I only made a little progress on Chapter 29 of TBP. Don’t ask me where the rest of the time went.

Since I haven’t done much in the way of progress, I thought I might share a bit about the side project I’ve been working on this week. The basic idea’s been rolling around in my head some time and I finally decided to start developing it as a potential Else Arc story. You see, playing Cinderella Girls I couldn’t help imagine Producer-san as an irritable sort who’s lost all patience with the world around him and particularly the nonsense of the girls he’s managing. For instance, there’s this one S Rare card of Kaoru with her holding up her empty bento box looking so proud of herself and I can just imagine Producer-san crabbily snapping at her, “Well, whaddya want, a cookie!?” To which the reply should be, “She’s a nine-year-old girl who made a happy plate, you dillweed. Yes, she’d probably like a cookie.”

Mostly because I ignore the threadbare plot of the actual game, I tend to imagine the character dynamics and I was seeing all this opportunity you’d never see explored in the actual game. For instance, pretty much every girl in the game comes on to you. Every girl. Given that more than half of them are minors, it’s a big problem. The anime plays with this somewhat by having Producer-san spend a lot of time with the cops, but I’m thinking about a darker look at the concept as a deconstruction of harem romcoms. Prodding at the seedy side of the entertainment industry is another part of it.

This ties into a recent trend in my work where I’m setting up fairly unlikeable leads but still trying to make them engaging. Now, I think with the poor talent agent in this story, his life is in such shambles and he’s so pathetic that you’ll probably feel a little sorry for him, but what do I do in the Nell series if the black comedy approach I’m going for falls flat? Well, I’m obviously not going be going anywhere as an artist if I don’t try pressing the boundaries. If something doesn’t work, I’ll just learn from the experience and move on.

Anyway, that’s just a little glimpse at what’s going on behind the scenes. A little more work and I might put up a teaser in the near future. Have to decide if I want it to be a one-shot or a series. Maybe a one-shot with an option for a prequel.

Hopefully I can get my story progress back on track. Stay tuned.

After so many days of brisk progress, it’s a little disappointing to report that I only managed a couple sentences of Chapter 14 of EM because I didn’t get to writing until I was starting to conk out.

Earlier in the day I did some work to detail an idea that may or may not ever see the light of day. Basically, I took elements of Jurassic World and adapted them to a Fifth Empire story about combat robots. You see, I really love the dynamics of the raptor pack in JW and I started thinking about an analog that would allow for human communication while still being removed from humanity, which led me to a dangerous combat AI rather unscrupulously developed and narrowly contained. Instead of a theme park gone awry, we have a military R&D program that goes out of control when the boundaries are pushed too far. Should the idea get further development, it’ll only retain a superficial relation to its inspiration, but I thought I’d bring it up since I didn’t have much other progress to report.

In other news, I may use the coming Thanksgiving break to launch the Else Arc I’ve mentioned in the past. I’ll still retain the “Five Arcs” label so I don’t wreck any links or search engine results, though. The Else Arc with be something of an unofficial Arc. However, as I allow myself total creative freedom with it, there’s some great potential. Stay tuned.