Alright, after much deliberation and soul searching and writer's block... I've decided that Price is the one I'm going with. It's the one I can do the most with, and explore the human elements the best in. I realized that there's a flaw with both Second Nature and Path... namely, I don't have actual plots for them. I have a richly developed setting and I have interesting characters. But I don't have an actual story to put them through. And while that worked out in its own way for Dune, it doesn't bode well for what I intend to do.
That narrowed me down to Price and the Midara Series. Price got the bigger vote... and as was pointed out, Midara's probably not the best for a webserial. It's more a Traditional Publishing workhorse. Actually, not even that. Midara: Paradox was *originally* written as the script for a traditional fantasy RPG video game. Long story short... that didn't happen. Can't say it won't happen in the future, still working on that, but didn't happen then.
It sounds like you want to go pro.
Yup. And this is a lot of useful information to have.
And it sounds like you really want to work on another serial
Less a serial and more a series. Think Discworld or Game of Thrones as relatively recent examples. Each story a new book, new main character. Possibly overlapping secondary characters. Possibly former main characters being secondary major characters, or vice versa.
Much like Amelia, I intend to tell each new story from many different perspectives. Each character, the main character in their own story. First person perspectives as was done in Amelia- because I've fallen in love with what I can do with that- and I'll *start* with the goal of what Amelia looked like toward the end, with approximately 10k stretches of a single character's perspective before swapping to the next. Each book, if I plan right, should only total around 100-200k words or so.
Unlike Amelia, I'll keep a cap on the sheer number of players per scenario. Four or five major players in any given book, no more. I can't give a cast of twenty characters the screen time they deserve, so I'll have fewer characters.
... Until the next book, at least, which will have a different pool of five or so major players.
So, Price is what happens when a Dating site achieves sentience and bootstraps its self into a singularity AI then?
Throw in a little bit (or whole fucking lot) more legitimate darkness than I could do with Amelia... after all, you have so many "I win, fuck you" buttons in Amelia that it's not funny. Let's run down the list.
Death of a Hero: First book in the series, Zach's perspective. It'll be as much an intro to the setting as a book unto itself, watching a Complete Newbie evolve into a hero. The process sucks. Because there were so many more horrific things I wanted to put him through in Amelia but never got the chance. Like, oh, Dream Girl could have been a full book in most stories...
Also, you get to meet Kitten. She's basically the stuff of Jack Slash's wet dreams. Victoria's powerset, but ice claws instead of electricity and she's also a sadist and a rapist. Yay. Zach fights her real early on. She gives him the moniker of "whipping boy", and is responsible for him having his first Jump on his first night out.
In Triplicate: The first story that explores the pairbonding effect in significant detail. May be second. May be third. May be fourth. Yay for nonlinear stories. You'll also get to see what I do with Baal and (maybe) Dream Girl.
Dysphoria: The mileage I intend to get out of Eric's story. Price doesn't have things like biomods or an Endslayer Army to save him from, well, everything wrong in his life. Transgendered is sorely underrepresented in fiction as is. To say nothing of his fucked up mafia family that won't just be removed from the story within the same three chapters as he's introduced as a character. This is a POSSIBLE second book. Might come (much) later.
Nothing Given: Tentative title for the tentative third book. Maybe fourth. Beth. Again, her story, but without the brain modding easy fix. Social Anxiety Disorder is a legitimate, serious, illness. This is a pretty damn big turning point for Zach's story as well. And it introduces The Fears. When the group has names like Aglio (fear of pain), Thana (fear of death) and Saphos (fear of being buried alive)... yeah, they're kinda dicks.
Paid In Blood: Akaihana's story in depth. I expect it to probably be the darkest story in the batch thus far. Which is saying something considering what the above three are going to be like. Poor Akaihana. Mer might also feature pretty heavily in this one. She's the character I based my interpretation of Sveta off of.
Thicker Than Water: Remember Kitten? This is where you learn about her past. There's a *reason* she's so fucked up.
Buyer's Remorse: Zach's next turn as a main character. Poor kid just can't catch a break. But he does have new tricks never seen in Amelia, and that's fun.
Don't Be Afraid: The Fears are back. Bad Things Happen (TM). So many bad things.
