Turns out that, unfortunately, there will be no BadCoFiMo in June. The strategy just wouldn't come together, at least not now. If I start editing Bad Company, I'll have to take my time doing it, since I'll be focusing on Black Science for JulNoWriMo and AugNoWriMo while taking part in the 50 Songs in 90 Days challenge. But instead of BadCoFiMo, I decided to take a different strategy: writing short stories to prepare for BadCo, Black Science, and especially Spanner. It's called "Mind Bomb", and it's the first of a new set of "Spanner Side Stories". And it's already expanding into at least a novella...
"Mind Bomb" takes place in 2025 (or 6025 by the "Neo-Egyptian" calendar), almost a decade after the spectacular ending of Spanner. Shira and Desiree are back, in a new post-"Corporate Empire" world dominated by a large collection of constantly warring imperialist governments dedicated to the economic philosophy of state capitalism. And guess what? Even despite the fall of the Corporate Empire and the leading member of its ruling Cartel, Dictel Corporation — guess what? Dictel's back, and it's up to no good yet again! This time it involves the latest version of its infamous mind-control machine, the "psychotron", the biggest project of Dictel Research since the 1950s. When word gets out, thanks in part to a new recurring character named (in a sudden spasm of geekiness) Lala Sun-Microsoft (note name of corporations used as family names, something I'll explain later), a notoriously insatiable gossip, word gets out. When the state-capitalist empires all find out, all hell breaks loose in a free-for-all over the new psychotron. So a new character I created just for this story, calling herself Lucy Williams (formerly a Russian businessman [male], now a young [and very much female] roving activist), hires Spanner and asks her to repeat the "mind bomb" trick that took down Henry Becket, only on a larger scale.
This short summary omits several elements that I created for it, of course. First there are the factions: Corporates, Imperials, Crusaders, and so on. Then there are the posthumans of various kinds, including the strange cyborg-beings prominent in Spanner and a new breed of cyber-entities who have uploaded their consciousnesses to the Internet and/or Hans Moravec-inspired robots, and thus abandoned carbon-based lifeform altogether.
Unlike the Dictel trilogy, and far more than even Spanner, "Mind Bomb" is a true science fiction story — cyberpunk, in fact.
So this is what I've been doing instead of BadCoFiMo. That and writing notes on the Spanner and its spinoffs, from Bad Company all the way to "Mind Bomb" and beyond.
I'll keep you posted here more frequently. And I'll make sure to tweet updates.
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