Thinking of writing your first novel? Dabbling in short stories, but not sure where to begin? Here are a few secrets that help me both get started and finished.

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Happy birthday, Dad. I wish you were here for it.

It’s that time of the year again, and so I’d like to present a preview of my upcoming novel, tentatively entitled The Typist – I’m getting REALLY geared up for it :D.

Something strange is going on on Earth – rolling blackouts are sweeping the planet, causing countless firms to close and mankind to worry about its future. Not one to panic, James Graham calmly buys an old manual type writer from a local garage sale and begins work on a story. It’s all he can think to do with his time now that he’s out of electricity – and a job.

After loading paper into the old machine, he sits down to write – only to notice that the keys are moving without his intervention. Slowly, words form on the blank page…

“Hello,

I am your friend.”

Against his will, Graham is suddenly pulled through space, between dimensions, and into another world not like Earth – the world of Talos, where the word “technology” has an entirely different meaning. It is a world where the streets shimmer golden brass, where steam-powered robots aid humans daily, and gargantuan locomotives carry parcels and people through the sky. And although it’s like nothing Graham has ever seen, there’s ever so much the feeling that it isn’t the perfect utopian society it at first appears to be. And hidden underneath the civil unrest and martial law is a much greater a secret – a secret that could destroy both Talos and Earth.

I’m a fanboy of two game series – The Legend of Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog. My fandom for Zelda is evident in the multiple fansites I run about the game series, but my Sonic fanboyism is not as evident. In reality, I’m deep down a Sonic boy; I grew up with Sonic, not Zelda, and so the blue blur has a little place in my heart that Link will never occupy. And that’s why I’m so upset about the state of the Sonic series. Sega is truly lost.

Let’s start by looking at Sega’s current focus for Sonic: speed. Speed is the focus, because Sonic runs fast. Sonic always runs fast – nowadays, too fast for your eyes to keep up. There is nothing wrong with pairing Sonic and speed. It’s always been done, and it should be done. But there’s a problem when you have too much of a good thing – the most recent 2.5D Sonic games, Sonic Rush and Sonic Rush Adventure, focus so much on speed that the player can hardly keep up with Sonic as he blazes (no pun intended) across the screens of the DS. But it’s too early for criticism, I’ve hardly explained the rest of the Sonic series.

The three-dimensional Sonics are in a purgatory of sorts; they don’t really seem to know what they are. Sega was onto something with Sonic Adventure and Sonic Adventure 2, and I think if they’d gotten the camera just right then the games would have been spot-on. I, personally, thought both were great fun, especially Sonic Adventure, which kept a good amount of the spirit and drive from Sonic 3D Blast for Genesis (a good deal of the music in SA1 was rehashed from 3D Blast). In addition, there was something nice about seeing Sonic jump up into an actual spherical BALL that made the action more pleasurable – they’ve since renounced the ball jump in favor of a more realistic less-flippy jump.

To take you through the years of that jumping mechanic, from the very first Sonic up until Sonic Adventure our hedgehog would always form a neat, spherical ball. Sonic Adventure 2 changed this mechanic by using the same model for Sonic’s jump as for the normal, stationary Sonic – so the current model was made to literally jump straight up in the air, and then tuck to flip a few times before gracefully landing. As unrealistic as it was, it would have also left Sonic open to attack – something spinning that slowly wouldn’t damage a think on impact. If anything, I always thought it was the sheer speed of Sonic’s rotation that dismantled Robotnik’s robots, not the foce of the jump itself, which is why Sonic is able to destroy baddies by spin driving into them or rolling into them as well. In Sonic and the Secret Rings (Wii), the flipping jump has been completely abolished – Sonic jumps like a normal human being. He even has to charge his jump.

There are some intrinsic differences between the newer 2.5D and the 3D Sonics, differences that have remained contingent throughout both developments. The 2D Sonics, as I said earlier, focus entirely on speed – there is no other purpose to the game than to run incredibly fast. In the 3D Sonics, we see a difference: Sonic does not run very fast, and if he does it is never too fast that he can’t be followed. This was refreshing in Secret Rings, which I considered the first in a long chain of “hybrid” Sonic games that began Sega’s attempts to merge the 2.5D and 3D Sonic series. And yet, both are lacking something remarkable that keep them from being successful – and it appears to have flown over Sega’s collective heads time and time again.

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This is the final product of the short story I’ve bee working on. It is the prequel to my upcoming still-titleless novel, and gives a glimpse into the first major conflict of the novel, which is based entirely in the still-nameless Steampunk World. You’ll notice soon enough that the Steampunk World has plenty of conflict all on its own, without the help of Cydia. This story specifically is focused in the major city of Lanford, a metropolis made almost entirely out of brass pipes, steel sheets, and brick, and powered by – you guessed it – steam. The main character, Danil Othret, has fallen from our world, Earth, into the Steampunk World. There he meets the strange Mr. Tesla, who introduces him to Lanford and all of its wonders – and its troubles.

I hope you enjoy this little glimpse into the new universe I’ve created. Look forward to November! Continue reading this post to get to the short story.

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No, I don’t mean the iPhone software. I mean the world – one of three worlds that my main character will unintentionally travel to during my November novel. Yessir, folks, I’m not divulging any details yet, because if I did this logo and the mere mention of Cydia would be a huge spoiler. In fact, you most likely won’t hear much more about Cydia until just before November, because it won’t become a major force in the plot until about halfway through my novel.

I will say that Cydia is a cyberpunk-themed world, whose inhabitants are all cybernetically linked together in a giant neural network, a “We Are Google” situation, if you will. Thus the entire planet shares a single consciousness; in fact, most of its inhabitants don’t even have bodies, but spend their time suspended in “the cloud.” If they truly want to walk upon the surface, they can rent host bodies – any body they like – and use them temporarily to interact with the real world.

But this has absolutely no hold on the first half of my novel, because the main character will be spending all of his time in a different world – which I haven’t named yet – a steampunk-themed world. Most of the novel will surround this steampunk world. While I may have made a “logo” for Cydia, I’ve created most of the society of the steampunk world. All it really lacks is a name.

The third world, of course, is Earth. You’ll see how Earth comes into plays between these two worlds in November. With that, I present the logo for Cydia, which is strewn across its streets – the real ones and the ones in The Cloud – as a representative “flag” of Cydia. It is nicknamed “The Leaf,” and represents the free-flowing nature of the society as a whole. A leaf will drift in the wind, as Cydia drifts through space and its inhabitants through The Cloud. In addition, “The Leaf” has veins that appear to glow, and it has a shine to it, representing Cydia’s triumph of technology over nature. There are no real trees on Cydia.