Friday Feature: Alpha Test

During the summer, I usually test-write new stories and post them as Friday Features during the late summer and fall.

Alpha Test is a Paranormal half-LitRPG Drama rewrite of Rogue. It has enough of a genre shift to differentiate itself and is written as a dual-POV story, with each chapter alternating perspectives. Its Jumpchain/LitRPG aspects are obvious, like Star Jumper or Soul Taker, but only within Tyson's chapters. In the love interest's PoV, the story is written more like a romance.

For those of you who suggested adding window dressing to Rogue to make it an original story, this is what I came up with.

This update includes the first two chapters, allowing you to get a sense of how the story unfolds.

Admittedly, I spent a ton of time on this one and have little to show for it. My goal was to take Rogue, and with as little work as possible, convert it into something sellable. This was the idea behind Soul Taker, before it became its own thing. I went through four iterations, which is why this took so long.

1. I re-edited Arcs 1-3 into a solid Arc 1 for Rogue. 145k words split into 23 chapters.

2. I started turning the edit into a parody. It started off okay. But I quickly ran into the problem of tone. Rogue is the most serious of my stories tonally, and to turn it into a parody, made it lose much of its weight. So I mixed in the appropriate humor with exaggeration. But it made me realize, could I actually do this for an entire book... an entire series? Maybe, would it be any good? Nah. So, scratched.

3. Similar to what Alpha Test became, but I hadn't changed much of the characters. Particularly, Lillianna was still a demon. This ended up reading way too closely to the source material. In Soul Seeker, it's like this, but that work has been sufficiently distanced from the source, so it's more obscured in all the high fantasy.

4. This version of Alpha Test.

This story is a contender for a new original series and the last of this year's Friday Features.

Previous Friday Features:

Wither

Palisades After Dark

Forced Villainy

Clouded

Next week is both a Star Jumper and Rogue week, so maybe on Friday, I'll put out polls for these stories then. Star Jumper needs a poll, too, maybe the following Monday.