Monday, February 9th

The State of the Me

I woke up bright and early, full of energy and ideas at 6 this morning. I did some writing before crashing after breakfast and sleeping for another three hours. I'm feeling pretty good now, though I am technically behind a bit on the day.

I didn't do my planned thing of having caffeine with breakfast because so full of energy then. I'm not sure under the circumstances if it would have been better to or not, as I feel like I probably did need the sleep.

The Daily Report

Well, my crash on Friday means that I am a day behind. I think I could have rolled with it if I hadn't had the weird start to today, but under the circumstances, I think I'm going to have to hold to my rule about not updating Tales of MU if I don't have full confidence in the chapter. It'll update Tuesday and Thursday this week.

The story I started last weekend is still shaping up pretty well, though I added a lot less to it during the week than I expected due to the side project. I'm aware I still haven't said much about it besides the fact that it exists. The first order of business after I get done posting this will be to make a post explaining what it is.

Plans For Today

As mentioned, first order of business is a post about my new story. Then I'm going to be setting up my MU drafts for the week, then threshing out tomorrow's chapter.

Project Lucidity

So, this story grew out of a dream I the Sunday before last. It's more "adaptation" than "transcription", as the actual dream itself would have made for a fairly incoherent and silly story when stripped of the innate suspension of disbelief brought by being inside a dream.

When I first started scribbling around with it, I wasn't sure it would go anywhere, but now I feel like it could be the next big thing in my life, a sort of spiritual successor to Tales of MU. TOMU was conceived of as a sort of "freshman" story... I wanted to write about immature people making mistakes. I started writing it in my twenties mid-to-late twenties when I still very much felt like a gawky kid. It's increasingly weird to find myself still writing about people in that phase of life in my mid thirties, which is why I've been nudging the main character through some maturation over the past semester of story. I'm not sure how far I want to take those changes, or how far I can without threatening the integrity of the story., though.

So enter Project Lucidity, which is a story that starts from a more secure, emotionally mature point of view from both the protagonist and writer. Rather than including a sexually repressed freshman's entrance into the world of kink and sex, it's going to be about a sexually awakened adult's entrance into a world of science fiction.

For Project Lucidity, I'm hoping to recapture some of what makes Tales of MU work so well: a speculative fiction premise that allows for interesting worldbuilding and "how things work" digressions, queer representation and kinky themes, and storylines that flow from characterization.

Project Lucidity is a science fiction story in a genre you might call neo-cyberpunk. It's set in the modern world with a few technological leaps in the field of human/computer interaction, which have disproportionately been adopted and pushed to their limits in the area of entertainment, particularly porn and video games.

The big advance is a device called a neural inducer, which allows the human brain to not only send and receive input to a computer directly, but also uses the brain's fantastic fuzzy heuristic-based parallel processing power to do a portion of the crunching for a program.

One of the limitations that has stopped the inducer technology from being more widely adopted is that they have to be calibrated based on some basic assumptions about how the brain processes information. Since everybody's brain is a little different (and some people's are very different), the process does not work for everyone, and does not work equally well for everyone. The people who get the best results are often those who have the chops to tailor the bridge program for their own neurology, or know someone who can do so.

The individual nature of the inducer process along with a media-driven scare campaign about mind-reading/brainwashing dangers has prevented large-scale commercial exploitation of it for entertainment purposes, but there is a large community of hobbyists who produce inducers and programs for them.

The largest single use of inducers is a sprawling, de-centralized semi-open source MMO called MUDscape (Multi-User Dreamscape) that's somewhere between Second Life and the traditional class/level-based games. The MUDscape is made up of a number of "realms" run by private individuals and groups all running the MUDscape code on a server. The rules and parameters of each realm are set by the owner, though the core program has to remain the same or the portals that connect it to other realms in the MUDscape will be locked. Some realms are basically games unto themselves, where one might be a deep immersion roleplay of vampire clan power politics, while another is a wacky, anything-goes capture the flag thing.

Because of the way the individual realm servers (called nodes) connect, there are multiple competing "forks" of the MUDscape code, each with their own network of nodes, but as often happens, the version that got an early lead is by and far away the most popular and largest one.

The viewpoint character for this story is Lucille Donato, who goes online by the handle LuciD. The fact that the double meaning of "Luci D" and "lucid" works much better in text than spoken aloud is remarked upon in the story. She's a veteran of text-based roleplaying and traditional (text-based) MUDs who is introduced to neural induction during her first trip to a local BDSM club, where she learns that due to some quirks of her brain she has some unique abilities. Like a lucid dreamer, she's more acutely aware of the world of the game, able to perceive things in terms of the variables and data structures, not just the finished product that she's supposed to be conscious of.

I'm trying to avoid the 90s trope of "virtual reality equals superpowers" that was so ridiculously common, and so ridiculously executed. The fact that the user's brain provides some of the platform for executing code is meant to give a little cover for the idea that some people would be able to gain access to variables that should be hidden from them. An induced reality could run on the principle of "you are as strong and fast as you think you are" a la the Matrix, but that's impractical. Within the MUDscape, LuciD can't just think herself stronger or faster (if she could alter her character's code, the server would detect the discrepancy and flag it as cheating), but she has a much more perfect awareness of her alternate self's capabilities than the average player, particularly the average newbie.

Because MUDscape has a formal character ability/skill/level system, just having an unusual neural situation doesn't instantly make LuciD the equivalent of the Chosen One. She's generally better than any other player at her in-game experience level and real world level of experience, she can do things that no amount of experience points allow you to do, but her power to affect the world is more or less the same as anyone else's, and she can't go toe-to-toe with higher level players. This makes her a potentially valuable pawn to the power players, but not an all-encompassing deus ex machina.

I'm still not 100% sure of the format the story will take: weblit serial, serialized novellas, actual novels. I think I'll wait until I have more story in hand and see what shape it's taking. The mid-February newsletter will contain a draft of what I have so far, though.

Thinking about story structures.

I've been thinking a lot about how to keep a sprawling, open-ended project like my preferred type of story moving forward and manageable.

I keep coming back to something I did early on in my experimentation in this form that I eventually ditched for being too arbitrary, and that was the way that the first few incarnations of Star Harbor Nights were divided into chapters of six episodes each. The pacing wasn't always perfect within the chapter, and very rarely were things entirely wrapped up with a bow at the end of the chapter (because it was a chapter), but it gave me a nice combination of space to work in and a looming story deadline for having some sense of closure, or revelation, or something else to mark the end of the chapter.

This worked really well for a giant ensemble like Star Harbor Nights, where there wasn't a single viewpoint character or focus of the story, but I think the general idea could be adapted to anything that I'm writing in the serial format, especially given how often I end up playing things by ear, sometimes by preference and sometimes by necessity.

I ditched it because I couldn't justify to myself why six-part chapters... why that number, why any number, why not let the number of installments fit the story instead of the other way around? All of which sounds very reasonable, but it ignores the point that what I was doing worked. The subsequent incarnations of SHN benefited from having a more experienced writer, but they had a greater tendency to get bogged down and go around in circles.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of Tales of MU. The current book is kind of a mix of fun-to-write-fluff and character evolution. There are a lot of question marks about what's going to follow it. One thing I might try is using this more structured approach to story arcs... possibly with a formal numbering system like SHN used (x.1, x.2, et cetera through x.6), possibly with the plotting just blocked out in chunks of 5 or 6 episodes.