The Next (Potential) Series In My Career

If you've ever been interested in hearing how I go about writing, then this post is for you. Expect rambling, grammar issues, and typos... xD

While I don't know if Towers of Heaven will be 3 books or 4, I'm absolutely certain it's past the halfway mark. As such, my thoughts have begun to drift towards my next project more and more lately. I've already written the first chapter of 3 different story ideas, only to drop them one after the other. Fortunately I've never had writer's block, so the ideas never stopped coming. Eventually one stuck, and it stuck well. I felt like it had great potential. Amazing potential. As much as ToH or more...

For those of you who've read all my books, you'll know that I've kept my distance from VRMMORPG stories. That doesn't mean I dislike them. Quite the opposite in fact, they're tied with Xianxia as my favorite genre. I think they have very appealing qualities, but I just wasn't confident in any of the ideas I thought of so far. Astral Plane and I Spawned In The Demon Queen's Bedroom were two attempts, but in each one it felt like I was double dipping and indecisive of the genre I wanted to be in. If I was gonna do that, why not just make it a fantasy world right off the bat like fabled islands (another book of mine)? Why does the earth aspect matter at all? It'll just make a worse story by dragging it down.

Please keep in mind that the following paragraph is my opinion and what I've experienced. You might disagree and that's totally fine.

if you're gonna write a story, you need to have stakes, tension, and knowing that mistakes have consequences (my stories might not reflect this belief because I lack the skill to write it such, lmao). And herein lies the problem: of the multitude of VRMMORPG novels I've read, almost all of them lack stakes, tension, and what have you. The vast majority of these book's real world don't matter at all. It would have arguably been better to just make it a fantasy world with VRMMORPG mechanics right off the bat. That's why all of my stories had real worlds with game mechanics.

I've been searching and searching for ideas to create my very own VRMMORPG story for a long time now. After all, it's my favorite genre. Only now have I finally found a unique and compelling VRMMORPG story that has stakes in the real world.

I suppose the idea first came about when I thought about twitch.tv and hollywood celebrity culture. What if I combined the two? What if in the far distant future, the best VRMMORPG players were worshiped and revered as celebrities? It isn't that hard to imagine. Even today, some gamers are already worshiped. But even then it wasn't quite at the level to make a compelling story with tension and all that jazz.

I kept thinking about solutions, until I was eventually enlightened.

What if this was exacerbated several times by fundamentally changing how society functioned? What if the world was merit based and addicted to virtual games because all other problems in the world were solved? Most importantly, what if a player's influence/strength in the virtual world directly affected their status in real life? Money, property, and status could be gained or lost based on one's ability.

Voila. All of a sudden, defeat, loss, and mistakes within the virtual world would cause direct consequences in the real world.  

By having the real world function in this manner, actions in the game suddenly have tension. Great! Problem solved, right? But then I thought: was having a meritocracy enough to make a compelling story? Maybe. Maybe not.

I thought not, so I went even further.

WARNING: THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS CONTAIN HINTS FOR THE OVERARCHING PLOT LINE OF VIRTUAL CONQUEST. WHILE NOT EXPLICIT SPOILING ANYTHING, YOU WILL HAVE SPECULATIONS THAT MAY BE ROOTED IN TRUTH.

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In this world, two inventions, both created by the same person, shook the very foundations of society. Virtual Reality and Artificial Intelligence. Unbeknownst to the majority of the populace, Anna, the most sophisticated and oldest A.I. which every other A.I. is connected to, manages the economy and merit-based system by which the world is run by. However, only the people who stand at the pinnacle of society, the 1% of the 1% of the 1% know that she controls much more than that... much more...

But enough about that. I'm afraid I've given out too much already.

Now for the general plot line that doesn't give too much away. 

Drake Thorn, the MC, is a fifteen year old youth who grew up worshiping celebrities whose player avatars were heroes that performed all sorts of heroic deeds. As a result, his sense of morality is very rigid. Either something is right, or its wrong. There's no in between for Drake. 

Unfortunately for him, as he grows ever stronger in the Virtual Scene, he comes face to face with some ugly truths. It turns out that combining celebrity worship culture with a meritocratic society isn't so pretty after all. Who'da thunk?

So with all of this in mind, I've made it so that a VRMMORPG story will be full of real tension and real consequence. In addition, I've made it so the real world isn't boring and dull like many other VRMMORPG stories. The VRMMORPG aspect of the story is directly tied to the real life story. They aren't independent, thus perfectly solving the problem I described earlier. At least, that's what I think. I could be completely wrong XD

Now that I've solved what I think is the reason why I haven't written a VRMMORPG novel, I can finally dive head first into writing a story in this amazing genre.

This is the first blog post I've written, and it took me over two hours to write. Would you like more of this content? I'd appreciate it if you left me your thoughts.