Rainfurrest: Final Writing Tally

I wrote five stories this weekend, one more than I planned to do.

Deep House of Horror  I began this story Thursday with a bunch of one-liners and ideas from Anthony and Sky and Chuck.  I did some research on House music overnight (and the ballet Giselle as well -- though that turned out to not have any bearing on the story), and Friday morning I set out to write it all up.

For a sidekick, I had Cranky Knuckles, an aging former boxing champion and House DJ turned crimefighter.  I had a  team-up with Nina Ballerina, and a dance villain named The Beat Breaker.  I wrote one scene where Nina meets Grandpa's new sidekick and expresses doubts about him, and warns them about what they're about to face, and then a scene where they're in the club and confront the villain, and then fight him and his cronies.

The story needs a lot of help.  The first scene probably doesn't need to exist, and there's nothing surprising about the fight or the ending.  Sometimes I try to throw things together and nothing interesting suggests itself to me.  I like the characters and I've been wanting to write a Nina team-up, so I'll have to go back and rework this one later.

Crystal Weenie  Death Medal has stolen the Crystal Weenie.  Grandpa and his sidekick Sixteen Tons are out to get it back.

This one works pretty well.  I start in the middle of the action, and I have a conceit that drives the plot, such as it is -- Grandpa's insistence that the Crystal Weenie is merely a plot device to drive the story and not important or powerful in and of itself.

Arbor of Pain  A few weeks ago I came up with a group of new villains to work with, and for this story I introduced one of them, Douglas Fear, a tree-man who controls plants.  Grandpa's sidekick in this is Aquakinetic Lad, whose powers are pretty cool but fairly useless against this particular villain.  I started writing a fight scene and came up with a villainous plot on the fly, and ended it in a way that made sense but has zero tension or humor... so this one probably needs help too.

A Good Start  Based on comments from Sky and Mike at dinner Friday Night, I wrote the first scene of this story on Saturday.  Mike was describing Old Man Henderson and I forget if this story was part of it or something Sky said, but the story was of a character who killed off an entire cult at the beginning of a Call of Chthulhu game, ending the game, because all of the cultists were dead.  Bad GMing aside, I liked the vision of someone going in guns blazing and killing every cultist they see -- because you can't be too careful with cultists.  Grandpa usually fights with his fists, but I wrote this opening scene in which he and a sidekick named Whiskey Tango Foxtrot slaughter an entire cult.

And then... I wasn't sure where to go with it.  Sky thought it was a finished story, but it didn't really have much of a point or punchline.  Later that night Gene suggested that, since I'd named the cult "The Cult of the Golden Apophenia" (which is a word meaning humanity's tendency to find meaning and pattern where none actually exists -- a perfect name for a cult if you ask me), then it would turn out that the leader of the cult had engineered the entire slaughter himself in order to "read the entrails" of those slaughtered and unlock the ultimate secrets that he sought.

So that gave me my ending.  Of course, Dark Dr. Dark is there to clean up Grandpa's mess.  ^_^

Hero's Sacrifice  I've had this story idea for a while in which Grandpa enters a situation in which he's certain to die -- running into a volcano, whatever -- because it's the only way to save people.  It's Spock in the radiation chamber -- the heroic sacrifice.  Grandpa knows as a hero that it's his job to make that sacrifice.  So today I picked this idea up and fleshed it out.  The villain is Baron Climate Change, the threat is that his Flying Fortress has been trashed and is about to crash into the heart of Detroit (some might argue that's not really a big threat -- it might even save them money by demolishing things that need it).  Grandpa stays on board to try and steer it away from the most populated portion of the city.

For this one I have a good idea of how I want to end it, but the specific ending proved difficult to get exactly right.  I'm going to work on it again tomorrow I think.

But all in all, a pretty successful weekend as far as writing went!