The Sequel

Strange Future – Dead?

9 years
by in Strange Future, The Sequel

Update on 6/1/2015:

Yikes. It’s been so long since I’ve had a free moment to think about Strange Future. What brought me back was an effort to clean up my web host and get things in order. Lots of old projects are either being removed entirely or “archived” in an effort to keep things clean and organized. Lots of memories are surfacing, and lots of projects I want to continue are coming back to light. So, what’s the long and short of things?

1) Strange Future’s sequel DOES exist and is about 65% written. The entire plot is in my head, and I know where I want to go with things.

2) Life has changed, and I don’t know that I’ll ever get to finish it. However, I’m still holding out hope! I’m not going to declare the project dead, but it’s definitely on life support…

The site is being left as is for archival purposes. If you’re curious as to what I’m up to otherwise, visit jfade.com for the latest.

Original post from May 2011 below:

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Hello! Just a quick note to let you know what’s going on with Strange Future. I realize it’s been AGES since I’ve posted any content, and I don’t really use Twitter often enough to make it relevant… As of this moment, Strange Future is NOT dead. I’ve just been very busy with other projects, so I’ve not had a lot of time to work on the sequel.

This past November, I participated in NaNoWriMo, so that basically pushed Strange Future to the back burner. I “won”, and really enjoyed it. I feel really good about the story that I came up with, too, so I do intend on trying to do something more with it. I also started working full time, which has majorly cut back on the time I have for writing in general. Excuses aside, I miss writing, and I miss the characters I came up with for Strange Future.

I still intend on finishing up the Sequel this summer, hopefully for a fall release.

In the meantime, you can follow my exploits over at jfade.com – my personal blog. I’ve not talked much about my writing there, but do intend on doing so as I get back to it. That’s all I can tell you for now. I still get plenty of views on here, so I know there’s interest. I’d just like to thank you for that, and please, stay tuned for more–because there’s more to come!

Teaser Tuesday: Vera and the Coffee Shop

14 years
by in The Sequel

It’s getting to the point where it’s more difficult to post sections from the sequel without giving too much away about new characters and plots, so the Teaser Tuesdays may become less regular and shorter as I have to limit what I can show you. This week is just a short little paragraph about an excursion Vera takes to a local coffee shop, and reflects most of the frustration and annoyance I feel when I go to a coffee shop myself (which is rare itself).

Vera left the coffee shop, sipping on her mocha, which was quite delicious. It was nice when baristas actually knew what they were doing. All too often they would utterly fail at creating a drink. In fact, the last coffee that Vera had drank in the twenty-first century was watered down, too sweet, and flavored far too strongly. To even call it a coffee was an insult to the arabica tree that the coffee beans had been harvested from. This time, however, the coffee was perfect. She walked along, enjoying the evening breeze coming off the ocean. It wasn’t long, however, before she arrived at the block containing the bookstore and had to put a stop to her evening stroll.

So what’s next? Well a bit of the bookstore scene will probably show up in the next Teaser Tuesday, which will be in a week or two.  Stay tuned!

Teaser Tuesday: Cloning

14 years
by in The Sequel

For this week’s Teaser Tuesday I bring you two paragraphs from a chapter that has a brief discussion on cloning (why, specifically, I will not reveal). This is only part of the narration from this section, and is part of my efforts to make more of the revelations about future life and tech come from the narrator and/or the character’s personal experiences rather than having Darin, Lyla or someone else explain things directly. Enjoy!

The major problem with clones is not so much the feelings of deja vu one experiences after encountering several of them in rapid succession, but rather in the semantics involved with keeping track of them. When the technology to clone first came into use, the scientists involved briefly experimented with numbering, lettering, even code-naming each clone to try and distinguish them from one another. This practice was quickly discovered to be rather ineffective due to the fact that as soon as the clones moved around the room, it was impossible to know which of them was ‘Alpha’ and which of them was ‘Beta’. It was rather disheartening for the scientists because the idea had seemed so good on paper, but in use was rather futile. This realization resulted in brief trials with name tags, but this too failed when the clones realized how much fun it was to distort the results of the experiments by switching name tags halfway through.

The labeling system caused just as much frustration for the clones. After all, it was rather disheartening to hear that Victoria M had gone off to a really great party and met a dashingly handsome young man while you, Victoria E, sat at home watching a sappy romance for the sixth time. Thus, most clones came to refer to themselves as if they were a single entity, causing the lines between which clone had done what to blur. Of course, with the technology to truly merge memories still based entirely in theory, the clones were left to merely revel in the delusion that they had all done really cool, awesome, and exciting things.

Teaser Tuesday: A Bit from the Introduction of the Sequel

14 years
by in The Sequel

For this week’s Teaser Tuesday, I bring you a small portion from the introduction to the sequel. Enjoy!

Ever since mankind has inhabited this planet, a great number of seemingly impossible events have taken place. The odds against these events were so mind-bogglingly high that the universe’s top historians wrote the planet off before it had a chance to make any history to begin with. Earth took no notice of this, however, and puttered on, unaware that it had caused the complete upheaval and replacement of those top historians. The universe’s current top historians have since called this “the greatest blunder in the history of historians,” and have since wrote many books on the subject, including The Little Planet That Could, See Earth Spin, and the all-time classic Where the Wild Earthlings Are.

Still, the same historians—and most of the rest of the inhabitants of the universe—were caught completely off-guard when humanity managed to pull out of their Third World War without completely obliterating themselves. They were caught even more off-guard when the humans managed to unite under one world government. They watched with keen interest as mankind rebuilt their civilization at a record setting pace. It all seemed, once again, impossible; but if there was one thing that the planet Earth and its inhabitants seemed to do right, it was the impossible.

First Blog Post! Plus, Teaser Tuesday

14 years
by in The Sequel

Well this is officially the first blog post I’ve made on the new site! (Well, first post with NEW content that is.) I think I’ve finally settled on the design, so things should stay pretty static from this point on from that standpoint at least. Let me know what you think of the setup!

For my first post, I’ve decided to do a Teaser Tuesday post featuring an excerpt from the sequel that I’m currently working on. (Teaser Tuesday is when someone posts an unedited portion of something they’re currently working on to get feedback and, let’s face it, to show off. :P) There’s only one bit in this portion resembling a spoiler, and it’s so excessively minor that you needn’t worry about it. Without further yapping from me, here it is:

The rather unfortunate thing about important, newsworthy happenings is that they have an uncanny ability of occurring when one isn’t at home. A person will blissfully go about the day’s business, completely unaware about the major event unfolding that’s making everyone’s head spin. Once they finally do get home to hear the news, they’re as shocked as everyone else was initially, and proceed to call everyone they know to find out if they’ve heard yet. Inevitably, everyone they call will have already seen it and mostly recovered. Recovered, that is, until the caller reminds them of what happened, stirring up the feelings of anxiety all over again.

With the advent of faster and faster means of communication, this rather awkward and irritating cycle was supposed to be eliminated. Telegraphs rose and were replaced by the telephone, which was supplemented by the television, which was then further supplemented by the internet, which was replaced by the portal system, which was supplemented by the implants… and so on. Of course, the endless loop of bad news being freely accessible didn’t reduce the anxiety cycle as people originally suspected, but instead intensified it, making things worse than they originally were.

This led to one scientist rediscovering a long forgotten, crude little device called earplugs. Upon realizing the seemingly magical power they had to reduce anxiety brought on by bad news, he began to market and sell them to the masses. He lived the next year of his life in a blissful, peaceful tranquility. Indeed, he would’ve lived a full, happy life, but he made the mistake of taking his earplugs off one day and died of an anxiety attack when a random passerby filled him in on everything that had happened in the past year. Thus, the government banned the earplug, and earplug addiction centers opened all over the world, gradually weaning people of their dependence on them.

Still, the problem remained, and steps were taken to try and reduce anxiety for the masses in small doses. One such step was to ban televisions and require the installation of portal service blockers in certain public places, such as fancy restaurants and nightclubs. Thus, Thomas, Lyla, Darin, and Doug were completely oblivious to what had just been revealed by Lydia Shults at the press conference in London. Vera could, of course, call them and tell them, but the laws of etiquette—which Vera was rather fond of following—would prevent that from happening.

That’s it for this week! I’ll be sure to do another Teaser Tuesday post later on. I can’t ensure that it’ll happen every week, but I’ll try to do one at least once a month. Let me know what you think in the comments!

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