I think I need to write the corporate commandments series. The idea is to have a series of ten books that follow a single individual who works corporate security on his journey from being just a corp sec guy to getting more and more twisted up in the politics of corporations and the underpinnings of what corporate society really is developing into in our modern world. This is not a shadowrun book. This is a cyberpunk book in the sense of having those connections to the punk ant-corp culture and the relationships with technology. It is a book series I have had on my mind for years. I feel like I wait too long between books and wind up spinning my wheels when the reality is that I have a ton of projects and ideas just brewing beneath the surface that do not ever get properly addressed.
So, what is CC? It came to me when I was doing web research for teaching. I found a series of, well, business theorems that felt to me like lead-ins for interesting plots that could help me dive into the inner workings of corporations and how those corps impact the world around us. I turned one of them into the outline for The Law of Diminishing Returns. That was meant to be the first of the series, and I staged it in the shadowrun universe. However, it doesn’t truly belong in that world. It is not about magic or cybertech or the shadows between the corps. It is about the shadows cast by corps over everything else. It is a chance to have that conversation in a way that I want independent of the world rules by which I am bound. It is also an opportunity to stretch my legs and really get back to thinking about story in unique ways and allowing myself to channel the stories that come to me.
I want to get back to that. I want to write more stuff as opposed to waiting around to write more shadowrun. I’ve allowed myself to be typecast as one thing for twenty five years. That means I have been doing that one thing half my life. Crazy. Time to do more.