It’s different, this time around. Softbone was largely written start to finish. I kind of knew the ending I wanted, but I made it 2/3rds of the way in and had to change a lot, which changed the ending.
I was always worried about the ending: people say if you don’t write with the ending in mind that it can seem rushed or misplaced. That didn’t seem to happen. This might be that the ending was the character arc, so whatever he did would have been appropriate. The world didn’t change, it kept moving in the same direction, but Jake, he was a pussy and then he was not and all is well.
This one is different. I have some ideas, points I want to hit, and a message I want to have run through all of it. So I write scenes, vaguely where they are supposed to go, vaguely with what I want them to accomplish. They are maybe 2k words a piece, which is fine, I’ll be expanding on them later for sure.
One is the idea of the ghosts people develop in tech turning into a religion having a war against the DEI proponents in the temple. A great scene was Deborah, a chick who invented Buzzers, (like from the first book) except it’s a surrogate child, AI baby that you can stuff in the drawer while you’re going to work. It seemed a perfect satirical take on feminists and motherhood. Add a jihad at the end and it provides something for Jake. Fem-law is the devil, and the Indians worshipping ghost.
I can’t wat to expand on this and build a moral conundrum.
A troon exfil from one of the ghost people. He has some tech that almost got him killed. Like the prefab, whats this macguffin, why would Jake care, what can it do, and who wants it and why?
What I did with the Dog Walker is get about a third of the book finished then give it a read, see what kind of themes come out, then rewrite it with the main plot and character arcs added into the scenes. I’ve been going back to source material, Aeon Flux and Blade Runner and Robocop. I think there’s a ton of inspiration to steal that I’m looking forward to using.
