
I started writing a fourth story in the series about 6-8 years ago in an attempt to find an outlet for various interesting (to me) plot points that I thought would make for an interesting continuation to the saga. It began some time from the end of the third story and the hook … well, I don’t want to give anything away. Or too much. Quite a bit of my stories ask questions about robotics and AI and the meaning and definition of sentience. These two stories were going to be no different.
The Challenges of Writing Live and From History
Which leads me to “Rogues…”. The opening scene was a common one for some of the situational stories I’d written years ago. Except, all is gone… fitting for what remains of the Barscape site… a database dump and a collection of avatars, images and custom GIF emojis on my hard drive. The Feldmarschal has arrived back at what was once a flourishing, yet hidden, community of friends and rogues and independent thinkers and dreamers. But his return is more escape than reunion. That much is probably obvious.
So, where do we go from here? There are many challenges in restarting the saga. One is the nature of the original works. They were based on the interactions of a live community, with some artistic license on my part, and there were quite a few inside jokes that other readers won’t get. A second is the obvious appropriation of characters from copyright-protected franchises. We as a community “borrowed” heavily; for example, one of our members went by the pseudonym “Han Solo”. Of course, we weren’t looking to rewrite canon or anything, but my stories included those characters and blended their on-line personas with interpretations of the official characterizations. As the roots of Barscape was as a Farscape fan site, my use of Farscape-style swearing in the dialog appears throughout. Dealing with this reality while also trying to open up the audience to the story leaves me with a challenge, which I’ll get into detail a little bit later.
Finally, there is the state of the storyline itself. I only released 2½ stories for “publication”. While I could just hand-wave things a bit, I discovered while writing chapter one (already in draft form) that the dialog becomes too cryptic even for the ex-‘Scapers who don’t know about my ideas for the intervening unpublished 1½ stories. For everyone else who might be drawn to my site, the story becomes a head-scratcher and won’t make much sense. Spoiler: why is Ebony sewing a quilt? If you knew, you knew and if you’d read the second story, you would most definitely know.
So… do I republish the old stories? I think I should. Do I rewrite some of the more obvious Star-Wars character rip-offs? I kinda want to, but as the second story exceeded 60 chapters, that’s a lot of rework and a fun project just became a job. At the very least, I should finish the third story and write the fourth story, although I could probably merge the fourth story into the current one in “Star Trek, The Menagerie” style.
It’s all doable, but again, I have games to develop, games to design, software to write, hardware to frell around with, cocktails to mix, genealogy to research, and, most importantly, family to love and spend time with. My pesky day job is no more. If any of you wondered why I didn’t take on another job, wonder no more.
Is it Time to be Serious?
I hate scheduling. My work estimates were the bane of my managers. My excuse: creativity knows nothing of clocks, unless you’re Salvador Dali. That said, if you’re going to be publicly creative, you need to set some sort of expectation. People who are interested in what you make want to look forward to the next thing, and they’d like it sooner rather than later. Even an “I’m sorry” comment is better than silence.
So… I will attempt to post something related to fiction writing on this blog every week or couple of weeks or so. I don’t know which day yet; it’ll probably evolve into something I can’t quite predict yet. Some of it will be a re-posting of old stories. We’ll see how it goes. It’ll either thrive or die quietly.
This blog supports the registration of user accounts. I have it disabled because I don’t want to keep swatting spammers away from the site. However, I can open it up for some small windows of time to allow for new user registrations, for the sole primary reason that feedback is welcome and encouraged, for the fiction as well as the other stuff. If you reply with a Facebook comment to the post which contains the link to this blog post, I will work out a way for you to notify me that you’d like to join this blog’s direct audience. Maybe there’s an invitation method or something. I’ll figure something out.
The Next Installment?
Rogues – Chapter One is in draft form in two places. The first half is on my iPad; the second half exists in draft form on this site. My iPad ran out of battery as I was in the middle of a writing spurt and my other available system was my Linux laptop. I should use this site for all future writing.
The chapter’s main elements have been written, but it needs some editing and a bit more dialog. Some of the scene feels rushed b/c I wanted to get the main plot point down in writing. I repeated a turn of phrase or two in the dialog as well; I may keep them in as a focal point for the reader with some minor adjustment.
Stay tuned… please…