I am ecstatic to announce my next project, Head Games!
The origin story on this one is a bit mussed. I've been sitting on this idea since before I started writing Spitfire, so, a few years.
I was contemplating the Hulk one afternoon, as one does. It makes sense that he gets giant and violent when he's angry (unless you buy that he's always angry), but I never got why he turned green. I started thinking about what emotions would look like as superpowers. I imagined a little girl literally glowing with joy, reading a book by her own light under the covers long after her bedtime. And it kept going from there. But most powers were painful in their first showing. For example, a flash of light from a burst of joy would blind anyone close enough.
So I have a group of people with emotional superpowers. But they're also super messed up because of what happened when their powers first showed. And anyone who is ever been told to smile knows that you don't get to turn on and off emotions whenever you want. My characters would be cooler together than on their own, but I also want to talk about their origin stories without pulling a Suicide Squad.
Enter a few more characters. What if the government didn't know what to do with these people, and instead of sending them to get studied in a lab, they sent them to counseling in an emotional rehab? So we get a husband and wife psychologist/psychiatrist duo to pull the origins out of each character. And now they're all in one spot where they can rub up against each other. Everyone knows someone they enjoy spending time with. Everyone knows the co-worker to avoid if they want to have a decent day. I wanted my team to have those elements.
But they have these powers, what if they want to use them? With practice you can get yourself into whatever headspace you want, but you can do it a heck of a lot faster with help from other people. Show interest in something important to a person to make them feel like you care. Threaten someone to scare them. Insult someone to make them angry. This is where the interactive part of my story comes in. I've talked before about interactivity and player/reader choice in media and how powerful that is as a storytelling element. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to utilize this tool in long-form fiction.
And then, once everyone has thoroughly exploited each other's emotional powers, they can come back and work things out. Or not. It's in the reader's hands.
Things I don't know yet:
The origin story on this one is a bit mussed. I've been sitting on this idea since before I started writing Spitfire, so, a few years.
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| The Fighters Generation |
So I have a group of people with emotional superpowers. But they're also super messed up because of what happened when their powers first showed. And anyone who is ever been told to smile knows that you don't get to turn on and off emotions whenever you want. My characters would be cooler together than on their own, but I also want to talk about their origin stories without pulling a Suicide Squad.
Enter a few more characters. What if the government didn't know what to do with these people, and instead of sending them to get studied in a lab, they sent them to counseling in an emotional rehab? So we get a husband and wife psychologist/psychiatrist duo to pull the origins out of each character. And now they're all in one spot where they can rub up against each other. Everyone knows someone they enjoy spending time with. Everyone knows the co-worker to avoid if they want to have a decent day. I wanted my team to have those elements.
But they have these powers, what if they want to use them? With practice you can get yourself into whatever headspace you want, but you can do it a heck of a lot faster with help from other people. Show interest in something important to a person to make them feel like you care. Threaten someone to scare them. Insult someone to make them angry. This is where the interactive part of my story comes in. I've talked before about interactivity and player/reader choice in media and how powerful that is as a storytelling element. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to utilize this tool in long-form fiction.
And then, once everyone has thoroughly exploited each other's emotional powers, they can come back and work things out. Or not. It's in the reader's hands.
- What POV I'm using. A friend asked me last week if this was going to be in second person like many choose-your-own-adventure books were, and I don't hate the idea. Still deciding.
- Whether this story should be told all the way through from each character's POV, or if each one should get a chapter where they would most strongly effect the story. I think I've talked about this before, but many fans of visual novels will replay stories to see all possible endings. This won't be a visual novel (at least that's not the plan right now) and I would need to take length into account, making the overall story shorter if I want each character to have a whole playthrough.
Things I do know:
- I'm featuring, in addition to happiness/joy, anger, eros (romantic love), storge (parent-child love), fear, sadness, and jealousy.
- This is the first novel I won't be writing in order from page 1 to The End. Not just because there are several paths that could be taken, but because I see the potential for it to spiral in to a behemoth, and I want to help stem that. So I'll make a list of the scenes I have in my head and write those, then see what needs to be filled in between them.
- I have my dream cast! If I blog about them, I'll do it in a later post.
I am incredibly excited about this project, and I hope to bring you more updates this month, and maybe some snippets in November :D
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