Here’s the funny thing about writing a cyberpunk story in which multiple scenes take place in virtual reality. I was searching through the novella to find a good passage that described CJ, my male character, and realized there are two. For my heroine, who has three different appearances including real life and two avatars, it’s even worse.

So, OK. This guy CJ. He’s got some heavy stuff on his plate. He used to be the best hacker in the community. But then he got caught by SpectreTek (the evil corporation). They confiscated all his illegal body modifications (people in my story’s world have data jacks in their necks and flash drives in their arms), and kept him prisoner in a facility in Connecticut Delaware (see what happens when I don’t look facts up in my own book!) until he agreed to work for them. His job? Tracking down his former friends. So he’s kind of a high tech bounty hunter.

But he’s also a prisoner. He has guys who come every week to check up on him. He also has an implant that won’t let him go more than a kilometer from his apartment and will kill him if he tries to remove it. So he’s pretty bitter, as well as scarred–both physically and metaphorically.

Like Riley, his real life appearance is kind of scruffy-looking. Because there need to be more romances about scruffy-looking people, okay??

Here’s a description of CJ from Riley’s POV. It just happens to be during a sexy part. But hey, everyone loves sexy parts!

His avatar had been better looking, but there was something visceral and downright dirty about the real man whose weight pressed her into the floor. His muscles were the long, rangy kind, and they flexed as he propped himself on his forearms above her—forearms, she saw now, that were dotted with round scars. They were shiny, circular patches, as if someone had stubbed out ten or twenty oversized cigarettes on his skin. His T-shirt had several holes in it, and his dark hair had grown long over his ears, which had silver studs running up the edges.

It was nothing that should make her so hot, and yet it did.

 

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Riley Janacek is the heroine in my cyberpunk romance novella Unsecure Connection, which debuts soon. So what’s her deal?

She’s a hacker who goes by the handle LaReineTX2, which stands for Queen of Tarrytown. You don’t call yourself that unless you think you’re the best, or pretty close to it. When we meet her, she’s hacking into a corporate database for a list of passwords. Only it turns out someone else is in the system, monitoring her. That’s CJ, the hero of the story. Well, more like an anti-hero, but we’ll get to him tomorrow.

Riley is kind of paranoid. I can’t really blame her, considering her line of work. Basically until the last page of the story, she won’t tell CJ her name. He knows her handle. And he knows one of her aliases, Samantha McTavish. And since he doesn’t have anything else to call her, he starts to think of her as Samantha. I can tell you other things about Riley, for instance that she is sarcastic and that she has a messy apartment. (Both my characters do. I like to think it’s what brings them together. Just kidding… although there is a moment where they talk about their dirty dishes growing mold.)

I don’t always imagine out my characters’ appearances that much. I know Riley has blue hair and a lot of implants in her arms and neck. I know she cares more about what she looks like in virtual reality than in real life, mainly because her work and her social life don’t tend to be in real life. She has multiple avatars… one for socializing, one for gaming, and I’m assuming another one for meeting clients, although we don’t see that one in the story.

In this excerpt, CJ considers Riley’s different avatars and what they might say about her:

Each of her avatars had similar features, but just enough was different about them. Her social avatar had bigger breasts than the real Samantha. She also dressed a lot more daringly. CJ remembered the little skirt from that first night. This avatar had muscular arms and a sturdier figure. And, he couldn’t help noticing, an ass that looked great in those military pants with the pockets. She wore a bandana tied like a headband across a forehead that sported a jagged white scar running from the left side down onto her cheek. This Samantha was pretty bad-ass. Like the other one and like the real Samantha, it had blue hair.

He wondered what her avatars said about her. The real Samantha was too skinny to even be called by more flattering words, like slender. In fact, scrawny would have been the most appropriate, but even CJ wasn’t stupid enough to say that to a woman he wanted to sleep with again. Was her Killblock avatar her attempt at experiencing what it was like to be physically powerful? And her social avatar that he’d seen in Slash was an exploration of what it would be like to be sexy? That thought sobered him. Was that what she saw about her real-world self? Things she longed to change? Because she was powerful and sexy just the way she was. To him, anyway.

Or maybe he was reading too much into it. It didn’t have to be either a massive wish-fulfillment fantasy or just a game. The truth might be any shade of gray in between those two extremes, he realized.

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Dark city.

Night had fallen on Tarrytown, at the far north end of the urban sprawl that had once been known as Manhattan. Here, where the vacant hulks of old buildings crumbled and moisture dripped from the shadowy rusted beams. Where the city moldered and you could see the fires burning in barrels in the very lowest levels where people camped. The people who lived here were the people the corporations forgot, as they gradually consolidated and closed up the buildings and moved south. It was the sort of neighborhood where no one looked each other in the eye. It smelled like wet metal and Chinese food.

 

This is how my debut novella Unsecure Connection, which is upcoming from Decadent Publishing, opens. I’ve always been attracted to the undersides of large cities, the parts that are more grit than glamor. My story takes place in a future version of New York. I never got specific about how far in the future–the truth is I don’t really know. But I don’t think I need to for the purposes of the story.

Anyone familiar with the state of New York (and I am, since I grew up around Albany) knows that Tarrytown is on the Hudson River a good ways up from Manhattan. So what’s the deal with my setting? Well, what I envisioned was a future in which there had been a huge growth explosion for New York city, and it had expanded to take over much of the lower part of the state. In this future, tech corporations rule the world. But at some point, the inevitable financial collapse happened, and the city was reduced once more to its center. It’s not post-apocalyptic exactly, but it’s post-financial apocalypse. So the outer areas of the mega-city become abandoned. And who still lives in the run-down, abandoned parts of the city? Shady characters, of course.

My characters are shady characters. So there you go. I’ll be introducing them in posts later this week.