Adventures in Parodyverse: Adventure in Babysitting Part 6


    Anna approached Vinnie in a darkened room in the Lair Mansion.  He was lying on his side, facing away from her.  When he rolled over, his eyes were glowing red.  She held out an ice cold bottle of water.

    Vinnie reached out almost instinctively and swiped at the bottle, so it flew across the room, and bounced off the wall.  Anna flinched, and stepped back.

    Then the glow in his eyes faded away, and he saddened.  He whispered weakly, “Anna...please kill me.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Why would you ask something so horrible?”  she asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I can’t be like this,”  he said.  “I...can’t.”

    Anna was inexperienced, but quick and very smart.  She went through several scenarios in her electronic mind, before coming up with a question.  “Before turning yourself into a demon, why didn’t you prepare a counter-spell first?”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I didn’t have the time,”  he replied.  Then he cleared his throat and made a choking noise while he fought back his demonic tendencies again.  “Please, kill me.  Each time it comes back stronger.  I won’t be able to fight it forever, and if it wins...everyone is finished.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No.”  Anna kneeled on the floor beside him.  “Tell me how to prepare a counter-spell.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“It’s lengthy and complicated--”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I will remember it,”  she insisted.  “I remember everything.  I will remember, and if I can’t complete it myself, I will find help.”

    Vinnie nodded.  “Whatever happens,”  he said, “I thank you for taking care of me.  You’re the only one the demon doesn’t hunger for.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I know.”  She smiled.  “I’m going to save you, Vinnie.  Just tell me what I need to do it.”

    Vinnie leaned over and whispered to Anna, “I need you to take my place.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I...don’t understand,”  she replied.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“The demon can’t be killed, by me, I can only suppress it.  I need to transfer it someone who can destroy it.  If I transfer it to you, it will die of starvation, because you are not flesh.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“But...what if I can’t control it?”  she asked.

    The door to the room opened, and Lara Night entered, closing it behind her.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“No...no, get out quickly!”  Anna stood and raced over to force her out of the room.

    Lara raised her hands to urge Anna to stop.  “Anna...Anna, relax.  Liu Xi told me what I need to do.”

    Vinnie sat up, making a choking noise again as his eyes briefly glowed red.  “Do what’s necessary,”  he said.  “Please, just make it quick.”

    Anna’s eyes widened, and she screamed, just as Lara’s eyes lit up and her hands fired white-hot lightning bolts across the room.

    Vinnie made a horrible ‘unh’ sound as the electricity hit him, repelled him off of the bed and into the opposite wall, leaving an ugly burn mark in the plaster.  And then he lay motionless on the floor.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What did you do?”  Anna yelled as loudly as she cold.  “What did you do?  I was going to save him!”  And then the android crumpled onto the floor and began sobbing.

    She looked up again in time to see Lara was now next to Vinnie’s lifeless body.  She had pulled up his shirt, and her hands touched his chest ever so gently.  There was a faint bluish-white glow emanating from them both.

    Then Vinnie gasped, and opened his eyes.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’ve never done that before.”  Lara whispered to him.  “I’ve never been able to bring anyone back from death.”

    Anna realized what was happening then, and she leapt over the bed to wrap her arms around Vinnie and hug him.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Easy, Anna, easy.  I’m still weak.  And smoking.”

    Lara turned her hands over and showed them to Vinnie.  There was a silver sparkling material applied to her palms, and it was now on his chest as well.  

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“What’s this?”  Vinnie looked closely at the blonde’s hands.  “No, it can’t be.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Fairy dust.”  Lara replied with a laugh.  “Apparently my elemental power magnifies it.  So you have a little girl and her brother to thank for saving your life.”

    Vinnie looked over her shoulder, and Magweed and Griffin were in the doorway looking like they were afraid to come in.  Faite stood between them.  Around Magweed’s neck was a necklace with the tiniest metal vial hanging from it.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“You could have told me,”  Anna pointed out.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“There wasn’t time.”  Lara replied.  “Besides, if you started behaving differently, the demon would have been on to us.”

    By then, Liu Xi was in the doorway too, standing beside Faite and the kids.

    Vinnie looked at everyone and said, “Do you all mind giving me some time with Liu Xi?”

    Lara nodded, and stood.  “Come on, everyone.  We have to figure out how to get the fairy dust off my hands anyhow.”

    A moment later, the Chinese girl was staring at Vinnie.  She crossed the room slowly, climbing over the bed to reach him.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Need some help getting up?”  she asked.

    He nodded, so she threw his arm over her shoulder, pulled him up, and then led him to lay down on the bed.  Then she sat beside him.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“So you’re still married to Pandemonica?”  she asked.

    He nodded, and then hung his head sadly.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I kind of understand why you’re sticking with her now,”  she said.  “She’s lonely, and needy, and you think you can turn her into a decent person.  And you feel like if you abandon her you will destroy her.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Kind of,”  he answered faintly.

    Then Liu Xi smiled.  “Just as I thought, she needs you more than I do.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I don’t think she’ll want to stick with me, though.”  Vinnie told her.

    Liu Xi stopped him.  “Don’t tell me anything like that,”  she said.  “Just help her as best as you can.  And we’ll see what happens after.  Okay?”

    He nodded.  “Okay.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I’m still your friend and assistant though, right?”  Liu Xi asked.

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“I dunno,”  Vinnie said.  “Magweed was pretty good tonight.  You might have some competition.”

    Ã¢â‚¬Å“Haha, very funny.”  The elementalist laughed.  “I’m going to send Pandemonica in now.”  She stood up.

    Vinnie grabbed her arm gently.  “I really miss sleeping with you.”

    Liu Xi leaned over and kissed him once on the lips.  “If nothing else, we have the memory of it.  Good luck, Vinnie.”

    With that, she left the room.  Maybe a little too quickly, because his last comment saddened her, but she wanted to stay strong for him.

    Vinnie sat up as he saw Pandemonica in the doorway next.  She shut the door behind her, and entered the room.  She never really smiled like Liu Xi did.  He thought he might start by changing that.


Story written and copyrighted (C) 2012 by Jason Froikin, and may not be reprinted without permission.  Yuki Shiro designed by Jason Froikin, based on designs by Masamune Shirow.  Liu Xi Xian and the Psychic Samurai are original design by Jason Froikin.  Lara Night is an original creation by Jason Froikin

Think something akin to the Byrne Superman: Man of Steel miniseries or Btman: Year One. Keep the story PV-lite so you could easily transplant it as story one of a Lara anthology later on.

...and I know because I started writing it. Not a linear story though, it's more like starting in the middle and exploring the past.

Think back to John Byrne in his heyday when he did the Man of Steel miniseries. He took a well-established character with a wealth of development but a lot of tangles and he somehow distilled a pretty convincing origin story that resonated with old and new readers alike. It's probably still the definitive version of how Superman began.

I think the time has come for you to consider a similar Lara tale. I know you've written her before, in and out of the Parodyverse, but I encourage you to consider another, definitive telling of her early career. With hindsight, years of knowing the character, and possibly even newer elements like her relationship to some of your more recent characters like Liu Xi and Anna to fold back into the tale you could probably come up with something mythic.

The publishing world has also evolved since your last novel was put out there. There are some very interesting deals from Amazon and Createspace and some others that weren't around back in the day. The appetite for e-books has grown substantially (55% of my sales are electronic now) and the market for superhero fiction has blossomed. Some of it, like Van Allen Plexico's Sentinels series, charts in the top 100 SF category on Amazon with every new volume.

Use the board here as a focus group and demo audience and put together something in the 60,000 word range that tells Lara's story and introduces Lara's world as you'd want it to be. Then let it loose.

Why not?

I started it, but I got about 2 chapters in before I realized it's going to be way bigger than the PVB miniseries I thought it would be.

And now I'm not sure people on this board would even read it, since it doesn't really include any of their characters, and it's not really fanfic either.

My biggest issue with published work is I'm never happy with what I write even a short time later, so I'd have to learn the most important thing: When to stop re-writing and fixing. That's the hardest thing for me.

It's because it's neither of those that I suggest the wider outlet.

The PVB board has always had a rather restricted readership. Even back at its most populous, the board probably had 35 regular readers and lurkers. That meant that 35 people in the whole world knew enough about the backstory and characters to be able to read the stuff that was posted here and follow it. A few brave souls were able to plunge in late but the longer we went on the harder that got; it's the nature of shared universes that they accrete.

My rule of thumb was that there needed to be at least 12 active participants to sustain a thriving community, 6-8 of whom were producing material fairly regularly. It's several years since we've been at anything like that level here. So realistically there are perhaps half a dozen people still around with the background understanding to follow the cast of our stories, and maybe half of them looking at the board at any given period. That's a very small demographic to cater to.

But what this community had traditionally been very good at is supporting people's writing endeavours, with comment and encouragement and even criticism. It's a fine place to hone one's abilities. That's why I suggest that you use the concepts and situations you've developed here and repackage them for a wider audience, while still benefiting from feedback and support from the folks who know you and your product here.




It is difficult. When possible I try and leave things I've written "fallow" for a while then go back and proofread again. For example, this week I've written 44,000 words of a novel that was commissioned from me last Saturday. That's fast for me and I just know I'll need to go back and do a heavy second draft. But the most important thing is to get a complete story down on paper. Then we go back and make sure its a good complete story.

It's the testing and feedback I'm worried about. More than a few times I tried posting World Class here and got just one reply. That was Visionary, and he was probably trying to be nice by reading it, which I appreciate, but it doesn't mean it's piquing anyone's curiosity, either.

If I write Lara a series, I anticipate much of the same thing - posts without replies, and then I go back to guessing as to what kind of draw it'll have if it's published.

Also note that Night Force, which I put in e-book form sold 2 copies, and both were purchased by a friend who was trying to help. When I posted it here, it drew hardly any attention. Naturally that added to the bad taste left with me - so I took it down everywhere both because I now feel like it wasn't very good, and also because I have the lack of readers to prove it.

And aside from fanfic and PV-stuff, all the stories I've posted anywhere topped out a under 10 readers each (probably the same ones).

I'm not saying I shouldn't try, but it is a worry that either a) I don't know how to reach an audience; or b) that I'm not nearly as good at this writing thing as I think I am; or c) I am not conveying the story nearly as well as I think I am. Any one of those items can mean failure, and because I've only seen very little positive feedback - mostly from friends - you can imagine why I'm nervous. It's like stage fright on a delayed time scale, I guess.





That's the one free thing about fanfic and PV-stuff. A few weeks after it's written, nobody really cares about it anymore. So if it's terrible, it fades with time. A published series, even on a web site, hangs around and taunts the writer forever.

My biggest problem while actually writing is that I write almost as a stream of consciousness. It makes for some really good cause-effect in the story, and for some fairly natural character reactions and interactions, but that stream also can get massively screwed up when it tends to go off the rails at the expense of the actual story. So then I have to invent chopping points where one ends and the other begins. I have not yet perfected that yet, which is why a lot of my stories look a little broken plot-wise. And if I end up doing that in a 60,000 word book, it's going to make me crazy.

I'm going to have to figure out how to write it twice, I suppose, so the first edition is all stream of consciousness, and then I kind of spread it all out and see what direction it points in, and then re-write most of it so it stays on track. Or something like that.

One downside of this kind of board is that replies sometimes come to be held as a measure of quality. Really, a sample of 10 people isn't enough to give a fair reflection of that; especially since this board's traditional subject matter is very atypical and might arguably draw a very skewed audience.

It seems to me that you enjoy writing for the sake of writing. There are stories in your head that you want to tell. Like most everyone else, you'd like it if people enjoyed your efforts and appreciated them, but your primary motivation is "art for art's sake". This is good. Low readership can be fixed. Motivation for writing can't.

I'm sorry if I missed any World Class, by the way. I try to read and resply to all your work.




To some extent the negative comments can be the most useful. Where a reader's unconvinced about a motivation or plot twist it tells you you need to do a better job of selling that story point, or setting it up, or explaining it. It underlines technique weaknesses to work on.

And pragmatically, no comments is no criticism. You're no worse off than when it was just on your hard drive.

The other point I'd make is that most if not all of your characters don't fit the classic mould for the shared PV universe. They're not broadly-drawn slightly humerous characters like Visionary, Donar, Dancer, Mumphrey, Finny et. al. They're really "serious comics universe" characters existing in a slightly absurd one. The PV format is broad enough that they can do so relatively comfortably, but they're the wrong kind of horses in the wrong kind of race to win every time here. I'm not arguing you shouldn't tell PV stories with them - I'm very glad you're doing so - but it seems as though you could do more with them outside that frame too.




Everybody cringes at their work from a decade ago. I know I do.




Finding an audience is a perennial problem for new writers. The average first self-published novel sells in the low hundreds if its lucky. Without a marketing budget and free review copies and publishers' networks its very hard to bring the work to mass attention. It happens, but those are rare lucky exceptions.

I've never actually self-published so this is all second hand stuff, but I'm told the keys to breaking in to the market are:

1. Get a damned brilliant cover. Covers sell. The blurb's vital too.

2. Use social networks and free review sites to really push the work. Get free samples online. Maybe offer tie-in stories (say 10,000 words) free to some of the online periodical magazines.

3. Price an e-version low, say $1.99. Have a print-on-demand paper copy for the folks who liked the book so much they want a "souvenir" edition.

4. Hand out quite a lot of "free" e-book versions to people who might generate buzz, even if that means you don't get two bucks off someone who might otherwise have shelled out for it.

5. Mobilise some friends to log positive reviews of it for you on Amazon etc.

6. Have the sequel in the works. Series seem to sell these days, especially in the SF/fantasy/superhero genres.




I think you have all the skills necessary to write good fiction. I think your technical and practical skills have increased over the time I've read your work. I think it's fit to publish.

That said, I also think you could push it up a notch. You're good at self analysis, so you know (and have even mentioned in this thread) ways you could bring your game up. I have to admit, I apply different criteria re. proofing and second drafting when I'm writing PV stories than when I'm writing stuff people are paying me for. I could do better with my PV stuff, but it's beyond the level of effort I'm willing to invest, or indeed have time for.

You may find the same applies to you. If you know this is going to be a "permanent record" bit of work then you tend to hammer it in shape that one more time.

At the end of the day, if you publish and "fail" at least you've had the experience of writing an A-game story, which is bound to improve your regular game anyhow. Even if only three people ever read the damn thing, the people who read the next thing you write will benefit from the process you've been through.

And you might have fun.




There comes a time when every writer has to "leave the nest" and fly or fall.




What I suggest is that you treat the book as a sectional story, say four parts of 15,000 words, each with its own mini-plot, all forming the overall arc. That way you can write closer to the pacing and format you're used to and still have a coherent novel at the end.

Pick the four main points you want to covney, eg:

1. Lara gets her powers
2. Lara encounters others with powers
3. Lara uses her powers for doing super-things
4. Lara vs the big baddie

Then work out a framing sequence, eg:

Prologue: Lara and friends in full-blown battle, city burning, destruction everywhere. How the hell did it come to this? Then flashback to Part 1: the Origin

Have a bit more of the "conflict now" bit between each of the flahback parts, each section relevant to and offering insight into the backstory of what's happening in the now. If you're putting Chiaki in there, for example, the bit of the fight after she first appears is followed by the major part where you show her first meeting Lara.

I feel this kind of structure would play to your strengths and offer a reasonably sophisticated reading experience without being too confusing.

By the way, I'm assuming a Lara book, but the alternative would be to cover Lara, Liu Xi, Chiaki, and Anna together, charting their individual origins until it was time for them all to crash together. In that case, unify them with a single archvillain somehow behind all of their problems.




Pick out the bits you most like about what you've already done. Work out the unique selling points of your characters. Then concentrate that.

You already have the stream of conciousness. Treat it as your first draft notes. Now work that raw stuff into the next generation. If nothing else, its a technique you need to master.

I didn't reallt think of it as a measure of quality, since at least two of the (former?) board regulars made no secret that they either don't like my stuff or are only here to read your stuff and/or Visionary's. I can't really do anything about that, it's like writing issues of a Supergirl series and trying to get someone who refuses to read any comic written by you, or any comic with a female lead. It's just not going to happen.

The part that does concern me is when people who used to read my stuff blatantly stop reading it (they're still here, reply to other stuff, etc). I start to feel like either I'm losing what I had, or I never had it in the first place and I'm losing the audience because I didn't manage to improve enough. I try to diagnose the problem, like maybe that last miniseries was too long, or contained thr wrong characters, etc., but when I don't see anything obvious I become a bit self-critical.





I do like writing, but at the same time I feel a little discouraged when nobody else seems to like it. It feels different from eating a food nobody else wants to eat, because writing feels more personal and more permanent. I feel like I have lots of stories that only I want to hear.

The other thing I often think about is whether the characters themselves are the problem. More on that further down.





I have an entirely new series of it that I've been slowly writing but havent't posted. It's what I write for fun these days.





In general I don't mind negative comments. The only kind that annoys me is when I take a risk with a character that's not mine because either nobody else is using it, or nobody is posting to the board, and I get a sort of "how dare you" response, and I'm told I should have either tracked down the original poster-character before starting, or if I can't reach them, don't use the character at all.

And that's only when the "risk" wasn't something particularly damaging, just something like, say, Hatman allowing Chiaki to take the lead on something because she actually has a good plan. I used to do that, and I got a lot of "Hat would never allow anyone else ever under any circumstances take the lead, go rewrite the story with him as the lead or take him out entirely". So mostly now I do the latter, and find a way for him to be either doing something unrelated, or that Chiaki has to solve a problem without him around, or that she takes it on as her own problem, etc.

The reason why that annoys me is because it does not really have anything to do with the story or help with it, it's instead a way of invalidating the whole thing, sometimes even a multiparter. If you notice, a couple times when that happened, I just made that character fall off the map after part 1, because no resolution was better than losing readers over an unwelcome one.





That's where World Class is now.





i have both - Yuki Shiro, including her name, is a parody of every Shirow manga character there is, from Ghost in the Shell on. Anna, likewise, is a parody if every intelligent, highly emotional synthetic person in manga and anime, and in fact she is heavily based on Kosmos from Xenosaga and I vaguely remember some reference to Battle Angel Alita and some others as well. Faite is a parody most people didn't catch. She is like a half goddess and half magical elf parody. So all of those wouldn't really do well outside of the PV.

Chiaki started out as an imitation of the lead character from the live action movie Princess Blade, and named after one of the actresses in Kill Bill, but grew into something entirely her own. She might be able to survive outside of the PV, and can definitely survive without support inside of the PV.

I don't remember what prompted the creation of Liu Xi Xian, but she too grew beyond her initial purpose. Because of her power set though, she either needs the PV or her own entire universe.

Shen Rae also comes out of Xenosaga, the concept of a space captain who works for a corporation, but who was hired because she has beyond human abilities. But then it becomes a little Star Trek and Outlaw Star after that.

For a little trivia, Lara Night was long ago originally created for another shared universe full of characters stolen from both DC and Marvel. I didn't want the other writers there abusing my characters, so I brainstomed someone that was very difficult to understand. I'm fascinated by the mystery of lightning and electricity and energy, so I used those as a basis. And originally she was very mysterious and difficult to motivate, like Faite is now, She worked so well as a complex character that she got me kicked out of that shared universe. Then I had a problem, because she grew so deep and complex that even I had trouble building a cast for her. The PV helped me with that a bit, because it helped me mold her as a problem solver who only needs a few close friends.

But history aside, I do think sometimes that because these characters are such drastically different and unique concepts, maybe the PV readers can't relate them to anything they already know, and therefore are turned off to reading them. The same problem creator owned comics often have.





I would like to burn it all.





I have noticed, amusingly enough, that JK Rowling seems to do the same stream-of-consciousness wandering off in the Harry Potter books that I do. It makes the HP books really long. Of course she has the gift of being able to manage a gigantic cast without losing anyone, too.
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What I see though is my story progression is weak, and my ability to bookend a story - create a clear beginning and end, and stay on course - is also weak.





I've posted a lot of PV stuff that I knew wasn't very good because I didn't have the time to write something else that week, or because I already started posting the story and I can't stop in the middle.

Sometimes though I get the feling I already lost the audience, and I rush to get through the rest, not really caring how it turns out.





Here's the thing about that: If something I write starring Lara Night fails, I feel like I failed the character, someone I "grew up with" and molded for years and years. And I feel like I want to start over again. She's not somene I want to feel like I have to abandon because the story didn't work out. It's why I resist giving her her own series.

This is partly why I started World Class. I'm invested in those characters too, but they are inseperably tied to the story. If the story dies, they die with it. i have a different impression entirely with those.

An origin story might be an exception, though, because it's open ended, and even if it fails, ultimately it's still an "origin bible" I can use later.





That might be an interesting one except for a few problems I'd have to solve, including:

1) Any archvillain capable of harming Lara would probably kill all of the others. Also, her origin is in another universe.

2) Chiaki never had an arch-villain. I've been toying with the concept that her pseudo-archvillain is balancing Akiko Masamune with thr rest of her life, and what happens if that friendship turns sour.

I always thought I might write something where Chiaki has to disappear because her criminal past came back to haunt her, and the others have to uncover what past exactly that is in order to rescue her. The trick is using that as a tool to dig up the others' pasts as well.

Interesting place this chapter leaves things...  I'm curious as to where Vinnie is going from here.