Some Kind of Virus 2.0 (AU Story - Chapter One)

Hi everybody! So I ended up taking the plunge and decided to rewrite last year's Some Kind of Virus from scratch. 

You're all basically getting a raw, in-depth look at my actual drafting process in real time, lol. With any novel or long-form project I start, I tend to get about 5 chapters or 50,000 words in (whichever comes first) before I write myself into a wall, then burn it down to the ground and start over again from the beginning. I did the same thing with WE HAVE ALWAYS BEEN HERE, I'm doing the same thing to my second novel manuscript (we're on Attempt #3 or 4, I think), and I guess I'm doing the same thing to SKoV now!

The big changes:

• No more first-person POV, epistolary format, or footnotes. 
• The story now switches between multiple characters' perspectives to accommodate individual storylines and larger plot arcs. I'm pretty sure every major companion is going to get their turn: this first chapter had Arainia, Blade, and Trouble, next is going to have Chase, Red, Tallys, and others, etc. Ayla and Tallys are going to have their own storyline elsewhere, and so are Red and his friends before the plots begin to merge together!
• Obviously this means big changes to several characters' backstories and motivations. The "redbands" are a bigger part of this new version, so check out the new primer below if you'd like to brush up on the context!
• "Brightburner" is now Arainia, who borrows her name from the Shepherds' novel protagonist but is currently modeled in personality to be more like how I imagine my V in Cyberpunk 2079, as well as one of the characters in my current novel 'script (the one I'm banging my head over as I stab at Attempt #4). I realized a big part of why I was dithering with Version 1.0 of this story was because I was attempting to make Brightburner as blank-slate as possible, neither specifying their gender nor their relationships to others, which resulted in me struggling with my own engagement because the story was written exclusively from their perspective (how do you write a story from the perspective of a character you're deliberately trying to be vague about)? So I'm going with what's more comfortable for me and throwing Arainia into the mix so that the story is overall easier to write. Her sections in this chapter are almost identical to Brightburner's, just written in third-person and with more backstory with Zori, but the Blade and Trouble sections are new, and more new content will keep livening up the story as we chew through the ground that was already covered in Ver. 1.0!
• There will very likely be romance, since I think it's difficult for me to write long-form projects without including at least some kissing. I don't know exactly who the romance will be between--history tells me that Blade and Arainia are likely, but a romance with Chase or Trouble in this AU also look equally appealing--and there may even be secondary romances between other characters: I'm not sure yet. However, because this is such a heavy AU, I don't want anyone to bring those dynamics over into the main Shepherds universe! If Tallys and Ayla happen to bone in this universe, that is not me shipping them or telling you that they're canon in the game or anything like that! I just, you know, think survivors in a cyberpunk zombie apocalypse are probably going to mess around. But some of these characters are very different from their canonical versions, as well, so maybe mentally separating the versions will be easier! *looks at Trouble*
• I'm going to be a bit shameless and admit that, while I'm feeling very reinvigorated and enthusiastic about this story (it's so much fun to write), I'm also using it to prototype certain (very specific) things I've been pondering about my second novel, which is also an apocalyptic road trip narrative featuring multiple character perspectives. That story is sort of like a floundering ship that's ground to a halt at the moment, and this story is like one of those little icebreaker ships that churns through the obstacles and provides safe passage for the bigger ship, so if that story ever ends up getting published and you see some faintly-familiar things in there, it's because I'm using this story as the trailblazer to play around in the sandbox and figure some things out!

Anyway, enough talking about it! I hope you enjoy this new version (I'm going to leave the old version up for archival purposes and just beg you not to read it lol), and thank you for all of your suggestions, comments, feedback, encouragement, and support as always! Thanks for reading! 🧟‍♀️

Content warning: this story holds all of the things common to zombie and cyberpunk stories, including descriptions of violence, blood, gore, infection and viral epidemics, horror situations, murder, and death. Brief mentions of drug addiction, economic collapse, crime, gang violence, and other dystopian elements are alluded to.