What’s Next
Well, as of last week, the first book of BRYZ finished. Thanks to everyone who read this far, and to my proofreaders Cheeto and Nor, I couldn’t’ve done it without you!
So, what comes next?
Well, as per the usual schedule, for the next three weeks’ worth of posting (including this one), I’ll post to my blog instead, and then on the 4th week, the first chapter of Summer Shadows, the BRYZ summer short will drop.
And after that? Well, that’s complicated.
As mentioned in a previous post, Penana just isn’t cutting it for me. It’s not the same website it used to be. As such, I’ve begun the process of porting my older works over to Royal Road, and unlisting them here as they are approved. Now that all the shorts are moved over, I’ll start working on the novels and novellas, along with some extensive proofreading and revising as I go. That will be a huge undertaking though, so I’m waiting until after I finish off the BRYZ summer short. I want to put the period on that, and my time with Penana, before I start moving on.
Once the short has finished and all my editing is done, I’ll be dumping my novels and novellas onto Royal Road at a rate of one chapter per day. This will burn through my content relatively quickly, but unfortunately, it seems the algorithm only favours works that post 5-7 chapters a week, which is hardly sustainable for a guy who works 12-hour shifts. As such, I’ll probably start a schedule of vanishing for a year, then popping on to dump my content in daily bursts, before vanishing again to work on the next book. This is ironically pretty similar to what an author would do, releasing a book a year. It’s not my preferred work schedule, but you gotta do what you gotta do.
Also, there will be a much larger lag between the completion of BRYZ and my next work, and there is a very good reason for this;
I have tons of ideas, and not nearly enough time for them all, so I want to try as many different medias as I can before settling back down to good ol’ writing. For example, I have a radio-drama story planned, as well as numerous visual novel ideas, and even plenty of narrative and non-narrative board games. Also, I intend to give a little freer reign to my writing. Fiction should be the freest of mediums, and while that’s an ideal I believe, it’s not really one I’ve lived. When I get back, I fully intend to be zanier than ever, writing the stories I want, even if nobody else wants them.
BRYZ
So, what’s the future of BRYZ look like?
Actually, I have no fewer than 8 books planned, something like two quadrilogies back to back. This was the first of those 8, and essentially the introduction. Things start going hard right from book 2, and they only get darker. I’m really excited to write them. But, BRYZ is also something of my child, the first story idea I came up with, and the one I want to write the most. As such, I’ll probably wait on continuing it until I’m more experienced.
If your curious about the canon, and how the side stories and summer shorts tie into it, here’s an in-depth explanation;
Essentially, BRYZ has many canons. The first and most important is the main storyline. Secondly are the spin-offs, which follow the canon, and fill in the background details. These are meant to adhere to the main canon perfectly, and are essentially supplementary reading; I.E. what’s going on in the background while our heroes complete their journey. However, they are non-essential, and will never be referenced in the main storyline.
Thirdly are the summer shorts. These are completely compatible with the canon, but follow their own cohesive canon as well. Like the spin-offs, they adhere to the main storyline and are non-essential, but they also reference each other. As such, Summer Short 2 will require the reader to have read BRYZ book 1 & 2, as well as Summer Short 1. These will have their own arc, which culminates in Summer Short 8, which not only explains a technicality in the 8th book, but also sets up the sequel. However, they will also not be mandatory reading for WYND, the sequel series. You can go into WYND having only read BRYZ.
Lastly are the side-stories. These are essentially the “filler” moments. They have no plot bearing, and no real arcs or struggles. They’re just fun slice-of-life moments with the cast. These are also non-essential and compatible with the canon, but they also tie directly into the summer short of that book, acting as a kind of prequel. However, as a prequel, one doesn’t need to read the summer short they tie into at all, and the summer shorts themselves will not reference them. However, there may be references to previous side-stories, that has yet to be decided.
I know it’s kinda complicated, but the idea is that whichever degree of BRYZ immersion you pick, the canon molds to you. If you hate filler but love extra stories, cutting the side-stories still gives you a “complete” feeling, the same as if you decide to only read the main storyline, or just the main storyline and the filler.
Next two posts
For the next two (and possibly last) main blog posts, I’ll delve into the lore of the BRYZ book 1 characters, both heroes and villains, and give a mini author’s comment on them. The next post will be devoted to the 20 Cutpurse characters we met, and the one after will be everyone else.
Teasers
So, I mentioned I’ll be writing freer, and trying out other mediums, but what will that look like? Well, for starters, I have a friend who has a really cool voice who I always wanted to narrate something for me, so I plan to have a radio-drama style story called Sunset of Humanity.
The plot synopsis is that a refugee ship crashes on a far-off planet, and with their communication systems down, they have to try to adapt to the new world. Unfortunately, the planet is a sun-baked rock that seems to support no life aside from some form of shrubmen, and any attempt for humans to leave the ship during the day results in them getting cooked alive by UV rays, even inside a spacesuit, thanks to the planet’s absurdly-close sun. As such, the humans are forced to only leave at night, in an attempt to find food and water.
However, time goes on, and they find none of these. Famine sets in, and the people get desperate.
Then, someone has an idea. They capture one of the shrubmen, and try to eat them. While they quickly find that the flesh is disgusting and inedibly fibrous, the sap is delicious, and so highly nutritious that a few sips can feed an adult for an entire day!
Emboldened by this, the humans began going out on night raids, slipping into the towns of the shrubmen while they sleep, and stealing away their populace to drink their sap. They even keep some captive, intending to farm them like the plants they are.
This comes to a head when the shrubmen form groups of Humanslayers, and invade their broken spaceship, intending to drag them all into the consuming sunlight. Eventually, after a hard battle, and under cover of darkness, the humans abandon their one way home and retreat into the caves beneath the planet, where they plan their revenge. While they do, they realize that months of consuming the shrubmen sap has started to generate unusual effects. Some can now see in the dark, others gain powers of hypnotism, or even sprout wings. How will these humans adapt to a world in which they are the monsters that go bump in the night?
Basically, there are tons of stories where the moral is “humans are the real monsters”, but it’s always symbolic, and that moral’s kinda been used to death. So I thought, what if I make it not symbolic at all? Anyways, I think a narrated version in the form of audio logs would really suit the story’s vibe.
Also, continuing the teasers section, a random thought hit me one day; Artists get to focus their hobby on whatever they want, and it’s very common that they get to bring all their little fantasies to life. Take Nor, she can (and does) draw all the hot dudes she could ever want. But me? I’ve never written anything even slightly racy.
It’s time I amended that.
But let’s be honest. Erotica lacks the potential to be interesting, and I’m not really suited for that genre anyway. So, I decided to go with a good old fashioned dark gothic horror harem story, set in the same world as Sunset of Humanity!
Taking place centuries after the humans have established themselves and formed subterranean colonies, the story begins as every good harem does, with a complete massacre. A colony of humans is completely wiped out by shrubmen Humanslayers. But what the Humanslayers don't notice is that a baby shrubman was imprisoned there, a livestock shrubmen the humans were planning on raising. He drinks deep from the spilled blood, as he grows to adulthood. As he does, he starts to change. Drinking human blood, he starts to become something of a pseudo-human himself, with horrible waking nightmares of a massacre he doesn't remember.
Fast forward, another colony under attack by shrubmen, another massacre. A group of young ladies escape through the ventilation shafts, and end up in the deep tunnels beneath the planet. There, they meet the half-human, half-shrubman. Thinking him human, they follow him to safety, and he brings them to his camp.
There, the truth is uncovered. He's really a shrubman after all! After some intense life-or-death negotiation, the girls come to realize he's not a threat. In fact, he lets them drink his blood so they don't starve. But there's something different about his sap. Usually, it takes countless shrubmen's worth of sap for humans to gain mutations with special powers, but for the girls, a few sips are enough. And something more comes across; memories, memories of death.
Each girl ends up with not just powers, but the split personality of someone who died in the massacre, who is fighting to take control of their body. Learning to make peace with them and control their powers, they embark on a mission to find a way to safety, and eventually to escape the planet, while the half-human, half-shrubman tries to unravel the mystery behind his existence.
Personally, I think it perfectly carries on the dark, sci-fi tone of the original, while still being a perfectly respectable harem-style romance.
Lastly, I mentioned I want to design board games. I have literally several dozen designs written down, some just in the ideas phase, some half-made, some even printed and laminated, but all incomplete. I really want to finish off a couple games and let people test them, to see if maybe I can make something of an alternate income source out of them. If worst comes to worst, at least I can keep them for myself.
One game I really want to make has the tentative title of Kotwica Serca, or Heart’s Anchor (also a reference to Kotwica, the Polish WWII resistance movement). The game would take place in an alternate-history Poland during the Nazi invasion. Only, instead of men of flesh and blood, the Nazi army is lead by cybernetic soldiers, the fearsome Kampfgruppe Eisentot, the Iron Dead.
On the fringes of Poland, our game centers around a mechanical engineer, and his young daughter who is dying of leukemia. Living in a small mining down, they figured that they would be well removed from the brunt of the invasion, but one day while the father is out trying to purchase medicine, the town finds itself besieged by a Nazi battalion, bent on taking over their mines.
After a fierce resistance, the town is overwhelmed, and the soldiers rush in, killing anyone still alive. By the time the father returns, it’s all over. Sneaking in, he finds his daughter on the edge of death, a bullet wound in her chest. Desperate, he turns to one of the devices he had been working on to save her, and he manages to transfer her consciousness out of her dying body.
Into one of the falling Nazi metal soldiers.
Together, the pair attempt to take back their town, and chart a path across the Polish border to behind German lines, hoping to reunite with the girl’s mother, who is working as a spy for the Allies.
The game will function with pick-up-and-deliver and engine-builder mechanics, as one or two players take control of the father and his daughter. The father is the only one capable of completing objectives, and is also the only one capable of repairing his daughter’s mechanical body. However, he has few hit points, and they cannot be recovered, and the Eisentot will always target him first, so he cannot stay close to his daughter.
On the other hand, the daughter is the only one capable of fighting the Eisentot, and can store multiple upgrades across her limbs, head, and body, which she will use to keep her father safe. However, every time she takes damage, she loses an upgrade, and will eventually have to reunite with her father so he can repair her, installing new and better upgrades he will discover as the game progresses.
I really thing an asymmetrical, co-operative game like this would be a ton of fun, and the story has the potential for a lot of heart. Either way, I want to see what I can do with it.
Closing
And that’s really about it. I won’t be able to keep the regular presence I used to, due to the various above reasons, but you can be sure I’ll never stop creating, no matter what. Here’s to the coming years, dear readers. And thanks again for everything.
Peace,
--The Yobanashi Girouette
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