Stories Written For April:
434 Ambassador
435 Real Girl
436 Academy
437 Hate Crime
438 Revenge
440 Powerslave
Stories I'm working on:
True Colors
Noticeable One
Frienimies
Becoming the Story
Beauty Treatment
Entourage
I feel a sort of ennui about my writing the last few months, as if I don't really know where I'm taking my characters or whether any of it is worth reading. Initially my plan was to greatly expand the number of robotic helpers that worked with Grandpa Anarchy -- and this seemed like an interesting direction to take things. This was building on stories I'd already written -- The Emancipation of Philip Dos, Wilfred 2.0, and Miss Trinity. I wrote I, Gardener, Maid Ex Machina, Infinite Dojo and Princess of Pluto. Halfway through doing this, I came up with a plan to resurrect an old villain of Grandpa's named Victorian Honesty St. Normal, a mad scientist he'd fought in the early 1920's, and this became The Return of Normal.
In writing these stories, I decided that killing Grandpa Anarchy would be a fun way to end the above story -- and resurrecting him in the clone body of his sidekick would be funny. This led to Grandpa posing as Miss Anarchy for a short time -- thus my stories Free Advertising and Inevitable. But then things took a sharp right turn again when I decided to take Miss Anarchy and her two great-granddaughters into space, with All I Ever Wanted, My Clone Sleeps Alone, Girl Squared, Wrong Number, Doomscrolling, Endorsement, Transformations, and Frills and Bows.
My plan was always to have a series of pulp space adventures involving Miss Anarchy, Elsie, Kelli, and Miss Trinity. But the actual stories I wrote did not always match what I'd envisioned -- and then things took another right turn when I wrote Mating Ritual, Afterglow, and My Own Daughter, which involved Miss Anarchy suddenly getting married and deciding to stay as she was for the time being.
This is where I was at the start of April. I participated in Camp NaNoWriMo for April, and I wrote 20,000 words. Originally my plan was 25,000 but I reduced it when I felt I was too far behind to catch up. 20,000 words in a month is pretty easy for me to manage.
I managed to finish the above six stories, but I also wrote a bit on True Colors and Noticeable One.
True Colors is meant to come immediately after Revenge, which is why my numbering is a bit off. In fact, Revenge was originally meant to be a part of True Colors, until I spun it off into its own story. Dark Dr. Dark and other members of the New League of Two-Fisted Justice come to space to create a photo op in which they pose as members of the Girls of Two-Fisted Justice. I had two ideas for what might happen here: Dark Dr. Dark helps Miss Anarchy investigate the wizard who is trying to kill her, and Cat does a sort of proposal when she presents Miss Anarchy with a magical ring. I spun the first part into its own story; the second part was based on the idea that Dark Dr. Dark has a magical ring made that allows him to easily become a girl for just long enough to pose for the photo; Cat takes the opportunity to have another ring made which she gives to Miss Anarchy which allows her to temporarily become Grandpa Anarchy again. The theory behind this is that Grandpa Anarchy might need to travel into the past to warn his past self about something.
When I considered all of this, several different ideas popped into my head:
1. The ending of the photo op story really needs to involve everyone having to fight a criminal or have an adventure as their Girls of Two-Fisted Justice alternate selves;
2. The ending of the magic ring story would probably involve it's immediate use to warn some version of Grandpa Anarchy from the past about something -- for some reason which I forget now, I thought it would be hilarious if Grandpa had to warn a prehistoric / cave-man version of himself about the future;
3. Now that I consider things, Grandpa (or Miss Anarchy) might have already warned Grandpa about a future in which he becomes Miss Anarchy and marries an actress. And/or Grandpa may have been warned about the future from a young Miss Anarchy who has forgotten to put on the ring, and then does so halfway through the encounter, cluing him in to part of the future accidentally.
Some of this probably stems from the idea that I haven't handled the entire Grandpa Anarchy becomes Miss Anarchy and marries Cat change-of-direction as well as I'd like, so I feel like I should go back and write one or two more stories to flesh out the idea better. (I also want to go back and write 1-2 stories that involve Miss Anarchy/Elsie/Kelli/Miss Trinity having more space adventures, before all of the other stuff happens.)
Noticeable One is the story I was working on at the beginning of April, but it was turning into a much longer story than my usual. I wrote several scenes, and I want to finish it, but it's a bigger undertaking than my normal story so I set it aside for the moment. It may actually be a 15,000 or 20,000 word story, by the time I finish it.
Also, the story Academy might possibly spawn several sequels. Eternia the Watcher creates a specialized high school that has already existed a dozen years. Miss Anarchy has attended several years, retroactively. Possibly Elsie and Kelli have retroactively attended. Miss Anarchy has friends and enemies that she's made during her time at the school, that she knows nothing about. There are a lot of fun things I can do with this, which so far are just ideas, but that's what the file Frienimies is about. But there are probably 2-3 stories to be written here.
Hate Crime is my long-anticipated third shaggy dog story from the Electric Bluejay. (The other two were Hurricane Punch and Time Trip, both of which I wrote in 2017.) I may write a fourth -- I at least jotted down an idea for another. Powerslave is a silly story about travelling back in time to watch an Iron Maiden concert, which Cat wants to do. I think both of these stories were things I came up with to avoid trying to figure out the next story in my more complicated series of interlocking stories -- these were both one-off stories that didn't really depend on What Has Come Before.
Anyway, that's about it. Like usual I barely managed to finish my NaNoWriMo goals, and then I immediately took a break from writing.
