Work (and now job hunting/education since I quit, long story short they wanted me to do something illegal according to state health codes and I said no I quit) and recreation that isn't explicitly writing stories has kept me busy. I still write, though. It's just not stories at the moment.
My current writing project is a World Building document about the strategy game Deserts of Kharak, a game set in the Homeworld universe as a prequel to the three titular games.
This project, named Desert of Kharak Overhaul aka DOKO, is a 30k+ word document for balance and content stuff, mostly centered around the expansion of in-game factions. It's been my focus for months as I wrack my brain trying to come up with ways for my creativity to work its magic. It's something I'm doing for funsies. I would upload it to Stories Online or I might stash it on a Patreon or something. Idk.
Related to stories, I do intend to eventually write a story using the content from my DOKO document, a short story (30k range) detailing a smaller family unit within Kiith Manaan, as they make their way across the Great Banded Desert after their festival grounds on their Manaan Command Carrier.
But yeah, I'm still here. I'm still writing about the derpy little creature named Maxwell. It's just taking time as I live life.
SAI was thought up on the spot a few days ago. I was posting on Reddit in a subverting common fantasy tropes thread and came up with "What if we started as a fantasy story and it ended up something different?"
Paladin is an old Avatar concept from my Avatar sheet listing all of my intended Avatars. It originally started out as something closer to Kenji from For Honor and gradually changed into a English/French knight. It's fully designed to be a melee-centric mecha in a ranged combat era with guns and missiles.
SAI starts off as being seen from the Avatar's perspective. This particular Paladin-class Avatar is supposed to be very, very old, probably one of the first to be designed. That's why he sees everything in fantasy terms.
In my Aal-Ibrahim sub-universe, dragons are a super-family of extraterrestrial creatures from a neighboring galaxy, spreading their genetics across the Milky Way. Most of them are apex predators, and on this planet, they get to massive proportions.
I don't think I'll add to this story and make it a longer, multi-chapter story.
Yeah, it's political.
Imo, very political since I specified BLM (Salah), Feminists (Ocean, who is specifically a FemiNazi), and MAPs/Epstein (Nolan) as major evil enemies. The 'pride troopers' are very obviously people from the TQ+ community, and they are specifically written as Nonbinary they/them. I used hippie names out of a name generator for the more progressive types in the overall Socialist Revolution.
The original draft for this story was started way back in the "The Fun Never Stops" story, and the Main Character agent involved in that story is referenced early in TC2. Three 'big bad' enemies take over the world. A take on Socialism, a take on the Military-Industrial Complex, and the Illuminati. The Socialism group was selected for the Americas and their short-hand name was the Republicans, which is where the Republican Guard comes from.
I thought about doing an old school USSR-type Socialist take over, but it wouldn't make sense because the remaining old school USSR-Communists are present day Russia's leadership. The USSR Secret Police members include Putin. Why would there be two separate USSR-derived organizations?
Ultimately, the agent was extracted by his superiors, a shadow civilization that left Earth in the 1500s to start an interstellar empire but would keep tabs on their home world. They will not be happy with what happens at home, and would return to cleanse Earth of the filth that showed up in the 500+ years since they were gone. The Christians, Jews, Muslims, and other smaller Abrahamic religions were really supposed to be their public fronts.
They're still in for this series. They'll be in TC3. That's why I wrote it where the Socialists won. Because the Socialists have to take over to be the big bad for the Abrahamic 'Aliens'. The shadow civilization has a mixture of Galactic Empire (Star Wars) and Interstellar Manufacturing Corporation (Titanfall) bent to them mixed with old school liberalism and some religious pagan magic shit.
Both of them (Socialists and Shadow civilization) are still going to get crushed by the third Commander, though.
For where I got my inspirations from, the Socialists are a mixture of Skynet forces from the Terminator franchise, the Regent fleet from Battleship (2012), Iron Man from the MCU, and Battle Droids from Star Wars. The Socialists are intended to eventually include a very Star Trek Federation style in TC3.
The reason for all the robots and stuff is because IRL, most people don't actually like Far Left Progressive (and Far Right Individualism) politics. Most people accept and support things like Trans rights and all, because 75% of us are filthy centrist Liberals, myself included. But we don't agree with bringing about the Socialist utopia where everyone is the same and happy and equal outcomes and just stop all usage of fossil fuels (seriously, no one wants to go back to the 1800s besides JSO activists). The super far left are just not very numerous.
Trying to have the "super far left" take over *anything* would require them some sort of technological edge. They don't have the numbers. We're talking about a group of people whom all combined across Canada, the US, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean number 2.5% of the total population of 579m people. If you give even half of this number a gun (9mm and up) and put them to fight the remaining 2.5%, the 2.5% will lose within a year.
So, robots.
Robots were the way I could leverage a Socialist victory. It doesn't matter if you have 500m soldiers if I have a billion robotic tanks and aircraft. You're a small Naboo rebellion vs the entire might of the (galactic) Confederacy of Independent Systems.
Combine that with technology giants (since people who lean left politically are more likely to support and invest in tech firms) and we have a way where a statistically insignificant demographics could win.
As for the series, there are four SupCom factions, United Earth Federation (TC1), Aeon Illuminate (TC2), Cybran Nation, and the Seraphim. I'm thinking of putting a Sera Commander into TC3 but I'll have to see as the story outline unfolds.
--
Leaving the topic of TC1-4 series, why I have focused my writing into this series rather than my usual smaller form writing is because a lot of my inspirations and prompts got stale. Or cringe. I get a lot of my basic ideas off prompts in the r/writingprompts subreddit and the past month has been weak sauce shit. I still have a couple small stories that I'm working on, the basic premises of them are:
1. An interesting twist on why we haven't seen a Second Coming from Jesus yet.
2. An Eon Game admiral leads her small fleet in battle against a superior foe.
3. The life of a small, dumb, physically handicapped Puppy Dog. Dumb doesn't mean stupid. All Catalum have ridiculously high IQ scores.
I've been writing for a few months and my main work so far is this colossal story that is only about 10% done but is looking at the 200k+ word length.
RTR is just a one-day smut story based on a prompt I was given by a random stranger. Technically there *was* plot in the prompt, so it's not pure smut, but for all intents and purposes, it's basically pure smut.
The random stranger is actually in her early twenties. It doesn't really make sense for her child to be any age so I went with an existing adult child that was away while Dad and Stepmom got married. He's older than her and if I was to expand on the story, the way their relationship would go would be more of brother-sister than mother-son, but whatever.
I would still make it less smut and more story, though.
But it's a short one day smut story meant for said random stranger and it gets to be posted here too in case someone wants to read it.