Triple Aaaar

I wasn't very satisfied with There Be Whales, and upon further thought, it occurred to me that I had perhaps two stories going on at once, or enough material for two different stories.

One story involved Grandpa and his sidekick in space with Jenny Nova and her friend Llahna, stopping to investigate a distress signal and meeting some pirates.  In the original story the pirate captain is somebody Grandpa knows, and he had a crew of robot cowboy samurai pirates.

The second story involves who Grandpa's sidekick is -- Scientifically Curious Nikko, who is one part science fiction horror movie scientist, one part Curious George, and one part Oz-style flying monkey.  I don't really explain how he came to be Grandpa's sidekick, but the ending of the story turns on his scientific curiosity and his desire to study the giant space whale that's about to eat them.

What I decided was that There Be Whales would be much shorter and work much better if the whole point of the story were a scientific expedition to discover and study space whales.  I may be able to work in the back story of how Nikko and Grandpa met, too.  But if I remove everything dealing with the emergency beacon and the pirates, I'll have a shorter, stronger story.

I created a second story file called Triple Aaar, which would be all the bits that I'm taking out of There Be Whales.  Grandpa and company respond to a distress signal, discover the pirate ship, and... well, I don't know, exactly.  I kind of want to explore the robot cowboy samurai pirate angle, and was thinking that each member of the crew was a different combination of "cool" things, such as nazi zombie hobo pirate or vampire ninja catgirl pirate.  There seems to be some joke material there, but I don't know how far I can push it, since I really haven't found the punchline to the whole story yet.  I mean, obviously one possibility is they fix the ship's engine, and then the pirates hold them up -- but that's way too obvious to be a surprise.  So I'm still thinking about it.

I was really hoping to get the story done today too, but I haven't worked on it enough.  I wanted another story to count against my July total, but maybe tomorrow.