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.
\
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.

Camp NaNo Aftermath, Part1: There Is No Try

I want to finish the three stories that I didn't manage to write in April, so today I got up and finished There Is No Try.  This turned into yet another physical and philosophical confrontation between Grandpa Anarchy and Kid Calculus, with a sidekick called Kollateral Damage.

My goal for the weekend is to finish at least one other story -- Past Life Sister, for which I don't have an idea or plot yet, and Grandpa Anarchy The Musical Act Two, which is fully plotted.  But today is also a Tai-Pan workday, so I will probably spend the afternoon trying to write something in the Tai-Pan universe instead.

My longer-range goal for the coming week would be to also finish Return To Amethyst Part Three.  I have some ideas for new stories I'd like to work on too.  For one, Kid Calculus should probably finally change his name -- maybe to Emperor Calculus, or something similar.  That might merit a new story.  For two, I still have the option of creating a new superhero team called the Iron Maidens or something similar if I choose.  I have some ideas for who would be in it -- maybe they're just a minor team like the superpowered maid service, I haven't decided.

Grandpa Anarchy Book and Publishing Plans

Last year one of my goals was to self-publish a book of Grandpa Anarchy stories.  I didn't work on this until July, but I came up with a list of the stories I'd place in the first book, and made sure my friends had access to the files, and edited all of the files myself, including rewriting several stories that didn't really work.  I talked to someone about doing a color cover.

I haven't really progressed much beyond that.  I suppose I'm not persistent in bugging friends to read/edit my stories, or my one friend abut the cover art.  I know I need to assemble all of the stories into an In Design file and I haven't worked at that -- probably I could get friends to help copy edit once I'm at that stage.

However I've continued to plan for how my stories would fall into subsequent books, and I did some work on that today.  Here's my plans at the moment:

Grandpa Anarchy's Tales of Two-Fisted Justice

1.  Reading Comprehension
2.  Garden Variety Hero
3.  The Magic Knight
4.  Kids These Days
5.  Doomed
6.  Remember This
7.  Simple Solution
8.  The Silver Coin
9.  Precisely
10.  Assassin
11.  Dancepocalypse
12.  Double Trouble
13.  Supper Soldier
14.  Roasted
15.  What You Should Know
16.  Contract
17.  Amethyst Road - Shadows
18.  Amethyst Road - Princess Kiss
19.  Amethyst Road - Who Do Voodoo
20.  Turncoats
21.  Sex Slaves of Sirix Alpha Six
22.  There Be Whales
23.  Space Kraken
24.  Triple Aaar!
25.  Shadows Over Scranton
26.  Stone Temple Space Raiders
27.  Soldiers Men
28.  Mostless in Capertown
29.  Dig My Grave
30.  Nemesis
31.  My Sudden But Inevitable Betrayal
32.  Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story

This is my planned first book.  This includes all of the stories I'd  written before November 2012 (NaNoWriMo) and a bunch of the stories I wrote during that month of November.  All of these stories have been edited and rewritten, and I'm fairly confident all of them work (to some degree).

Read At Writer's Night:  Many of these stories have been read to my friends at writer's night, so I have had feedback on those.  That's true of the first nine stories, and of Stone Temple Space Raiders, Shadows Over Scranton, Mostless In Capertown, and Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story.  Of those, Stone Temple Space Raiders was the only one that was not well received and I've substantially rewritten (and shortened) it.

Order Of The First Nine:  Remember This was the first Grandpa Anarchy story I wrote, and I've kind of written forward in time from there.  But I felt that I couldn't start the book with that story.  It was a more serious, non-comedy story (since rewritten to add a slight bit of comedy).  In it, Grandpa's arch-nemesis, Carnival Act, has just killed several thousand people in a terrorist act, including Grandpa Anarchy's sidekick Circuit Girl.  Given that Grandpa treats Carnival Act as kind of a chummy adversary in Kids These Days, I wanted to make sure that the second story appeared before the first.  My stories are meant to read more-or-less in chronological order.  Kids These Days is probably the weakest of my first nine stories, so I didn't want to lead with that one either.  I wanted to lead with at least three strong stories before my "weak" story out of the first nine.

More recently it became important to me that Circuit Girl was a sidekick right after Kid Calculus -- for the purposes of the plot in Grandpa Anarchy the Musical, which spans Kid Calculus's entire career thus far -- so I had to make sure that Doomed took place before Remember This.  Thus I rearranged the story order slightly again.

Oz-Inspired World:  The Amethyst Road trilogy forms the first of my larger stories/story arcs.  Most of my stories are one scene, maybe two, and about a thousand words to fifteen hundred or so.  They don't have plots per se.  Amethyst Road is a linked series of three stories, and the middle one has several scenes and an actual plot.  This was my "Adventures in an Oz-Style Fairyland" idea.  I had fun with it and revisited this idea (and this world) again.

The Assassin:  Double Trouble and Contact both deal with an assassin known as Double Donkey Motel.  I like him a lot, but I haven't used him very much since.  I really need to.  I think he appears in at least one other story, and is mentioned in a couple more.

Space Opera:  Sex Slaves of Sirix Alpha Six, There Be Whales, Space Kraken, and Triple Aaar! form a quartet of space adventures with Jennie Nova -- great-granddaughter of an old friend of Grandpa's.  Three of these stories were reworked from the shambles of an earlier story with too many different ideas crammed into it.  Also, one of these stories contains a scene that occurs between the second and third Amethyst Road stories, which forced me to rewrite the third one a bit.  So I've got a space opera that crosses with fairy tale fantasy!

Former Sidekicks:  Turncoats and Nemesis introduce the League of Former Sidekicks, which includes some very old Grandpa Anarchy sidekicks from long before any of the current stories, and also includes many of the sidekicks who appeared in the first nine stories -- Kid Calculus, Kid Enigma, Kid Gloves, Geothermal Jenny.  Turncoats is their first group appearance, then Nemesis is the first big story involving them.  It's two or three scenes long, bigger than my usual stories.

Christmas Ghost Story:  Two-Fisted Christmas Ghost Story is an even longer story.  Our Tai-Pan writer's group meets for writer's night once a month, but in December we always have a Christmas party and the theme (if you choose to participate) is Christmas ghost stories.  This was my entry for December 2012.  It's a little out-of-place here -- it references a past sidekick who hasn't actually appeared in one of the previous stories, and it also references a young supergroup who don't actually form until later stories.  But otherwise I think it makes a really good ending for the book.  It also involves the third appearance of the League of Former Sidekicks -- although I actually wrote it before Nemesis and Turncoats.  That was one reason I worked hard to get those other two stories written, and why I have them placed earlier in the book.

Fists of the Anarchist

33.  Dead Again
34.  DarkFireDragonNinja.
35.  Trouble Focusing
36.  OmniGen Again
37-40.  World of Hero
41.  Fryer Out of Time
42.  Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom
43.  Idiot Ball
44.  Oceans of the Void
45.  Justice Hangs In The Balance
46.  Let Sleeping Gods Lie
47.  Love and Justice
48.  Veteran of the Bone Wars
49.  City of the Monkey God
50.  There Ain't No Justice
51.  Future Me
52.  Roll of the Die
53.  Most Dangerous
54.  The Thing in the Suitcase
55.  The Devil In the Details
56.  Questionable Judgment
57.  Your Stupid, Stupid Minds
58.  The R Word
59.  Stronger
60.  Unfinished Business

This is my current plan for a possible second Grandpa Anarchy book.  Things are subject to change.  Few of these stories have been edited, and some are known to need rewrites -- World of Hero needs a complete rewrite from scratch, Oceans of the Void needs to be cut down and reworked, and Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom probably needs work too.  And this may be true of several of the other stories -- most of them haven't been read since I wrote them.

Read At Writer's Night:  Dead Again, Trouble Focusing, There Ain't No Justice, Most Dangerous, The Devil in the Details and Questionable Judgement have been read at Writers Night.  Of those, the last was considered the weakest, though it probably still works.

Christmas Ghost Story:  Unfinished Business was my Christmas ghost story for December 2013, so that one has been read as well.  Like my previous Christmas story, it's a longer story that I felt would make a good end to the book.  In fact I may try to end each book with a Christmas ghost story.  Why not?

Grandpa's Demonic Lawyer:  The Devil In The Details introduces us to Grandpa Anarchy's demonic Lawyer Malevolent P. Brimstone.  He also appears in The R Word and Unfinished Business, and will probably be retroactively written in to There Ain't No Justice since that is also a courtroom drama.

Unconnected Stories:  I don't think there are any other big themes running through this book, but of note, World of Hero is intended (once I rewrite it) to be a big story, or interconnected series of stories making up one story arc.  It's hard to say since I have yet to figure out how I can make the story work, but that would be the only really large story in this book, or the only story arc.  Otherwise we do not have recurring villains or sidekicks that last more than one story.  I think Carnival Act appears twice, all of the members of the League of Two-Fisted Justice make appearances, and some other side characters from the first book reappear.

Black Moon Arc:  Oh, but there's Solar Sister and her sidekick Lady Lune who appear in both Solar Sister and the Disco Trolls of Doom, and also in Oceans of the Void.  Both stories feature Fire Maiden as Grandpa's sidekick, and the second features the return of Dark Dr. Dark with Black Dahlia as his sidekick, and also the return of the space pirate Captain Plasma, last seen in Triple Aaar!  So there's a case to be made that Idiot Ball should not be placed between these two stories, since it involves a different sidekick, and there's a good case to be made that Black Moon Rising from book three should be placed here as well, since in it Fire Maiden is still Grandpa Anarchy's sidekick (and Black Dahlia is still sidekick to Dark Dr. Dark, and Lady Lune still sidekick to Solar Sister).  I'll have to consider that.

Big Finish:  Aside from the Christmas story, Stronger is also a longer story that I feel is very good, has more of a plot, and delves into Grandpa Anarchy's history a bit.  That and the Christmas story should make a pretty powerful end to the book.

Anarchy is Forever

61.  An Inconvenient Airship
62.  Continuity Error
63.  Dark Anarchy
64.  Ruse
65.  Black Moon Rising
66.  Hackernaut
67.  Brothers and Sisters
68.  Gutbucket Magic
69.  Pandora's Closet
70.  Take Me Back to Constantinople
71.  The Chef that Time Forgot
72.  The Time of Your Life
73.  Endangered Species
74.  Magic is a Bitch
75.  Zero Hour
76.  Anarchy Is Forever
77.  Self-Made Man
78.  The Statue Got Me High
79.  Pick of the Litter
80.  Historically Accurate
81.  Youth is Wasted on the Young
82.  Transformation Station
83.  Curse of the Teenager
84.  I Was a Teenage Ballerina
85.  A Glitch in Time
86.  Damsel in Distress
87.  It's a Dirty Job
88.  Vows
89.  X Chromosome
90.  Deep House of Horror
91.  Crystal Weenie
92.  Arbor of Pain
93.  A Good Start
94.  Hero's Sacrifice
95.  That Sinking Feeling
96.  Banana Also Rises
97.  Fate Maid to Order
98-100.  Return to Amethyst 1-3 (#3 unfinished)
101.  Next Christmas Story?  (not written)

This is my tentative third book.  It contains more stories than the second book and there's a good chance I could move one or several of these stories into the second book.

Read At Writer's Night:  Actually, I'm not sure if any of these stories have been read to my friends yet.  Wait -- Crystal Weenie has been read, and was well-received.  Now that I think of it, I may also have read Continuity Error sometime in the last year.

Black Moon Maidens Arc:  Unlike the second book, which is mostly unrelated stories, this book would contain a number of themes and related stories.  The first of these is the one that deals with the formation of the Black Moon Maidens -- the founding members of which are Black Dahlia, Fire Maiden, and Lady Lune.  Although I may move Black Moon Rising to book two, we'd still have Brothers and Sisters, Pandora's Closet, Magic Is A Bitch, Pick of the Litter, Transformation Station, Curse of the Teenager, I Was A Teenage Ballerina, Vows, X Chromosome, and finally the three Return to Amethyst stories which all involve Black Dahlia and her Black Moon Maidens.

Continuity Crusaders Arc:  The second big arc for this book deals with Kid Continuity, a new sidekick for Grandpa Anarchy who wound up in four consecutive stories, made a reappearance after she's finished being a sidekick, then went off to form her own secret supergroup.  In fact much of this book  revolves around either the Black Moon Maidens or the Continuity Crusaders.  I was in a mood to expand on the lives of some of the sidekicks I'd invented!  Kid Continuity's personal arc is covered in the first four stories and a later one:  An Inconvenient Airship, Continuity Error, Dark Anarchy, Ruse, and Anarchy Is Forever.  The arc continues with the formation of her group in Historically Accurate and A Glitch In Time.  They appear again in two stories that will likely be placed in the fourth book, Serum Theorem and Diary of an Anarchist, although it might be nice to find a way to add those stories to this book.

The Second Banana Arc:  I introduce the Order of the Second Banana in Brothers and Sisters.  They appear again in Banana Also Rises.  This story may require some juggling of other stories because of who appears in it.  In any case, these stories can be seen as sequels of a sort to Nemesis since all of them deal with Jay Medberry, aka the Electric Bluejay, and his network of sidekicks and former sidekicks.

Superpowered Maids?  In another story in this book I introduce a superpowered maid service.  They make a repeat appearance in a more recent story that will probably appear in book four, but given that this book is so focused on super groups other than the one Grandpa Anarchy is in, it might be fun to move that story here.  Also, although A Fate Maid To Order does not involve them, I could rewrite it to include a cameo....

The Archons of Excellence:  Since we're noting the heavy focus on other super groups, I should note that the full team of the Archons of Excellence appear in two stories, Youth Is Wasted On The Young and Transformation Station.  Oh -- also in Fate Maid To Order actually, and now that I think about it, Vows and X Chromosome.  Most of the time they are a punch line rather than an active presence -- Grandpa never misses Pinocle Night on Thursdays with the Archons, and another running joke is that people only contact the League of Two-Fisted Justice for help because they can never get a hold of the Archons.  In any case, they've appeared before but they get a lot more face time in this book.

The Body Swap Arc:  Curse of the Teenager, I Was A Teenage Ballerina, Damsel In Distress, Vows, and  X Chromosome all form an arc during which two characters are body-swapped, and during which Spirit Summoner Sally is Grandpa Anarchy's sidekick.  All of this gets revisited in Fate Maid to Order, which takes place quite a bit later.  Sally appears again in Banana Also Rises.

Baron Climate Change Ascendant:  Baron Climate Change was a throwaway villain in Simple Solution, but he reappeared in book two in Trouble Focusing.  In this book he makes his claim as one of Grandpa's most-frequent recurring villains, appearing in An Inconvenient Airship, Damsel In Distress, A Glitch In Time, and Hero's Sacrifice.  He's an over-the-top, larger-than-life kind of villain and is therefore fun to write, and I've retroactively given him a bad German accent (which I still need to go back and add to one or two stories I think).

Big Finish:  Finally we have a very long story arc, Return to Amethyst, which I'm still finishing up, but it's much longer than the original.  I think it will be a good read though.  Then in theory we will have another Christmas ghost story to cap off the book, though I haven't even thought of writing that one yet.

Never Say Anarchy Again

102.  Serum Theorem
103.  Second Class (unfinished)
104.  Tryout Trouble
105.  Final Act
106:  Villain Of The Weak
107:  The Eagle Has Landed
108:  Revealing
109:  About A Hellboy
110:  Bombs Away
111:  Landoff
112: Disorientation
113:  If Books Could Kill
114:  Landmark Decision
115:  Trick of the Trade
116:  Out Of Cheese Error
117:  Diary of an Anarchist
118:  Blah Blah Blah
119:  Reboot
120:  Grandpa Anarchy, The Musical Act 1
121:  Grandpa Anarchy, The Musical Act 2
122:  Grandpa Anarchy, The Musical Act 3
123:  Four Weddings and Nine Hundred Funerals
124:  Beneath the Skin
125:  The Hand You're Dealt
126:  The Bane of the Black Spork
127:  Temple of the Dog
128:  Startup
129:  Grandpa Anarchy and the Fiendishly Foul Fetid Frog
130:  Empathy For The Devil
131:  Iron Maiden Surprise
132:  Crack Squad of Misfits
133:  The Pompatus of Love
134:  No One Cries For Superman
135:  The Archimedes Death Ray

This is the most in-flux book of them all, given that I wrote most of these stories within the last month and only assembled them in the above list today -- and I'm still writing stories that may appear in this book.  But it helps to see what I might have already.  This one would have several themes / arcs going for it:

The Rise of a New Arch-Nemesis:  The book begins with the final chapter of Grandpa Anarchy's great nemesis, Carnival Act.  But it quickly shifts focus as Kid Calculus makes his bid to become Grandpa's new arch-nemesis.  He appears in Villain of the Weak, Disorientation, Grandpa Anarchy the Musical (a three-act story), Startup, The Archimedes Death Ray, and will most likely be the villain in another story I'm working on, There Is No Try.  Grandpa dismisses his claims to being his number one enemy, but he's certainly trying very hard to earn that title.

A New Regular Villain Appears:  When I read Crystal Weenie at Writer's Night people were a little disappointed that I hadn't done more with the villain Death Medal.  I decided they were right, he's a fun villain, so I vowed to work him into another story or two.  In fact, he quickly became another favorite recurring villain.  He appears in About A Hell Boy, If Books Could Kill, Out Of Cheese Error, Reboot, and The Bane of the Black Spork.  Like Baron Climate Change he's an over-the-top villain that's fun to write.

Roster Changes:  Another theme is changing supergroup rosters.  Second Class, if I managed to write it, is a big-arc story that deals in part with Nina Ballerina leaving the League of Two-Fisted Justice and eventually joining the Black Moon Maidens.  Several others join as well, and Nina will end up as head of a second unit within the overall group.  Then Tryout Trouble is about the League finding a replacement for Nina.  That replacement appears in several more stories within the book.

Big Stories/Arcs:  Aside from the very large Second Class and the three acts of Grandpa Anarchy The Musical, there's a four-story arc under the heading "The Amphibiad Trilogy" that begins with Grandpa Anarchy and the Fiendishly Foul Fetid Frog, and continues with Empathy For The Devil, Iron Maiden Surprise, and Crack Squad of Misfits. There are hints that all of this began with the story Temple of the Dog.

And, of course, there will probably be another Christmas ghost story, but that's pretty far into the future yet.

A Few Grandpa Anarchy Stats

Here's some Grandpa Anarchy stats:

Stories written before 2012:  7

Some of these were written as far back as 2007 or 2008 I think?

Stories written in 2012:  29

This includes two new stories written before November, a Christmas ghost story to be read at the Tai-Pan Christmas party, and twenty-four stories I finished for NaNoWriMo 2012, in which my goal was to write a new Grandpa Anarchy story a day.  I eventually completed all 30 stories started in that month -- but some desperately need rewrites.

Stories written in 2013:  62

My goal for 2013 was to write a new story a week (or really, 4 a month), which I more than managed to accomplish.  This also includes my Christmas ghost story for December 2013.  By the end of the year I'd written 98 Grandpa Anarchy stories total.

Stories written so far in 2014:  31

It's my goal again this year to write a new Grandpa Anarchy story a week, or at least 48 for the year (4 a month).  But I had only written one in the first three months so I signed up for Camp NaNoWriMo in April with the goal once again to write a new story a week.  I'm better at doing this than I was in 2012.  I not only wrote three new stories in the last three days of March leading into Camp NaNoWriMo, but I managed 27 of 30 stories for April.

Currently I've written 129 total Grandpa Anarchy stories to date -- 122 of them in the last 2 years.  I haven't done a tally of the number of words involved, but a rough guess would be 1,200 words per story, about 155,000 words total.

Sidekicks in Rough Chronological Order

Here's a rough chronological list of all the known sidekicks that Grandpa Anarchy has had:

Miss X
Two-Fisted Timmy
Rocket Robbie
Sam Solo
Electric Bluejay
Double Jester
Nina Ballerina
Whole Grain Kid
Solar Sister
The Crimson Cyclone
Kid Enigma
The Great Society Kid
Geothermal Jenny
Resistable Force and Moveable Object
Circuit Girl
Kid Gloves
Low Blood Sugar Boy
Lifesaver Louie
Tinkerbell
Danger Boy
Lard Lad
Green Horn Kid
Circuit Boi
La Fillette Révolutionaire
Scientifically Curious Nikko
Black Dahlia
Adventure Boy
Anagram Lass
Boy Waitress
Dog Is My Copilot
Microbot
Mighty Tim
Frayed Knot
Fire Maiden
Most Common Girl
Big Picture Boy
Fairy Soldier Candy Valentine
Kid Physics
Kid Flux
DarkFireDragonNinja.
Red Panda Boy
Retro Girl
Natural Twenty
Ravella the Traveler
Punk Rock Girl
Broad Spectrum
Gangsta Kid
The Naughahyde Kid
Kid Continuity
Sanitation Man
Kid Dino-Might
Wayback Boy
The Erlenmeyer Flash
The Ritzy Cracker
Mahou Shoujo Blues Summoner Stella
Distractigirl
Mechanical Advantage
Spinner Lad
Spirit Summoner Shaman Sally
Cranky Knuckles
Sixteen Tons
Aquakinetic Lad
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot
Cuttleboy
The Ironic Avenger
Hard Hat Holly
The Oxford Comma
Dyslexic Girl
Luftballoon Lad
Kargyraa Moan
Kid Obvious
Kid Tuesday
Cell Site Girl
The Russian Eagle
Yellow Tree Frog Girl
Slightly Magnetic Girl
Grindstone Cowboy
Blah Blah Ginger
Copyright Infringement Boy
P.P.O.D.  (Pom Poms of Death)
Jolly Roger
The Semi Colon
Huckleberry Grimm
Boy Redundant Lad
Exit Stage Right Boy
Non-Sequitur Lass
The Compound Eye
Anime Wig Girl
The Crooner
Rain on Wednesday
Oakie Fenokee
Abike, Daughter of Shango

May Writing Goals

Since Camp NaNoWriMo is over, I need to set new and immediate goals to keep myself writing.  Chief among those should be finishing up what I didn't accomplish last month.  With that in mind, I'm outlining an ambitious set of goals for the next two weeks.  We'll revisit them on May 15th and see where we're at.

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

This is a given.  I've been writing a story a day for a month, I should be more than able to finish the three stories I started and failed to finish.  In the first three days of May to be honest.

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

These are some of the Grandpa Anarchy stories that I've been meaning to write for a while.  I finished two others in April -- Stronger and The Eagle Has Landed.  Return to Amethyst Part Three is the ending of a story I began last summer, of which I finished part one in October and part two in December.  Unpossible is a multi-scene story about the origins of Unpossible Man (which, if I finish it, I'd like to do similar stories for  the other heroes of the League of Two-Fisted Justice).  Performance Review is a simple one-scene story that I've had in mind for ages but have never gotten around to writing, it should be quite easy to accomplish.  As for the last -- rewriting World of Hero has long been a goal but it's a longer story that needs a thorough rewrite.  It's a big project and I keep putting it off.

3.  One new Grandpa Anarchy story a week.

In the meantime I should not get out of the habit of writing brand new Grandpa Anarchy stories.  We'll see.

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

I need to start working on my Tai-Pan stories and/or other story projects again.  Finishing a single chapter of any one of the above stories will be a good start.