All You Struggling Fiction Writers: This is where you post about story ideas you abandoned but still kinda like and maybe someone else could do something with them ...

So um... I'll get back to you on this one when I get home and can look over my notes :)

Damn I hate being at work and in this creative mood... AGAIN...

- Plate tectonics and seismic doowhickies don't cause earthquakes, dragons do.

- Slasher movie about Captain Hook killing off the descendents of Neverland's Lost Boys (who returned to the world, grew up, etc.)

- Three really odd stories started one after the other in a two day period right before I was sent to the emergency room: all of them about sudden painful deaths

- Murder mystery, guy who runs one of those fundamentalist "we can help you not be gay anymore" clinics is killed, and of course was secretly gay himself, but neither the lover nor wife did it

- Martians land in the American West, early 19th century, appoint a local tribe the official delegates of Earth in the Big Galactic Hoopahoo

- The Rapture strikes, all the goodie goodies are called up to God, but their bodies stay behind, mindless zombies, and the town slut and town drunk gotta fight their way out of the Bible Belt

- Guy obsesses over, fetishes, the eyes he's removed from his wife's corpse

- Way way in the future, a guy rich enough to afford almost-immortality has built an enormous house because even though he's in perfect health, he's just plain too old to remember everything, so he fills the house with his life

- A guy finds a severed finger on Decatur Street. No real story there. One day I found a severed finger on Decatur Street. I thought to myself "there's a story here." Six years went by. I was wrong. Sometimes you just find a finger and nothing happens.

- Aliens land on Earth or otherwise encounter Earth humans; cultures, biologies, moral values radically different, moreso than we would have guessed; only commonality beyond the fundamentals of intelligence and non-collective identity is a holy text from one of their ancient cultures, which few of them see as relevant anymore, which translates nearly word for word to the King James Version of the Bible.

- In 1960-something, Neal Cassady is the fastest man alive.

- Jack the Giant-Killer vs Jack the Ripper

I think that's an awesome idea right there! Could be sorta Waiting-for-Godot-ish ....

- a haunted submarine which sunk to the bottom of the ocean takes on the sentience of its captain and surfaces to take revenge on the government who let his crew die.

- bea arthur is: eleanor roosevelt

- "Jack Kennedy's Camelot + Arthur's Camelot -- Marilyn = Gwenevere or Morgan?"

- "Prince Henry whoever actually did become King of America, but secretly, public never knew, Washington a puppet, somehow the puppet govt and real govt have drifted apart and now the Federalists and Royalists battle it out behind the scenes with the President having no clue."

- "Instead of sending a man to the moon, Kennedy put money into paranormal whatsis. Continues to rule in realm of dead, colonized forty years ago by US, codenamed Camelot; Soviets got there a few years later, Cold War going on in the afterlife."

[Apparently I had a short-lived fascination both with Kennedy and with secret histories.]

- "This is the house the wolves built when we were only three."

- "Bar that caters to retired gods, like Callahan's but cool."

- "Guy gets addicted to relationships with dying women; his first real love died suddenly, and they never had time for the angst."

- "The world ends, but they leave this one guy behind. Now what?"

- "Robinson Crusoe's Pockets."

- "F. Scott Fitzgerald is an astronaut and there are dinosaurs in space."

Some of those are short stories that I started to write and never finished -- the earthquake/dragons one, the eyes, the finger, the old guy, the Jacks. Novels peter out more often, though, cause if it's not going super-well, I don't take it past the idea stage; a short story I can wait till I'm a little ways in, and I'm only out a night or a weekend.

I'm the same way, now that you mention it. Which is a shame cuz, you know, I'm so goddamn clever ...!!

I guess it's just another variation on the old "find the line/scene/gag/bit/image you really like, now delete it" advice (which I'm bad at following).

Old old old notes:

- From before Waterworld: "World covered mostly in water. Tribes of nomads on surfboards."

- "Johnny Appleseed vs Godzilla" (I actually spent like my whole sophomore year of high school on this one)

- "Pioneer guy leaves wife home back east, takes Indian wife out west, they meet when wife follows him, wives fall in love," AND THEN THEY LEZ UP

- "Old cowboy convinced a roadrunner is the Messiah. Second Coming of Christ? Or just 'the messiah'?" Still want to write that one.

Gotta be another disk here somewhere.

- "Coyote decides that if the Earth is round like an apple, it must have a star at its center, and goes to find it."

- "The puppies were exploding again." (I wrote that one, actually, but anyone is free to write it themselves.)

- "Guy gets weird powers from some kind of accident and decides to dress up and fight crime because what else is he gonna do? It goes horribly wrong."

2
vengeful 'feminist'
stalking internet boards is
computer program

singer who was jailed
in late 60s for 'do the
violent revolution'

he's all zenned up now
living in chicago and
imparting wisdom:

'go back to your wife
and daughter you asshole' but
dude just never does

now you all see why
my fiction career's for shit
(got no ending here)

A man is invited to stay the weekend in a big house where his professor friend lives. When he gets there he discovers the previously celibate professor has built himself, using his immense medical knowledge, a perfect wife out of the corpses of young women. But the corpse wife takes a fancy to the visiting man rather than her husband.

{Shortly after abandoning it I heard that Tim Burton is bringing out an animated film that has the same basic "corpse wife" idea - don't know if it has the love triangle thing, tho.}

I also had a go at doing a horror story once. The plot: an old man has a box containing six photographs, posted to him by people unknown, all of which show in sequence the kidnapping and assimilation into some sort of strange vampiric technology of a woman he loved, decades ago. He has tried to get the police involved but they claim he is wasting police time - a bizarre conspiracy is underfoot. And now the people who "absorbed" his one true love are after him too.

I always knew you were an unoriginal hack, RJG.

It's a roman a clef!

I have ideas that I never write down so I forget them. I figure this is actually a good thing, though.

That sounds rather like the story about the making of the oracle from Lanark; although I think that in that the bloke became disembodied because he started ignoring everything around him, not the other way round.

(haha except when she's visible again she's really horrible)

I like this one a lot! (Probably b/c I'm more a history person than a fiction person and I'm imagining all the delicious research to be done.)

Last vacation I took, I had the 're-evaluate your life during a long drive' episode and thought maybe I'd write a book loosely draped on something from the Mahabarata but ostensibly about a young woman who survived the WTC collapse. That's as far as I got though. I totally thought I was going to be a writer when I was young, but I'm really undisciplined. :(

Yeah, see, I realized very quickly into my history program that -- as with everything else -- I was just there to get story ideas :) A professor mentioned the "Prince Henry was offered the American monarchy" thing in passing, I went "hm?", and almost wrote the story.

And take any and all of the above. I do kind of like the Prince Henry one, but there's not actually a plot there, nor a protagonist (actually, I was planning on have Doc Holiday be faking the whole tuberculosis thing, fake his death, and then continue the royalist fight against the forces of ... somebody... see, no plot).

Some of the others could be good stories written by other people. My good stories are always "so there's this vampire, and he's got a gun," or "boo!"

Terrorist org breaks him out after abt 3 wks, but since clock-prison is connected to some dream-like part of the brain, he experiences the full sentence anyway. Terr org also miffed cos they thought they were springing their captured leader GIL GHURKA, not some kid: apparently whatever bum info led cops to nab the kid also had terr org fooled. After this I think the story did kind of a 'dread pirate roberts' thing where it was all a master plan by GIL GHURKA (himself no the original GG) to appt a successor -- kid brought into fold, takes up w GG's girl, finds he has a knack for int'l terrorism. I think they blew up a spaceship on launch bound for the moon to build a secret slave-mine.

secondly, here's another idea I had back when I had illusions about writing short stories: 'the antipenultimate homunculus'. far future, humans gone, only artificial intelligences exist. some of these AIs are obsessed with replicating human culture, some are radical anti-humanists, etc.; our narrator is one of the former, but deals with the latter as kind of a past-researcher, expert on human subbacultchaz. they've all been programmed by humans who knew the human world was ending and created a culture that would outlive them--thing is, these programmers/gods were all science fiction geeks and ordered their world according to SF tenets. and, since they don't actually exist IRL, it's like a self-replicating ILX, except they think they're all walking around, talking, interacting, etc.: Sims Gone Wild.

and then, the twist....

< back to corny-ass haiku mode>

This also happened in Buffy.

"Every force evolves a form, and I was Justice's paperwork."