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When I'm not mucking about in someone's database, I write subversive short stories, and some of them demand a follow-up. That's the case with the story I finished over the weekend, which is the 5th installment in a series I'm not done with yet. Most of my stories start with an idea, rather than with a character. I grow that idea into a story using much the same techniques that I've used forever when working on tech projects. First I work out a situation that expresses the idea, which gives me a setting; then I work out what sort of person would be in that setting; and so forth.

Anyway, the current series started with a story called "Bait", which takes place in 2095. The main character is a freelance infrastructure failure analyst who is watching a feed about the failure of the sea wall across San Francisco Bay that was keeping the risen ocean out of the interior lowlands until it collapsed. The thing is, the official story is terrorists blew it up, but that's not what it looks like to him.

I don't create an arc to the series, but rather start each succeeding story with the assumption that the prior stories have happened, and where does that lead to? Sometimes, the next story follows the action directly, which is what happened in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th installments. The new one, which is called, "Standing to Resist", widens it out, and the 6th one, which I've started to sketch out, takes it even further afield.

In the past, when there was a SlashDot story, or a comment about one, that was relevant to a story I'd written, I post my comment, and leave a link to the story. I'll probably continue doing that here at SoylentNews. But you don't have to wait for a come-on; poke around any time. Maybe you'll instigate a story.