I've written very little in the last two months, but I've been working on story ideas for a couple of weeks now. I just need to sit down and write them up.
1. I want to write a story about what the Gentleman Brawler has been up to since the events of last summer's Secret Crisis Wars, in which he was brought back to life but fooled everyone into thinking he had been "unmade" at the end of the story. He's somewhere on earth, in disguise, probably acting as a hero since that's in his nature. I also want to write a story about what Kid Enigma is up to. He was given the power to change people's gender, which he sort of asked for, with the knowledge that Black Dahlia had made millions of dollars from her use of a similar spell. Essentially Kid Enigma is ready to give up on being a villain bent on revenge, and instead wants to set up a magical gender reassignment clinic of some sort. Anyway I wrote down some of my ideas for all of this in a file I called Enigma.
2. Along with the above idea, I came up with a plan to have the demonic lawyer Malevolent P. Brimstone hand off his Black Dahlia / Black Moon Maidens account to his neice, a young, up-and-coming lawyer in the firm. I decided this was probably a separate story and I collected this into a second story file currently called Transformation Story.
3. I had an idea for a story that involved Unpossible Man as a young boy, working with a Solomon Kane-style hero / slayer of evil known as Nathanial Slade, who had unbreakable bones. I titled this story idea Them Bones.
4. I created a file called Tremor of the Earth, with just a quote in it: the human psyche cannot tell the difference between good events and bad events, it can only sense the tremor of the earth. Not sure where I'm going with that yet but I liked the quote/concept.
5. I also created a file called Crystal Hart, just because the idea of a Crystal Hart (a male deer) who gets confused with Sailor Moon stuff kind of amused me. Maybe the Crystal Hart is a future sidekick for Grandpa Anarchy.
6. Snopes and Larpers is a very dumb working title for a story that I've actually written several paragraphs on. The basic idea is that Grandpa and his sidekick or companions are trapped in a Jumanji-like game, but it's based on snakes and ladders. The game snakes and ladders has a very interesting history so I was trying to figure out how to work some of that in, but I don't have a good punch like yet.
7. I also created a story file called Invictus. This is based on the famous poem, and it sounds like something that Grandpa Anarchy would embrace, and it makes a nice story title, but as yet I don't actually have a story idea attached to this.
8. For the last two months I've been working on Oz On the Half-Shell, and in particular on a couple of scenes in which Death Medal attempts to summon the god of chaos to the heart of the Emerald City, with hopes of bringing about the utter destruction of the fairyland. As part of this I decided to address the idea that "every villain, in their own mind, is the hero", because this is certainly not true in Death Medal's case, and he wanted to expand on why that is. I wound up figuring out his entire back story in the process, although I still haven't actually finished the scene.
However, that lead to me trying to figure out the back stories of some of my other villains, and this ultimately led to another story idea I created this week which I'm calling Motivational Poser, in which Kid Calculus tries to prove he's the better of Grandpa Anarchy's villains because he has a clear motivation and a back story. He, at least, fits the mold of a villain who is the hero of his own story. But every other villain he brings up that apparently has no motivation or back story or reason for existing -- such as Death Medal -- Grandpa can counter by explaining what their real back story and motivation are. I really liked this idea -- it was not only another funny way in which Kid Calculus fails to be different or exceptional, but it also gave me the chance to figure out and explain the back stories and motivations of several villains at once. Still not sure on the punch line but I have much of the story written in my head and sketched out in the file.
9. Another story idea I had last night involves how Grandpa is brought back to life after he dies. In my half-written novel Serial Anarchy, one of my ideas was that the members of the League of Two-Fisted Justice had clone bodies waiting in several secret bases hidden around the world. (Part of the plot involves Kid Calculus locating and destroying each of these bases before making an attempt to kill Grandpa Anarchy once and for all.) This was based on a setup that a friend and I had for our villains in Gene's old Super Heroes game, but I'd never fully fleshed out the idea anywhere else. It seemed like a good subject for a short story -- Grandpa dies, Dark Dr. Dark leads some of the new members of the team to one of the secret bases where Grandpa is revived. Because Dark Dr. Dark is a sorcerer, he knows it's not just a clone of Grandpa -- Grandpa's soul possesses the new body. They've done this maybe a half-dozen times before. He can reveal that clones of the new members have been prepared, and that they have X number of bases in remote areas of the world, and that the programming and technology involved is far beyond anything most people have ever seen, and was probably created by the Electric Bluejay with the help of Miss X. For now, I've titled this story idea My Clone Sleeps Alone.
10. While I was running through my head the scenes that involve villains and motivation, I decided that maybe Death Medal had more to say on the subject besides that which I was writing into my scene for Oz On the Half Shell. I may actually have two more stories here -- one in which Death Medal ponders the nature of evil itself, and one where he gets bogged down in trying to explain the Dark Side of the Force in Star Wars, or just explaining its inconsistent logic. At least, I think there's two different story ideas involved -- it may turn out that they are not both worthy of expanding into an actual story. But for now I've saved everything to a file titled The Dork Side of the Force.
11. I don't have a story file for this idea yet, but I just remembered it so I'm writing it down. As part of my Motivational Poser story I was trying to envision where the story takes place. I had an idea that maybe this time Kid Calculus had teleported them to as a remote a place as he could manage -- perhaps he's stranded them on a planet that is not simply in a different star system, but in a remote galaxy. This might be some new technology of his -- I've never really tried to figure out exactly where his dimensional gates can let him go, but on reflection the general idea was that he could port between realities. In the very first story in which he appears, he and Grandpa are proposing to save a bunch of other universes from destruction. At the time I did not give any indication how they would accomplish this, but later when he shows up again, I give him the ability to open gateways to other dimensions and to teleport people and dangerous creatures from one dimension to another. I think he also uses it for local teleportation, as a means of travel and escape. But does that mean he can travel to other stars in the same galaxy? Even if he can manage that, travel to a galaxy other than the milky way is probably something new that he hasn't attempted before. To reach a very distant galaxy may require multiple jumps using his improved gateway.
All of this, as a backdrop to a story that has nothing to do with being on a remote planet in a remote galaxy, is probably too much to cover in one short story. Also other ideas popped into my head based on this -- for example, an entire conversation about why he's not putting this amazing technology to better use for the betterment of mankind, or the idea that probably even if Grandpa Anarchy were abandoned on a planet hundreds of millions of light years from our own galaxy, Continuitae (Avatar of Continuity) and Saturnae (Avatar of Time) are now powerful enough to track him down and rescue him. That's not a story in and of itself, but it was another thing that said this was a different story idea from my Motivational Poser story idea.
Camp NaNoWriMo for July is almost upon us. I've skated by the last two months posting stories to my blog site that I wrote for April's Camp NaNoWriMo, and my story file is getting low. Once again I want to tackle 2 or 3 of my big novella-length stories and finish them, but I find that I have a lot of short story ideas and a need for a lot of short stories, so that's likely what I will do for the first couple weeks of July. Just based on the above, I've come up with roughly 10 story ideas in the last two to three weeks, and I of course always have other ideas lying about that I can work on. So I guess I have no excuse for not getting something done. ^_^
No comments:
Post a Comment