Reining it in

When I first designed the world of Rome's Revolution, I had the overwhelming desire to redo everything. That included their speech (Vuduri), their technology (gravitic-based), their social structure (Overmind-controlled) and their symbology. I made the Vuduri short so Rei could be tall.

I dressed them in white so Rei could stand out. I did everything I could to create a dichotomy between the two cultures. In the original long-form, Rei was not even able to read their signs or displays. He could tell that it was a written language but the letters and numbers were incomprehensible to him. Their food, style of dress, method of interaction, power sources, mode of travel, absolutely everything was completely different. I developed a severe case of fontitis in showing how different the computers were.

In a previous post, I even stated flat out that Rome was too weird.

In retrospect, I think now that all of that might have been too much. The story is good: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy and girl save all of mankind. It probably was not necessary to introduce so many variations on normalcy to get that point across.

Sometimes I dream that these books will be made into movies. But all of the stuff that I threw in to make the two cultures so different would be the first things to go. A movie is only 120 minutes long (give or take) and there is only so much time to develop the characters, the plot and the essential conflict. The fact that the images are up on the screen should be to enhance the story, not to detract from it.

So I learned my lesson. In the next novel, The Milk Run, there will be very little Vuduri spoken. There will be very few instances of typography and the hero, Aason Bierak, will act like a normal human being. Because the story is the story and that's what I want to get across. The rest is hand-waving and misdirection and that would be a sign that the story itself is not strong enough to hold up under its own weight.

Believe me, this story will hold up.