I have a headache, and its name is Honest Impulses. This is the sequel to Honest Question, and it's meant to be novel length. Honest Question introduced two characters I hoped would become important to the series, Misuko and Linia, and was meant to explore a great many details about what it means to be a robot, to be in love with a robot, to have morality and ethics, and a lot of other questions that I'm vastly interested in persuing.
Honest Impulses happens shortly after Honest Question, although there are two shorts before it, Necessary Repairs and First Impulses. Honest Impulses basically asks the a simple question: if the robot Linia's purpose is to be Misuko's ideal beloved, and Misuko's ideal beloved is a human with all the humane impulses Misuko admires, then what if one of those impulses is to fall in love with someone else?
Especially when that someone else is a fucked-up, fragile young woman who's just as confused about the universe as a college kid is supposed to be.
There's an entire mystery plot, too, about how robots are mistreated, neglected, and taken for granted, and about how one man, reacting to the mistreatment of robots, decides that the only way to prevent that mistreatment is to convince all robots that killing off humanity is in all sentients' beings best interests, and how he's going to use Linia, whose antique mind is a great proving ground for his plan. I've written over 118,000 words on this story-- and I can't get it to finish.
I have some fabulous scenes. Some of them are downright amazing. There are great smiles and laughs. The individual chapters have some really great moments. But dammit, I can't seem to bridge the muddle in the middle. You know, the part where Linia decides she can love more than one person, where Misuko decides she can let Linia be poly, where our heroes investigate, Scooby-Doo style, exactly why Saia Omertum blew her own head off in a very public and grisly fashion.
Gaah. I've re-written this three times. Something has to come together sometime. Right?