So back in 1992-93, before I got into the Internet, I started writing this really, really awesome cyberpunk-with-psi-powers novel, featuring an albino, neutered telekinetic assassin who's a double agent, and a shapechanger with multiple personalities, one of which is a werewolf, and a teenage girl with telepathy and cyberpathy, who narrowly avoided becoming an ego-destroyed conduit for an artificial sentience and now has a secret that could shake up the world. It had anime physics, it had made-up future slang, it had extra genders and superpowers and multiple double crosses and all in all it was essentially a paean to the
Rule of Cool.And then I got into Q, and started writing Only Human, and ran out of steam on the project. I only ever got two and a half chapters into it.
My top priorities right now are still
The Cold At The Heart of the Light and
Play Like God, but I think I'm going to resume work on Hands of the Bright. In typing in the handwritten third chapter, I've observed that my writing has improved slightly -- I can tighten things up and remove some "she said" type phrases -- but overall I'm surprised how well the thing holds up. I guess I shouldn't be -- I still like the opening chapter of Only Human and it was written contemporaneously with Hands of the Bright.
Also, I found the opening few pages of an original story set in the backstory to
The Green World, which riffs on X-Files rather than on TNG like "The Green World" does. That, too, was pretty good and deserves for me to finish it one of these days (although, honestly, "The Green World" itself probably deserves it more.)
(BTW, all links in this post are going to original work friends-locked on
alara_works; I friend everyone who friends that journal, but I do need some way to control who gets to read my original, publishable work before it's published. So if you want to read any of this, friend that journal and I'll give you access.)