Friday, May 4, 2018

May 2018 Update

Last month, I shared a short story written for what I have in mind for a series set in the world of Neostriker: Shining. As you can probably see, the style is different than the Legends series I was posting before. I still plan to work on Legends, especially since I do have one story that I would like to write. One thing you might notice is that Neostriker works a bit differently in each of the stories, and that's something I decided after writing Shining back in 2009. The core would be the same in that Neostriker would be spirit-based, but how that would come into play would vary from series to series. Now let's dive into elements I intend to build the new series on as shown in this short story.

First element to point out is that David and company are not the main characters. This has always been the plan. This helps keep Shining as it's own complete story and I really don't have a story where they are the main characters.

The second element I want to try to expand is the continued link between dialog and combat. There are hints of it in Shining. Perhaps I will mostly use the same model as in Shining, but as this story shows, I want to focus on the dialog more and have that dictate the action. There is another model I'm considering where it'd be like a detective story where there is a battle and in the aftermath, a conversation. At the same time, I'm open to the possibility that some stories won't have any fights at all, sort of like the chase chapter in Shining or some stories in Legends.

The third element of the stories I'm planning is the task force model. Rather than being an adventure, the new series would simply be stories taking place in the same general area. My thought is that this would be a combination of superhero vigilantes, but they are actually a government force tasked with stopping evil Neostrikers. Part of that would be the use of human operators rather than Asens.

The fourth element is the additional combat mechanics. At the moment, I have two planned though they are pretty much related to each other. One isn't shown in this story, but it is related to the second element I mentioned above. The other mechanic is actually an old one that I didn't include in Shining called purification. While you could see Jenny do purification, it was actually a combat mechanic that the warriors would use.

The fifth element is the kind of topics the stories bring up. Arguably, this short story is more mature than all of Shining since it focuses on depressing matters like suicide, depression, and heartbreak. While I intend to stay away from having profanity and sex in my stories, I figure a topic that might concern a twelve-year-old is important to cover. I believe I was 10 when I I had a thought of committing suicide. And we also know there are stories of adolescents committing it even on live video feeds. As a result, I think providing good stories that help bring up the conversations while also providing some answers to help prevent such depressing actions is a good thing to do. Therefore, a large focus of this series would be examining everyday issues and questions youth may have.

The final element that I want to include is the letter at the end of the story. I actually originally had another story that I wanted to do based off the rival I mentioned before since there was great dialog and action, but there wasn't a good letter for that yet. These letters are based off the letters you can read from N. D. Moharo's blog, though I'm still working out how I want it to work.

How did you like the short story? What do you think about these 6 elements that I plan to base the new series on. Do you think the short story did a good job as a proof of concept? I would love to hear your thoughts about what worked and what didn't. I especially would like to know if you are interested in reading more stories like this.

Dream On!
J. D. Nyle