The End of Grandpa Anarchy!

 Stories that I have written since last week:

430  Frills and Bows

431  Mating Ritual

432  Afterglow

433  My Own Daughter

Stories that I still plan to write:

Noticeable One:  This has been my "next story that I write" for nearly a week now, and I keep thinking of other things to write instead.  This is the current version of my long-anticipated "Miss Anarchy in popular media / Miss Anarchy is insanely popular" story.  I have an opening written, which I probably need to cut down, and I have an idea for someone to assassinate Miss Anarchy (which... just means she's resurrected -- but it's during an interview so it's shocking).  Right now my problem is that I haven't figured out how this ends, where it's going, what is the central theme (other than Miss Anarchy is really popular and this also means many people hate her.)

Becoming the Story:  Part of what I wrote two weeks ago for the opening of Noticeable One includes two newscasters joking about how much money it would take for the male newscaster to allow himself to be transformed into a young girl as has happened for Miss Anarchy.  It was mostly written as a scene to demonstrate that people are talking about Miss Anarchy and she's a big news item, but I struggled to figure out how to fit it into a story where it wasn't just filler that extended the story for no good purpose.  Then one day I thought, what if the male newscaster jokes about becoming a girl, in a way that makes it clear he would never want that, and then you immediately cut to a scene where he's begging Miss Anarchy for help in doing exactly that?  He tries to pitch it as a way to get an "inside scoop" on the Miss Anarchy story, a way for him to become a part of the story process -- but really, he'd just rather be a woman.  And maybe also his female cohost would rather be a man?

As you can see, this idea is kind of entwined with Noticeable One, since they'd take place at roughly the same time.

True Colors:  In this story, Dark Dr. Dark, Circuit Girl, Sister Fryer and Unpossible Girl show up on the space station where Miss Anarchy is in order to assemble a group Girls of Two-Fisted Justice photo.  With Miss Anarchy, it is nearly possible to assemble a full team of girl heroes like the ones in the cartoon.  Of course, not everyone is as young as fourteen, and Sister Fryer would have to cosplay as the girl equivalent of her dead uncle, but it mostly works.  The only exception being Dark Dr. Dark, who would use a magic ring to temporarily become Dark Sister Dark.  Also, they don't have a little girl to play Little Nina Ballerina, but there was a contest among fans and the winner will get transformed into Little Nina and will be part of the photo, and will probably wind up at many future promotional events should they opt to stay a little girl.

All of that is background material for the real story, which involves Dark Dr. Dark and Miss Anarchy trying to determine who the sorcerer is trying to capture and curse Grandpa Anarchy.

Beauty Treatment:  I have an idea where Elsie and Kelli's mothers show up.  These are Grandpa Anarchy's granddaughters, and they generally don't approve of all of this silly superhero business.  I still think I'll write this one but it's not an earthshattering idea.

Spirit Animal:  Earlier this week I had an idea for a body swap story.  This would be an adventure in space story, where my cast of characters encounters a kind of blink dog / blink beast animal who has a peculiar defensive trait whereby when it's trapped or scared it can swap bodies with people -- the idea being that it swaps through several bodies and then back to it's own, leaving behind a bunch of people (or predators) in different bodies and completely confused.

I wrote a little bit about the beast for this story, but I quickly realized that this would never work.  All of my characters at the moment are young women -- not very different from each other physically.  Most are related.  What makes a body swap story fun is taking people that are very different from each other and putting them in each other's shoes (and bodies) to see what happens.  In my version of the story, there seemed to be very little that could happen that would be funny or interesting.  I briefly considered having Miss Anarchy comment on why this entire body swap situation made for a bad story, but that alone did not make for a better story.  :P

Shadow:  Catherine McDowell spent several weeks following Grandpa Anarchy around, about two years ago, as preparation for playing Miss Anarchy in the movie.  Although Catherine is a lesbian, she grew very fond of Grandpa Anarchy and even surprised him with a kiss at the end.  All of this is backstory which sets up the events in stories I've written recently, Mating Ritual and Afterglow, but I realized actually crafting a story around that earlier time would be a very good idea.  If I write it, I will place it in an earlier book of stories so that it fits chronologically with when it happens.

Woofy:  Possibly titled Woofy Drumdik, this one is a silly idea.  Jennie Nova speaks in a nearly incoherent spacer slang (space surfer slang actually, which I originally used for the Bronze Beach Bum) which is composed of multiple slang words that I've borrowed from science fiction books, interspersed with slang terms that I created myself.  Elsie has been imitating her second cousin in using a lot of this slang, and when it gets to be too incomprehensible, Miss Anarchy tries to retaliate by overindulging in 1920's flapper slang.

Uncanny Valley:  I want to write another space adventure that involves a valley that is almost, but not quite, real.

A Better Tomorrow:  I don't really have an idea attached to this one, but I like it as a story title.

Real Girl:  I keep expecting to write this story soon.  When I planned it, I had just finished story # 419, The Return of Normal, and I envisioned a series of several stories, with Real Girl happening at maybe story 425.  Then I bumped it up to 428, 430, and finally designated it story # 437X, because I have no idea when I'll get it.  The basic idea of the story remains unchanged.

Entourage:  Since this story was viewed as one of the "end" stories for this long arc I've been working on -- the point which the movie Girls of Two-Fisted Justice gets its premier -- I have yet to be on the verge of writing it -- it's always some distance in the future.  But I had originally planned to write it after a series of maybe six other stories, and instead I've written 13 so far with several more planned.

Stories that I will likely never write:

Just Like Miss Anarchy:  This was meant to document the rise in popularity of Miss Anarchy as the real-life version continues to fight crime and have adventures.  Ultimately, all of the ideas I had for this story are elements that appear in the other stories I've written; there's no story at the center of this idea that needs to be told.

We Meet Again:  This was never more than an idea, and it wasn't a good one.  I don't plan to ever write this.

Custody Battle:  Yeah, I won't be writing this one either.  It was an idea whose time never actually came.

Trust Mother:  This was a "Miss Anarchy gets kidnapped and adopted against her will by Julia Judas, in an attempt to control the Anarchy estate/Anarchy fortune" story.  The timeline of events that I wrote instead made this entire idea obsolete.

Mother's Treasure:  I actually did write this one, and it sucked, and I went in a completely different direction that meant I didn't even bother to rewrite this.

Orphan White:  I think this one was replaced by All I Ever Wanted, but it's another story that I wrote completely and then immediately discarded.

The End of Grandpa Anarchy?

All of these stories revolve around a central premise.  The wildly popular cartoon show Girls of Two-Fisted Justice has been around for several years.  It features Grandpa Anarchy and his companions in the League of Two-Fisted Justice as a team of fourteen-year-old girl heroes.

I wrote the original story Girls of Two-Fisted Justice in 2015, so we can imagine that Girls of Two-Fisted Justice came out in 2016 and has been running for five years.  It was story # 169, and I'm up over 430 stories now.  A lot of things have changed since I wrote that story.  Nina Ballerina had already quit the group, but was included anyway (that part is in the story).  Deep Fat Fryer is dead -- his niece Sister Fryer took his place.  Unpossible Man is now Unpossible Girl (she asked a godlike being to transform her into her Girls of Two-Fisted Justice counterpart).  The League of Two-Fisted Justice was replaced by the much larger New League of Two-Fisted Justice, with multiple new members including Circuit Girl, Geothermal Jenny, Guy Shadow, and Girlbot 9000.  They all join in the story No Surprises, and it's strongly suggested that they will all be given counterparts in the Girls of Two-Fisted Justice cartoon.

The central premise of my current stories is that Grandpa Anarchy winds up as a girl by accident, but decides to spend the time fighting crime as Miss Anarchy, the character from the cartoon.  The live-action movie is due to release in a month and Mal is keen on getting any extra advertising in that he can.  Over a series of stories, Miss Anarchy is transformed into a more accurate version of her cartoon counterpart; she complains a bit but also decides to stick with it until the movie premier; she adventures with her two great granddaughters, who are now 15 and 16 respectively (while Miss Anarchy is meant to be 14, so she is kind of the junior member of the trio).

I had planned to write a series of six or so stories along these lines, but as I went along I began to accept that it would be a longer series of stories, all featuring Miss Anarchy instead of Grandpa Anarchy.  At various times I had plans to magically create a version of Grandpa Anarchy that was separate from Miss Anarchy, so that both could exist at the same time -- or maybe I wouldn't do that, and Miss Anarchy would go back to  being Grandpa in the end.

Then I wrote several stories where Miss Anarchy falls in love and decides to remain a girl, and the question becomes can I continue to write Grandpa Anarchy stories without a Grandpa Anarchy?

Mind you, another Grandpa Anarchy might still appear.   At the moment we have a stand-in robot named Grandpa Anarchy II.  But I am contemplating writing an extended series of stories focused on Miss Anarchy and her companions, with little or no involvement of an actual Grandpa Anarchy.  I don't think there's anything that says I can't pull that off at least as well as everything I've written up to this point, and technically Miss Anarchy is still the oldest active hero around, even if she's also a teenager.