The First Taste
I have updated the character profile PDF and placed a work in progress, The First Taste, on The Goods page; feel free to go download both and let me know what you think.
To fill you in on The First Taste, it is literally the first taste of my writing for this project, and a glimpse, perhaps, of what’s to come. It’s by no means perfect, complete, or authoritative on this project at this point, just me stretching my legs for this project. The title comes from the Fiona Apple song of the same name (I strongly encourage looking it up and giving it a listen), which came on at a time that I was considering the core plot, the core story, of our project. It is what led me down the path to awkward romance between hero and villain, and I started thinking more and more about who our villain really was. Thinking about that made me want to explore who she was in a context that was only tangentially connected to our story.
That said, The First Taste may get absorbed and utilized in the final work for Caught in the 3rd Act, but at least right now, it’s merely exploratory. And early.
As for what’s there, I suppose I should give you a bit of background on me to help you understand why it’s particularly technical so far and not completely inaccurate. Before I decided to work towards being a professional writer so many years ago, one of my first loves was computer programming. Although I’ve never been employed as what I would call a software engineer, I’ve been writing programs in a host of languages for over 35 years, and have a pretty solid idea of what goes into software engineering and the understanding that as experienced as I am, I know only some of the high level stuff that I was taught or learned over the decades. Twenty years ago I was marveling at the Assembly language demo teams like Future Crew (see “Second Reality“!) and what they could do, and software engineers have done nothing but get more amazing since then. Nonetheless, I have been heavily tracking developments in software and hardware forever, but only occasionally tried to incorporate any of that knowledge into stories. Most of the time, it’s irrelevant, the details behind technology are very rarely important to the story; but in this case, with The First Taste and the story for Cit3A, it will play at least as important a role as some of the characters, so I thought it appropriate to bring it to the forefront.
The story, as it goes on to completion, will be less technical and more developmental about Aoi Katsuragi — “Blue Usagi”. (Katsuragi is not Usagi/rabbit; I decided on her real last name yesterday as well though she will go by Blue Usagi on the internet.)
In the meantime, please leave me some feedback! What did you like, what didn’t you like, should Aoi (blue) be renamed Akai (red)? For God’s sake, speak to me!