I've been thinking about how best to market/monetize while keeping myself happy with what I produce. I admit I am lowering my aim to a certain degree, but it's also a style I've always wanted to take a crack at... So I've ditched the project I was working on and have begun anew. The ditcher was thematically a relatively near-future dystopian genre-mash commentary on our present state of affairs, and I was pretty much through the planning stage and had three decent-reading chapters already written (somewhere around 5500 words) so it was tough to put it aside.
This one is going to be a series, solidly genre, written in episodic format with perhaps a few threads that arc over the entirety of the series. That last bit seems impossible to avoid, and I think actually the smart way to go, so its best to have some idea of what those threads will be beforehand (I haven't decided yet).
It will be sci-fi detective. Not hard-boiled---ie there will be value judgements within the observations and not told in the most limited PoV. But fairly limited I think. Hammett et alii don't always follow this rule themselves, so I'm okay with pushing that boundary. The series will be overtly noir (or neo-noir now I guess) in theme, but somewhat self-aware in that regard, and thus there will likely be some recursive logic to the world. There will also hopefully be humor. Hopefully.
I wrote the first prologue I think I have ever written in my life to start myself off, simply to see if I can write in the voice that this wry, dry sardonic noir demands before spending a lot of time on world-building and character creation and plotting. I do have a villain/antag in mind, a vague---very vague---idea of ending and plot, and the opening will be somewhat familiar is my guess right now. I don't think I nailed the prologue from the PoV of world physics, but I quite liked my first stab at the voice, so now I've decided to proceed with planning and see if I can coalesce all this ephemeral vagueness.
I haven't settled on the full nature of the first crime, other than it's likely to take on the trappings of conspiracy when brought fully into the light. There is potential for humor in the Bad-thing-that-was-done, but I'm trying to be careful of not directing the humor at the genre itself. Readers have to take the world seriously and the characters have to take themselves seriously, or these things fall apart. That humor certainly wouldn't be enough to sustain a long episodic series. Drinking from that well usually only works once... with apologies to the Naked Gun and Scary Movie franchises. And Xanth and Discworld I don't think are really centered on being genre spoofs. So, apparently I will be satisfying my apparently innate drive to comment on the world with my fiction through humor and satire. A good part of that, likely the biggest part, will be built directly into the world itself.
Tonally, I want this to come out somewhere between Pratchett and Douglas Adams although it would be nice to get a little Tom Robbins feel in there too. If it ends up as far from Stephen R. Donaldson as humanly possible, I will be a happy writer. I also don't want to go the full Monty. I think I should be---at best---rock-throwing distance from the Pythonistas... not so close I can take out an eye with a loogie.
If anyone can spot some natural or obvious pitfalls to what I'm doing here, please jump in and wave your arms, flag semaphore, pull the fire alarm, whatever. This is pretty new territory for me. Crimes and whodunits aren't really my style... but I've never written anything that didn't contain mystery and suspense so hopefully I slip right into mode. The humor aspect is intimidating, but I have those strong pre-existing models I mentioned above to emulate, so I am a little more sure than that nassty Bagginses about setting off on adventure.
Sorry about the wall of text. Now that I've re-read it, this was clearly more about helping myself get some things straight in my head than it was about reporting to you. Rgiht now, I think I'm that guy painting the solid white borders of the playing field before game day.
