Origins of The Sixth Precept - Part 5

By the time I’d finished “A Concerned Citizen” and “Time Noir” (aka “Detective Story”) I knew I definitely wanted to continue writing a series of Kim Yoshima adventures. So, I began the third story installment, called “The Eighth Component.” This was to be a direct follow-up to “Time Noir” with Kim and Smith forming a “psychic detective agency” and going out to solve all manner of weird and unusual crimes. Little did I know when I started this that it would be the least successful conceptually and the most confusing (yet imaginative) story of the first three as well as the longest. Technically, it was a novelette, coming in just under 15,000 words whereas both previous short stories were in the 9,000 to 10,000 word range. But unlike those, “The Eighth Component” was a hot mess! After being negatively critiqued by my writers’ group and me rewriting it a couple of times, I was still disappointed enough to never even send the final draft out to any markets.

It did provide me, though, with some ideas for furthering Kim’s backstory and personality and I ended up cannibalizing a couple of scenes and descriptive passages for The Sixth Precept (albeit rewritten). Plus, I created some really wild and absurd supporting characters that I’ve been trying to find a home for ever since--I really like them and can’t let them go!

So, where to begin? At the end of “Time Noir,” Kim had approached a newly regenerated form of Smith (actually a homeless alcoholic whom Smith’s psychic essence had taken over after his artificial body had been destroyed, which my writing group objected to as mind-control, etc). She proposed that he join her very special detective agency. In “The Eighth Component,” she’s retired from the police force and is anxious to begin her new career. All the while, her telepathic powers are growing stronger and more diverse. Smith, in the meantime, is hiding from his alien counterparts (since he failed to solve his own murder in “Time Noir” and broke all kinds of intergalactic rules) and reveling in what it means to be human.

But Smith’s mind is taken over by the self-destructive, dark aspect of the homeless host he now resides in. He’s become catatonic as a result and, in order to save him, Kim uses her bourgeoning esper abilities to enter his mind. There, in a bleak, neural landscape, Kim meets seven avatars of different aspects of the man’s personality-- a Chinese Mandarin named Wing Toy and who talks like Charlie Chan, a 1950’s, beehived party girl named Maria, pulp-era Spacecateer Rock Sampson, Rock’s Martian sidekick Goomy, a black-skinned merfem and Raya the dolphin who doesn’t really do much at all. They’re banding together to fight back against the man’s reptilian brain whose avatar is that of a mime and is called the “Eighth Component.” I told you they were wild and absurd, didn’t I?

The seventh of these avatars has been destroyed and so Kim is forced to replace it in order to complete the group. All the while she’s communicating with a rapidly weakening Smith somewhere in the “psychic ether.” And on and on. Shortly after this point, I decided to write the novel although there was one final Kim Yoshima short story yet to come.