EP04: Introducing Neon Vape - TRANSCRIPT

Hi! You're listening to Hyba is Writing, and I am your host, Hyba. In this first handful of episodes, I've been going through and introducing all of my active projects. Today, I am introducing Neon Vape: A Vaporwave Odyssey, a futuristic science fiction novel that hopefully puts a bit of a new twist on some fairly common scifi tropes! This is one that I really only started as a fun side-project, and though it's not something I really expect to publish, I'm still going to treat it as such and do my best with it while sort of unleashing my creativity and letting myself have fun with it.

Here's the blurb for Neon Vape:

When down-on-her-luck concept artist Ramona Marx is hired by virtual reality giant VeAre to help design the breakout game for its new virtual reality operating system, she jumps at the opportunity.
    
What begins as the experience of a lifetime transforms into a nightmare when Ramona is asked to test out Neon Vape, the game she has been designing.
    
VeAre's operating system malfunctions, and Ramona finds herself a prisoner in the game.

So, let's talk a little bit about the name. The full name of the book is Neon Vape: A Vaporwave Odyssey. In the book, the game that Ramona is hired to work on is called Neon Vape, and it's this huge open world game that features a vaporwave, retrowave, synthwave kind of aesthetic. It's really fun to play around with these aesthetics, and I've definitely had fun creating Pinterest boards for this book!

This book deals with some of the pretty big tropes in scifi, especially when it comes to virtual reality and that kind of thing. Artificial intelligence plays a big role in this book, because Ramona actually finds herself dealing with Zuri, the self-teaching AI that is built into the game to help players. It also deals with a lot of other popular tropes, such as the dangers of technological advancement, which is something that has been around pretty much since Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and probably for decades and centuries before even that, even if not in the form of a scifi story.

What I like about this particular story is that I use it more as a way of unwinding. If I need a break from The Fall of the Black Masks, or The Pirates of Sissa, or An Entity In Your Midst, or whatever it is I'm working on, this one is a fun one to just go and play around with the worldbuilding and the story and see what I can make.

Maybe it's because it's the exact opposite of my fantasy novels. While they're jam-packed with characters, this book has two or three characters for the majority of the time. While my fantasy books have this sort of historical feel to them, this book is all futuristic and shiny. While the main plots of my other stories are complicated, the plot for this story is pretty straightforward.

At the same time, I also get to do a lot of research on some pretty cool stuff that I think we will be seeing come to the forefront more and more as we as a society move towards virtual reality and augmented reality as the next stage of not only gaming, but of technology. I think that's really intriguing stuff, and so I've been taking my time doing a lot of research and playing around with some new concepts that will hopefully sort of give the usual tropes of science fiction stories a little something new and unique.

As for the worldbuilding, of course that is its own beast. I like that because I don't have any big expectations for this story, I can relax and make outlandish or just plain weird worldbuilding without having to explain it - I mean, it's VR, too, so I don't think I really need to explain weird worldbuilding for a VR game. A lot of games have very strange but fun worldbuilding! I recently went back down memory lane and played a little bit of Final Fantasy X and I realized then that, honestly, when someone is enjoying the story and having fun exploring the world, you don't have to have some airtight worldbuilding. You can just have fun and let your creativity free! So that is what I am trying to do with Neon Vape. I'm usually quite the perfectionist - and I have to admit I'm still being a bit of a perfectionist with Neon Vape - but it's a real treat to be able to let go of the idea that everything needs to make perfect sense for a little while and just enjoy crafting a story.

That's all I have for today, and that wraps up the four main active projects that I've got going on! I hope you've enjoyed these little introductions, and from this episode onward, I will be making more episodes that actually discuss my writing journey, challenges that I have faced or continue to face, breakthroughs that I have, and so on and so forth. If you have any questions about these stories, though, please don't hesitate to send them in!

You can leave me questions/comments/thoughts/suggestions at my Tumblr which is hyba.tumblr.com and via my Twitter, which is @HybaIsWriting. You can also join my mailing list via my website, linked to the podcast and in the episode description.

Thank you very much for tuning in! Until next time!