End of February

I don't have much of an update this week.  I didn't get a lot of writing done.  I edited my story Sally Stardust Is Dead, and I couldn't decide on the composition of a couple of paragraphs, and I fiddled with it but eventually posted it for better or worse.  Sometimes I think it's the best of my Eve stories, other times I feel like it's one of the most problematic.

My other big accomplishment for the week was to start a story that I eventually decided to call the Return of Sally Stardust, or the Resurrection of Sally Stardust.  I've got a lot of ideas for it but at the moment no completed scenes.  And I sometimes think how I feel about my other story affects my desire to actually sit down and write this one, or the two that follow.  :/

One idea for the story is that I want to progress the relationship between Eve and Amaryllis, and have them conceive a child.  In Amethyst this is done through the use of a plant called a wombflower, so neither of them will be pregnant.  Then I decided that, at the same time, Eve's partner Muriel would become pregnant -- which is a thing that her species does asexually, through parthenogenesis I think the term would be.  I want Eve to finally read a bit about Muriel's race and realize how little she knew about her partner -- they are not actually very human-like normally.

I also want to explore other divisions of the 5E government wing of the Eieio Empire.  It makes sense to me that there is at least one alien military division similar to the space babes, but where the members are not humanoid at all.  Maybe like sentient rock creatures or floating psychic wooden monuments, something very abnormal to earth life.  Something as strange as a sea cucumber, you know.

My second idea for this story is that the company which produces the Girls of Two-Fisted Justice cartoon want to do an episode with Eve and Muriel in it, and they've hit upon an idea where, since Eve looks like an old cartoon character named Sally Stardust, they went out and bought the rights to that character and even want to talk Eve into maybe changing her name legally to Sally Stardust.  Which is a weird idea but I did write up a background history of the character and where she came from, and I want to include some of it in the story somewhere.

Since neither of these ideas presents a lot of drama I thought I should manufacture some sort of fight or conflict to actually drive the story.  When I thought about what kind of villain might show up, I thought of the Space Thralls.

I wrote a story called the Ring of Hanubatum a couple of years ago, and this involved Grandpa Anarchy's two great granddaughters, on an adventure through space and to the fairyland of Amethyst.  Along the way I established some things that had happened in the past but which I'd never written into a story -- Elsie McDaniel is a princess of Amethyst, so she's been there more than once (she was there when she was about six in my story Return to Amethyst) and Kelli Nova is a junior member of the Space Babes.  Both girls are descended not only from Grandpa Anarchy, but also from the Nova family which founded the Space Babes -- and also from the heroine Hellfire Lass, who was Grandpa's wife and their great grandmother.

In order to explain some of this, I created a backstory of a dramatic event that was unwritten which involved an invasion of Amethyst from Space Thralls -- trolls from space -- which were repelled by members of Grandpa's supergroup along with the Space Babes and with the help of at least Kelli Nova.  Afterwards a space station was set up over Amethyst, which I've used in several other stories including Sally Stardust is Dead.  I presume the steampunk Space Babes space station over Amethyst is heavily defended against any new Space Thrall attack, and so I thought, what if the Space Thralls try to attack through our universe first?  They'd encounter Eve and Muriel.

I had an idea that maybe the king of the Space Thralls would fall in love with Eve on sight and try to make her his bride.  I dunno how far I want to go with that -- I don't really want to make Eve a damsel in need of rescue, although having Muriel and/or Amaryllis rescue her might be fun.

Anyway, as I said, I have a lot of ideas and it sometimes seems that I have an entire story if I assemble everything in the right order, and I suspect that maybe the heart of the story should be about whether Eve want to marry Amaryllis, which may mean Eve wants to remain as she is after her tour as a Space Babe.  Also, perhaps part of the conflict is Muriel deciding to remain humanoid because her child is born as a humanoid child?  I dunno.  They could retire to a farm in Amethyst or something.

All of this caused me to reread the Ring of Hanubatum, which has some problems because I figured out the backstory mentioned above as I was writing the story, and Kelli acts completely oblivious about Amethyst despite the back story saying she's been there before.  Also Elsie's stuffed dragon talks to her in the first scene, and never again. There are a lot of inconsistencies.  I need to rewrite it a bit, which I always knew.  I want to revisit these characters who are young heroes but whose parents are against heroes and adventures in general.  I have to figure out how they come to terms with being heroes despite their parents wishes.

All of which made me think that I should really go back and write the unwritten story of the Space Thrall invasion.

So basically, I want to work on Space Babes Are Easy and You Can Be Sally Stardust, but I came up with a prequel to work on first called the Return of Sally Stardust, and then I came up with another prequel to this and the Ring of Hanubatum called... well, Space Thrall Invasion for now.  And then assuming I can write all of these stories, I may also write a sequel to Ring of Hanubatum.  I think I already have one partially plotted actually -- The Devil and Miss Elsie.

I didn't write much this week, but I plotted a lot I guess.