Meanwhile In Frosthaven -- 7/13 Camp NaNo Update

I feel like I haven't done as much writing as I should have, but I've done an awful lot of plotting.

Over the weekend I did not write much.  I was working on a story on Friday and then did not work on it much until Sunday night, but it's a longer story -- several scenes -- titled Shadow Secrets.  I finally finished it Sunday.  I'm not sure I'm happy with the results, but I like the general idea of the story and I rewrote the first scene to make it much more action-packed.

I also started working Sunday night on the story Prison World.  I had an ending in mind for this, and I changed the ending several times.  When I went to bed Sunday it was still a jumble of ideas but by Monday morning I'd figured out what I wanted to do with it and finished it.  I think it works.

Tuesday morning I started and  finished a new story, Short Circuit.  I've been writing all these stories about Kid Continuity and this one kind of popped into my head -- what if I wrote a story where Kid Continuity and her brother meet Grandpa Anarchy when she's still very young?  What if they meet Circuit Girl as well?  Suppose this happened at a comic convention?  Before I knew it I had the story written.  My original idea was that I could place this story at the very beginning of the first book, and with its reference to Grandpa Anarchy comics and its foreshadowing of characters who would become far more important later on, it would make a perfect first story to introduce Grandpa Anarchy.  I've always kind of felt like the first story I actually wrote -- Remember This -- is actually a terrible story to introduce Grandpa with, given that it's not very funny and not quite in the spirit of most of the Grandpa stories.  I even went so far as to rearrange the order of the first few stories so that I could have several of my funnier stories appear first.

Well, now that Short Circuit is finished, I'm not actually sure if it's a good idea to place it in the first book.  I'll have to think about it for a while.  I'm not sure if it's actually that funny or novel, and maybe I'm being self-indulgent in tossing in characters that nobody has any reason to know anything about until much later on, assuming they even read that far.  (Kid Continuity wouldn't appear until book three, I think.)  At the same time now that I've done this I'm kind of thinking that one or two stories involving Circuit Girl would be a good idea.  In the story Remember This, Circuit Girl is already dead before the story starts, but her death has grown in significance with how many other stories I've written that link to it or mention it, and I've since described her as one of Grandpa's best and longest-lasting sidekicks.  Which is something you'd totally miss if you read the current stories in the order I have them, because several sidekicks appear before her and she never actually appears "on screen" at all.  So maybe it would be a good idea to insert a couple of stories involving her, if I can come up with something good.

Anyway!  Today I created a series of new stories.  The plan was to work on Doom, my Doom Patrol tribute story, which I decided to rename Gloom and Doom since I actually have a story called Doomed in the first book, one of my earliest stories.  This story involved a group called the Bastions of Gloom, the strangest hero supergroup ever (hence the Doom Patrol tribute).  But first I decided I should work on Interlude or Here and There, which I think are the same story but it isn't an actual plot, it's just "Geothermal Jenny and company are still trying to find Grandpa Anarchy".  That may or may not be something I can spin into an actual story, we'll see.  Before working on it I re-read Opportunity of a Lifetime and Status Report, and I was actually more interested in figuring out what Sam Solo and Two-Fisted Timmy were up to -- these are the two oldest members of the League of Former Sidekicks, who stayed behind when Jenny and company left earth in her interstellar saucer.

I started thinking, what if they broke into the Anarchy Mansion while Grandpa was off planet? Who might they run into? What if the shadow creature returned to earth to look for Grandpa Anarchy, and ran into them instead?  And before I knew it I had dialog in my head, and I started writing Meanwhile In Frosthaven. And this story potentially spawned another, because I imagined them entering the mansion, perhaps for the first time in fifty years, or at least for the first time in quite a while. Grandpa never changes anything. How long has that picture of him fighting Doctor Zero Hour and his giant Atomic Zombie been hanging on the wall in the entryway above the stairs? For fifty years, perhaps?

And immediately Two-Fisted Timmy starts talking about the man who painted it (has it always been a painting? I think so). Old Romany guy who lived in New York's East Village. Grandpa saved him long ago and he was so grateful that he painted not one giant picture -- but several, maybe ten. He would give a new one to Grandpa every year or two on Christmas.  (I only know what two of the paintings are -- there's one of Grandpa and his former partner Guy Shadow fighting some villain.) Anyway, the moment I wrote "on Christmas" I realized that there's a Christmas ghost story hidden in this detail somewhere.  At the moment it's tentatively titled The Final Painting, although I haven't figured exactly where I'm going with it.

I started two other stories today that are unrelated to anything I've bee working on.  I decided that I need a sidekick called the Pompadour'd Pamplemousse, whose power stems from his amazing hair, maintained with a grapefruit hair gel.  Later I also decided I needed a sidekick named Butt Rock Boy, and when I looked up "Modern Butt Rock" online (I was 100% right that Five Fingered Death Punch is considered butt rock -- Butt Rock Boy will wear one of their tee shirts, and also insist that Nickleback is the greatest rock band ever and that Creed was a really good band, honest!) I found an article that tries to define exactly what butt rock is, and I realized that not only is Butt Rock Boy a big fan of butt rock, but also has a fairly cerebral take on what it is.  And I started writing dialog, and of course the villain who has this discussion with him on what is or isn't butt rock has to be none other than Death Medal, and so I have another story partially written.  For now the title is simply Butt Rock Boy, but a possible better title is Unified Theory, which is part of the title of the article I read -- Toward A Grand Unified Theory of Butt Rock, by Mark Lee on the Overthinking It web site.

All that, and I've plotted another story in my head after listening to this month's free HP Lovecraft Literary Podcast while on a walk.  Their subject this week is Wuthering Heights, and after hearing some of the backgroun history on Emily Bronte, I have an idea in my head involving a weather-controlling undead creature called the Wuthering Wight, which may take place right before or after Gloom and Doom.

So far this month:

Opportunity of a Lifetime  7/3, 917 words
Eclipsed In Time  7/3, 822 words
Status Report  7/4, 1,424 words
Chaos and Order  7/5, 1,913 words
Above the Law   7/6, 1,160 words
Muse  7/7  1,017 words
Shadow Secrets  7/10  2,347 words
Prison World  7/11  1,091 words
Short Circuit  7/12  959 words
Meanwhile In Frosthaven  7/13  1,068 words

Camp NaNo Report for July

It's time for an update!  Hope springs eternal, and just as I did in April I signed up for the July Camp NaNoWriMo with the goal of getting some serious writing done.  Then, of course, I wrote next to nothing for the first two days.  But!  I then sat down and got to work!

I am trying to complete the same set of stories that I was working on back in April and May.  These are stories for a sixth book of Grandpa Anarchy short stories, this one tentatively titled Weird Tales of Weird Anarchy, and in this one I'm trying to do something a bit different -- I'm trying to string together a series of independent stories that tell an overall story or all link together in some way.  Here's more or less what I accomplished back in April:

Superpowered Self Defense - Finished
Legal Eagle - Finished
Strike The Worm - Finished
The Nonhumans - Finished
Painted Into A Corner - Finished

Bombs Away - Unfinished
Intergalactic Order of Space Babes - Unfinished
Girl Gravity - Unfinished
Green-Skinned Alien Babe - Unfinished
Llahna's Girl - Unfinished
Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy - Unfinished
Punchathon - Unfinished
Happy Jack - Finished May 3rd
Doom - Unfinished, In Progress

Now, the thing is I originally planned out a series of stories, then as I worked on them I started retroactively fitting new stories in between the stories I'd already planned.  So when I went back to this group of stories in July, I did the same thing again.  First, I decided that the details of how the shadow creature is defeated in between its appearance in Superpowered Self Defense and the legal consequences of that defeat in Legal Eagle should really be a separate story in its own right, so I wrote Eclipsed In Time.  At the same time I came up with a separate but concurrent plot in which the League of Former Sidekicks plan to get rid of Grandpa Anarchy, and this required a "prequel" story which I wrote called Opportunity Of A Lifetime, which takes place just before Superpowered Self Defense.

On top of that, I decided to move another story, Shadow Secrets, so that it happens just before Superpowered Self Defense.  So now three of the first four stories in my collection didn't exist or weren't in that chronological order previously.

But that's not all.  I had already started a story sometime in late May or early June called Chaos and Order which I place right after Legal Eagle and before the story that originally followed it, Strike the Worm.  Because at the end of Legal Eagle Grandpa and company are tossed into another dimension, but then in Strike the Worm they turn out to not be in another dimension after all, and that seemed like a waste and kind of a cheat to me -- I wanted some adventures in other dimensions first.  Ideally, I wanted at least three.  So not only did I manage to finish Chaos and Order a couple of days ago (it needs a rewrite, really), but I have also outlined two other stories that go between it and Strike the Worm.  For now I'm calling these two stories Prison World and Here and There, but those are working titles only.

And as for my League of Former Sidekicks plot, I've written the second story in that sequence, called Status Report.  Which is also a weak title, I might need to come up with a better one.

So now my story order is:

Opportunity of a Lifetime - finished 7/3
Shadow Secrets - in progress
Superpowered Self Defense - finished
Eclipsed In Time - finished 7/3
Legal Eagle - Finished
Status Report - finished 7/4
Chaos and Order - Finished 7/5
Prison World - unfinished
Here and There - unfinished
Strike the Worm - finished
The Nonhumans - finished
Painted Into A Corner - finished

Bombs Away - Unfinished
Intergalactic Order of Space Babes - Unfinished
Girl Gravity - Unfinished
Green-Skinned Alien Babe - Unfinished
Llahna's Girl - Unfinished
Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy - Unfinished
Punchathon - Unfinished
Happy Jack - Finished May 3rd
Doom - Unfinished, In Progress

I've also been working on some stories that happen after all of the interdimensional and intergalactic adventures.  These include two stories I had previously plotted, Complete and X Factor, and two brand new stories that I wrote today, Above the Law and Muse.  These stories form a kind of separate chain of Kid Continuity stories that happen before and mostly after the adventures in dimensions and space:

Shadow Secrets - Kid Continuity and Wayback Boy delve into the mystery of who was Guy Shadow, partner to Grandpa Anarchy in the 1950's.
Above the Law - Grandpa Anarchy and the Continuity Crusaders stop a would-be time-travelling assassin, but have to figure out what to charge him with and where to lock him up.
Muse - A conversation between Kid Continuity and her brother, and a clue to where her powers come from.
Complete - Through the miracle of time travel, Kid Continuity secures the last piece of her collection of Grandpa Anarchy fiction,  But why is it that no copies survived to the present day?  Did someone destroy them on purpose?
X Factor - Kid Continuity sets out to solve the last big Grandpa Anarchy mystery -- who was Miss X, Grandpa's first sidekick?  Unfortunately Miss X is still alive and does not want people to know who she is.


So for those keeping score, that's six stories completed in the first seven days of July.  So far so good!

End of April Camp NaNoWriMo and 2016 Goals Update

1.  Write two Grandpa Anarchy Stories Each Month.


January

Jan 18:    Gorgon Gun (#160)
Jan 19:    Sharp Dressed Man (#163)

February

Jan 22:   Old Boys Club (#171)
March 29:  Superpowered Self Defense (#178)

March

April 17:  Legal Eagle (#179)
April 23:  Strike The Worm (#180)

April

April 23:  The Nonhumans (#181)
April 26:  Painted Into A Corner (#182)

May

May 3:  Happy Jack  (#190)

------------------------------------

So I'm doing well on my first goal of 2 Grandpa Anarchy stories a month.

For Camp NaNo I started quite a few stories and finished about half of them:

Superpowered Self Defense - Finished before April.

Legal Eagle - Finished

Strike The Worm - Finished

The Nonhumans - Finished

Painted Into A Corner - Finished

Bombs Away - Unfinished

Intergalactic Order of Space Babes - Unfinished

Girl Gravity - Unfinished

Green-Skinned Alien Babe - Unfinished

Llahna's Girl - Unfinished

Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy - Unfinished

Punchathon - Unfinished

Happy Jack - Finished May 3rd

Doom - Unfinished, In Progress

So since March I can generously say I started twelve stories and finished five.  That's not nearly what I intended to accomplish in May, but it's a lot better than I managed through the first three months of the year, so I'm happy.  I want to continue writing through May and see if I can't turn that into a dozen finished stories, or more.

Some of this is tentative -- for example, I'm pretty sure that Llahna's Girl actually takes place after Happy Jack and Doom.  One or two other stories may follow Doom before I write Llahna's Girl as well.

By the way, the rest of Book 6 currently looks like this:

Secret Crisis Wars

Secret Crisis Wars 2 -- The Beginning of the End

Secret Crisis Wars 3 -- Quantum

What Comes Next

Tyrone the Great

Complete

Another Secret Crisis Wars

Shadow Secrets

Truthiness

X Factor

Pharmacopia

The King Am I

Bad Trip

A Thousand Ninjas
High Performance Chocolate

Most of these are just ideas -- and in some cases, such as the Secret Crisis Wars stories, it's one big idea that I thought might stretch over several stories, but there's no guarantee I'll be able to do that.  The Secret Wars 3 - Quantum contains the germ of an idea that I actually have already placed in Doom, so that title may go away.  Complete, Shadow Secrets, and X Factor are all stories with solid plots however -- kind of a trilogy of sorts.  Those three I should be able to complete easily.

So that's where things stand at the moment.

April -- Camp NaNoWriMo Report

April is Camp NaNoWriMo.  Like previous years, my plan was to write a Grandpa Anarchy story a day, and 30,000 words overall.  It hasn't really gone so well, but at least I'm getting some stuff done.

As I laid out last time, I had a plan (there's always a plan, until you get punched in the face).  I was going to write a series of stories in which Grandpa Anarchy had adventures out in space.  I had some story ideas for this, and I had three potential sidekicks in mind to work with -- Quantum Uncertainty Boy, Magical Mimic Cosplay Girl, and Suck It Up Buttercup.

Then in late March I tried to get some writing done in preparation for April.  I wrote a story at Norwescon that started out with Grandpa Anarchy teaching superpowered martial arts to some of his former and yet-to-be sidekicks.  For this, I included the characters that I knew were going to form their own supergroup -- Magical Midriff, Magical Manic Pixy Dreamgirl, You Go Girl, and Boy Gravity.

(On a side note, I also read the Boy Gravity story Sharp Dressed Man back in April I think at writer's night, and went back and revised my description of the character a bit, both in that story and in the previous story Asphalt Cemetary.)

For the purposes of my story I also included a new sidekick who was a speedster named the Spit Second.  I hadn't done a speedy character before, and she seemed to fit in nicely.

The villain that shows up in the story is a walking void creature called the Shadow of Evil, who somehow was a comic book villain come to life.  You punch him, you get teleported to another dimension.  I'd used him in a story called The Shadow Out of Joe's Mouth and Grandpa had failed to defeat him, but I brought him back for this story. Superpowered Self Defense, and demonstrated that Grandpa has since figured out a way to counter the creature.  Although the story ends there, it gave me an idea.

I had not really figured out how Grandpa and company get into space -- but another of my story ideas floating around was to bring back a superpowered lawyer named Legal Briefs and have him represent Grandpa Anarchy.  This had been suggested at another writer's night a few months back, after I read the story Old?  It occurred to me to have Grandpa and everyone involved defeat the shadow creature (off-screen) and then be put on  trial in intergalactic court on murder charges, because living voids are people too.  The way you defeat the Shadow of Evil is with a solar eclipse (according to the comic book), and the way you get a solar eclipse on demand is to teleport the shadow creature through space and time to where you know one will occur.

This meant Wayback Boy was involved, and since he was involved so was Kid Continuity.

I wrote Legal Eagle at the beginning of April, kicking off my Camp NaNoWriMo.  But I struggled with making the followup story.  At the end of Legal Eagle, everyone winds up in a random dimension courtesy of another, similar shadow creature.  This, then, was how I got my heroes into space and how I launched them onto a series of adventures.  My only problem was the sheer size of my team -- the two members of the Continuity Crusaders, four future members of The Nonhumans, Grandpa's current sidekick and the three other future sidekicks I'd planned to use for my stories -- plus Legal Eagle the lawyer into the bargain.  That added up to twelve people counting Grandpa Anarchy -- a very unwieldy number.  But off I went.  Next up on the docket -- the story called The Nonhumans, in which my cast of unafilliated former sidekicks decided to form a team.

At this point my idea was that they would wind up on an alien planet, then get rescued by Jennie Nova and Llahna (more characters!).  And I spun the first part of that idea into a story about them fighting giant worm creatures on this alien planet while holding a discussion about what to name their new supergroup.  I wanted to establish several of the characters as a new supergroup, and I like the setup where, in the middle of a fight, the heroes are holding a very mundane discussion.  It's funny on the face of it, so this seemed like a good direction to go.

I finished The Nonhumans, but it didn't feel like it worked.  The big revel was not only Jennie showing up to save them, but that she knew the name of their new supergroup before they'd finished forming it.  My idea was that there were already a bunch of comics based on their group, thanks to some fourth-dimensional beings that could see into the past and future and liked to make comics for some strange reason.  But even though I hinted at the aliens and hinted that Grandpa knew all of this ahead of time, it really didn't seem to flow well.  The surprise wasn't much of one, and didn't seem to directly tie into what came before (the fight with the giant worms).

At the same time I was working on the next story, which involved all of the unafilliated characters becoming temporary members of the Society of Intergalactic Space Babes (with the silver bikini uniform -- I thought this would be a funny direction to go), and also Kid Continuity getting wrapped up in reading all of the new comics she'd just discovered and getting really excited about them.  I had some ideas about where that second line of reasoning could go, but again, the story wasn't coming together in my head.  I decided that I had at least two different stories here -- one, in which they're conscripted into the Space Babes and have to wear the uniform, and one, where Kid Continuity gets excited about the comics, and where that leads.  These are the stories Intergalactic Order of Space Babes (working title), Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy, and Punchathon.

So I set out to write the bikini uniform thing as a separate story, but I was still trying to improve The Nonhumans and so I also went back to that and decided that it was also at least two stories -- one about their fight with the giant worms, and one where they're rescued and it's revealed that their supergroup is already named, and that there's a comic about them.  I came up with a new ending for the worm fight story that I think is much funnier -- at least it works on some level.  This story I called Strike the Worm.

I struggled a bit with my revised story The Nonhumans, still about the superhero name and the team's rescue.  It all fell into place when I decided that there wasn't just a comic book, but a movie about them (or a tri-dee/interactive entertainment thing -- who knows what entertainment will be like in a highly-advanced intergalactic civilization?)  The movie idea helped bring the incongruity into sharper focus faster, which makes the end of the story have more of an impact.  Thus I finished a completely different (new, improved!) version of The Nonhumans.

I briefly considered writing a story about the interactive movie itself -- how the main characters could go to experience it, and wind up playing each other's parts -- but after some thought I really couldn't see an actual plot or anything interesting based on that idea.

The bikini uniform story was much harder to figure out.  I called it Wear the Uniform, which was a terrible working title.  At some point I realized that a story about them wearing new uniforms wasn't really a story, so it morphed into a situation where they suddenly had to go on a mission.  And I still think that will work -- I've written the beginning and the end, but making them meet in the middle is still confusing me.  But for now, this is the story I call Bombs Away.

Along the way I spun off a couple more ideas into separate stories.  The team registering as superheroes of the galactic empire -- separate story, called Girl Gravity.  One guy falling in love with Jennie's alien sidekick -- separate story, called Blue-Skinned Alien Babe, and then a second story idea based on that called Llahna's Girl.

But my new problem was that I introduced the idea of comics and a movie based on the new supergroup -- and then multiple stories went by before I explored that any further.  That didn't work at all.  The heroes would want to ask questions.  My only problem?  Explaining how and why the comic books exist wasn't a story idea in and of itself.

And then, as I tried to drift off to sleep last night, it came to me -- and I realized it was an idea I'd thought of a day or two earlier, then forgot about.  I got up and wrote it down this time, and that is now the basis for a story called Painted Into A Corner.

So at present my proposed book Weird Tales of Weird Anarchy begins with these stories that I've written or am working on:

Superpowered Self Defense
Legal Eagle
Strike the Worm
The Nonhumans
Painted Into A Corner
Bombs Away
Intergalactic Order of Space Babes
Girl Gravity
Blue Skinned Alien Babe
Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy
Punchathon
(maybe one or two more stories -- possibly Doom and Secret Crisis Wars)
Llahna's Girl

January Progress

As I noted before, I began 2016 by trying to finish all of the stories in my 5th Grandpa Anarchy collection, and I started a 6th book/collection/folder.  Here's what I have to report so far.

Book 5 -- Steel Knights & Iron Maidens

Finished:

1/18/2016  Gorgon Gun (#160)
1/19/2016  Sharp Dressed Man (#163)
1/22/2016  Old Boys Club (#171)

Proposed stories still not finished:

161 Oz on the Half Shell (novella)
164  Happy When It Rains
172  Unpossible
173  Patron of the Arts
176  Sisterly Love
177  Christmas Story for 2016

While we're at it, here's my unfinished stories from previous collections:

Book 2 -- Fist of the Anarchist

37-40 World of Hero  (Novel-length)

Book 4 -- Never Say Anarchy Again

103 Second Class (Novel-length)
141 Gate Into Danger

(Not assigned to any collection)

Serial Anarchy (novel-length)


And now that that's out of the way, here's what I've actually been working on for most of this week:

Book 6 -- Weird Tales of Weird Anarchy

I came up with a good title for my 6th book, as you can see.  I forget exactly what I was calling it to begin with, but it was a very uninspired title.  This one works.

My theme for this volume -- I really have never had a theme before but this time I do -- is "Grandpa Anarchy in outer space / alternate dimensions".  I had one story idea called Doomed in which Grandpa interacted with a group of very weird superheroes, along the lines of the old DC comic Doom Patrol.  I had come up with some very weird ideas for heroes too, but I hadn't really figured out the plot yet.  And I had another story called Secret Crisis Wars, in which Grandpa and some of Earth's other famous heroes wind up in a cosmic battle that will result in a "reset" of the universe.  Each hero winds up different in some way, and maybe a couple are written out of existence.  So my plan was to combine the two ideas into a story arc in which Grandpa and company head off into weird dimensions and alien planets for a while.  Eventually I'll reboot everything to the way it was to begin with, but I want to have some fun with the concept first.  My ideas range from Grandpa's only change being that he wears nicely-pressed black suits, to killing off the entire League of Two-Fisted Justice and replacing it with people who are former sidekicks or currently dead.  A twist where Grandpa Anarchy died instead of Circuit Girl would be fun -- she might wind up as leader of the New League of Two-Fisted Justice.

Anyway I broke the Secret Crisis Wars story idea into three parts, but exactly what each story entails is pretty nebulous at this point.  I also created a file called Another Secret Crisis Wars, which would be the reboot of the reboot.  Although suddenly I want to call it Return to the Valley of the Secret Crisis Wars, or something similar.

For the purposes of these stories, I've come up with three sidekicks that I think will be a lot of fun to write.  The first is Magical Mimic Cosplay Girl, the second is Quantum Uncertainty Boy, and the third is Suck It Up Buttercup.

This past week, my goal was to work on the unfinished stories from book 5, and I did indeed get a lot of work done on Sisterly Love, it's about half done right now, but then I began getting ideas for other stories and kept adding to my Book 6 folder.  Initially these were just ideas jotted down and saved as documents in the folder, but several of them converged together and I began writing on them.

Shadow's Secrets -- This story popped into my head at the beginning of the week.  Grandpa Anarchy teamed with Guy Shadow from 1950 until Guy Shadow died in 1959.  Who was Guy Shadow?  I'd never really thought about it, but what if it was a big mystery and no one (save Grandpa) knew the answer?  Wouldn't that drive Kid Continuity crazy?  Wouldn't she and the Continuity Crusaders go back in time to try and figure it all out?

That sounded like a great idea for a story, and I only had to figure out who Guy Shadow really was, and why it might be a cool revelation.  Maybe he was someone from Grandpa's earlier past, or the son of someone?  Anyway, I've done a bit of work on this story, although I think it's one that will require several scenes -- not one of my short-shorts.

X Factor -- Once I had the idea for Shadow's Secrets, it was perhaps inevitable that I would think of Miss X.  Miss X is a deliberate mystery I added to the universe that I'd never really figured out.  She was supposedly Grandpa Anarchy's first sidekick, but information on who she really was, or anything about her at all, is very hard to come by.  She's also supposedly working with Cyber Granny and the Electric Bluejay as a silent, hidden partner in their Temporary Superfriends corporation -- the company that provides sidekicks for Grandpa Anarchy and other heroes.  But nobody ever sees her -- I'd never even written her into a scene.

The thing was, I'd never actually tried to figure out who she really was.  Someone who was good at covering her tracks and hiding her past, apparently.  What if she were a powerful sorceress?  Who could she be?

I spend some time working out who she really was, and plotted a story where Kid Continuity tries to find out.  But of course, Miss X doesn't want anyone to know who she really is.  Kid Continuity could find out, and the suddenly not know anymore, because the sorceress intervened.  But Kid Continuity would just go back in time to try and figure it out again and again.  There needed to be another way for her to guess at the truth, so that she could be satisfied that she knows the answer, without having to go back and prove it and then have her mind erased yet again.

Complete -- And this spawned a story that had to happen earlier than the others, in which Kid Continuity picked up something from the past that would eventually clue her in to the secret of Miss X.  And that by itself spawned a really interesting story idea, which I've more than half written, in which Kid Continuity goes back in time simply to fill in a glaring hole in her Grandpa Anarchy memorabilia collection.

All of this meant digging into my timeline and history, and adding a few things.  Now I know the name of Guy Shadow and Miss X, and I know of a story written by Evron Lempel that might possibly reveal some secrets.  And all of this gets my mind working even more.  Writing stories that explore the long history of Grandpa Anarchy are some of the most fun.

Tyrone the Great -- I'm not sure if this can actually be worked into a plausible story, but the idea was a kind of conflagration of a washed up, Bill Cosby trapped in a sex scandal of his own making, and Tony the Tiger.  Possibly this happens in a different universe while Grandpa and company are out in space -- a universe where the idea of an aging Tony the Tiger type character who's involved in a sex scandal would actually be possible, and Grandpa has to bring him down.

Truthiness -- This entire idea is built around Grandpa having a sidekick named Truther Boy, who believes every weird conspiracy known to man.

Throw in two old story ideas about a villain named Big Pharmasaurus (Pharmacopia) and a story about Kid Calculus finally changing his name -- to Emperor Calculus -- (The King Am I) and another story idea in which some of the more recent sidekicks form their own super group (The Non-Humans) -- and that's what I have on hand for my Book 6 folder so far.  At this point it looks like I'll be writing some of these stories soon, but mostly my plan is to write this set of stories come Spring Camp NaNoWriMo in April.

2016 - Goals, and So Far

Goals for 2016:  Pretty much exactly what my goals were for 2015 -- that is, write 2 Grandpa Anarchy stories a month, write a story set in my fantasy universe, finish my third magical girl adventure arc in Girl's School and also begin the next chapters after that.  Also, publish the rest of what I've written for Girl's School, and get my Grandpa Anarchy book published.

Anyway.

I have five folders of completed Grandpa Anarchy stories, listed mostly in order of completion and in the order that I would expect to publish them in five books.  Every time I start a new round of stories, I've created a new folder and designated it the next book -- but a few of those  stories have not been finished.  Book 1 is complete and I really need to get around to publishing it, but Book 2 contains at least one long, unfinished story, World of Hero.  Book 4 has another long story, Second Class, that is unfinished, and also a short story called Gate Into Danger.  Book 5 contains mostly the stories I wrote last Spring during Camp NaNoWriMo and just before and after that.   There were several stories that I started or designated as stories I was going to write, but never managed to finish.

This past week, I've been going through each story in Book 5 and rereading them, and tweaking or reworking them as needed.  When I reached Gorgon Gun (story number 160), I found a half-finished idea that I had struggled to finish back in May 2015 and then dropped.  That was pretty much the last time I tried to finish a Grandpa Anarchy story in 2015, apart from the Christmas story I wrote.

So I began working on it and last Saturday I finished it.  Then I proceeded along, and did some extensive rewriting on Asphalt Cemetery, and then pulled some of that out and placed it in a kind of sequel that I had envisioned but had not written called Sharp-Dressed Man.  I managed to finish that story today, so I'm feeling pretty good about what I've accomplished so far in 2016.

I read Girls of Two-Fisted Justice today, and also Old.  I like both stories, but I especially liked Girls of Two-Fisted Justice because I really didn't remember how it went.  The ending was kind of a surprise, and it worked.

I still have several stories in book 5 that need to be written.  I want to get most of those done so I can plan new stories.

End of 2015 Update

Here were my goals for the year:

1.  Write two Grandpa Anarchy Stories Each Month.

What I did:

January

March 5:  Permit
March 7:  Abjure the Realm of No Return

February

March 25:  Superdrone
March 31:  Dream A Little Dream

March

April 1:  The Shadow Out of Joe's Mouth
April 2:  Elementary

April

April 3:  Whom the Mad Would Destroy
April 3:  Consuming Passion

May

April 4:  Substitute
April 5:  Godzilla Was An Artist

June

April 19:  Avatar Bazaar
April 19:  Old

July

April 28:  Girls of Two-Fisted Justice
April 29:  Walpurgisnacht

August

April 30:  Asphalt Cemetery
May 3:  The Heart of a Girl

September

May 10:  Lessons
May 10:  Number One

October

May 12:  The Trauma You've Been Craving
Dec 20:  Conspiracy Clause

So it looks like I fell 4 stories short of my goal.  Ah well.

2.  Finish Three Tai-Pan Stories.

I did nothing -- worked on some stories but got nowhere.

3.  Finish the third "magical girl" arc for Girl's School, and try to wrap things up.

I wrote over 50,000 words in November for NaNoWriMo, but the third magical girl arc is still not quite done.  I wrote a lot of stuff that happens after it, because that was easier.  :P

4.  Write 1 short story set in my Otherworld Blues universe.

I plotted a lot of stuff for Camp NaNoWriMo in July but ultimately I wrote nothing much.

5.  Publish Book One of my Grandpa Anarchy stories, edit 2nd book, assemble stories for 3rd book.

I did nothing.

List of stories I intend to work on:

Grandpa Anarchy Stories

World of Hero:  3 of 4 parts finished, but it's a mess.  Needs a rewrite.
Second Class (working title):  I did a lot of work on this in eary January, nothing since.
Unpossible:  No progress.
Serial Anarchy:  This is the Grandpa Anarchy novel I started in November.
Gate Into Danger:  A SG1-themed story that I meant to write this year.

Conspiracy Clause:  I actually wrote this one!  ^_^

Fan Fiction

Girl's School, Third Magical Girl Arc (Kahotep Adventure).
I Can See Clearly Now.
A Goddess In Oz.

Other Original Fiction

Otherworld Blues Stories, Jubel In Oz.

Tai-Pan Stories

Bitch, Chance Encounter, Blanking the Lady (variations), Zesh and the Bitted Throug.