Into the Fillerverse! (My First Kindle Vella Effort)

Since Kindle Vella debuted as kind of Amazon's answer to Wattpad and other microfiction sites, I've been wanting to do a story there.  The problem as I said earlier is they wouldn't let you repost stuff you've already published, like the flash fiction stories I put together for Last Dance and Other Stories and Mortal Sins, which would have been perfect for that platform--had it existed at the time.

I kept thinking of doing an Eric Filler story on there but just didn't have the idea or the time.  And then after watching Marvel's What If...? series I was writing a story and I threw in a reference to Eva Vantu, who I realized was the closest to a Watcher in my Eric Filler stories.  Besides being the framing device and sometimes star of the 13-book 24 Hour Gender Swap series, she has also appeared in Casting Change, Presto Change-O 3, The Magic Panties 2, and soon in From Boss to Goth.

Kindle Vella covers are supposed to be square with no words. 

Who is she?  Eva Vantu is a Gypsy from Eastern Europe who was born about 100 years ago, shortly after WWI.  Her parents were killed by Nazis (Gypsies being one of the early groups targeted by Hitler's minions) and she and her brother fled to France.  He put her on a ship to America while he stayed to fight the Nazis--and was killed.

In America she wound up living in a house on Long Island, where she made charms and potions and read palms and stuff like that.  But unlike scammers, her charms and potions actually work and her palm readings would be accurate.  She got a huge crush on Elvis and in Casting Change she gets the movie producer main character to arrange a meeting with the King.  

During the 24 Hour Gender Swap series she comes to adopt two girls.  In the last book she uses a potion to make herself a young girl and leaves Long Island.  In The Magic Panties 2 we say she's working at a coffee place in Seattle and in From Boss to Goth it mentions she stopped in Chicago to do some palm reading and stuff on Navy Pier to pay her way to Seattle.

Since she's been in multiple stories and since she has magical abilities, I was thinking that she could be kind of a Watcher character.  And then thinking of the end of What If...? I got thinking that maybe there could be some big crisis that prompts her to recruit characters from across the Fillerverse (trademark pending) to fight back.

But the thing is, you wouldn't really want characters who are guys turned into normal women or bimbos or anything like that.  I mean, what use would that be?  So I focused on stories where the characters have useful skills.  So I was thinking my Guardians of the Fillerverse Team would be:

1. Dixie Larson (aka Eunice Collins) (Gender Swap Detective series):  She was a male private eye who became a girl (mostly), so she has investigating skills and stuff.
2. Chase (Gender Swap Warriors series):  Chase was a rich college kid whose body was merged with the spirit of a female alien warrior named La'ce who was a strategic genius, so she has strategy and fighting skills.
3. Bluestreak, aka Allison Bassett (Gender Swap Heroes series):  Allison used to be a scientist until a meteor turned him into a young woman with superspeed, so she has a skillset like The Flash.
4. Princess Alta (From Hero to Shero):  Alta was a warrior prince named Altor until the evil Lord Boniface changed him into a girl.  But since then she has a magic sword and a flying war pig, making her kind of like She-Ra.
5. Zenna Howser (Presto Change-O 3):  Harold Howser was a stage magician in 1928 when a rival changed him into a young woman and sent him across the world, where he met a young Eva Vantu living in Eastern Europe.  An old magician gave the female Harold the name Zenna after his daughter and she soon found she had real magic abilities.  At the end she was living with her fiancé with a baby on the way.
6. Morgan Casey (Swapp:  Jailbreak):  What does every 21st Century super-team need?  A computer hacker!  And Morgan is the best.  He was a convict recruited to infiltrate a computer company by becoming a woman with the help of AMI the AI and a program called Swapp, so presumably AMI could also show up.

That seems like a pretty formidable team, wouldn't you say?  But now who could they fight?  I was thinking of doing a Grant Morrison thing and making their enemy...me!  (Or Eric Filler.)  But then I thought, who is even more of a threat in my universe?

The answer:  Amazon!  You know, the assholes who while they sell my books and take my money have stomped out about half my books and sabotaged others?  Yeah, them.  So a big, evil corporation in Seattle is killing men who have been turned into girls and because she's sensitive to these things, Eva sees the danger and recruits her team to break into the company's headquarters and stop them.

And this could easily play out over a bunch of episodes on Kindle Vella.  The first episode focuses on Eva recognizing the problem.  Then through the next 10 episodes we have her recruiting the other main characters while they also learn more about the Nozama company.  It's like one of those heist movies or Seven Samurai, Magnificent Seven, Justice League where she goes around recruiting people of different skills.  We try to make it organic.  First she recruits Zenna, who has the magic ability to reach others.  And young Eva is featured in Presto Change-O 3 so it's easy for Eva to send herself a message in the past and have her young self deliver the message to Zenna.

I wanted to use Dixie/Eunice but I wasn't sure why Eva would need a private eye from 1940.  But since book 3 was deleted by Amazon because it featured Dixie becoming a little girl, I realized I had an easy way to work her into it by making her a target of the thing killing gender swapped people.  Zenna and Eva show up to try to stop the thing, but while they fail, they save Dixie and bring her back to the future.  She brings with her a chunk of the thing that helps them identify Nozama and then she tries to infiltrate the company.

I had her in a Starbucks, where she's trying to get used to the modern world, and meet a Nozama driver.  I saw another opportunity there and had the driver get shot.  He's given a potion that makes him into a young woman.  And that way we have a fresh gender swap in the story, plus it should lead to some sex with him and Dixie, providing some romance too.

From there they recruit Chase because they need to make a plan and she's good at that.  And when they have trouble getting into Nozama they recruit Allison for her speed that can go through walls and stuff.  When she's trapped by the bad guys, Morgan bails her out and reveals that she's also been watching Nozama.  For the final assault, they recruit Alta for extra muscle.

Another thing I had to work out was the bad guy.  Who is Nozama?  Why are they doing this?  I thought maybe they were just trying to censor the real world like the FCC in Family Guy or V-GINY in Futurama.  But it didn't really make much sense why they would be doing that.

Then I thought of using someone from a previous book as the villain too.  I was thinking of Morgan being a turncoat, who infiltrates the team to destroy it from within.  And that got me thinking of the Race Against Time books where Detective Lottie Donovan and her daughter Casey are put into a VR game where they keep getting younger if they don't pass whatever challenge.  In the end Lottie's mind is basically wiped and her daughter ends up part of the Matrix.  In the next two books Casey abducts men and tortures them in various ways.

So then I got the idea that Casey could be behind all of this (and in one of those happy coincidences, Morgan's last name is Casey!) for some reason.  And then I got the idea that all of these men are being turned into younger girls, so what she could want is the temporal energy from these swaps.  With that energy she hopes to go back in time and save her mom.  Tragic villain backstory!

That's at least the plan.  I might change it as I see fit.  When I started this entry it was all pie in the sky but now I'm actually writing it and using this entry as sort of my blackboard to write notes and stuff.  I have it down on paper but in case I lose the paper or spill on it or something, it's good to have it in "the cloud" somewhere.

It sounds like a lot of work, but the first six episodes ranged from 1000-2500 words for less than 9000 total.  So the whole thing might end up about 35,000-45,000 words or so.  Some of it in Episodes 1-2 I just pasted from previous stories, only in Episode 2 I had to convert it to 3rd person from 1st person.  Still, that's a lot less time-consuming than rewriting it from scratch.

I'm not sure how readers will respond, (so far, not great) but it sounds like a fun idea for me and a way to get my feet wet with the format.  Plus for readers who might not have discovered Eric Filler books in the traditional format, it's kind of like advertising for those other books.

The link!

Wednesday I'm going to crunch the numbers on Vella royalties.  Fascinating stuff.