It's been so long since I wrote regularly that it's hard to get back into the habit of writing anything. I have ideas and sometimes I jot them down but mostly I don't, and they come and go.
A few weeks ago I pulled up a story under the working title of Princess, that dealt with a pocket dimension contained in a broach that I was going to use as the supergroup base for the Daughters of Anarchy. I'd written quite a bit on the "story" but it was just them explaining what the pocket dimension was, and exploring it, and it was all quite boring because there was no plot. So I'd stepped back from working on it over a year ago to try and figure out what the plot would be.
Around the same time I conceived of this story, I wrote a sort of companion story called Prince Allwyn and Princess Erin of Arowen, which was a fable about a similar magical amulet. It helped me encapsulate my ideas about how such a magical device could work, but at the same time, it wasn't the history of the amulet I was trying to write about. I'd sketched out a history of that amulet though, and had envisioned a possible plot involving it.
Anyway while trying to work out how to rewrite my story, it occurred to me to write another fable about how this particular amulet came into being, because I had some ideas about that already. For the past few weeks I've been writing and rewriting this story/fable in my head, but I haven't committed much to paper. It's evolved into a sort of love story between a very old wizard and an immortal fairy, but I'm still not sure if I know how to start it.
So that was going to be my project for July's Camp NaNoWriMo since I was already working on it in my head... but in the meantime, I've come up with some other ideas that may be easier for me to work on and can help get me writing more.
I had an idea to compose a list of international superheroes for the Grandpa Anarchy universe. I've been reading the My Hero Academia manga, which is about heroes and kids training to become heroes, and they reference the top ranked heroes a lot (strangely, all of the top ranked heroes are in Japan -- they don't specifically say their rankings are confined to Japan, but eh, anyway). This got me thinking about who are the top heroes in the Grandpa Anarchy universe, and what would be their ranking, and that also got me thinking about how I don't have a lot of international heroes and maybe I should come up with a bunch of them.
Another aspect of this is that, when writing Grandpa Anarchy stories, I don't often start with imagining what powers a hero or villain should have, and consequently I write an awful lot of heroes and villains with fairly straightforward powers. Either they're strong and tough, or maybe the can throw fire or water about. Nothing much more esoteric than that, usually. But the manga I'm reading involves a lot of interesting and exotic powers, and it makes me want to create more characters like that for my own universe.
So for the moment my goal is to create a new hero every day, from someplace other than North America, who has interesting powers. My first one comes from Nepal and has the power to grow to a height of 40 or 50 feet. He's half English, gets his powers from an ancient magical artifact, and has the head of a dog. He's known as K2K9, or the Mountain Dog / Dog Mountain, or the Himalayan Howler.
I think a second part of the challenge might be to write a short scene / story involving each new character, but we'll see if I can manage that much.
