Announcing GUARDIAN ANGEL, a new Troubleshooter serial on Patreon!

It’s finally time to debut that new Troubleshooter content I promised a while back for my Patreon Original Fiction tier! It took longer than expected, but I’m trying something new here, and I wanted to put extra care into it.

Starting today, I’m publishing a 5-part serial, Guardian Angel, focusing on Only Superhuman supporting character Koyama Hikari/Troubleshooter Tenshi. In hopes of attracting new readers, I’m offering Chapter 1 to all Patreon subscribers at the $1 level and above, while the remaining four monthly installments will be at the usual $10 Original Fiction level. As usual, the story comes with annotations at the $12 Behind the Scenes tier. Here are the links:

GUARDIAN ANGEL Chapter 1: “The Angel and the Panther” 

GUARDIAN ANGEL Chapter 1 annotations 

Guardian Angel is actually the self-contained B plot of a planned second Troubleshooter novel (still untitled), but since I’d run out of original material to post on Patreon, I decided to write and publish it as a standalone serial, thereby getting half the novel out of the way while keeping my Patreon alive a while longer. The story picks up a lingering thread from Only Superhuman, but everything the reader needs to know is explained within the serial.

Kari/Tenshi is a character I’ve always been fond of and wanted to do more with, and I felt the tragic backstory I gave her in Only Superhuman was rich with potential. However, now that I’m much more familiar with Japanese culture from my years of watching tokusatsu and other Japanese TV/film, I find that my portrayal of Kari in OS feels a bit naive in retrospect, based on somewhat cliched archetypes (a Japanese heroine who’s an expert martial artist from a Yakuza background) and some inaccurate assumptions. So I wrote Guardian Angel to flesh out Kari and her cultural heritage with (hopefully) more dimension, depth, and authenticity.  I even tried to capture Japanese phrasings and idioms as best I could in the scenes where characters speak or think in Japanese, “translated” into English for the readers’ benefit. Thanks to Yumiko Bendlin for consulting on Japanese language and cultural elements, and thanks to Keith R.A. DeCandido and Yoshiko Lane for getting me in touch with her.

The serial is also an opportunity to pay homage to Japanese superhero fiction, much as I’ve done in my Tangent Knights audio novel series. Tangent Knights was an attempt to do for tokusatsu superheroes what Only Superhuman had done for American superhero fiction, to homage it and justify it within a scientifically plausible setting (although TK is for a young adult audience and above, while the Troubleshooter series is for mature readers). It seemed natural enough to use Tenshi as a vehicle for bringing the same kind of homage into the Troubleshooter universe.

My hope is that this serial will generate enough interest to bring in more subscribers for my Patreon. The more readers I gain, the more motivated I’ll be to write more content in the future. So please consider giving this first chapter a try by signing on at the $1 level or above.