It's December and I've Done Nothing

I'd love to tell you about everything I've written since July, but frankly, I've written next to nothing.  I was in the middle of my second "Camp NaNoWriMo" back in July when I got wrapped up in MMO gaming, and I've had a hard time getting anything written since.  I like gaming -- but I also like getting a little writing done.  It's hard to find a balance.

I was hoping that NaNoWriMo would solve this problem for me, but the pull of gaming was too strong.  I had a hard time getting back into the rhythm of writing, and ultimately failed.  My plan was to write a Grandpa Anarchy novel -- called Serial Anarchy.  I wrote the first chapter and half of the second.  I'm still adding bits of dialog to it, so I haven't abandoned it and still want to finish it, but in the meantime I got diverted into other pursuits.

The first thing that diverted me was a strong desire to work on a Tai-Pan story during the second week of November.  I wrote several scenes on a Vashti story that I've had in my head for years, but I got bogged down on that one too.  After that, I simply didn't try very hard to write anything the rest of the month.

I did a bit of writing yesterday on Serial Anarchy, and I still want to work on that Vashti story, and I have a strong desire to get back to working on my sprawling, ongoing anime fan fiction novel Girl's School, but I realized today that what I really need to work on this week is a Christmas ghost story.  Christmas ghost stories are a tradition for our writer's group, thanks to Gene's interest in  them (they were quite popular back in the 1900's, A Christmas Carol is just one famous example but there were many of them written back in the day.)  I've written two Grandpa Anarchy Christmas ghost stories the last two years, and I want to have one written for our writer's night Christmas party this year as well.

I came up with an idea between last night and this morning, and I've already written quite a bit of it down and saved it under the title "The Conspiracy Claus".  But I also knew that I had a file saved as "Christmas ghost story 2014" and when I pulled it up, it's actually partially written already.  Not only that, but the idea is a very good one -- I want to finish it now.  So I guess "The Conspiracy Claus" will have to go on the back burner until next year, and I'll try and finish what I'm currently calling "Gin and Ginger".

So, yeah.  My big goal right now is to finish that one story, in the next week or so.  We'll see how that goes.

Grandpa Anarchy Story Ideas July - Sept.

A list of Grandpa Anarchy story ideas that I've come up with in the last few months.  Some are partially written, and respresent pretty much all the writing I've done recently:


All Relative - This is a story about someone who thinks he's disproven the theory of relativity.  This is a big thing for crackpot science, everyone thinks they've disproven relativity, usually without even fully understanding what relativity is.  But in a superhero world, what if a villain really CAN disprove relativity?  That could destroy the universe as we know it!

Boy Gravity - aka Dress Your Best, Sharp Dressed Man, needs a better title.  A battle over fashion with a fashion-conscious sidekick.

Choco Castle - Needs a better title.  This is a story idea built around a villain who steals all the chocolate in the city and builds a castle out of it.  He wasn't hard to track down....

Deadly Rainbow - This is nothing but a title and I forget why I created it.  I guess I liked the title.

Elementary - This story begins with Grandpa gathering people into the great room of a mansion in order to explain how the recent murder took place.  Only Grandpa's not known for his dectective work....

Godwined - What is Godwin's law of supervillains?  The more they resemble Nazi's, the easier they are to defeat?  The more crime you fight, the more often you will have to defeat Hitler?

Great Brain Robbery - A brain switch story idea, since I haven't done one of those yet.

Hooked On A Feeling - An intergalactic tale of mass destruction and 70's pop music, maybe.

Mercury In Retrograde - Bad things happen when Mercury is in retrograde.  Apparently.

Mission - This is a takeoff of the idea of Grandpa Anarchy receiving a random tip in the manner that such things happen in City of Heroes.  It all seems ridiculous to the sidekick, and I think the plan was for it to be a trap to lure in Grandpa.  I don't remember exactly where I was going with it, but I have the first dozen lines of dialog written.

Patron of the Arts - The title of a Nina Ballerina origin story.

Robe And Wizard Hat - This isn't really an idea per se, I just think it would be funny to write a story with this title.

Substitute - Grandpa Anarchy, substitute teacher at Dr. Z's school for gifted superheroic students.

Taming of the Lemur - The idea here would be to try and write an entire Grandpa Anarchy story in a Shakespearean style.  I may never actually tackle this idea, but it's there.

The Curse - A story about a ghost/zombie who's cursed to do something (drink, gamble) with a new person every night until someone beats him.  Enter Grandpa Anarchy!

Thing in the Sewer - Some sort of tentacled alien monster story.

Why Do Ghosts Have Clothes - Well, why do they?

YOLO - Grandpa Anarchy is a very good counter argument.

2014 Writing Goals, Update for End of September

I've written nothing since mid July.  At the time I was in the middle of Camp NaNoWriMo, and my friends chided me for complaining when I failed to write anything for a week, but I know well that a week can turn into three months in the blink of an eye, and it did.  I've written virtually nothing for three months.

I also haven't done a monthly update in that long, so here we go:

I did finish two more stories after my last update -- Crowdsourced and Bookstore Avenger.  At the moment I don't even remember them that well.  I've dinked around with a few other ideas, but haven't finished anything.

I do plan to participate in NaNoWriMo in November, and I'm hoping to get some things done in October leading up to that.

Yearly Goal Progress:

1.  Write a Grandpa Anarchy Story a week.

For April I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo, in which my goals were 35,000 words and to write a new Grandpa Anarchy story every day.  I managed 27 out of 30 stories and finished the other three soon after.  I managed a few more stories in May, then set out to completely rewrite World of Hero, which had been one of my long-time goals.  I managed to greatly expand it and completely rework the plot (or to add a plot is more accurate), and I completed 3 of 4 parts, but it's still a mess and I got bogged down in trying to complete it.  I switched to Return to Amethyst 3 and after some fits and starts, I finally finished that in early July.

I've pretty much already completed this goal.  Here's my new totals for the year, based on my one story a week (4 per month) goal:

January:

Feb 07:  Revealing
March 29:  About A Hell Boy
March 30:  If Books Could Kill
March 31:  Out Of Cheese Error

February:

April 1:  Villain of the Weak
April 2:  Banana Also Rises
April 3:  The Eagle Has Landed
April 4:  Bombs Away

March:

April 5:  Landoff
April 6:  Disorientation
April 7:  Landmark Decision
April 8:  Trick of the Trade

April:

April 9:  Blah Blah Blah
April 10:  Reboot
April 11:  Four Weddings and Nine Hundred Funerals
April 12:  Beneath the Skin

May:

April 13:  The Hand You're Dealt
April 14:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act One
April 16:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act Three
April 17:  The Bane of the Black Spork

June:

April 18:  Temple of the Dog
April 19:  Startup
April 20:  Grandpa Anarchy and the Fiendishly Foul Fetid Frog
April 21:  Grandpa Empathy at the Gates of Hell

July:

April 22:  Iron Maiden Surprise
April 23:  Crack Squad of Misfits
April 26:  The Pompatus of Love
April 27:  Stronger

August:

April 28:  Diary of an Anarchist
April 30:  The Archimedes Death Ray
April 30:  Nobody Cries for Superman
May 3:  There Is No Try

September:

May 5:  Distracted By The Sexy
May 6:  Family Tree
May 8:  Where's My Supersuit?
May 9:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act 2

October:

May 10:  Past Life Sister
May 20:  Call Me Maybe
May 23:  World of Hero 1:  Save the Girl
May 25:  World of Hero 2:  Going Off Script

November:

May 27:  World of Hero 3:  Rude Awakening
July 5:  Return to Amethyst 3:  Spirits of Stone
July 7:  Performance Review
July 11:  Hip Bone

December:

July 14:  Maps of Vampires That No Longer Exist
July 20:  Bookstore Avenger
July 22:  Crowdsourced

So by mid July I was 1 story away from finishing my goal... and I haven't finished it three months later.  :p

2.  Write a Tai-Pan story every 2 months (6 in the year).

I didn't work on this for July Camp NaNo, and I haven't worked on anything since.  I probably won't make this goal but we'll see what I come up with for NaNoWriMo in November.

3.  Finish the third "magical girl" arc for Girl's School, and try to wrap things up.

No progress.

4.  Write 4 short stories set in my Otherworld Blues universe.

No progress.

5.  Draw a picture each month.

No progress.

5.  Publish Book One of my Grandpa Anarchy stories, edit 2nd book, assemble stories for 3rd book.

No progress, aside from having the cover illo done.  Which I don't have a good copy of yet.


List of stories I intend to work on:

Grandpa Anarchy Stories

Stronger:  This one is finished!
The Eagle Has Landed:  This one is also finished!

Return to Amethyst Part 3 Spirits of Stone:  Finished!
World of Hero:  3 of 4 parts finished, but it's a mess.
Second Class (working title):  I did a lot of work on this in eary January, nothing since.
Unpossible:  No progress.
Performance Review:  Finished!

Fan Fiction

Girl's School, Third Magical Girl Arc (Kahotep Adventure):  No progress.
I Can See Clearly Now:  No progress.
A Goddess In Oz:  No progress.

Other Original Fiction

Otherworld Blues Stories:  No progress.
Jubel In Oz:  No progress.

Tai-Pan Stories

Bitch, Chance Encounter, Blanking the Lady (variations), Zesh and the Bitted Throug:  No progress.

Writer's Night July 19

For tonight's Writer's Night I was going to read City of the Monkey Gods, which is the story I picked out to have read during Norwescon in April that didn't get read, and which I have planned to read at a couple of recent Writer's Nights only to switch to something else or, for example, in June there were a lot of people with stories and I did not get the chance to read anything.  Anyway I once again changed my mind and read something else -- one of my recent stories, Startup.  I wrote this at Norwescon in April and had already read to my friends Keith and Juli, and which they liked.  I got some good feedback on it tonight and have already made the minor changes needed to improve it.  It passes the read test though!

(I need to mention these things in my journal because after six months or a year, it becomes hard to remember which stories I read when, or even if I've actually read a given story at Writer's Night or not.  I think I've mentioned most of them in the last year, so that helps.)

Chuck read his own Grandpa Anarchy story -- the first such story not written by me.  He'd read most of it in June, but now it's finished.  It's a fun story!  Chuck has a different writing style from me, more detailed, more descriptive, so it's a longer story than I usually write, but it has a fun villain and a clever sidekick (clever and stupid at the same time really), and a satisfying ending that, to me, demands a sequel someday (or at least, there's the chance for the sidekick to pop up somewhere else in another story).  I have no idea what Chuck plans to do with this story, but Gene has plotted more than one Grandpa Anarchy story himself, so perhaps at some point I can either include them in a book with some of my stories, or we'll have enough stories written by other people for a small book of it's own.  I got no idea -- I still have to publish my own first book (and probably my second as well) before we really get to that.

I'm currently working on a story called The Bookstore Avenger, which unless I'm mistaken is only the second appearance of the villain The Literate Lemur.  This was one of my earliest villains, appearing in one of the first six stories that I wrote back around 2007 - 2008, so it's high time he made a return appearance.  I have a pretty good idea of how this story goes, I should have it finished by tomorrow at the latest.  It's really the only story I've worked on in the last five days, unfortunately -- my Camp NaNoWriMo effort has not been going so well.

I have two new story ideas to toss into the file.  Really, three if I go back to earlier in the week.  No -- it's four.

Mercury In Retrograde  My idea for this story morphed into my next Christmas story actually, but I still want to write a story with this title.  I'm thinking of a sidekick who believes in Astrology and is afraid of bad things happening because Mercury is in retrograde.  It's partly an in-joke about a person I used to work with, but it's also a very common thing for people that believe in Astrology to talk about these days.

Third Christmas Ghost Story  While trying to figure out what would happen in the above story, I imagined the ghost of a former ally of Grandpa's showing up.  This would be someone who was on the hero team he formed in the 1930's -- I suspect they are all dead by now, or most of them.  Still haven't figured out exactly who was on that team, which is why it would be fun to write this.  But the ghost of a former ally showing up isn't a plot in and of itself, and she's not a villain now, so she's come to help or warn Grandpa about something.

And then I got three ideas:  one, a sidekick who knows that ghosts always visit Grandpa around Christmas and is prepared for the worst; two, the former ally showing up and complaining about the waiting list for ghosts to contact Grandpa around Christmas, and three, a possible plot.  In my story Family Tree, we learn of Grandpa Anarchy's long-dead older brother, who was cursed.  What if there's a way to break the curse, but it can only be done on Christmas with the aid of the ghost of his former colleague?  That's a good Christmas ghost story plot!

There's more to it than that, of course, and I don't have the title yet, but I have enough to work with.  I can start writing it at any time -- maybe once I'm done with The Bookstore Avenger.

Nefarious Things  This was a line out of the beginning of Gene's story (the beginning of chapter 25 I think, or maybe it was part of his recap).  It was just a nice-sounding title for a Grandpa Anarchy story.  I don't have a specific idea yet, and in fact even if I never write it, we may have inspired C.D. to write a song to the tune of A Few Of My Favorite Things.  So mission accomplished either way.

Crowdsourced  This was an idea I got while rewriting Startup, which I did as soon as I got home.  This idea would involve a villain who live-broadcasts his fight with Grandpa Anarchy, and uses internet crowdsourcing to determine what method of attack he'll employ next.  His probably beatdown should get a lot of video hits on Youtube, so he'll be happy to lose the fight.  I'm not sure if that's the actual ending, or if there's another twist to it, but I have most of the story in my head already.

Those Who Forget History...

Yesterday when I woke up, I wondered if The Gentleman Brawler was ever in a superhero group, or whether Grandpa Anarchy had been in one earlier in his career before the founding of the League of Two-Fisted Justice.  I'm a big fan of the Watchmen, and also of the Venture Brothers, and both have elaborate back stories to explain how things got to be the way they are now.  My Grandpa Anarchy universe has bits of back story that I've made up as needed for different stories, but I didn't have it all collected in one place.

For example, I had two stories that establish that the Gentleman Brawler died in Butte Montana in 1920.  In an early story I'd mentioned this without giving a date, but later I wanted to depict the actual event so I'd established exactly when it was.  My first Christmas story establishes how Grandpa Anarchy met the Gentleman Brawler, but there are no dates given.  I'd written up a history of the Grandpa Anarchy comics that states that a man named Evron Lempel started writing Gentleman Brawler pulp adventure stories in the 1920's.  I don't think this is written into any story (it would be in one of the Kid Continuity stories, I'll have to check them) so I changed it to 1918.

I also had mentioned in another story that the Tunguska Event in Siberia in 1908 was caused by a Nikoka Tesla death ray, and that he and the Gentleman Brawler were fighting Grigori Rasputin.  (This is, by the way, not far off from some of the wilder conspiracy theories on the internet.)  I had written into my back story on the origins of OminGen that the original company was Jebediah Incorporated, founded by Jebadiah Judas in 1887 who sold Jebadiah's Miracle Elixer, a cure-all with nasty side effects.  Although I hadn't written it down, even in my back history notes, I knew that Madman Judas was a big nemesis of the Gentleman Brawler.

I spent a good deal of time yesterday constructing a timeline based on notes and comments in maybe  twenty different stories and my background history document.  When I was done, I had established that the world's first "super group" was the New World Heroic Society, formed in 1909 by the Gentleman Brawler and Nikola Tesla, and including Dermota Avalon the sorceress (grandmother or great aunt to Dark Dr. Dark), and Valentin Zholdin the strongman (grandfather to Nina Ballerina).

Based on that I established that Grandpa Anarchy formed his own supergroup in 1932, called  the New Revised New World Heroic Society.  The members were Mr. Anarchy, and several others to be determined later, but possibly including two heroes named Slay Belle and Monkey's Uncle.

Previous to this, Grandpa had teamed with his older brother, a cop, in the 20's.  They called themselves Order & Anarchy, and mostly fought gin runners and organized crime.  Grandpa met Unpossible Man during World War II, when he went by Sgt. Anarchy.  After the war he worked with Unpossible Man for a while, and in the 50's he worked as a duo with Guy Shadow.

However I noticed another discrepancy.  The League of Two-Fisted Justice wasn't formed until after Guy Shadow's death.  I marked this down as 1961.  But my notes said that the Two-Fisted Tales of Grandpa Anarchy comic book was launched in 1955.  It seemed odd that the comic book title would come before the super group, but I wondered, maybe Grandpa formed an early version of the group after the war and it didn't last long?  Thus in 1951 I note that the first incarnation of the League of Two-Fisted Justice was established, with Grandpa Anarchy, Unpossible Man, Guy Shadow, and Popeye Khan.  It disbanded in less than a year.

Anyway -- having worked all of this out, I have a much better understanding of Grandpa's entire career, including a good idea of when he was actually born.  I'm sure all of this will be useful in a few future stories.

2014 Writing Goals - Mid July Update

Haven't done a monthly update on my yearly writing goals since the end of April.  So here we go.

I spent most of late May and June wrestling with World of Hero, and finished 3 of 4 parts but got derailed.  It's much improved but still kind of a mess.  I also worked on Return to Amethyst 3:  Spirits of Stone which I finished in early July and I'm very happy with how it wrapped up.

July is Camp NaNoWriMo again, I signed up and decided to write 1,000 words a day on various stories.  I got off to a good start with finishing Return to Amethyst 3:  Spirits of Stone, but I've managed a paltry 3 short stories since then.  It's the halway point and I should have 15,000 words by the end of today, and I'm only at about 9,000 right now.  But there's time to catch up.

I want to start work on a Tai-Pan story, but I'm still deciding what I'll work on today.

Yearly Goal Progress:

1.  Write a Grandpa Anarchy Story a week.

For April I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo, in which my goals were 35,000 words and to write a new Grandpa Anarchy story every day.  I managed 27 out of 30 stories and finished the other three soon after.  I managed a few more stories in May, then set out to completely rewrite World of Hero, which had been one of my long-time goals.  I managed to greatly expand it and completely rework the plot (or to add a plot is more accurate), and I completed 3 of 4 parts, but it's still a mess and I got bogged down in trying to complete it.  I switched to Return to Amethyst 3 and after some fits and starts, I finally finished that in early July.

I've pretty much already completed this goal.  Here's my new totals for the year, based on my one story a week (4 per month) goal:

January:

Feb 07:  Revealing
March 29:  About A Hell Boy
March 30:  If Books Could Kill
March 31:  Out Of Cheese Error

February:

April 1:  Villain of the Weak
April 2:  Banana Also Rises
April 3:  The Eagle Has Landed
April 4:  Bombs Away

March:

April 5:  Landoff
April 6:  Disorientation
April 7:  Landmark Decision
April 8:  Trick of the Trade

April:

April 9:  Blah Blah Blah
April 10:  Reboot
April 11:  Four Weddings and Nine Hundred Funerals
April 12:  Beneath the Skin

May:

April 13:  The Hand You're Dealt
April 14:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act One
April 16:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act Three
April 17:  The Bane of the Black Spork

June:

April 18:  Temple of the Dog
April 19:  Startup
April 20:  Grandpa Anarchy and the Fiendishly Foul Fetid Frog
April 21:  Grandpa Empathy at the Gates of Hell

July:

April 22:  Iron Maiden Surprise
April 23:  Crack Squad of Misfits
April 26:  The Pompatus of Love
April 27:  Stronger

August:

April 28:  Diary of an Anarchist
April 30:  The Archimedes Death Ray
April 30:  Nobody Cries for Superman
May 3:  There Is No Try

September:

May 5:  Distracted By The Sexy
May 6:  Family Tree
May 8:  Where's My Supersuit?
May 9:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act 2

October:

May 10:  Past Life Sister
May 20:  Call Me Maybe
May 23:  World of Hero 1:  Save the Girl
May 25:  World of Hero 2:  Going Off Script

November:

May 27:  World of Hero 3:  Rude Awakening
July 5:  Return to Amethyst 3:  Spirits of Stone
July 7:  Performance Review
July 11:  Hip Bone

December:

July 14:  Maps of Vampires That No Longer Exist

2.  Write a Tai-Pan story every 2 months (6 in the year).

No progress, but this is a goal for Camp NaNoWriMo in July.

3.  Finish the third "magical girl" arc for Girl's School, and try to wrap things up.

No progress.

4.  Write 4 short stories set in my Otherworld Blues universe.

No progress.

5.  Draw a picture each month.

No progress.

5.  Publish Book One of my Grandpa Anarchy stories, edit 2nd book, assemble stories for 3rd book.

No progress.  Well, I think I have a cover now, so someone has been working, just not me....

List of stories I intend to work on:

Grandpa Anarchy Stories

Stronger:  This one is finished!
The Eagle Has Landed:  This one is also finished!

Return to Amethyst Part 3 Spirits of Stone:  Finished!
World of Hero:  3 of 4 parts finished, but it's a mess.
Second Class (working title):  I did a lot of work on this in eary January, nothing since.
Unpossible:  No progress.
Performance Review:  Finished!

Fan Fiction

Girl's School, Third Magical Girl Arc (Kahotep Adventure):  No progress.
I Can See Clearly Now:  No progress.
A Goddess In Oz:  No progress.

Other Original Fiction

Otherworld Blues Stories:  No progress.
Jubel In Oz:  No progress.

Tai-Pan Stories

Bitch, Chance Encounter, Blanking the Lady (variations), Zesh and the Bitted Throug:  No progress.

Undead Stories!

A while back -- in the beginning of May -- I wrote Call Me Maybe, in which the leader of the Iron Maidens of the Zombie Apocalypse complained to Grandpa Anarchy that he and his League of Two-Fisted Justice friends had fought undead several times recently and had not called in her group, who only exist to fight the undead.

Although this little story wasn't dependent on my having written about those adventures, I determined anyway to write at least one vampire story and one army of skeletons story, and maybe a story about a ghoul or wight or something too.  I hadn't really written any such stories for Grandpa Anarchy previously -- well, maybe one zombie story that I could recall.

Anyway I created two files, Hip Bone and Maps of Vampires That No Longer Exist.  The second was actually a file that I already had that was based on a misheard phrase -- I no longer remember what I misheard or why this particular phrase appealed to me, and as a consequence I'm not sure I like it as a story title.  But it was a title for a vampire story, and I wanted to write a vampire story.

This past week for July Camp NaNo my goal was to write a story a day.  I failed miserably at this, but I did finish the above two undead stories, for better or worse.  I think I like the vampire story better.

I'm very much behind on my Camp NaNo goal, but oh well, I've finished one long story and written three short stories that I'd been wanting to write for a while.  That's still progress.

My new story idea of the day is It's All Relative.  This is based around the idea that lots of crackpots think they've somehow disproven that Einstein's Theory of Relativity -- it's one of the favorite targets for people who want to be physicists without any training.  I  thought, well, in a superhero universe, what if a villain believes they've done this?  Could it come true just because of the way superhero physics and belief warp reality in such a universe?  What would happen if it did?

That's the basic story idea.  Dunno when or if I'll actually write it though.

Performance Review

Saturday I finally managed to finish Return to Amethyst 3:  Spirits of Stone.  I think I'm fairly happy with how the story wraps up.  Part 3 is about 12,000 words, and parts 1 and 2 are about 6,000 words each, so all told it's a novella of around 24,000 words.  I'm pretty sure that makes it my longest complete Grandpa Anarchy story.  The original Amethyst Road story was not that long, and while World of Hero and Second Class may wind up being longer, neither is finished yet.

My original goal was to finish Return to Amethyst and World of Hero, and then work on something else (a Tai-Pan story), but instead I've given up on World of Hero for the moment and decided to write a few shorter stories.  To that end on Monday I wrote Performance Review.  I feel like I actually wrote this story at least twice -- when I was in Longview I made some minor changes to the story file in preparation for writing it out, and then failed to transfer this from my laptop to my thumb drive.  So when I got home Sunday night, I just made the changes again on the file that's on my desktop computer.  I again failed to transfer the altered file to my thumb drive, so when I got to work on Monday I had to start over again.  I wrote a good chunk of the story at work that day -- about 60% of it -- and then at the end of the day I managed to copy it over with the unaltered version that was on my thumb drive.  I've done that before, and as usual I remembered most of what I'd written and was able to rewrite it at home and finish the story (and now it's saved in several places).

This story is one of my earliest ideas, an idea I had way back when I'd only written 8 stories and was just planning to try and write a new story a day for NaNoWriMo 2012.  Since then I've written nearly 150 Grandpa Anarchy stories.  It's also a story that kind of got co-opted by a different story.  Performance Review is about Grandpa Anarchy getting a job performance review at the Department of Superhero Licensing, but I'd since written The R Word in which the same department tries to force Grandpa to retire.  Still, the ideas weren't exactly the same, and I'd wanted to actually write Performance Review for a good long while.

I'm not sure how successful the finished product is, but at least I can say I finally did it.

"Nevertheless," said Agent Morrison, "our department is understandably concerned about what seems to be a trend...."
"A few isolated incidents can hardly be declared a trend," the lawyer said.
"Mr. Brimstone, from where I'm sitting it very much is a trend."  Agent Morrison held up a manilla folder.  He opened it up.  "Let's start with Four-Legged Octopus Lad, eaten by a giant shark with head-mounted lasers...."
"I warned him," Grandpa said.  "I told him, sharks with lasers, you don't get that in the wild, that's clearly a villain thing.  And an octopus with four legs ain't an octopus.  It's a quadropus.  Kid didn't have a lick of sense."
Agent Morrison held up a second folder.  "Pine Saul, sucked into a engine aboard Baron Biohazard's rocket-powered dirigible...."
"It was the cape," Grandpa said.  "I thought everyone knew about capes by now."
"Nellie the Technicolor Eliphant," said Agent Morrison, picking up another folder.
Mal stood.  "Gentlemen, I object most strongly to this line of questioning," he said.  "We are all aware of these unfortunate incidents -- none moreso than my client Mr. Anarchy.  He feels very bad for each of these terrible events.  What does dredging up this past accomplish?  I must insist that you stop this line of inquiry, or we will be forced to terminate this meeting and request a new review with a fresh  review board...."
"Very well," said Agent Chen.  "We will table the discussion of deceased sidekicks, and move on to an equally troubling trend -- that of the large number of sidekicks who have become villains after working with Grandpa Anarchy...."
"Large number?" Grandpa exclaimed.  "What the heck are you talking about?  One or two, maybe...."
"Seventeen," said Agent Chen, "within the last two years.  That's fully twelve percent of all sidekicks who have worked for you in that time frame."
"There!  See?" Grandpa crowed.  "Twelve percent ain't a large number!"
"Mr. Anarchy," Agent Morrison exclaimed, "the government pays you to deal with existing supervillain threats, not to create new ones!"
"Hey," said Grandpa, "I instill good old American values into those snot-nosed punks!  Is it my fault if they're too twisted inside to see the light?"

Anatomy of a Magic Spell

"Now," said the queen, "if that's all the interruptions...."  She paused dramatically, but no new threat appeared.  "Very well.  Shall we begin?"

She retrieved a gilded box from nearby and removed from it a dagger.  The blade was black and inscribed with runes that glowed faintly red.  The hilt and pommel were polished bone.

She raised this high overhead and shouted, "Chun Mink in the East!  Kinwei in the West!  Lagdun Qi in the South!  King Illi in the North!  I call upon the guardian spirits of this land and bind them to my purpose!"

Princess Amethyst screamed and struggled against her bonds.  Grandpa Anarchy threw himself against the ice dome.  "Dang it!  We didn't come this far to see that princess die!" he yelled.  Unpossible Man slammed into the ice walls with his massive bulk, but there was no sign of even a crack forming.

"Lorelei, Queen of the Fairies and Amethystos, Goddess of these lands," the queen called out, "heed my and do my bidding!"

BOOM!  BOOM!  BOOM!  The sound came from far off.  At first it sounded like a drum beat, but it grew steadily louder.  The ground began to shake with each crashing thud.

"By the black blood of the earth that flows beneath the mountains," exclaimed the queen, "I summon the Children of Obsius to this place!  Awaken from your eons of slumber!"

BOOM!  BOOM!  BOOM!  The trees shook.  The sound was deafening.

"Hear me, Obsidian Spirits!  I am not drunk!   This sacrifice I make to seal our pact and to bring you forth upon the lands of Amethyst once again!"

So for the climatic scene of my story Return to Amethyst 3:  Spirits of Stone,  Queen Annatanzanite has apparently defeated all of the heroes and is about to sacrifice Princess Amethyst in order to awaken the Obsidian Spirits, a fearsome army of Obsidian Trolls that nearly conquered all of the lands of Amethyst in the distant past.

When I reached this point I thought, okay, I can just type, "The queen began to chant in a strange tongue" which is how I sometimes deal with magic spells.  That works fine for simple spells in the heat of battle -- you don't really want to stop the flow of a fight in order to explain what words Black Dahlia uses to summon her fireball.  When the queen first appears in the story, she does little more than gesture:

A tall, pale woman in a flowing black dress with an elaborate headdress came forward.  "So, the Necromancer King sends an army against me...."

"We're more a band of adventurers that got a little large," said Unpossible Man.

"Does the Great and Terrible Hawkins think me a fool?  Did he not know that I would be aware of your coming?  Does he think I'm unprepared?"  She gestured with one hand.  Black ice flew forth, encasing the giant Andre.  A second gesture froze Grandpa, Unpossible Man, Dahlia and the catgirl in ice.

But this is the big one, the grand finale.  You want to draw it out, you want details.  And a grand sacrificial spell to summon dark powers must be more complicated and involved than a simple ice attack, right?  After all, the heroes need time to try and stop her.  So it's far more dramatic if I actually have a spell for the queen to speak, isn't it?

Based on what I've done previously (spells for Dark Dr. Dark and Black Dahlia), I knew that a spell that called on various ancient gods, either to the left and right and above and below, or to the four corners of the compass, was a great way to begin a spell of this sort.  Guardian spirits, summoning the power of the gods to aid you, that sort of thing.  But this is the Land of Amethyst, an Oz-like fairyland.  The queen won't be calling upon any known earthly gods, will she?

After due consideration I hit upon the first part of the spell:  Chun Mink in the East!  Kinwei in the West!  Lagdun Qi in the South!  King Illi in the North!  These sound like made up names (which they pretty much are) and they sound vaguely Chinese or Asian, but in fact these are anagrams of the four lands of Oz:  Munchkin Country (East, in the book, though sometimes shown as west on maps),  Winkie Country in the west, Quadling Country in the south, and Gillikin Country in the north.

I don't know if anyone would figure that out on their own or not, but possibly if they were Oz fans.

Lorelei, Queen of the Fairies and Amethystos, Goddess of these lands heed my and do my bidding!

Aside from summoning protection on all sides from the guardian gods/spirits of the east, west, north and south, I have the queen call upon the powers of those who rule this land.

In the mythology of Oz there are no gods, but there is Lurline, Queen of the Fairies.  Her name is a variant of Lorelay, the nymph of the Rhine.  Lorelei is another spelling.  I work with someone named Lorelei, so I've looked this up before.  There are several songs by that name, including the one by the Scorpions which is about the nymph rather than just any woman with that name.  (The Styx song Lorelei is simply about a girl named Lorelei....)

In Oz mythos, first mentioned in The Tin Woodman of Oz, Lurline transformed the Land of Oz from an ordinary land into a magical fairlyland, and gave it to King Pastoria (and his daughter, Ozma) to rule.  So in a way she's the creator of the land, a goddess equivalent.  But I also read up on amethyst, the stone, and there are some mythologies about the origin of the stone (which were made up by a French poet in the 1500's, so it's not a true ancient myth).  In various versions, a beautiful maiden named Amethyste or Amethystos is pursued by the god Bacchus or Dionysus, and is transformed into a quartz statue when she begs for help from the goddess Diana or Artemis.  The heartbroken god either pours wine over her or cries tears of wine, staining the quartz purple.  Never ask for help from the gods is the moral, I think.

So a goddess named Amethystos seemed like a good idea to throw in as well.  Lorelei, Queen of the Fairies, and Amethystos, Goddess of the Lands of Amethyst.

By the black blood of the earth that flows beneath the mountains, I summon the Children of Obsius to this place!  Awaken from your eons of slumber!

Apparently Obsius was the guy who discovered obsidian in Ethiopia, according to Pliny of Rome in his Natural History.  I'm not sure we know anything else about the guy, but Children of Obsius makes a nice name for my obsidian spirits.  Black blood of the earth comes from Egg Shen in Big Trouble In Little China, of course.

Hear me, Obsidian Spirits!  I am not drunk!

This line might seem weirdly out of context or just goofy, but in point of fact the word amethyst is Greek for "not intoxicated".  The ancient Greeks and Romans believed that amethyst stone protected you from becoming intoxicated, and would wear charms of amethyst or craft wine goblets out of amethyst.

Anyway, put all of that together and you get a half-assed summoning spell that sounds like it might actually mean something!  Or at least, reads like a spell, and not just words like "hocus pocus!"  :D

Trying to Finish For June / July Goals

I've been struggling to rework and finish World of Hero.  I went back yet again this week and rewrote bits of parts 1 and 2.  Each time I do this, I think I improve the story -- I give it more of a narrative drive, especially in the first two parts which at times have felt like they take place before the real story begins.  I don't think that's actually true, I just haven't been telling the story in a very compelling way.

My most recent change was to add one of the player characters to the initial parts of the story.  A large part of the story involves the people that played the game and their desire to see the game return, but previously I'd had this one character in a prologue and a couple of other scenes, but not involved in the main plot at all until part 3.  That seemed like a problem to me, so I reworked it to add her in, and things began to work better.

But all of this means that I've basically been reworking the first three sections of the  story over and over, without moving on to section 4 and finishing the thing.  Part of the problem is that I've gotten into the habit of going home and not sitting down to write, so I'm only getting a little bit written each day on my breaks and lunch at work.

Camp NaNoWriMo is in 5 days, July 1st.  I still don't know what exactly I plan to do for that.  My original plan was to finish World of Hero and also Return to Amethyst by July 1st, and then work on something different -- probably a Tai-Pan story.  But it's looking like I won't manage to finish these two larger Grandpa Anarchy stories before then.  Yet I'm determined to finish them and not abandon them half-finished, so I may make finishing them the first part of my Camp NaNo goal, and then the rest of the month finishing other things.  Despite my desire to work on non-Grandpa Anarchy stories, I have 3-6 short stories that I'd like to write, and I also want to work on Second Class.  I'd like to finish at least one Tai-Pan story, most likely Chance Encounter, and maybe another shorter one.  I'd also like to work on something in my Otherworld Blues universe, which I've had on the back burner for many years and for which I've never actually written a complete story.

So I dunno.  I guess my goals are:

1.  Finish World of Hero.
2.  Finish Return to Amethyst.
3.  Write Chance Encounter.
4.  Write a short Tai-Pan story, or
5.  Write a short Otherworld Blues story, or
6.  Write any of the following:  Hip Bone, Maps of Vampires that No Longer Exist, The Goul Story, Gate Into Danger, Performance Review, Substitute, or The Thug Story.
7.  Work on Second Class.

Some collection of the above will probably be my goal for July Camp NaNoWriMo.

Goals For the Rest of June, I Guess

I haven't written anything for more than a week.  The first weekend of June I got sick, and I was sick for most of the next week.  I didn't feel like writing anything.  This past weekend I was feeling much better, but it only takes a week to fall out of the habit of writing regularly, so I got very little done.

What I want to do -- what I absolutely need to do -- is finish World of Hero.  Already I want to  reread through the parts I have finished and start reworking them, but I haven't finished the story yet.  I need to do that first.  Then I need to finish Return to Amethyst.  And I need to do both before July 1st, because I want to do something different for Camp NaNoWriMo in July.  So I have 2 weeks to get things done.

What I actually did this past weekend was start a new short story.  This one I call Substitute, because the whole idea is for Grandpa Anarchy to become a one-day substitute teacher at a school for gifted students -- something like Professor X's Academy, only without mentioning the word mutant.  As soon as I had the idea I  thought it was brilliant and wrote it down, then went to bed, then got up again because I had too many ideas/jokes in my head for the story and wanted to write them down.  On the one hand I'm glad I wrote all of that down because I wouldn't have remembered the next day.  On the other hand, all I have are a setting and some jokes.  I can't figure out an ending that works for me yet.  But I still like the idea.

I watched a lot of Stargate SG1 this weekend.  I'm working my way through season 3 now.  I know I'll eventually get around to writing at least one "stargate" story for Grandpa Anarchy as well, Gate Into Danger, I'm just waiting for the right inspiration to strike.

Regress is Progress

I keep adding to my current 4-chapter novella without actually getting very far on part 4.  In my latest round of revisions, I decided to try and figure out exactly what story I'm trying to tell here.  The simple answer is, "A gaming world becomes real, with the help of the heroes".  This was my original plot and it was very boring because there were no surprises, no twists and turns, no conflict except with a big bad monster at the end in which the victory of the heroes was clearly predestined.

In my second incarnation of the story, I've added a lot of twists and turns.  I've added villains, I transformed the big bad monster into a more complex and sympathetic character, I've added a ton more characters and plotlines in an attempt to flesh out and fully explore the whole idea.  But until yesterday I really hadn't taken the time to figure out who my main protagonists were.  The heroes are theoretically the protagonists -- but they don't really change much over the course of the story.  There are actually two sets of heroes, and the second group has the opportunity to change quite a bit more, but I hadn't really worked hard at that angle.  Meanwhile, I had a group of other characters who do change (or should change) over the course of the story that I wasn't always focusing on.

After identifying the characters who should be main protagonists -- those who actually go on a journey, who are different at the end of the story than they were at the beginning -- I sketched out a bunch of new scenes that I'll need to write.  So I'm kind of blowing up the story a bit; I have to go back again to the first three chapters and rewrite things.  But I think I'm finally figuring out how to make this story really work.

1.  The world of Elowhen is a protagonist itself.  It goes from being a shadow of a game world to being a fully-functioning independent world or alternative reality.  That was always the original idea, and I think it's still important to remember to tell that story in any ways that I can, so I want to keep in mind that the world itself is one of my characters.  A scene in which the heroes witness how the people of Elowhen are still trapped into doing things over and over, as if they were still a part of the game, helps demonstrate why the world needs help, and gives more motivation for them later when they want to go back and really fix things for good.

2.  Gammatron.  This is one of two people who bring the heroes to Elowhen to try and fix things.  In his zeal to free his friends from the game code, to help everyone in Elowhen become self-aware as he has, he ignores warnings about what the consequences will be.  Later he realizes what a mistake that was.  When I consider this, a prologue scene where he makes the decision to free his friends at any cost now seems obvious to me.  I had a prologue where the major villain awoke, but it's Gammatron seeing his friends trapped in static looped actions and speech patterns that helps you understand why he's so desperate to free his world.

3.  Katy.  One of the characters (sidekick to Grandpa Anarchy) who originally goes to Elowhen and is changed in an obvious way.  She's also an obvious choice for an internal change.  She is the counterpoint to Lard Lad, who is a sidekick who will eventually join the League of Former Sidekicks, becoming a villain.  Katy needs to go the opposite route and embrace being a hero, and embrace the person she's become.  I've sketched out several scenes in the later part of chapter 3 in which Katy makes friends with some of the other young people who are drafted into trying to save Elowhen, and in which she more clearly defines herself as not agreeing with Lard Lad's outlook on life.

4.  Gothika.  This is a code name for a character who is a sleeper agent for the villain.  She's a mental copy of one of the villain's best allies, but she should go through a change of her own.  I'd already written quite a few scenes for her without understanding why she was so important to the story, other than to move the plot along.  She is furthering the goals of the villain -- but she is also no more than a tool for the villain.  She comes into contact with the heroes, and that should affect her view of the world.  More importantly, I think she may be the key to helping Katy change.  Knowing more about her and the story arc she's travelling on means I now need to rework the scenes that she's in, which I did some of today.

5.  The second group of heroes.  This is the counterpart to the League of Two-Fisted Justice, and I don't anticipate them changing in a major way over the course of the story, but they all eventually change their minds about coming back to Earth, and all return to Elowhen.  That's really their major change -- a change of heart, a decision to join the effort to save this other world -- but I'm not sure I've told it effectively enough.  I need to write a few short scenes to make it more clear how they all come to that decision.

6.  The Save Elowhen Group.  This is the group of former players who are trying to bring the game back or recreate the game in some way.  They're the most fanatical of the former players of the game.  I haven't explored this group much, but one of the plot threads that becomes more important near the end of the story is that many of the people who used to play the game World of Hero will get the chance to actually become the heroes they once played in the game.  (It's kind of a "have your cake and eat it too" offer -- they remain on earth, but they also become heroes on Elowhen.)  This is crucial to saving the world of Elowhen, but I really didn't have any scenes with them early in the story, except for a prologue and one later scene involving one former player of the game who was not identified as connected to this group in any way.  I don't need to focus on them much, but at least one or two more scenes about their desire to bring the game back and their love for the game world are in order to help set up later scenes, and I think I need to connect Jennifer (the single player mentioned in the first prologue) with this Save Elowhen campaign.

7.  Lady Carnival Act.  I'm still debating this one, but through the magic of a game world that is in the process of becoming a real one, the villain Carnival Act clones himself not once, but several times.  (Which also allows me to kill off one or more of him!)  Early in the story there is a female Carnival Act which is the character he used to play in the game World of Hero.  She may get killed off.  Or not.  Or maybe killed and then brought back to life again, through the same process that brought her to life in the first place.  But what I'm really debating is whether I'd like to have her (or a version of her) give up on villainy and become a hero.  I haven't decided yet, or written any scenes along those lines, but it's another idea that I'm floating in the back of my brain.

Anyway, in the meantime, I have a lot of reworking to do in order to get this story into better shape.  I'm still a bit worried about how the story is balanced.  Right now, the first two chapters are a kind of prologue to the real plots of the story, which means chapters 3 and 4 are much, much longer.  I haven't decided yet if chapters 1 and 2 really need to be consolidated into a single chapter or not, but that may turn out to be the case.

Did I Get Anything Done?

I had a lot of plans for things I was going to do this past weekend, and then it kind of all went off the rails.  Friday night I went to a movie with my friend Tom, which meant I didn't get any writing done or do the things I was planning to do in Second Life, or get in any exercise, or watch the next episode of Star Gate SG1.   Then I stayed up late, and slept in, and accidentally started a war of words on one of the forums I visit, which made me depressed.  Ultimately I skipped a Tai-Pan work party because I was a few hours behind everything on Saturday and wanted to get some writing done on my current story, which I did.  I also got in some good exercise and did shopping at the same time by walking to Winco and back (Winco is not far from the BPA trail).
But then Sunday I had plans to get some of the stuff done that I failed to do Friday or Saturday, and instead I did nothing.
It feels like I've written very little the past week, which isn't true.  But several days ago I was beginning part 4 of World of Hero, and after a weekend of writing... I'm now beginning part 4 of World of Hero.  What I managed in the meantime was to move part of the story in part 3 back to part 2, and then add a prologue and a 2nd prologue to part 1, and add a bunch of scenes in parts 2 and especially part 3 that detail what some of the villains are doing.
Hopefully this all makes the story better... but I may just be tossing in too many plot threads, I dunno.  Will have to see how I feel about it later.  As it currently stands, World of Hero 1 -- Save the Girl is now  4.716 words long, World of Hero 2 -- Going Off Script is now 5,318 words long, World of Hero 3 -- Rude Awakening is 9,151 words long, and the incomplete part 4 is 5,384 words long.  So at 15,000 to 20,000 words, I have a very long story or even a short novella.

World of Hero -- Memorial Day Weekend Update

Slowly I'm working my way through my World of Hero story -- I spent the Memorial Day weekend on it.  This is a much, much larger Grandpa Anarchy story than my usual -- possibly my longest.  At this point I have a finished version of World of Hero 1 - Save The Girl at 4,079 words, a finished version of World of Hero 2 - Going Off Script at 2,425 words, and a finished version of World of Hero 3 - Rude Awakening at a whopping 7,386 words.  I'm working on the last chapter of the story, but while I have a lot of ideas for early scenes, I'm not entirely sure what the ending will be, or how long  this chapter will wind up being.

I don't know if the chapters I've provided really mark natural breaks in the story.  I'm unsure of a lot of things at this point, but I do know that the new story is better than the original, which was abysmal.  The new version may still have a lot of problems, though.  But getting a finished rewrite of the entire story is the first step in finally reworking this story into something worth reading.  I'm hoping to finish this week, and maybe even finishing Return to Amethyst 3 - Spirits of Stone.  This would get two of my longest Grandpa Anarchy stories done, which would be a huge relief.  That would leave only Second Class as a very long story Grandpa Anarchy that I've started but haven't come nearly close to finishing.

As for World of Hero, I'm still uncertain whether the story hangs together, but I think I've addressed some of those concerns.  Right now the best thing I can do is get to the finish, then go back an decide how well it works.  So that's my goals for the rest of the week:  finish World of Hero, then finish Return to Amethyst.  So I guess that pushes any Tai-Pan story work into the first part of June.

May 20: Call Me Maybe

Last night I finished a story, Call Me Maybe.  This is my story about the 'return' of the Iron Maidens of the Zombie Apocalypse.  Technically, it should happen after several other stories, since I only just wrote Distracted By The Sexy a few stories ago.  I do have plans to write a couple of undead stories -- Maps Of Vampires That No Longer Exist and Hip Bone -- that should take place before this story.  But you write first whatever inspires you at the time.

I've done this sort of thing before.  After a series of stories in which Grandpa Anarchy and Nina Ballerina have switched places -- Curse Of The Teenager, I Was A Teenage Ballerina, Damsel In Distress, Vows, X Chromosome -- I wrote Fate Maid To Order, which is intended to take place a long time later but calls back to those stories and the fantasy world the last two took place in.  I had the idea in my head and had to write it right away.  That's how it goes sometimes.

My goal for this week was actually to finish Return To Amethyst 3 - Spirits Of Stone, but I had trouble finding the inspiration to finish it off  right.  Instead I was inspired to jump in and work on World Of Hero, one of my older stories that needs a complete rewrite.  I actually finished part one, which I called World Of Hero 1 - Save The Girl, so technically I've finished two stories this week.  Right now I'm in the middle of World Of Hero 2 - Going Off Script.  My ideas for how the story plays out are changing and being updated daily, but at least I'm reworking the story into something better than it was previously.

As for Call Me Maybe, it's not a strong story.  I did the best I could but the central joke was always weak and probably broadcast to the reader, so there's not a lot of surprise at the ending.  But I like the central story idea overall.  If I think of a way to improve it later I will, otherwise it's just one of my lesser stories, but at least it's also quite short - less than 900 words.

May Goals: The Rest of May

To review, my goals for the first fifteen days of May were:

Goals For May 15

1.  Finish my three remaining stories from Camp NaNo:  Done.  (Past Life Sister, There Is No Try, and Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act Two.

2.  Finish one of the following stories:  Return to Amethyst Part Three (needs title), Unpossible, Performance Review, World of Hero.  Nearly done -- still fighting my way to the finish of Return to Amethyst Part Three:  Spirits Of Stone, but the end is in sight.  It's a long story and will need to be edited quite a bit also I think.

3.  One new Grandpa Anarchy story a week.  Done.  What I've written this month, with brand new stories bolded:

May 3:  There Is No Try
May 5:  Distracted By The Sexy
May 6:  Family Tree
May 8:  Where's My Supersuit?
May 9:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act Two
May 10:  Past Life Sister.

4.  First chapter of one of the following:   Jubel in Oz, or Zesh and the Bitted Throug, or Chance Encounter.  This I did not accomplish.

Goals For May 31

So my plan for the rest of the month is as follows:

1.  Finish Return To Amethyst Part Three:  Spirits Of Stone

2.  Write / Finish A Tai-Pan Story

3.  Work On A Few Newer Grandpa Anarchy Ideas:  Gate Into Danger is one I want to finish.  I also want to maybe work on a brand new Spam King story involving a Nigerian Prince.  A quick search tells me that the "what if the Nigerian Prince is real and really does need my help" joke has been done many times, so I need to think up a more surprising third angle for my story.  I also have in mind a few stories where Grandpa and company battle undead, followed by another story involving the Iron Maidens of the Zombie Apocalypse, who never get called in for any of these battles.

That's about it for my goals.  Although really I need to start doing something about getting my book ready to publish....

May Goals Day 14: Spirits of Stone

I am slowly slogging my way through Return To Amethyst Part 3:  Spirits Of Stone.  I may finish it tomorrow, or by the weekend at least.  It's slow going but I think I'm making good progress; I've gone from not really having any idea where I was going except for a few end details, to having a very good idea of where I'm going -- and from half a scene to nearly three complete scenes, which is probably half the story finished.

In order to get this far I had to figure out exactly who the enemy was, what she was planning to do, and how she got to where she was.  I tend to not figure these things out ahead of time as a rule, and if it's a one-off villain in a two-page story, it doesn't matter.  But this is a much longer story and one of the reasons I was having trouble with it (and why I didn't know what to call it) was that I didn't really know where I was going with it.

Queen Annatanzanite is the Wicked Witch of the South.  She has kidnapped Princess Amethyst and plans to sacrifice her to the Obsidian Spirits on Fairy Solstice.  That's pretty much as far as I had gotten.  Our heroes, after a long journey, have entered her lands and have one day left to rescue the princess.  I already could sense that I had neither the time for a journey to the center of the kingdom, nor the narrative drive to sustain anything of the sort.  Thus, I'd settled on the Queen capturing them right away.

I sat down and tried to figure out who the Queen was, what she could do, how she came to power, how she was a threat, what were her plans.  What, for that matter, was the "Fairy Solstice"?  It's not a given that this fairyland is on a planet that orbits a sun, or that the people who live there understand this (if it is true).  But there were seasons, surely.  After some thought, I decided that it was through some agency of magic that the sun grew weaker and the days shorter in winter, and the sun grew stronger and the days longer in summer.  Or at least, that's the explanation the people will give.  At this point in the story I may not even reveal this explanation, other than to establish that what is meant by the Fairy Solstice is the longest day of the year, but at least I've done enough world-building to know what the apparent answer is should it come up.

Next, Queen Annatanzanite.  It's all well and good to call her a wicked witch, but in the Oz books witches typically had very specific powers and spells.  It wasn't like they could do just anything.  I had by now decided that a rat-person witch was going to rescue the  heroes from the dungeon, so I proceeded with the idea that the rat people -- I named them the Ratmalkin -- were the locals who had been subjugated.  Queen Annatanzanite had a magic item that allowed her to control winged cats, ala the Wicked Witch of the West and her winged monkeys.  Winged cats do not make a great army -- they don't follow orders well or work together well -- but they were natural enemies of the rat people, so she was able to conquer this land with just her winged cat army.

I threw in a line about her next conquering the straw people.  My adventures had earlier run into (and easily defeated) a straw man army.  Turns out this was the remnants of those driven northward after Queen Annatanzanite had conquered their people (which was of course, easily done).

I liked this tie in to earlier events, but a better one came to me:  the Post-Traumatic Disorder Tiger had told a story about war between his people and the vegetable people of Kalhoun.  The next part of the story seemed obvious:  Queen Annatanzanite invited refugees from that war into her kingdom, then molded them into a stronger and more disciplined army than her winged cats.  She had conquered the rest of the southern kingdoms with her army of vegetable people.  They were the main soldiers found in the kingdom.

But of course, she wanted more, and a vegetable person army would only take you so far.  There was a legend about a fierce and warlike race of obsidian trolls who had once conquered this land and threatened to conquer all the lands around Amethyst City.  They'd laid siege to the city itself, and then had been driven back by a united army and perished in the valley of the Ratmalkin.  They were so fierce that none had surrendered.  All had perished, and it was said that their spirits still haunted the hills.

Queen Annatanzanite's plan was to give life to the obsidian spirits once again, through blood sacrifice of a virgin princess on the shortest night of the year.  They would form a new army with which she would conquer all.

So anyway:  now I know who the villain is, what the threats are, and where the story is going.  Knowing all this, it was pretty easy to come up with a workable title for the third chapter of my story, something I'd been unable to do when I had not really known exactly where the story was headed, other than "rescue princess, defeat witch".  And I've managed to make sense of some of the stranger things that had appeared earlier in my story.  Sort of.

At this rate it seems clear that I won't work on any non-Grandpa Anarchy stories by the 15th, as I'd planned, but I will at least be nearly done with this older story that I've been working on for much of the past year.

Today's story idea file is titled:  YOLO.  Because Grandpa Anarchy has died a lot, so there's probably some fun I can have with the idea of "You Only Live Once".  No idea beyond that, but I created a file and saved it for possible later development.

March 9: Grandpa Anarchy The Musical, Act Two

I finished Where's My Supersuit? this week -- Thursday I think.  At the moment I'm not very happy with it.  The joke or surprise is that things work the way Grandpa expects them to -- against all logic, but operating per super hero logic.  I've used that schtick before and did it better, this time I don't think it's as effective.  But eh.  I finished the story, and I'll revisit it later and see if I can patch it up.

My sidekick for this story is Kid Metaphor, who I was excited to do something with.  She likes to use really inane and badly-constructed metaphors.  Unfortunately, the story structure didn't really allow for me to have her use very many of them.  Because of this I placed her in Past Life Sister as well.  That story is nearly done and again, the plot doesn't really involve her so I'm only able to squeeze in a couple of bad metaphors.

I've had sidekicks that I've used multiple times because the idea or joke they were designed around was too good to throw away on just one story.  Kid Continuity suggested several stories to me at once, and her character wouldn't go away even after that so she's now in charge of her own supergroup.  Non-Sequitur Lass was similarly too much fun to abandon in a single story, so I added her to four more (my "Amphibiad Trilogy" quartet).  She also joined a supergroup, though I do think her joke has mostly run its course.

I still had ideas for Kid Metaphor -- in particular, I hadn't even discussed the difference between a metaphor and a simile -- so I decided to add her to a third story.  Right now she's the sidekick in Gate Into Danger.  I still don't know the actual plot of this story, but I now know that it happens right after Where's My Supersuit? and Past Life Sister.

Which is fun except the first story isn't very strong, the second is feeling like it won't have a strong punch ending either, and the third may also be weak if I can't come up with a great idea or ending to wrap it a round.

On the other hand, I finally finished Grandpa Anarchy The Musical Act Two on Friday, and I'm much happier with that trilogy of stories.  These are not built around jokes, they are a dramatic retelling of events leading up to Kid Calculus's current attempts to become Grandpa Anarchy's number one arch villain.  With musical numbers.  And as I should have suspected, Kid Calculus hates Grandpa Anarchy so much because he once considered himself Grandpa's best sidekick and most ardent defender.

The best part of this middle section of the musical is the confrontation between Kid Calculus and Circuit Girl.  This idea appealed to me so much that I rearranged the order of my first ten stories to make sure that Circuit Girl isn't mentioned until after Kid Calculus has had his turn as Grandpa's sidekick.  These are very small parts from which a great deal has been developed -- in Doomed, Kid Calculus is initially the sidekick in a story in which Grandpa Anarchy is tasked with saving hundreds or perhaps thousands of different worlds at once, while Circuit Girl is merely mentioned as the sidekick who has just died in Remember This.  But Circuit Girl's death takes on a special significance.  Grandpa tries to kill Carnival Act, but is prevented from doing so by his future self.  This drives him crazy, as Carnival Act is not just his arch nemesis but also a mass-murderer.  Circuit Girl's younger brother becomes a sidekick in her footsteps, and appears in multiple stories.  Meanwhile, Kid Calculus reappears as a member of the League of Former Sidekicks, and slowly evolves not only into one of their most talented members, but also the one that hates Grandpa Anarchy the most.  In more recent stories, Carnival Act has finally died, and Kid Calculus has made the leap to independent villain with his goal to become Grandpa Anarchy's new arch-nemesis.

These two sidekicks are possibly the most important of Grandpa Anarchy's career.  Certainly the period in which one followed the other was hugely significant.  They were both apparently long-term sidekicks, both very talented, and one turned out to be a major villain (and likely Grandpa's new arch, despite what Grandpa thinks on the subject) while the other died tragically but her story is intertwined throughout Grandpa's recent history.

I had to be careful because I realized after setting up this confrontation that in What You Should Know, Kid Calculus faced Grandpa for the first time since they'd worked together.  At that point Grandpa is surprised that Calculus is still alive.  Of course, I could have gone the route where Grandpa is surprised that Kid Calculus is still alive several times over -- that would have involved some rewriting, but it would have been very funny and indicative of why Kid Calculus hates Grandpa so much.  Instead I crafted my encounter with Circuit Girl so that Grandpa doesn't have to know or find out that Kid Calculus is still alive.

(But I wonder if the above idea is something I can use for another story?  "Kid Dictionary!  You're still alive?"  "Yes, we've fought ten times now, how do you not remember?")

Anyway this is the only time Circuit Girl appears on-screen in all of my stories, and I wanted to make it a good one:

Circuit Girl strode up a stone path towards a fenced compound.  She wore white tights and a skirted leotard of green with a circuit board pattern.  Completing the costume were green go-go boots and a golden tiara that flashed with circuitry and LED lights.  Behind her robots fanned out, weapons at the ready. Some hovered, some crawled on spider legs, some rolled about like self-aware bowling balls.

A young man in a form-fitted suit of blue floated before the gate.  Mathematical formulae in glowing silver script flowed. above the surface of his costume.  A laptop hovered in the air beside him.

"I don't know who you are," Circuit Girl said, "but you'd better get out of my way our you're gonna get hurt."

The young man grinned.  "Circuit Girl, isn't it?" he said.  "How very disappointing that you don't recognize me. After all, you're the one who stole my job."

The young girl's eyes widened.  "Kid Calculus?  But that's not... Grandpa said you were dead!"

"Oh, he left me for dead, all right," Calculus replied.  He slowly spun in midair.  "As you can see, I got better."

"You moron!" the girl exploded.  "Where have you been?  Jay Medberry spent weeks looking for you!  They never found a body.  Why didn't you contact us?"

"Contact Grandpa Anarchy?" the man replied.  "The one who nearly got me killed?  Why would I do that?"

Circuit Girl's eyes narrowed.

"Whatever your beef is with Grandpa," she said, "it's got nothing to do with me.  I'm here to do a job, Calculus.  Step aside."

"Oh, I'm afraid I can't do that, Circuit Girl," Calculus said.  "You see, Double Jester is my friend."

"He's holding innocent people hostage," she said.  "If you try to stop me, you're an accessory to kidnapping."

"Oh, but I'm much more than that," said Kid Calculus.  "I'm his ally."

The girl stared at him for a long moment.  "So," she said, "you've joined this motley group -- the Legion of Former Sidekicks."

"Indeed I have."

"I would never have expected it from you," she said.  "But no matter.  I've studied you, Kid Calculus.  You're a very smart man, but you're no warrior.  If you fight me you'll get hurt."

The man performed a mock bow.  "You are no warrior either, Circuit GIrl."

"True," she said.  "But I don't have to be."  Her tiara flashed.  The robots around her attacked -- with gunfire, electricity, and streams of fire.  Calculus shot high into the air.  He tapped his keyboard.  Two gateways in space opened before Circuit Girl, disgorging giant lizards twice the size of komodo dragons.  The creatures spied the girl and lunged forward.

Circuit Girl leaped into the air.  She landed on two flying bots, who lifted her up to Kid Calculus.  "Nice trick," she said.  Spinning metal blades whizzed through the air.  Kid Calculus tapped his keyboard and vanished through a hole in space.  Moments later, gunfire erupted from behind Circuit Girl.

She spun about, as bullets ricocheted around her.

"Magnetic shield?" Kid Calculus asked.  He vanished through another wormhole.  A split-second later he was next to the girl, swinging a weapon at her feet.

Knocked from her robots, Circuit Girl tumbled towards the ground.  Her tiara flashed and a larger bot flew beneath her.  In moments she rose again to meet her adversary.

"You can fight!" she exclaimed.

"Oh," said Kid Calculus, "you'd be surprised at what I'm capable of."

Gunfire erupted, and Calculus's floating keyboard exploded into fragments.  "But how much can you do," Circuit Girl asked, "Without your little toy?"

I like the musical numbers in this act as well -- I Don't Know How To Hate Him and Defying Anarchy.

Anyway I've had a productive first nine days of May:

May 3:  There Is No Try
May 5:  Distracted By The Sexy
May 6:  Family Tree
May 8:  Where's My Supersuit?
May 9:  Grandpa Anarchy the Musical Act Two

I want to finish Past Life Sister this weekend, and possibly Gate Into Danger or maybe even work on Return To Amethyst, Part Three, but I also want to try and change gears and get some work done on a Tai-Pan story, something I completely failed to do last weekend.  And actually, all of that by May 15 would fulfill my May Writing Goals for the first half of the month:

1.  Finish my three remaining stories from Camp NaNo:  All done save Past Life Sister, which is nearly finished.

2.  Finish one of the following stories:  Return to Amethyst Part Three (needs title), Unpossible, Performance Review, World of Hero.

3.  One new Grandpa Anarchy story a week.  Clearly I've done this.

4.  First chapter of one of the following:   Jubel in Oz, or Zesh and the Bitted Throug, or Chance Encounter.

Write It Down!

One thing I have become better at is writing stuff down when the inspiration comes.  Generally speaking, inspiration comes when I've already been working at writing -- but it doesn't necessarily come when I'm writing.  I find that a lot of the time, things come to me after I've turned out the lights and gone to bed.  That happened to me several times in the last couple of weeks, and I find that it's always a good idea to get back up and write things down.

If all I've been doing is playing games, then that's what's in my head when I sleep.  That's the part where writing leads to inspiration.  Your mind is very good at solving problems and spontaneously coming up with dialog and story plots when you're no longer thinking on these things, but have been thinking on them recently.  That's why walking is good, too.

I get ideas in the morning while waking up too, but those are not always as good since I'm surfacing from the land of dreams, where nothing makes sense.  Anyway, write stuff down when it occurs to you, that's my advise.  It's helped me a lot.  It may just be quick bits of dialog or sketches of how a scene should go, but it always gives me the kernel of an idea or scene to expand upon later.  Just the act of writing it down means I'll remember what I was thinking about the next day.

Today I'm working on three different story ideas at once, and it's anyone's guess which I'll decide to finish first.  I'm still working on Past Life Sister, one of my stories from last month's Camp NaNo, and I'm working on Where's My Supersuit? and Gate Into Danger, two new ideas from the last couple of days.  Of the three, I have the most written on Past Life Sister and I think I have an ending for it, and I also think I have an ending in mind for Where's My Supersuit? which is a much fluffier silly piece.  I don't really know where I'm going with Gate Into Danger yet, other than some Stargate:  SG1 jokes, but I wrote those down at least.

Where's My Supersuit? is a good example of what I'm talking about though -- writing stuff down when inspiration hits.  Last night I read two reviews of The Amazing Spiderman 2 movie, and among the many plot problems they talked about is the fact that at the precise moment one character becomes a super villain, a door opens up as if by magic containing his costume.  And this happens more than once in the movie, apparently -- hero and villain costumes are just lying around waiting for people to develop powers, or something.  If I remember right, Spiderman's costume in the first movie just kind of appeared with no real explanation.

So I thought, there's a trope waiting for a story, and then Frozone's line from The Incredibles came to me as the perfect title for such a story.  And I wrote it down, before I forgot it!

Actually that's true for Gate Into Danger, too.  I watched another episode of Stargate:  SG1 last night, and I wrote down the jokes that came to me.

Too Many Ideas!

I finally made some progress on my attempt to write a story called Past Life Sister.  In fact I have a full plot and the principal characters now, but not the sidekick yet.  But this is good progress.  I constantly surprise myself with the ability to take nothing but a story title, and come up with a story -- not always great ones, but sometimes they are.  In this case I feel it's a solid idea, so we'll see.

In the meantime I continue to create new story idea files at a faster rate than I can write stories.  I'm supposed to be finishing the above story and then working on Grandpa Anarchy The Musical Part Two and Return to Amethyst Part Three.  Instead, I wrote a new story yesterday and in the last three days I've created the following story file ideas:

Gate Into Danger:  My Stargate story idea.

Parasites Suck:  My parasitic aliens story idea.

Bookstore Avenger:  An idea built around the decline of American bookstores, possibly featuring the return of the Literate Lemur.  It's about time he showed up again.

Villain Teamup:  My story about villains teaming up.

The King Am I:  My story about Kid Calculus changing his name.

Science Is The Future:  Possible story about Aristotle, Archimedes, Nikolai Tesla and who knows who else working together... maybe as a time-travelling superteam, I dunno.

Undead Consultation:  My idea which would reference the Iron Maidens of the Zombie Apocalypse one last time.

Downloading Denmark:  A weird idea based on the Minecraft downloadable map of Denmark, and possibly aliens downloading the whole country for real.

Family Tree:  This is the idea that threatens to take me over  today.  It's about Kid Continuity researching Grandpa Anarchy's family tree, and possibly about a brother who keeps coming back from the dead.  I just thought of it this morning but most of the story is already in my head.

*UPDATE*  I actually did manage to finish Family Tree today, which in theory means I might get some work done on Past Life Sister.  The story came in at less than 700 words, which is probably not enough considering there's two scenes.  I'll need to go over it and flesh it out a bit later.

Of note:  both of these stories are kind of ghost stories... which means I might go back and retroactively turn them into Christmas ghost stories at some point.

Distracted By The Sexy

Today's story is Distracted By The Sexy, not because I wanted or needed to write this story right away, but because the more I thought about it, the more dialog popped into my head.  By the time I wrote it all down, the story was more than half done.

So now my universe has another superhero team.  Their final name is The Iron Maidens of the Zombie Apocalypse, which encompasses the fact that they wear armor (plate mail bikinis) that protect them from the undead.  The Vampire Hunter Iron Maidens was another choice, but clearly zombies are in the ascendant right now, and vampires are more and more frequently the good guys.

All of these are one-joke characters with no powers, who miraculously got a second story because them forming a team is a second joke.  (Technically Non-Sequitur Lass appeared in five stories previously, and Anime Hair Girl in four of those).  It's unlikely they will surface again.  On the other hand, I can see a running joke where every time Grandpa fights the undead, they complain that they weren't consulted or brought in to help, so that may result in another story.  We'll see.

Iron Maidens and Kings: Story Ideas

Stargates:  I've been mainlining Stargate: SG1 this weekend -- I watched about six or so episodes.  One thing that occurred to me was that the extras on that show had to change the set around for the second stargate for just about every episode -- set it up in a new location, make it look like a different world.  I actually noticed this because after about six episodes they do an entire episode in which you don't see the stargate on the other world.  It's like they decided, "Yeah, you've seen how it works, you've got the idea, we don't even need to show it to you.  Give the extras who set it up an easy week."

Anyway all of this has got me thinking about Grandpa Anarchy stories as usual.  I haven't done a "stargate" or "jump gate" style episode yet.  Oh, there's lots of stories that involve Kid Calculus and his ability to gate about in time and space, but other than that, no specific story in which Grandpa and his sidekick use a stargate to visit another world, per se.  Although I'm sure they have.

Alien Parasites:  I've also been thinking about parasitic aliens, and how far back does that trope go?  Because it seems to me that it's a distinctly modern one -- even if it isn't really, the impression is that the Alien movie kind of set a new bar for that kind of alien horror story.  Grandpa comes from an era when aliens were something you could shoot with a pistol or laser carbine.  At least, I think he'd argue so.

The Villain Team-Up:  I read a review of the Amazing Spiderman 2 (tl;dr:  it's good enough, but not great, just like the previous one) and I started hearing Grandpa Anarchy in my head, explaining (just like the review did) why team-ups don't work well and especially villain team-ups.  Kind of genre meta-commentary of the sort Grandpa Anarchy sometimes engages in, that confuses those around him.  He's been at this hero thing so long that he sees all the tropes, he revels in the tropes, he depends on the tropes, he complains when the tropes do not go according to plan.  I went ahead and created a story file for this one -- which I should be doing with the two ideas above as well.

The Iron Maidens:  I haven't actually decided if I want to name my new supergroup this or not.  They are really "chicks in chainmail" rather than maidens in iron armor.  Searching for a good title for such a story, and possibly a better team name, I tried out Wrathchild (former name of the Iron Maiden all-female tribute band the Iron Maidens), Eiserne Jungfrau (German for Iron Maiden), and a few other options.  I settled on Distracted By The Sexy as the story title -- this is a TV Trope title heading, of which "Chainmail Bikini" is a sub-trope, so I have my story idea file now, consisting of a title and a few ideas.

My plan has been for the two sidekicks who appear in Iron Maiden Surprise to decide to form the group.  These two are Anime Hair Girl (no known powers other than the distinctive hair) and Non-Sequitur Lass, who also doesn't have any special powers but has the fun schtick of saying random things out of the blue.  But put them in magical battle bikini armor, and viola, super powers!

There are four sets of the bikini armor in the story, and I haven't decided if the third woman who wore the armor (Rowena, Witch of the Westmerelands) would still be around and/or a member of the team.  I have an idea that they would recruit other female sidekicks from Grandpa Anarchy's recent past, including possibly Blah Blah Ginger (yet another female sidekick with no special powers, but a fun schtick to play with -- she never pays attention or hears anything others say, and this nearly qualifies as a super power in its own right) and possibly Abike, Daughter of Shango, who is a bona-fide superheroine, being half-goddess, invulnerable, and able to call down lightning.  The question is, would she want to join their group, and if she did, she wouldn't need the battle bikini would she?

Anyway, still mulling this idea.  I think one of my instincts is that a bunch of B-list sidekicks without any real powers except the battle armor they've found would need a leader to be in charge, but I'm not sure if any of them are dynamic enough to assume that role.  Which is possibly why I'm considering adding Abike.  I'd also consider one of several other former sidekicks -- Spirit Summoner Shaman Sally is a good choice, but I keep thinking she should be teaming up with the other two magical girls I've used before.  Then there are several female sidekicks who really seemed to have their act together:  Punk Rock Girl, Broad Spectrum, Retro Girl, Cell Site Girl, Hard Hat Holly.  Most of them, however, are wedded to their current costumes, or their names no longer work.
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And then I keep thinking, I should team Distractigirl with Non-Sequitur Lass and Blah Blah Ginger, and put Anime Hair Girl in charge.  They're supposed to be a minor superhero team after all.

Super Scientists:  Aristotle appears in my Amphibiad Trilogy (or at least, a version of Aristotle).  Archimedes and Nikolai Tesla are mentioned in The Death Ray of Archimedes (they appear off-screen), and now I'm seriously considering if I should keep this group around, and if it's the real people or clones or other dimension copies.  They could possibly wind up as consultants to the Iron Maiden supergroup, or I don't know, form their own independent group of superpowered super geniuses.  Maybe they're a time-travel group as well, which would explain why they're not around complicating things with their inventions.

Emperor Calculus:  I played around with the idea of Kid Calculus changing is name.  I was going to go with Emperor Calculus, but King Calculus sounds better (and closer to his original name) and then I decided to name the story The King Am I.  So I guess that settles it.  No idea what the rest of the plot would be just yet, but I have my story idea file now.

I'm also reminded that Unpossible Man is supposed to make up new origin stories for himself every time he appears.  I put him in a lot of stories last month, I need to go back and add those side comments in.