Another Story Done!

When I was nearly done  with Infinite Secret Crisis Wars, I had a lot of things in the air.  I was changing characters around and adding or removing characters, and there was going to be a lot of fallout following the story -- so I began plotting new stories in my head.

I thought, "There needs to be a story where Circuit Girl and the other new characters join the League of Two-Fisted Justice."  I created a story file for that.

I thought, "Circuit Girl should visit her brother in the fairyland of Amethyst City."  I created a story file for that.

I thought, "Everyone in the Continuity Crusaders has changed or gotten something out of the whole event, save for Natural Twenty who got left behind on earth."  I created a story file about their return.

I thought, "There would be a funeral for Deep Fat Fryer.  Maybe that's where we learn that his niece has inherited his powers."  I created a story file for that.

I thought, "The League of Two-Fisted Justice is growing!  They're also probably making good money from that new cartoon show and the movies.  Maybe they build a brand new headquarters and hire a secretary."  And I even thought of how that could make a good story, so I created a file for that.

Now that I've finished Infinite Secret Crisis Wars and the two stories that lead into it, I've been working on the above ideas.  The  third one became Time Waits For No Ninja.  The second one became Fairytale Physics which I wrote today.  The other three are in the wings, but probably "Funeral For a Friend" comes next.  There's probably at least one more story in there somewhere that I haven't thought of yet.

(As an aside:  the term fairytale physics is one which I believe was coined by Jim Baggott to describe some of the fancy ideas of modern theoretical physics, such as multiverse theory.  My original idea was to have one of the sidekicks try to argue with Grandpa that, even if multiple universes exist, it would be impossible by definition for someone in one universe to travel to another.  Of course, Grandpa does this all the time so the sidekick would be arguing that this is impossible even as they did exactly that.  A funny idea perhaps, but I never managed to find a way to fit it into a story.  Before I knew it I was already past my series of adventures in other dimensions, but I still had a file titled Fairytale Physics in my Book 6 folder.  And then I realized it made a nice title for a story that included discussion on how alternative pregnancy works in a fairytale world.  Actually, I like it as a title better in this context, because it sounds like it's going to be about one thing when really it's referring to something else.)

Just like my other stories, Fairytale Physics was initially a jumble of ideas until I figured out the right setting and order to put them in, and suddenly it became a story.  Circuit Girl visits her brother.  She gives him a copy of her power armor, designed to look exactly like hers from the outside but to fit his body on the inside.  She meets his daughter, and learns how children are born in a fairytale world.  There are a lot of things I managed to squeeze into the story -- cameo appearances from characters who appeared in my past Amethyst stories, for example -- but of course once you figure out the direction of the story, where it begins and where it ends, you can't wander too much, so I didn't get to do more than mention them.  This time around I solved my problem in this way:  my original idea was that the armor that Circuit Girl brings was the big surprise at the end -- the big  reveal (if you can call it that) is that Circuit Girl suspects that her brother will one day have to assume the role of Circuit Girl in her place -- thus the armor which fits him but looks exactly like hers.

This wasn't much of a reveal and the story leading up to that point was just a jumble of dialog on other subjects with no direction.  But I realized that the fun part of the story would be Princess Amethyst -- Circuit Girl's brother -- testing out the armor.  While that's going on, I can toss in the dialog between Prince Humperdink and Circuit Girl about their daughter and how she was born, and a few other things, and the reveal at the end is a situation in which Circuit Girl and Circuit Boy get to use their power armor together in an unexpected battle.  Still not a massive twist reveal, but I think it works okay, and the story flows much better now.  Starting the story with the testing of the armor gives me a setting and lets me explain why the armor has been gifted to her brother, and then leads into dialog with the prince.  It's a small, subtle thing, but suddenly it feels like a scene where everything flows together rather than a bunch of pointless dialog.

So that's another story finished.  I'm happy -- that's four stories since the end of Camp NaNoWriMo in July, so I'm managing to keep writing for the moment.

I was thinking about these things this afternoon and I realized that Circuit Girl has been dead for about 8 years, Guy Shadow has been dead 50 years, and the new Geothermal Jenny comes from a different universe.  They're not going to be familiar with a lot of Grandpa Anarchy's villains and their storylines, and who's been Grandpa's sidekick and where these new heroes come from.  They could use a refresher course... taught by the Electric Bluejay.  I'm quite certain I can spin that into another story.  ^_^  I think I'll call it Grandpa Anarchy 101.

End of Camp NaNoWriMo Report

My final tally for Camp NaNoWriMo in July 2016 was 24 stories totalling 53,303 words.  Quite a nice result, considering halfway through the month I had cautiously revised my target from 30,000 words to 25,000.  Furthermore I had written 9 stories before this in 2016, and 3 since July 31st, and my goal was 2 a month, so at 36 stories on the year, I'm already at my goal.



Sometimes my stories come to me full-formed, and sometimes I seem to manufacture them out of thin air with no idea where I'm going or how I'll get there.

Case in point:  my story Punchathon, which I finished this week.  I had this general idea -- well, let's stop the and go back even further.

I wrote a story called The Shadow Out of Joe's Mouth.  The title is a play on H.P. Lovecraft titles like The Shadow Out of Time and the Shadow Over Innsmouth, of course -- but the actual idea for the story was that Grandpa would fight a shadow creature, a walking void, which was actually a creation by Grandpa Anarchy comic book writer Joseph Zuzarte, which has somehow come to life.  I never explain how, and by the end of the story Grandpa has not really defeated the creature.

Much later, during Norwescon 2016, I wrote a story in which Grandpa Anarchy is teaching some young heroes fighting techniques for the super-powered.  I literally had no idea where I was going with this or how to end  this story, so I wound up bringing the Shadow of Evil creature from the above story back.  Grandpa had lost the first fight, but now he got to demonstrate what he'd learned since.

I threw shadow creatures into more stories -- Legal Eagle, Happy Jack.  Then I went back and fleshed out an off-screen incident in which the original Shadow of Evil is killed, and wrote a story about it called Eclipsed In Time.

None of this really explained where the shadow creature(s) came from, although the latter stories seemed to suggest they weren't from the comic after all.  But I got an idea in my head about how the creatures could be accidentally unleashed from an interactive comic.  I eventually wrote this in The Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy.  And I imagined that  there should be at least two stories of our heroes dealing with the aftermath.  One morning when I was half-asleep, I got an idea where Grandpa Anarchy fights a bunch of weird aliens from a bad comic book story.   They were round creatures with multiple arms and fists, and they fought constantly.  I named them the Pugilists, then later I called them Brawlings.  I got up and wrote the idea down in a file titled Punchathon.

Of course, Punchathon really didn't have a plot.  But later I decided this would be the lead-in story to my Infinte Secret Crisis Wars story/arc, so having the heroes teleported to a distant planet to do battle right as they seem on the verge of finally going home seemed like a fun idea.  I added a bit to suggest that ending.

By the time I was getting ready to actually write the story, I had also decided that Unpossible Man was a big fan of the Girls of Two-Fisted Justice animated show, and I wanted to establish this in an earlier story.  Punchathon seemed like a good choice to do this, because I really had no idea what the story involved yet.  I added some more lines to the file so I would remember to include this idea.

When I went to write the story, I decided to start with Grandpa fighting the Brawlings.  That seemed like the core idea so I wanted to get that down.  I included Kid Continuity so that I could add in dialog explaining what these creatures were, where they came from, and establish that these were the last of the villains unleashed from the comic that they needed to round up.

Next I wanted to have Unpossible Man watching the cartoon show, so I added a different scene back on the space station.  Then I wanted to show the Painter aliens fixing the interactive comic book, so that everything was back to normal and our heroes could head home.

By this point I had 3-4 different scenes and even though I wasn't done yet, I could tell that this wasn't going to work.  Sometimes I can do short shorts with 2 or even 3 scenes, but most of the time you need to do it all in one go.  Everything needs to be bang-bang-bang-ending.  I wasn't even close on this story, and worse,  the scenes really didn't have anything unifying them other than they happened in sequential order.

I decided to start over.  I imagined Kid Continuity and Jennie Nova flying the transport ship down over the area where Grandpa Anarchy was fighting the creature.  In the back of the  transport, Unpossible Man was watching his cartoon.  In the meantime I'd realized  that I had to explain what he was doing there -- originally he wasn't in space with the others, and only showed up when all of the heroes and villains were summoned by the alien entity in the Infinite Secret Crisis Wars story -- so I added a few throwaway lines to cover that.

Suddenly the story came together.   There were still two scenes, but they flowed together much better than before.  By rearranging how I set the story and introduced my themes, I came up with something that I think works pretty well.

Anyway, I lot of my stories come together like that.  ^_^

I finished Infinite Secret Crisis Wars on Sunday, with a little bit of cleanup for the final scene on Monday.  I also wrote Nursery Rhymes on Monday, and then wrote Punchathon on Tuesday.  Those were the two unfinished lead-in stories to the Infinite Secret Crisis Wars story, so that seems pretty well set now.  I still need to  go back and write Meanwhile In Zendeth Sector 9, which is a bridge story that links Meanwhile In Frosthaven to Blessed and Cursed.  Other than that I'm now free to write all of the stories I plotted last week coming out of my big Infinite Secret Crisis Wars story.  The first of these, Busy Bees, retitled Time Waits For No Ninja, is written (mostly yesterday, finished this morning).

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

The Wight Stuff  7/14 1,647 words

Meanwhile On Planet Zorlthrax X9  7/18  1,176 words

Ripperology  7/18  1,304 words

Meanwhile In Intersect  7/19  1,063 words

Gloom and Doom  7/20  3,683 words

Blessed and Cursed 7/21  1,696 words

Bombs Away  7/22  1,784 words

Daughters of Anarchy  7/22  804 words

When We Last Left Our Heroes...  7/25  1,162 words

Girl Gravity  7/25  1,458 words

Green-Skinned Alien Babe  7/25  838 words

The Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy  7/25  1,490 words

Llahna's Girl  7/26  1,552 words

Infinite Secret Crisis Wars  7/31  20,645 words

Nursery Rhymes  8/1  969 words

Punchathon 8/2 1,184 words

Time Waits For No Ninja  8/3  1,507 words

Secret Crisis Wars in Oz

I continue to insert stories between other stories.  When We Last Left Our Heroes is a story inserted between Daughters of Anarchy and Girl Gravity.  In Daughters of Anarchy, the story ends with the heroes under attack -- their first battle as a new supergroup.  In Girl Gravity they are registering with the galactic empire as superheroes and discussing several adventures they've already had.  I felt that a story in between the two, highlighting one of those adventures, was in order, and I came up with a way to do it and wrote it.

Today I started and mostly wrote another story, Nursery Rhymes, which I've inserted between Llahna's Girl and Punchathon (although I might place it before Llahna's Girl; we'll see).  Again, I felt a part of the overall story that had happened mostly off-screen and was mentioned in passing needed to be highlighted.  I keep doing this -- it's the same thing I did with Eclipsed In Time, when I decided that the death of the void creature called the Shadow of Evil ought to be shown on-screen.  This time, I was trying to allude to the fact that the Shadow of Evil was launched into our reality from a comic book and somehow split into at least three creatures before travelling back in time, thus explaining the existence of the two other void creatures I've so far inserted into this series of stories -- it just seemed like an awful lot to explain as an aside in one of my other stories, so I came up with an entire story centered around what actually happened and why.

I'm in a bit of a quandary at the moment. I've reached a point where, save for finishing up 2-3 stories (Nursery Rhymes, Punchathon, Meanwhile in Zendeth Sector) I've finally reached what I originally conceived as the heart of this book of stories -- the Secret Crisis Wars.  The joke here is to make fun of how Marvel and DC Comics continually reboot their universes (DC in particular), and make fun of Crisis on Infinite Earths and all of the subsequent permutations, and of Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars and all of its spinoffs and subsequent rehashings.  I would have Grandpa Anarchy and a bunch of other heroes teleported to some planet or other plane and forced into a big battle, and then everything would change/get rebooted.  Possibly more than once.

As you can imagine, I didn't actually plan to write a story covering everything that might happen during these events -- that would be pretty boring.  The plan was to gloss or skip over most of it.  I reread some of my stories this past week that did exactly that.    X Chromosome did this very well -- Grandpa and a bunch of earth heroes go on a quest in a fantasy world, and in only about 5 or 6 scenes I cover several days or a week of questing and battle.  Each scene is funny on its own, and I think you get a sense of the overall story without having to read through the whole thing.  I also did this sort of thing in Youth Is Wasted On The Young, perhaps less successfully but still it mostly works.  In that one Grandpa, Nina, and the Archons of Excellence go on a journey in search of a fountain of youth -- and once again I skip over a lot of the actual details, because they would mostly be pretty boring.

I want my Secret Crisis Wars story (or stories) to work in a similar way.  And I'm very excited to work on it, and to get the last three stories that happen before it done.

However...

Having read through Youth Is Wasted On The Young and X Chromosome, I also read through several related stories, including finally Oz On The Half-Shell.  This is a story from my last collection (book five) that I never finished.  It's one of my novella-length stories.  I have at least four, none of them completed -- the first, World of Hero, is one of my early stories that I've rewritten a couple of time and it's still a mess.  It's planned for book 2.  The second, Second Class, is intended to be a novella-length story in book 4 about the Black Moon Maidens, which is much better plotted but only half written to date.  The third is my Grandpa Anarchy novel I tried to write two years ago called Serial Anarchy; this is several chapters and some idea of a plot, but I can't say I had a fully-formed plot for this one, which is probably why I failed to finish it.

(And to be fair, I have written some longer stories/story arcs that are completed -- the three Amethyst Road stories on book 1 combined are nearly 8,000 words, so we could call that a novelette, while the sequel in book 3, Return to Amethyst, which is also three stories, clocks in at 25,000 words.  That one, at least, could be considered a short novella.)

But Oz On The Half-Shell is more than half written and is already at 21,000 words.  It's also, in my opinion, one of my best stories involving Grandpa Anarchy.  It gave me the chance to expand on characters and develop them quite a bit, and I think I did a pretty good job of that -- when I read it, I really enjoy it.  And having just read it, I really want to work on it and try to finish it.

But of course, I need to work on the Secret Crisis Wars story.  Thus my quandary.  :/

Camp Nano Update 7/26

So far this month I've written 23 stories totalling 32,658 words.  (For those keeping score at home, I managed all of 9 stories in the first six months of 2016.)  I validated my Camp NaNoWriMo already and claimed my win badges -- I forgot to do this once before and it's always bugged me, so I didn't want to wait.  I had lowered my goal from 30,000 words to 25,000, but I'm already over 30,000 anyway.

Here's where I am:

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
The Wight Stuff  7/14 1,647 words
Meanwhile On Planet Zorlthrax X9  7/18  1,176 words
Ripperology  7/18  1,304 words
Meanwhile In Intersect  7/19  1,063 words
Gloom and Doom  7/20  3,683 words
Blessed and Cursed 7/21  1,696 words
Bombs Away  7/22  1,784 words
Daughters of Anarchy  7/22  804 words
When We Last Left Our Heroes...  7/25  1,162 words
Girl Gravity  7/25  1,458 words
Green-Skinned Alien Babe  7/25  838 words
The Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy  7/25  1,490 words
Llahna's Girl  7/26  1,552 words

Book Six, Renumbered!

I finished Meanwhile In Intersect at around 2 AM Tuesday.  Two days later I finished Gloom and Doom.  Today's project was Blessed and Cursed, which is a story that links the "dimensional adventures" section of the book (which is what I've been writing for the last 20 days) to the "outer space adventures" section of the book, which includes stories I wrote in April and a bunch that are plotted and only partially written.

Today I renumbered all of the stories in book six.  This was a bit of an undertaking.

I'm not exactly sure when I started numbering my stories.  At first I had only five.  Then I wrote two more.  Then I challenged myself to write a new story each day for NaNoWriMo in November of 2012.  It's easy to remember this date, because it was the last month that City of Heroes existed.  In fact, I'm pretty sure the announcement of the closure of City of Heroes on the last day of August 2012 was what spurred me to start writing Grandpa Anarchy stories again.  The character is based on one I made in the game, and even though I only played that character for a few levels, the idea behind the character stuck with me and a few years later I wrote my first few stories.

Throughout November 2012 I started a new story each day, and I eventually completed all of them by the  Spring of 2013.  I challenged myself to write a new story every week for 2013, and by the end of the year I had a ton of Grandpa Anarchy stories written.  At some point, I think it was the Summer of 2013, I started numbering the stories and laid out what I thought would be my first book and my second and third books.  I know that by August or September of 2013 I had enough stories to fill three books, and I'd gone back through the stories in the first book to rework them and in some cases break stories that didn't work into 2 or 3 separate stories.  In the spring of 2014 I did Camp NaNoWriMo and wrote quite a few more stories.  I've tried to add more stories every year, but when it came to Camp NaNoWriMo for April 2016 I tried something different.

I had an idea to do a "Secret Crisis Wars" kind of story in which Grandpa's universe gets rebooted, and things get changed around, then they reboot again and maybe change everything back at the end.  I had another idea involving a "Doom Patrol" kind of supergroup.  By January 2016 I had tossed these and a few other ideas into a folder for the proposed sixth book, Weird Tales of Weird Anarchy.  And when April came around I worked on this.  I only got a few stories done, but I had a numbered sequence of stories for my book by then.  Then I inserted several stories into the sequence and had to renumber everything.  I did that a couple of times.

When I picked up the thread again in July I was having some problems with what I'd written and planned to write.  My original idea had included Grandpa and company getting tossed out into space, but then in Legal Eagle I'd had them attack a creature that teleports people to random dimensions.  And then, for reasons unexplained, in the next story Strike the Worm they did not wind up in another dimension, but wound up on a different planet in this dimension, and had a lot of adventures in space but in this dimension (mostly only planned or half-written to date).

But!  I had also written Happy Jack in which they wound up in the interdimensional city of Intersect, and I had written a bit on my "Doom Patrol" story which placed it in Intersect as well.  How did they wind up in other dimensions?  I was planning for this to all happen later after the space adventures, but ultimately it made a lot more sense that the events in Legal Eagle which promised to send them to another dimension actually did so.  Rather than jump directly from Legal Eagle to Strike the Worm, I should toss in a few stories of their adventures in other dimensions, and even move up Happy Jack and Gloom and Doom to happen during this sequence, before they wound up back in regular space.  This would be my "Dimensions Arc" which came before the "Space Arc".

Thus I started inserting stories early into my numbered list.  I would number them "175.5" and "179a, 179b, 179c, 179d" etc.  I was also adding stories from the very beginning involving a plot hatched against Grandpa Anarchy that involved the League of Former Sidekicks, so there were a lot of new stories to insert into the early part of the list.  Eventually I had 14 stories that I was trying to insert between other number storie,s and it became a real mess.  After finally finishing Gloom and Doom last night (my "Doom Patrol" tribute story), I finally had a list of completed stories that stretched from the beginning of the book right up to Strike the Worm. I had one possible story left to write, and I also needed a bridge story to explain how we get from the end of Gloom and Doom to the start of Strike the Worm.  Once those two stories were written, I could begin to rework and finish all of the "Space Arc" stories.  So it seemed like as good a time as any to renumber everything.

My new story order:

178  Opportunity of a Lifetime
179  Shadow Secrets
180  Superpowered Self Defense
181  Eclipsed In Time
182.  Legal Eagle
183  Chaos and Order
184  Status Report
185  Prison World
186  Happy Jack
187  The Wight Stuff
188  Meanwhile in Frosthaven
189  Meanwhile in Intersect
190  Meanwhile in Zendeth Sector (in progress)
191  Meanwhile on Planet Zorlthrax X9
192  Gloom and Doom
193  Blessed and Cursed
194  Strike the Worm
195  The Nonhumans
196  Painted Into A Corner
197  Bombs Away (in progress)
198  Intergalactic Order of Space Babes  (in progress)
199  Girl Gravity  (in progress)
200  Green-Skinned Alien Babe (in progress)
201  Llahna's Girl  (in progress)
202  The Further Adventures of Grandpa Anarchy  (in progress)
203  Punchathon (in progress)

212  Above the Law
213  Muse
214  Complete (in progress)

217  X Factor  (in progress)

Meanwhile On Planet Zorlthrax X9 (Camp NaNo Update for July 18)

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
The Wight Stuff  7/14 1,647 words
Meanwhile On Planet Zorlthrax X9  7/18  1,176 words
Ripperology  7/18  1,304 words

I wrote nothing much Friday through Sunday, but I wrote two brand new stories on Monday and I may not be done yet.

The Wight Stuff:  Sadly this story revolves around a bad pun.  I did a lot of research into things before I wrote it, and consequently I liked most of the idea behind the story, but when it came to the ending the pun was all I really had.  I'm not sure how well it works, but it involves the Brontë sisters, their shared universes, and a few related things.  It involves paracosmoses and the city of Intersect, which is my version of Cynosure -- a city at the crossroads of dimensions.

Meanwhile On Planet Zorlthrax X9 is a story idea that I had Sunday morning but I wasn't sure there was an actual story to the idea.  But Monday morning I figured out the way to tell it that gave it a kind of kick at the end, which is really all most of my stories have.  What I like most about this one is that it's kind of a companion piece to Meanwhile in Frosthaven and Meanwhile in Intersect.  The first deals with what Sam Solo and Two-Fisted Timmy are up to while the rest of the League of Former Sidekicks is hunting down Grandpa Anarchy, the second is intended to deal with what Grandpa and the two future sidekicks that are with him are doing in Intersect.  Zorlthrax X9 kind of covers what the rest of Grandpa's companions are up to, although you don't really learn that much.  The whole idea tickles me, and now I'm also wondering if / when I write a story about how Geothermal Jenny and company are handling their search for Grandpa and company, I should give that one a Meanwhile title as well.  But Zorlthrax X9 absolutely has to be the final one in the sequence.

Ripperology  I've been struggling to turn Meanwhile in Intersect into a story with a plot, and I also had decided to write at least one Circuit Girl story.  I created a story with the preliminary title Jack, in which the plan was for John Haggard (Happy Jack) to appear through the gate in Grandpa's Anarchy Cave, at a time when Circuit Girl was Grandpa's sidekick.  But that by itself wasn't a story, and I began to explore the idea that Haggard was on the trail of Jack the Ripper -- or maybe Jack the Ripper appeared in Meanwhile In Intersect, jumping from Intersect to earth via the gateway in Haggard's bar and the one in Grandpa's cave.  But those weren't fully formed ideas either.  I had an idea that Jack the Ripper skipping through time was something that happened a lot to Grandpa, but when I started reading up on the Whitechappel murders and on all of the tropes surrounding the Jack the Ripper myth, I came up with a very different story that didn't involve anyone travelling to/from Intersect at all.  Instead, it involves people travelling back in time to try and find out who Jack the Ripper really was -- and this is the thing that Grandpa Anarchy has seen over and over again.  And as I'd planned to do, I made this a story that happens while Circuit Girl is Grandpa's sidekick.  She doesn't get to do all that much, but it's more than she's ever been allowed to do on-screen before now.  Mission accomplished, I say!

I'm pretty proud of what I came up with for this one.  Because of how I structured the story, you don't get to actually see Grandpa or Circuit Girl in London, 1888, which would have been a lot of fun to write, but it would not have set up my punchline well.  I think I came up with a nice twist ending for this one.  ^_^

Now my only question is whether I really still need a story involving Circuit Girl and John Haggard, and what can I possibly make out of Meanwhile In Intersect...

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