Plan for Neostriker Sabre

Happy New Year!

Over the course of the New Year holidays, I published my short story Intent to Join on Kindle and Kindle Unlimited. It's approximately a 30 minute read and only $1. While it's not the first story I wrote for SABRE, it was one that I felt like was in good shape and a good story that would convey my intentions for the series. (Sample with first scene below)


SABRE is indeed set after Neostriker: Shining, but I'm also trying to make it not necessary to read the novel. This is helped by the facts that the main cast is not the same and it's set in the future.

One thing I wanted to do with Shining is to make each episode like an episode of the TV shows I grew up watching. Arguably this was before arcs started to be a main thing. What I liked was this meant each episode pretty much stood on its own with only a quick explanation about maybe an event or character required. This was also important because I would miss a lot of episodes and reruns were not always in order. At the same time, I liked being able to know which episode I liked so that I could re-watch it as much as I liked. As my son has been watching Thomas and Friends, I have greatly grown to appreciate this stand-alone structure more.

In the end, I made partial success in my goal for Shining. Each episode was pretty much unique and could be enjoyed at least partially if not mostly on its own. This is in part because Shining is a complete story and a novel. SABRE, on the other hand, was always intended to be serialized like Sherlock Holmes stories. I did plan a couple of novels to bookend SABRE, but I think I'll toss that out. As a result, SABRE may resemble more like Detective Conan where many episodes and cases are stand-alone, but there are a few arcs scattered around.

Now let me explain the tone idea I have for SABRE. The way I view Shining is that it's like the original Star Wars movie. It's mostly light-hearted and fun, establishes the core of Neostriker, and I think can be enjoyed by a large age range. My youngest reader was in middle school and oldest non-biased reader is late-twenties/early thirties. If it was animated or in comic form, I think even 4 year-olds would have fun, just like they would with the original Digimon series.

In contrast, I intend SABRE to be more like Empire Strikes Back and the 90's Batman the Animated Series and the Spectacular Spider-man TV series. What I hope this means is that it can be enjoyed by younger audiences, but I also don't intend to talk down. Occasionally there may be a dark scene or episode that covers more mature topics, but I plan for the stories to be more of platforms for allowing kids to talk to their parents about them and potentially propose a solution to dealing with an issue. To that end, I think Intent to Join is a fair representation of how I plan to go about.

I hope you take a look at Intent to Join and enjoy it. I'm also trying out a few new things and storytelling tactics so I would love to get some feedback. And if you enjoy that, I hope you would also take a look at Neostriker: Shining.

Dream on!

J. D. Nyle